What the song brings itself to imagine is someone out there whose responsive presence can take the dark out of the shadow-time:
I sung the song slowly502
As she stood in the shadows
She stepped to the light
As my silver strings spun
One of the shadows is consciousness that there may be impurity in the air, the suspicion that may overshadow – even though it need not smutch – all these great exhibitions in performance. Again this is something about which Dylan has been open. “When you’re up there and you look at the audience and they look back then you have the feeling of being in a burlesque.” The thought, one that then thickens into a feeling, that even in this moment of unique happiness you are by way of being a stripper (for such is the kind of burlesque that Dylan is glimpsing): come to think of it, there is a thought to be going on with, or a thought that might make you want to be off. To be off-stage, even. Dylan spells it out, sings out, in Gotta Serve Somebody: “You might be a rock ’n’ roll addict prancing on the stage”. Not dancing but prancing.
The diction of addiction is there again, in his own person, as the next thing that needed to be said in the interview:
When you’re up there and you look at the audience and they look back then you have the feeling of being in a burlesque. But there’s a certain part of you that becomes addicted to a live audience.503
Some days I get up and it just makes me sick that I’m doing what I’m doing. Because basically – I mean, you’re one cut above a pimp. That’s what everybody who’s a performer is.504
This was seized on:
Years ago you said that sometimes it feels only one better than being a pimp.
“Well, unfortunately there is a nature of that. Yeah, I do feel that way. Performing’s all the same. When you’re up on stage and you’re looking at a crowd and you see them looking back at you, you can’t help but feel like you’re in a burlesque show. I don’t care who you are. Pavarotti might feel the same way, I don’t know. I would think that part of him sincerely does.”505
What is it that’s only “one cut above a pimp”? Prostituting oneself? And yet if there were no erotic charge (however suspect) to these occasions, would they ever be able to surge as they do?
I hope that Dylan actually said “Well, unfortunately there is a nature of that”, for it dextrously combines “Well, unfortunately there is a touch of that” and “Well, unfortunately that is the nature of it.” Anyway he had been aware of this exposure – aware of needing to beware of something that lurks within it – back then in 11 Outlined Epitaphs.506 Of what reporters write, he wrote:
they can build me up
accordin’ t’ their own terms
so that they are able
t’ bust me down
an’ “expose” me
in their own terms
givin’ blind advice
t’ unknown eyes
who have no way of knowin’
that I “expose” myself
every time I step out
on the stage
Immediately following 11 Outlined Epitaphs in Lyrics 1962–1985 there comes Eternal Circle, a song that sees unknown eyes, that understands what it is to expose one’s self (not just expose oneself) as a performing artist, and that sets the thought of “every time I step out / on the stage” to the tune of “She stepped to the light / As my silver strings spun”. There is surprise but also justice in Eternal Circle’s being available to us only (so far as I know) in the one studio out-take that Dylan finally released in the bootleg series: she stepped to the light, he has not stepped to the lights.
“Spun” is fine for the strings, when what they bring into existence is felt as in touch with how one kind of string might come into existence. I and my strings call to her (with silver sounds), and she calls back. And this without uttering a sound. For the line “She stepped to the light” soon steps with perfect poise to “She called with her eyes”. (“Light” into “eyes” as though the eyes light up.) The singer will heed this call of hers, only to find in the end that she is no longer to be found. Meanwhile, the transition from the strings to the eyes is one that calls to – and may call upon – an ancient love-thought, of lovers’ reciprocated gazings as a cat’s cradle perfect for purring in.
Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes, upon one double string.
(Donne, The Ecstasy)
The song’s wording is itself a tremulously sensitive stringing of it all together, and this without ever stringing anyone along.
She called with her eyes
To the tune I’s a-playin’
– this plays not only with eyes / I’s but with the delighted duplicity of “To”, which pivots from “called to” into “to the tune of”. How he hopes to be able to take the opportunity to take up with her. And how fitting it is that she has her importunity, not being too proud to call again, though this time with a different angle:
My eyes danced a circle
Across her clear outline
With her head tilted sideways
She called me again
“She called with her eyes” is recalled as “She called me again”, and that tilt of her head is enough to tilt everything in her favour. But then the song breathes a suggestive spirit, with the singer either being sweetly solicited or letting his thoughts run away – no, drift away – with him.
As the tune drifted out
She breathed hard through the echo
– you get the drift, for sure, but although it would be hard to paraphrase this (“through” being a word that teases again elsewhere in the song, in the run “Through a bullet of light”), it is not hard to feel, in “She breathed hard through the echo”, the breath of desire. Hers or his or his yearning for hers.
Unlike Fourth Time Around, which – for all its “Around” – is scant of breath in its linear weariness, Eternal Circle dances to the word “circle”:
My eyes danced a circle
Across her clear outline
“Eternal” is clear enough, and goes without singing. For this is an eternal circle in that it is a song about having sung a song, the present song folding the past one.
