![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/tempestCD.jpg\")
<\/p>\nBy Richard Marshall.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Bob Dylan Tempest<\/em><\/a>, Columbia 2012<\/p>\n \u2018Magical activity is a kind of dynamo supplying the mechanism of practical life with the emotional current that drives it. A society that thinks that it has outlived its need for magic is either mistaken in that opinion or else it is a dying society, perishing for lack of interest in its own maintenance.’ – R.G. Collingwood<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Bob Dylan gives popular music a sense that it is serious and not \u2018a matter of courtesy.’ If the following fragments are just sensations, then I’m going to be prone to illusions. But if I start making judgements then I’m going to get things wrong. Such are the risks. Robert Bresson said that an actor draws from himself what is not really there. This is the condition of the artist working in the unrealised future. \u2018Unrealised future’ is what originality gestures towards. It’s when you stop listening to the same thing over and over again. All of Dylan is the event that happens if you never hear a piece of music more than once. His solution has been not to imitate anyone. He rather uses comparisons to untie worlds. His voice is a fugitive. If asked whether Beethoven looked like a musician Dylan might drawl, \u2018Of course she didn’t.’<\/p>\n Dylan’s ghost America is its future where beauty is skin deep in places where people have to exit twice to leave a shadow. And it’s all<\/em> about beauty. To outwit potential forgers, he might keep changing his signature, on the principle that you can always make things a little worse and sell at a higher price. Dylan’s single gesture is to avoid triviality, first and last, so as to clear the ground for the future. Of course these days,as ever, no good deed remains unpunished.<\/p>\n If sociology is the history of the present then folk songs are obituaries. Religion is the world’s way of corrupting the spirit and created man out of its own offal. Some have tested whether religion has a biological value. Navajo Indians believe coyotes sing the world into existence. Dylan’s flavour of provincialism is both in that and his simple prosodic wakefulness to Elvis who knew that being modern is just about twisting. \u2018Long and Wasted Year’ nails the matter.<\/p>\n Tempest<\/em> is a story pretending to be an object, and vice versa. It’s title gives you a clue to what shape the songs are in, at the very least. You know what he’s saying, you really do, but you can’t tell it. It’s like, ‘how can you tell your left from your right in the dark?’ Dylan’s using an alphabet of 63 letters. This means he says more even though, curiously he uses no new words. But it gives him greater powers of discretion by having to expand what stays unsaid. Dylan wakes up the future because it is always beginning somewhere in his mind.<\/p>\n The first Romantic elements of poetry in America cover more fluid dates than its British counterparts. After the Revolutionary War the first generation poets made Romanticism visible. A contrast between these early pioneers and their British counterparts was the American’s focus on the vast new landscapes. In Britain the French Revolution and the Reform Acts of 1832 were redefining a political and cultural landscape in dramatic and unpredictable ways. Rapid industrialisation was the deeper setting for these struggles as Britain began to develop its technological base that would transform it into a world power. War with post-Revolutionary France \u2013 with Napoleon an iconic and divisive figure for British intellectuals and poets – and the emancipation of the Catholics granting religion freedom were important features of this time.<\/p>\n The great poets of these times in Britain were central to the formation of a peculiar self consciousness. Keats’ \u2018Fall of Hyperion’, Coleridge’s \u2018Kubla Khan’ and Wordsworth’s \u2018Prelude’ stripped down to the naked imagination and its process. Keats describes the moment of \u2018negative capability’ in a letter.<\/p>\n \u2018I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, and at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason – Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.’<\/p>\n So \u2018Negative Capability’ is that state of the imagination that lives with uncertainty and strife. It’s a quality of a certain tribe of poets. Keats writes of Dilke, not of the tribe but rather \u2018\u2026a man who cannot feel he has a personal identity unless he has made up his mind about everything. The only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up one’s mind about nothing – to let mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts, not a select party. The genus is not scarce in population: all the stubborn arguers you meet are of the same brood. They never begin on a subject they have not pre-resolved on. They never begin on a subject they have not pre-resolved on. They want to hammer their nail into you, and if you turn the point, they still think you are wrong. Dilke will never come at a truth so long as he lives, because he is always trying at it. He is a Godwin methodist.’ The Godwin Methodist is a preferred mode for our scorched days.