Yet although the narrative may be straightforward, to end it is no straightforward matter. Fortunately, the rhyme – the paradoxical rhyme – of “again” and “end” is happy once more to be of service. The central verse employs it as the only rhyme: “She called me again” / “And it was far to the end”. Or rather, as the only one at the line-ending, since there is an internal rhyme within the one-but-last line that is heard in four verses out of the five: “But the song it was long”.
Until the song duly arrives at its end (such an end as a circle can’t even begin to think of), this line, “But the song it was long”, has performed the office of a rhyming refrain. It had not itself been one of the rhyming lines, of which there had only ever been two, the fourth and eighth lines in each verse. These were always responsible for submitting a report on the progress of the song that is being sung about (with its intriguing relation to the song that is being sung here and now). These two lines, the only rhymed ones, stage the stages of the past song – as yet uncompleted – that is being recalled within this song. So in the verse that begins the song, the rhyming lines move from “As my silver strings spun” to end with “And I’d only begun”. In the second verse, “That rolled from my tongue” to “And there was more to be sung”. In the third verse, “She called me again” to “And it was far to the end”. And in the fourth verse, “I could see none” to “And it had to get done”.
But this insinuating insistent shape, this report on the work that (back then) had been in progress, has to cease when the present song (framing the past one) braces itself to cease. For, like the old song, the present song does have to get done, and would not feel done if it were still doing the same old thing with rhymes and all. So at this final point, the line that till then had always been the penultimate li
ne, “But the song it was long”, is ultimately sundered, so that it can furnish instead the rhyming that now at last can round off the eternal circle: “Who’d stayed for so long” / “And began the next song”.
The ten lines that rhyme are set to preserve community and continuity, for their sound is this: spun / begun; tongue / sung; again / end; none / done; long / song. Essentially they all intone an n. They even resound to the nth, being drawn out by all those other line-endings: a-playin’, reflectin’, outline, pretendin’, missin’, searchin’. . . Dylan knows how much the nose can effect through the mouth, and what all those n’s and their endings enhance is the sung song’s tone, its sinew and sinuous drone.
“But the song it was long”: yet this present song, as against that past one, is not long (a mere five verses of eight short lines), and it has now fulfilled its reminiscential arc. “But the song it was long”: the internal rhymes of this are at last brought to external life, are reversed, and are finally folded. And this, with the words “so long” hovering around the thought of saying goodbye (too good a word), and with “the next song” saying goodbye to this one:
As the tune finally folded
I laid down the guitar
Then looked for the girl
Who’d stayed for so long507
But her shadow was missin’
For all of my searchin’
So I picked up my guitar
And began the next song
This final verse is different, first, because “guitar” rhymes with itself: “I laid down the guitar” lays down the word, and then “So I picked up my guitar” picks it up. Then “long” rhymes with “song”, and “missin’” is in the vicinity of “searchin’” (something for which it is searching, which is missing?). Although this last pair is not the verse’s rhyme (which is long / song), “But her shadow was missin’ / For all of my searchin’” touches upon a rhyme. The strings are plaited here.
“As the tune finally folded”: finely folded, too, given how much the word “fold” may enfold. Came to an end, came to its end. Did so by means of a spiral or sinuous form, coiled and wound. Did so with a particular arrangement, where one thing lies reversed over or alongside another, doubled or bent over upon itself. Reversed: as the rhymes in “But the song it was long” came to be, happily – for if this is a reversal, it isn’t one in the sense of a defeat, just as the thought that “the tune finally folded” is not an admission of defeat, since – and this is the point – it is not that the tune (which has finished its unfolding) folded in the sense that it gave way, collapsed, failed, or faltered.508 But (sadly, this time) likewise not folded in the sense of an erotic glimpse of being folded in someone’s arms, embraced. For “her shadow was missin’ / For all of my searchin’”. Nor was it only her shadow that was missing. She, too. Not that you can take in your arms a shadow anyway.
And not that he then immediately “began the next song”.
When in the end he released Eternal Circle from the studio demo tape, he ended with a few chords. This performance is the only one we’ve got, apparently, and there is something at once endearing and eerie about having only one performance of a song about performing. On the illegitimate bootleg that was out before his bootleg series, he was heard to play more than those few final chords, leading into them with the whole tune again instrumentally. Whether with that fullness or as officially released and reduced, there is no equivalent to such effects when a poem ends. The words of Eternal Circle come to an end, but its music does not at that moment, or does not altogether. But since a poem consists of nothing but words and their punctuation, a poem can end with something that is both like and unlike “And began the next song”. Take John Berryman’s Dream Song number 168, The Old Poor, which ends:
I have a story to tell you which is the worst
story to tell that ever once I heard.
What thickens my tongue?
and has me by the throat? I gasp accursed
even for the thought of uttering that word.
I pass to the next Song:
Berryman’s colon at the very end presses you to presume that the next Song is the one that follows, number 169. But you will never really know for sure. Yet how different it is at the end of a page to write and read
I pass to the next Song:
turning the page to the words of a next song. For the next sound after Dylan’s concluding line “And began the next song” is not words but music, the guitar and at least a snatch of the past tune.
There are many moments when Berryman and Dylan are akin. Berryman: “He stared at ruin. Ruin stared straight back”. Dylan: “i accept chaos. i am not sure it accepts me”.509 But much more than a moment is constituted by Berryman’s Dream Song number 118. The scene is a poetry reading, not a concert, but there stands a performing artist: Henry, who both is and is not Berryman, rather as the singer, past and present, in Eternal Circle both is and is not Dylan. (The Dylan “I”, while it holds certain things in safe-keeping, is less evasive, more accountable, than the bluff “he” of Berryman.) The performer is likewise involved in – involved with? – a stranger out there imagined or imaginary.
He wondered: Do I love? all this applause,
young beauties sitting at my feet & all,
and all.
It tires me out, he pondered: I’m tempted to break laws
and love myself, or the stupid questions asked me
move me to homicide –
so many beauties, one on either side,
the wall’s behind me, into which I crawl
out of my repeating voice –
the mike folds down, the foolish askers fall
over theirselves in an audience of ashes
and Henry returns to rejoice
in dark & still, and one sole beauty only
who never walked near Henry while the mob
was at him like a club:
she saw through things, she saw that he was lonely
and waited while he hid behind the wall
and all.
Like Eternal Circle, this poem has to risk self-pity. Berryman may even court it, but neither of them is wedded to it. D. H. Lawrence thought that human beings should be ashamed of this mawkish weakness of theirs:
SELF-PITY
I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.
Both Berryman’s poem and Dylan’s song are about self-pity, as against merely manifesting it, but Berryman – even if we acknowledge that he knows he is fantasizing – does rather enjoy his concluding plangency:
she saw through things, she saw that he was lonely
and waited while he hid behind the wall
and all.
The American turn with the phrase “and all” differs from British English, which often has an air of strong impatience (“and so on and so forth”) or of specificity (“Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all” – all of them available to be named). These lack the sidling sliding sidelong movement of the American “and all”. In Visions of Johanna, Dylan can turn the acquiescent helplessness and uselessness of “and all” into the far-from-hopeless or -useless energies of aggression and baffled anger:
Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously
He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously
And when bringing her name up
He speaks of a farewell kiss to me
He’s sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all
Muttering small talk at the wall while I’m in the hall
– where “and all” is itself a kind of muttering but is not small talk; threateningly, it is talking big.510
Berryman proffered himself as little boy lost, and he liked to live dangerously, and he sure had a lotta gall. In Dream Song number 118, does he brag of his misery? We might set the tone of his scene against the candidly healthy word “pretendin’” in Eter
nal Circle:
I glanced at my guitar
And played it pretendin’
That of all the eyes out there
I could see none
One impulse that, when not resisting self-pity, may endorse self-pity is aggression. The Dream Song is explicit about such feelings both towards the listeners (“the stupid questions asked me / move me to homicide”) and from them: “while the mob / was at him like a club”. Just because it is a fan club doesn’t mean that it won’t beat you to death. (A reader of the Dream Song may think of Berryman’s friend Dylan Thomas.) But in Eternal Circle the possibility of aggression is entertained but rescinded. It is felt, for instance, in “the pierce of an arrow” (the guitar string vibrating to the bow-string):
As her thoughts pounded hard
Like the pierce of an arrow
There is a feeling that “her thoughts” may be not her thinking about him but his thinking about her (the performer may be tempted to flatter himself), the thought of her, with the thought of an arrow certainly having been prompted by the existence of his silver strings. This, and the effect, tilted sideways, of “the pierce of an arrow”: first, the penetration that comes from having “pierce” be a noun as against a verb (a piercing effect that is unusual but not unprecedented511), and second the coincidence that would advertise “the pierce of an arrow” compacted as the car that is called a Pierce Arrow.512
As so often with the company of strangers, danger may be glimpsed in a cryptic turn of phrase:
Through a bullet of light
Her face was reflectin’
The fast fading words
That rolled from my tongue
“Through”? Danger, then, perhaps. Or danger as the thing that might have been expected to arise but then is not permitted to. For the equanimity of the song is such as to suggest that the hope within it, or the fantasy if you wish, is proof against any such bullet or any such arrow or any such accidental automobile. The final resignation in the song is felt as endorsing the all-too-human wish that, for the two of them, this intense way of being together without being alone together, this meeting at a public distance (a long distance, looking to be bridged by the communion of song), might somehow have been succeeded by a meeting that would have been deeply private, not only personal but individual. And not at all to be grouped with groupies.
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 50