<\/p>\n Keats, in ‘Sleep and Poetry’ writes: ‘ …I must pass them for a nobler life \/ Where I may find the agonies, the strife \/ of human hearts.’ Milton, of the same tribe, writes: ‘She disapeared, and left me dark: I waked \/ To find her, or for ever to deplore \/ Her loss, and other pleasures all abjure.’ Dante<\/a> writes his Comedia<\/em> whereby reading it becomes a spiritual quest journeying through the uncertainty and illusions of a cold mysterious desert.<\/p>\n Dylan rewrites Dante as a type of Orasmus Turner<\/a> life cycle, the woodsman thing, a rapid eye movement that gave you the essence of pioneer life \u2013 kids arriving, neighbours, a railroad getting laid \u2013 four intervals \u2013 six months, two years, ten years and then a lifetime all coming into his head in a great water chute of energy \u2013 like, if you don’t know where you’re going then all roads are going there \u2013 mills, water-powered, single-bladed, and friction feeds, edgers, drying kilns, logs hauled to the river’s edge, splash dams, slender logs, crooked logs, rotten logs, sunken logs fished up from the river bottom, beams that made railway bridges, rafters in Gothic cathedrals, shingles, spools, pail handles, veneers, wooden furniture pegs, hemlock bark for the tannery, combing brains for reclamation, trees, doors, blinds, sashes, massive stumps, steep slopes, firewood, furnaces, charcoal, Hanging Rock, Allegheny Valley, Juniata, Scioto, Jackson, Vinton Counties, Ramapos Mountains, steamboats, steam engines, steam locomotives, where to imagine America without trees is to imagine another world. In this is \u2018Scarlet Town’, his damned Titanic, New York, everything.<\/p>\n Memory and the soul collide in Dylan. Memory draws us back into time when the soul seeks release. The great tension in Dylan is awareness of the time coming where time ends. His consciousness of the history of this process is of \u2018Two trains running side by side, forty miles wide\u2026 I think when my back was turned the whole world burned\u2026 we cried because our souls were torn, so much for tears, so much for these long and wasted years.’ There is a flicker of Burke’s warning. He warned: \u2018 \u2026 people will not look forward to posterity who never look back to their ancestors.’ Dylan’s ancestral Lithuanian proverb adds: \u2018Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye. Ignore the past and you lose both of them.’ It reaches to the splendid abundance and infinite melancholy of Gatsby wherein Fitzgerald wakes us to \u2018 \u2026 the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.’ In \u2018Tempest’ that same green is a dress Mary is wearing near midnight where a two-timer is dating the Fairy Queen.<\/p>\n Complex contradictions circle us in Dylan. The new landscape, a new revolution of sensibility, its great moment in America of transcendentalism as in Thoreau, Emerson and Fuller and the strange unconventional religion of Blake, Coleridge, Hazlitt<\/a> and Leigh Hunt, all occupy the past. So a mixture of Romanticism and Transcendentalism via catholic and non-conformist Protestantism is an ancestry of Dylan’s future capitol.<\/p>\n In an earlier epic, Dylan links through rhyme the industrialised power of a transcendent USA with its brand new Roman republic through the Great Coulee Damn and Washington’s Capitol in \u2018Idiot Wind’. In \u2018Scarlet Town’ Uncle Tom’s still working, running crimson lines in a bloody thread of evil that runs through this Edenic vision and calls up Hannah Moore and Olaudah Equiano and the governance of slavery, racism<\/a> and desolated class war.<\/p>\n The Zen nun Ryonen of the transcendentalist times wrote \u2018Sixty-six times have these eyes beheld the changing \/ scene of autumn \/ I have said enough about moonlight, \/ Ask no more. \/ Only listen to the voice of pines and cedars when no \/ wind stirs.’ Memory is a virtue of history but a danger. It draws everything into time. Dylan’s potent sound is moving on burning bright and rolling on, looking to the future that obliterates time by clearing away the past. Like Empodocles Dylan sings: \u2018I am an exile from the gods, a wanderer, placing my trust in MAD STRIFE.’ Adoring Aphrodite, he is wary of Aphrodite’s trap. Aphrodite’s trap was harmony. In one of the songs the protagonist roars \u2018Our nation must be saved and freed’.<\/p>\n The deep romantic chasm in Dylan expresses the unsettling changes rendered in his recovery and invention of a national identity. Dylan is nothing if not a poet of empire. His creativity moves a direct commerce in this realm along with Shakespeare, another empire man. When the European neo-classicists compared Racine with Shakespeare it was a fundamental distinction. The great rationalist aestheticisms of Germany looked to the French classicist as the embodiment of an Aristotelian rational art. Reason conquers and fills the universe with its light.<\/p>\n But Shakespeare was hearing the Duquesne whistle blowing, \u2018Blowing like she ain’t gonna blow no more\u2026Blowing like the sky is gonna blow apart.’ That reckless sense of dark unconstrained powers is the insane passion and desire that rings Renaissance England with Carolingian America in its sublime crown of strife. It is the \u2018Idiot Wind’ that blows through. Dylan here records both the sense that there may never again be such poetry and also the awesome, sublime moment when poetry expresses itself. The condition of poetry’s glory buckles to the drama of its time and place its gilded monstrosity. Dylan’s voice has never sounded more apt and bold.<\/p>\n Shakespeare, at the height of his powers found his power coinciding with the potency of Elizabethan nationhood. In his doubling intelligence, he wrote into the teeth of impending doom: Empire’s fall. This link, between everything and nothing, is clear where the potency of the land and place is clasped by the poet. The Duquesne whistle is both being born and is busy dying in the opening song, \u2018sounding like she’s on a final run\u2026’, \u2018blowing like she’s never blowed before.’ It’s still there blowing right through to the end. Dylan stares at the ruins of what had been one of the largest blast furnaces in the world, a symbol of the industrial muscle that marked the USA’s domination of the whole world and sees in it a sign of a coming end, where the empire falls and the promise of its originality too. The Titanic metaphor is a hundred American chances going under.<\/p>\n Aristotlealian notions of the tragic were exploded by Shakespeare and Spencer et al<\/em>. The world explodes when reason admits there’s too much for it. Escaping from the formal constraints of Reasons’ classical shadows, Blake and Keats created literary forms that are epic in scope but modern in form and found their model in the example of the great republican poet Milton.<\/p>\n Dylan has nourished himself on just such meat. The \u2018Early Roman Kings’ are both one of the gangs of New York and also the Miltonic Roman Republic epic form of \u2018Paradise Lost’. America has this spirit yolked to its expansive, bloody, empire-soaked self consciousness. Whitman’s \u2018Song Of Myself’ and Melville’s Moby-Dick<\/em> swim through the hell and slaughter of this kind of poetry. There’s \u2018all the nobility of an ancient race’ deep and settled in Dylan’s work.<\/p>\n The authentic voice is more complex and tricky than it is sometimes taken to be. Dylan is often written about as if merely nostalgic, or attempting to return to history to find a voice modernity has lost. But this is to ignore the fakery that is authentic to this tradition of revolutionary voices and newness, a fakery that haunts itself with elegiac voices that were sprung from contemporary traps. Consider the case of James MacPherson’s translation of the ancient Scots poet Osian in the 1760s that were influential on Goethe and Thomas Jefferson. Consider \u2018Fingal’ translated from ancient Gaelic. Romanticised Celtic and Scots poems of mythic origins were invented to feed the Romantic mood and the nation builders need for heroic history. An invented history avoids the traps of truth. Sir Walter Scot invented tartan as ancient Scots gear. Clan colours are all fakes of nineteenth century tourism.<\/p>\n It is an error to misunderstand this as betrayal of authenticity. This fakery is a short cut, revealing what the authentic sign hopes for. It functions to paint the scenery of your mind. Consciousness of the Genocide of the native Americans has largely been overcome by using a faked authentic vision of America as empty when the Europeans arrived. The empty landscape was faked up as an Eden, contrasting it with the cynical, tired and ancient sophistications of teeming Europe. Shelley’s \u2018Ozymandius’, Keats’ \u2018Ode On A Grecian Urn’, Byron’s \u2018Curse of Minerva’ frame a romantic consciousness in relation to a ruined empire. If Dylan’s epic title song \u2018Tempest’ is nothing else, it is here that it finds its companion pieces. America’s built on the blood of old civilisations wiped out by its new original men. Coming from the East and then spreading down, and from the South, up through Mexico the original men destroyed the genuine originals.<\/p>\n This is the secret in the land, that everything is based on that. So too the civil war, and the African slaves, like the Jews in Europe, and all the anti-labour stuff, it places a burden on speech, on thought, on joy. There’s a price needs paying yet. America the beautiful has a lot to own up to. And the crushing of the working figure, the millions of blue collar workers, the proletariat, eaten alive to despair in the heart of the new world but fed the Great American Dream in compensation. What are these slaves, the vast millions, the poor and hungry and destitute? Nuclear canaries? \u2018Tempest’ is spleen.<\/p>\n In it, the USA is like that great angry ape playing fantastic tricks before high heaven to make angels weep, as Shakespeare almost said, ‘angels who would with our spleens all themselves laugh mortal.’ The ruined industrial landscape Dylan travels through here is where the empire’s powers betray the dreams of its own. Poor Americans are victims of a dirty State power where politicians pump out the piss and angry beggars blow kisses. Dylan’s ire is complete: his America is at once the hope of originality and Blake’s forest of the night.<\/p>\n There’s never been a moment when all the secrets get revealed in Dylan. The whole scene is given over as mystical secret, a bargain of the spirit. Indians in New Mexico didn’t complain when whipped by the Spanish priests. You figure why? Priests used to whip themselves too. Whipped themselves hard enough to draw their own blood. So they reckoned there was a truth in what the priests were up to. This is the kind of interpretative justice we might give, like in \u2018Scarlet Town’, paying in blood (but someone else’s). The humour here is dark and dry. And integrity beyond just the usual process, beyond mankind, the body, ordinary pain and language is fashioned with loose and lovely ingenuity. And so \u2018Que no haya novedades’ \u2013 secrets were to be kept \u2013 \u2018let nothing new arise.’ That’s what is happening in these hollered terrifying and gorgeous songs.<\/p>\n The locus classicus of this imagination, one seeking the land beyond the corruption of dying empires, old ways, long and dreadful hours, is in the sublimity of landscape. As if we might have forgotten the role of landscape and his imagination Dylan again has signaled his understanding of this. He draws together the notion of the sublimity of a nature that overpowers and is too much for human civilization and history with both the history of his own empire and his own consciousness. Like Wordsworth on Snowdon, Shelley on Mount Blanc, Whitman by Blue Ontario shore, Turner as Vesuvius explodes, Dylan’s poems roam out in a way Shelley saw in Byron: \u2018Most wretched men \/ Are cradled into poetry by wrong \/ They learn in suffering what they teach in song.’ In the use of rhyme and slippery, sly humour and his own status as not quite a poet but something like one, he approaches the saturnalian reputation of Byron playing with the Byronic flavor that there’s always something marvelously inauthentic there. In Dylan’s arsenic music, especially his reaching back to days of American yore, he’s breaking free.<\/p>\n Is this possible? Even to imagine it? There are precedents. Thomas Chatterton<\/a>, the \u2018marvelous boy’, forged a medievalism that inspired Wordsworth to write \u2018Revolution and Independence’. Chatterton’s suicide and the cult of genius unconstrained and natural isn’t something that directly announces its trickery, if trickery is indeed what it is. Ballads and songs from rural backwaters and the link to labouring classes is of course the ground of Burns, Clare, Bloomfield, Hogg whose reputations are those of primitives working with untutored genius and sublime sensibility. Blake’s revolutionary supernaturalism burns bright in this too, and its no surprise to find him and his ‘Tyger’ surfacing in the last song to John Lennon, one where Lennon is encoded in an elemental and sublime code of honour, understood as a fallen hero grasped as an unpolished, rooted in ancient elements that burn out all civilised history. Those seeking a historical reanactment of mourning will be baffled, mistaking Dylan for someone else. Dylan is working like Keats in \u2018Lamia’: \u2018Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings.’<\/p>\n <\/p>\n To think of Dylan’s lyrics as being about the actual words used by actual people is to mistake the hand he’s playing. The violence and gothic elements of his work have been present right form the start and anyone unclear that this is so should watch recent perfomances of \u2018Ballad of a Thin Man’. We saw this in Bournemouth a few years ago. Dylan stalked the stage holding his mic like a dagger. He sang the song like the devil himself. The threat and violence of the performance contained the weirdness of gothic preaching. Iago or Macbeth could have been the spirit animating it.<\/p>\n In Tempest<\/em> there are huge swathes of this gothic horror monstrously and belligerently pressing their claims. \u2018In Scarlet Town when I was born\u2026 the streets have names that you can’t pronounce\u2026 the music starts and the people sway, everybody says, are you going my way\u2026 Scarlet Town is under the hill\u2026’ This sways from gothic fairy tale to gentle nature lyric under a threatening tone that mix the macabre and the mystical. \u2018\u2026 the evil and the good living side by side \/ the human form seems glorified.’ If ever there was a problem it’s where humans want what is god’s, where an achieved ideal is presumed and desire alone is blasphemous. Dylan’s singing is where \u2018a chilly wind blows’, where we’re always wishing we were elsewhere and someone else.<\/p>\n Throughout, Dylan continues to explore what is the quintessence of the Romantic hero and heroine and in so doing confronts us with the fact that the perpetual restlessness and unsatisfied longing are the grounds of great villains as well as heroes. And if there is a candidate for the everyman archetype that haunts Dylan’s poetry it is Goethe’s \u2018Faust’, imprisoned by his subjectivity and yearning for a reality that will dress up his wounds. The disorder and sickness is all here in this: \u2018I aint dead yet, my bell still rings\u2026 I can strip you of life, strip you of breath, ship you down to the house of death\u2026’ is the threat of \u2018early Roman Kings’ which is Faust singing from hell, transposing the Athenaeum heritage of German Romanticism to the dark shadowy underground of labour gang wars, death ballads and \u2018bent visions.’<\/p>\n It should be clear from all this that Dylan’s not nostalgic for anything, not in the forms he’s using nor the subject matter. Dylan’s nerve has held throughout fifty years of working at this, working like Emerson says poets should, to \u2018liberate Gods.’ The poetry, the song, is written purely for itself, the rhythmic creation of beauty as Poe puts it. And Poe is instructive. All that gothic darkness, the horror and hauntings, crumbling ruins and wrecked psychologies, Poe might too be blamed for being too gripped by the past. But all Poe was, was modern.<\/p>\n So too Dylan, who for fifty years has been the most modern of poets. Originality is Orphic and what Poe writes holds for Dylan.<\/p>\n \u2018If a man \u2013 if an Orphicist \u2013 or seer \u2013 or whatever else he may choose to call himself, while the rest of the world calls him an ass \u2013 if this gentleman have an idea which he does not understand himself, the best thing he can do is say nothing about it \u2026 but if he have any idea which is actually intelligibly to himself, and if he sincerely wishes to render it intelligible to others, we then hold it as indisputable that he should employ those forms of speech which are the best adapted to further his object. He should speak to the people in the ordinary people’s tongue. He should arrange words such as are habitually employed for the preliminary and introductory ideas to be conveyed \u2013 he should arrange them in collocations such as those in which we are accustomed to see those words arranged.’<\/p>\n \u2018Meantime we earnestly as if bread and butter be the vast IDEA in question \u2013 if bread-and-butter be any portion of this vast IDEA? For we have often observed that when a SEER has to speak of even so usual thing as bread-and-butter, he can never be induced to mention it outright\u2026’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In the words of Poe<\/strong> we find the outline of what is Dylan’s originality. Dylan’s complaint has ever been the unoriginality of American plagiarists before him, who move to find culture and therefore poetry and art generally elsewhere. The irony of those who find lines stolen from elsewhere in Dylan is that Dylan’s whole oeuvre is one which refuses \u2018to bring the tower of Seville Cathedral to Madison Square.’ Such would have nothing of the New World in it. It’s why once he spat out that \u2018The Beatles were never rock and roll.’ The sublime, truculent, hard, sardonic dimension of the USA mass, the greatest world power, is unrealisable in borrowings, liftings, in the business of transposition. Poe uses latin to goof the illiteracy of his plagiarising public. By its power this permits him to be original, to find freedom in a satirical authenticity rooted in the blasted, quarried might of the US land and place. So too in Dylan. His raided tropes from murder ballads, work songs, folk tales and so on, the familiar Dylan landscapes, are used to wrestle freedom forms out of the hugeness of his place.<\/p>\n Lithuanian ancestors, American blood. Dylan’s Tempest<\/em> again wrestles with the twin time bombs of the American poetic heart. On the one hand is the local, the prehensible, the honest, upright, the close up of the New England melancholy and town pump, the intimacy of the vague humours of each locality and all its protean teemingness. Here is Dylan showing consuming touching pathos, singing \u2018its soon after midnight, and my day is just begun \/ a girl named honey took my money \/ she was passing by \/ it was after midnight and the moon was in my eye \/ my heart is cheerful’, a Dylan of pure Spenserian radical style and most available scholarship, singing \u2018I’ve got a date with the Fairy Queen’, in a sprightly, Puckish gleam of radiant imagination and consummate ingenuity. Yet the voice switches in a moment of self-awareness as his character mutters darkly of \u2018Two timing Slim \/ who’s ever heard of him? \/ I’ll drag his corpse through the mud’ contrasting stylish delightfulness and surprise with blunt viciousness.<\/p>\n On the other hand there’s Dylan writing out of invisible ink, feeding the pigs with all the smart efforts of critics and scholars, the writer out of the monstrous, the Dylan who flies out to the end of the world and beyond \u2013 \u2018it’s a long road \u2026 we looted and we plundered on different shores\u2026’, a Dylan standing far off so as to see (rather than sitting by the fence in the square as the darkness comes). Dylan in this is doing something that has not been done before and is not an American version of anything else. When Wallace Stevens wrote of the originality of Poe he finds a ground \u2018not of sentiment or mood, as not of trees and Indians, but of original fibre, the normal toughness which fragility of mood presupposes.’ If nothing else, Dylan is the toughest of poets. A hard judgment extends through his soundness in blazing lines of difficult, uncompromising flint. \u2018Be gentle and pray, it’s a long road, it’s a long and narrow way.’<\/p>\n The deeper intent of Dylan is in the dismembering disgust and fear, the shallow put-downs that then fall into extreme dark beauty that is pitiless and so extreme we ask \u2018Is there some place we can go? Is there anyone we can see\u2026 I ain’t seen my family for twenty years \/ they may be dead by now \/ I lost track of them when they lost their land\u2026 don’t you know the sun can burn your brains right out.’ This song is the very apotheosis of the place and time.<\/p>\n It is the great mystery. A song with the mystery train in parallel places with a penetration of what it is to have a torn soul, destroying the very vial that contained his shaken gleeful desire. The acid power breaks down the truth of love. Love is what is being forced on love wearing an iron heart. When Dylan sings elsewhere, in another time \u2018I can make you feel my love’ there’s a sense of power and greed in the voice where the word emphasized is \u2018make’. Never has a threat been so wild and terrifying.<\/p>\n His concert performances counterpoint Adel’s<\/a> wonderful recent version: he contradicts her version. Metamorphosised, Dylan is both reducing all things to method whilst commenting on this. Who else but murderers and rapists know this exiled \u2018elsewhere’? The full horror of the isolation is here enacted: and it lifts these songs to a power at once so different from any other we can hear. These songs are poems on the edge, original and caught on the cusp between his time and no time. It is a refrain from the hollow, a kind of echo caught in the desolate line about the Titanic sinking into the underworld.<\/p>\n Listening to the new ten songs there’s a way of understanding them as the growls of a long way off. \u2018Lights down the hallway\u2026 the veil was torn asunder’ is the way Dylan keeps his poetry at the edge of thin insulating surfaces. We are lashed to a tide of sorrow and impotence. When he snorts, \u2018alarm bells were ringing to hold back the swelling tide’ the line is full of the \u2018love and pity’ that comprehends the futility and stupidity of the very idea of a bell being supposed, as if in a fantasy, to hold back the watery tempest. Here’s an example of what Dylan keeps doing, showing how we foolishly misplace things. A warning is no solution. In all this, in each verse, in each of the variety and beauty and rampaging glory of doom tales and sweetness is the noise and racket of the mad pure essence of the American, New World locality.<\/p>\n Wallace Stevens said ‘Poets, they are the test.’ Terror enlarges its subject and, in comparison, inevitably, diminishes outsiders hidden from the \u2018Tyger’ and the \u2018Book of Revelation’, both books about the need for an original future. Dylan is needling America for not being the way it supposed itself \u2013 supposes itself – to be. The originality of America is for Dylan betrayed in the creeping fearfulness of its marinated wealth, its forgetfulness, its tired bones that can hardly fetch itself the bones of its own acquisitiveness. America holds everything out of reach and in the gap it gains fear, hate, madness and time that fortifies a carcass where there is \u2018no more joy’. By wishing for unoriginality America is just the piss of the blood of 72,000 Indians wiped out between Southern Maine and the Hudson River in the name of god and New England between 1615 and 1690. There is only shameful iterating.<\/p>\n His landscape is a surreal dark one, as sublime as Endymion’s beneath the sea, walking underwater where there is no shining moon anymore. The Dorothy Six Blast Furnace was once the largest in the world but now is a ruin. A sign, like Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, but for the American poor, whose lives are tricked to believe in a personal devotion to their ruinous and monstrous masters. Dylan writes and performs in an America where cults have formed to abolish the poor \u2013 cults of unimaginable wealth<\/a>. And at no cost, the poor are carried away from the public consciousness as an offense might be wiped away. The ‘Duquesne Whistle’ blowing through America is the contrasting story of hope and despair portrayed in the great smile of America that builds self-esteem out of the gap between touch and the thing. Everything is to honour the dissembling idea that everything is for generosity and honour and the dream that all are equal in America’s smile. Battleships for peace. The smile that increases the gulf, and fixes it, a mechanism to increase the gap between the thing and its touch. Dylan sings a chirpy song into a ghost landscape of destroyed industria, where unemployment and the brittle miraculous energies of the past are just waked up ghosts. Dylan takes the industrial past and its myths and shows them from a perspective where life becomes disconfirmed. Work slaves are ruled by a fear and utter darkness that flies into foreign places seeking sensationalist escape.<\/p>\n Dylan finds originality through killing spree language, the wilderness and affection of America’s total self-ignorance of scale. The parochialism and small town confrontations that leave the world shaken by thunders from American mountains, their crooked ice peaks, the narrow bend of its laws is what Dylan speaks to. Heroic rhetoric and hackneyed gestures belies its reality and the childish, unconstrainable power that trembles with unearthly reality darken the grace of the Bixby<\/a> letter say, or Lincoln.<\/p>\n This then is the theme again of the idea of America, its status as the final empire, in Williams’ words, \u2018So deep must stones be hurled \/ whereon the throes of ages rear \/ The final empire and the happier world.’ And Dylan is still wondering where the modernity, the absolute newness of America, can be found. The very idea of an American Renaissance is like a habit of the place, and the confusion and fear of it all being \u2018such a long long time’ makes the theme too large for habitation, as if America is that too. Dylan is asking whether there is a place to go anymore, or whether everything’s finishing at his doorway.<\/p>\n Poe was a rumour of the French, but his reality was American through and through, and as such, an original. Broken and killed for it, but nevertheless truly so. Dylan is courtesy to the UK and an excietement not quite understood in Johnny Hallyday’s Europe. But like Poe, Dylan is working from the dead centre of America. Its makeshift, profuse and colossal sign is where Dylan grasps his locality. Everything that makes us anti-American \u2013 its brute force and strength, its size, its crushing of the whole world \u2013 these require a poet who can scare hogs and birds, can summarise its venomous capacity with clean accuracy. There must be the capacity to speak to its gluey protean enormity and emnity. Dylan is founding that voice.<\/p>\n Just as Keats could visit steam boats on Loch Lomond with barouches and the lot, could sing praises to the banks of the Clyde whilst dreaming of chivalry barges, trumpets and banners, so is Dylan’s imagination impressing itself, seeking and finding glory in things better than mere scenery and the local touch. Just as Keats was entranced by his own Cleopatra’s and Charmion’s erotic depths and the theatrical, pantomimic and worldy dealings of heart and sex, whilst his politics went the way left towards the liberals against Tories, berating Napoleon for harming the liberal cause, writing \u2018Ode To Autumn’ to mark the Peterloo Massacre, and worrying that Russia might threaten China, so too Dylan’s passions inflect love, politics, history, nestled prejudice and money matters \u2013 most likely poverty and defeat \u2013 from out the belly of a great beast.<\/p>\n His songs catch up the Erie Canal that connected barge traffic from the Great Lakes to New York, catch up the link between Cleveland to the Ohio River and on to the Mississippi, seeing these as arteries from the Midwest to the southern port of New Orleans and in that way seeing America as a huge evolving body, a monstrous, beautiful child. The Sante Fe trail \u2013 Missouri to the Southwest \u2013 and the Oregan Trail across the Sierras to California \u2013 stories, songs, legends, films, Dylan’s endowed these with a belief in the beauty in these things, believed in them as carrying something within them, something he had been missing whilst in the underwater world of Warhol’s New York.<\/p>\n Buffalo, antelope, wide rivers, conifers, mountain ranges, Thoreau and Emerson, Fennimore Cooper, Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, he’s trying out his hand with a kind of moral play. All those visionaries, outlaws, vagabonds, he is thinking about figures who almost made it, who were almost heroes. New York, it came to him one night in his mind, New York was dead. Or better, John Lennon killed New York as surely as New York killed him. \u2018The City’s gone dark, there is no more joy.’ He moves from voices of indolent and supreme carelessness to those of wicked anger and hatred.<\/p>\n Dylan is not singing to consecutive men, with one image plodding after the other, nor are these mere concatenations of words. These are the regular stepping-after truths and for this progress he can’t duck the history, the philosophy, the thought and the knowledge that are indispensible for such progression. But this is a journey of solitude and work, and what his voice endures are the pains of sympathy, strong feelings without quicksteps and hurry. Unlike so many of his commentators he is not looking for results. He isn’t shutting these words snap shut in a box. He is content \u2013 if that is the word \u2013 with the half knowledge, the doubt, the foggy uncertainty that we’ve heard before in, for example, the opening of Beethoven’s Ninth, where the sound doesn’t fix on any definite key, and we’re left wondering whether this is joy we’re hearing, or despair.<\/p>\n The immense self concentration links Dylan to Schiller’s notion of dignity<\/a>, a subject<\/a> he’s sung about and one whose contrast is grace. The success is to find the way of opposing the inclination \u2013 in listeners and critics, in the response as well as the genesis \u2013 of magnifying differences of grade, of opposing levels of reality, say, rather than accepting things in curiosity making good of the non-ideal and its contrasts. Leave the feeling be, it will find its target and stay fine, even though there may well be things finer. It is this that enabled Shakespeare call up the feeling of Iago and of Macbeth just as Dylan can make the force of his villains take up their existence just as well as the virtuous.<\/p>\n This confuses some who like to take the voices as if they are Dylan’s own. But Dylan works in the Shakesperean, Keatean mode whereby he is not possessed by his own creations in any such profane and simple-headed way. Keats describes Dylan as the poet having \u2018no self’ because the poet \u2018is everything and nothing\u2026 It enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things, any more than its taste for the bright one, because they both end in speculation. A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity.’<\/p>\n So Dylan’s is the imagination that ends in greatness of speculation, trying for the originality required of his New World empire that now is looking tired, raging and insane. Dylan started 71 years ago with Hank Williams on the radio. Jerry Lee Lewis on the radio. Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, Elvis Presley on the radio. Then he rode out to the record store in the Twin cities of Minneapolis and St Paul. He would find it romantic to be alone in the snow under the Minnesota blue sky, wrapped up warm in the cold fresh air, loitering outside the record store, alone like James Dean, like Brando, like Marilyn, like Elvis. He was in his head, without beginning, middle or end, waulking the homemade thoughts round in a sunwise direction, rowing, lulling \u2013 he was like a mother singing a lullaby, a strong song over troubled waters praising her child, dreaming of the future. And the baby in that future was its hero. He bought a guitar. He formed a band. The Sam Danforth’s played in Deluth. First night and his cousin and he shivered in a hallway with just four songs that they could just about string out.<\/p>\n There was something half-crazed about it but in the L&B caf \u00e9 in Hibbing later on, with Echo his girl at his side he was already knowing that no place could hold him. He was looking for the future orgy. The point of this is to note that self-trust is the essence of heroism. Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of the great and the good, to the voice of mankind for a time even. Something like that. Emerson says of heroism: \u2018Its jest is the littleness of life.’<\/p>\n Norman Mailer said, \u2018The wall between rich and poor is a wall of glass through which we all can see.’ And, \u2018The space between hypocrisy and honest manner may not forever insulate the powerful from the poor.’ Cezanne said, \u2018Blue gives other colours vibration’. Dylan’s blues are a kind of American\/Lithuanian Hellenism.<\/p>\n Whilst many were all ready to listen out for the revolution and the future, Dylan was listening to the subterranean history of our culture in preparation. A kind of syncopated pause caught by his ear. Like a fearful man caught in a narrow space, trying to expand his space by moving frantically about \u2013 building his home underground, looking for exits, digging into the past and into the future, old themes and new modernities all come scrambled up in what he does. Cadillacs and owls are built phrenologically through a kind of deviant method acting. Sometimes I think of what he’s doing as being posthumous, like he was already dead but from the future. Listening to Dylan is listening to sounds not made yet. When Beethoven wrote his Ninth Symphony, he wrote sounds for an instrument that hadn’t yet been invented. Dylan is doing the same.<\/p>\n Of Michaelangelo it was said: \u2018Unlike the other poets he does not portray a place or a manner, does not celebrate a literary fashion, taste, or style; he does not tell in verse his own personal life, or not it alone. His thoughts are the great thoughts of the century: art, beauty, love, death; his drama is the great drama of the era, fought between heaven and earth, flesh and spirit, love of life and cult of death, Plato and Christ. That, writing of these things, he could have written better but it is worth remembering that no one else writing well wrote of them at all.’<\/p>\n But if Dylan is sweeping away the worthless chaff to clear the ground, doesn’t the weight of the ground leave his project impossibly self-cancelling? \u2018There’s nothing but the past in his compass’ critics complain, \u2018Where’s his originality?’ But that is to miss the obvious thing. All those poets, they never knew what to do first with a guitar, then electricity. 71 years ago, there was nothing like a Bob Dylan, so he invented one. An American boy with an appetite, no reasons, no explanations, no more involved now than anyone else, struggling to keep the sun over his head, trying to do the job he’d been given to do \u2013 which was to sing some songs \u2013 to be a poet out of that humble profession, to make that profession submit to the poet in him.<\/p>\n He was like Eliot<\/a> in his bank, Kafka in his insurance business, William Faulkner writing the film script of The Big Sleep<\/a><\/em> for Howard Hawks out of Chandler<\/a>, or To Have And Have Not<\/a><\/em> out of Hemmingway \u2013 and then one day he found electric music for each voice he’d put on up on stage, night after night – Richard Widmark<\/a>, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre<\/a>, Humphrey Bogart<\/a>, Brando<\/a>, Dean<\/a>, Monroe<\/a>, Lucy Ann Polk<\/a> and the thousand others. His originality is hidden in plain sight.<\/p>\n His colloquialism shows how his language varies from English. His practice lets the business of composition show through. The primitive awkwardness of diction, like in Twain, belies the serious amazement of his own engagement and enjoyment in making these songs. It is the very extreme of playfulness that livens the skill of an almost Cubist, abstract detachment.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/john-keats1.jpg\")
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