In the end, the plague touched us all. It was not confined to the Oran
of Camus. No. It turned up again in America, breeding in-a-compost of greed
and uselessness and murder, in those places where statesmen and generals
stash the bodies of the forever young. The plague ran in the blood of men
in sharkskin suits, who ran for President promising life and delivering
death. The infected young men machine-gunned babies in Asian ditches; they
marshalled metal death through the mighty clouds, up above God's green
earth, released it in silent streams, and moved on, while the hospitals
exploded and green fields were churned to mud.
And here at home, something died. The bacillus moved among us, slaying
that old America where the immigrants lit a million dreams in the shadows
of the bridges, killing the great brawling country of barnstormers and
wobblies and home-run hitters, the place of Betty Grable and Carl Furillo
and heavyweight champions of the world. And through the fog of the plague,
most art withered into journalism. Painters lift the easel to scrawl their
innocence on walls and manifestos. Symphonies died on crowded roads. Novels
served as furnished rooms for ideology.
And as the evidence piled up, as the rock was pushed back to reveal
the worms, many retreated into that past that never was, the place of balcony
dreams in Loew's Met, fair women and honorable men, where we browned ourselves
in the Creamsicle summers, only faintly hearing the young men march to
the troopships, while Jo Stafford gladly promised her fidelity. Poor America.
Tossed on a pilgrim tide. Land where the poets died.
Except for Dylan.
He had remained, in front of us, or writing from the north country,
and remained true. He was not the only one, of course; he is not the only
one now. But of all the poets, Dylan is the one who has most clearly taken
the rolled sea and put it in a glass.
Early on, he warned us, he gave many of us voice, he told us about the
hard rain that was going to fall, and how it would carry plague. In the
teargas in 1968 Chicago, they hurled Dylan at the walls of the great hotels,
where the infected drew the blinds, and their butlers ordered up the bayonets.
Most of them are gone now. Dylan remains.
So forget the clenched young scholars who analyze his rhymes into dust.
Remember that he gave us voice, When our innocence died forever, Bob Dylan
made that moment into art. The wonder is that he survived.
That is no small thing. We live in the smoky landscape now, as the exhausted
troops seek the roads home. The signposts have been smashed; the maps are
blurred. There is no politician anywhere who can move anyone to hope; the
plague recedes, but it is not dead, and the statesmen are as irrelevant
as the tarnished statues in the public parks. We live with a callous on
the heart. Only the artists can remove it. Only the artists can help the
poor land again to feel.
And here is Dylan, bringing feeling back home. In this album, he is
as personal and as universal as Yeats or Blake; speaking for himself, risking
that dangerous opening of the veins, he speaks for us all. The words, the
music, the tones of voice speak of regret, melancholy, a sense of inevitable
farewell, mixed with sly humor, some rage, and a sense of simple joy. They
are the poems of a survivor. The warning voice of the innocent boy is no
longer here, because Dylan has chosen not to remain a boy. It is not his
voice that has grown richer, stronger, more certain; it is Dylan himself.
And his poetry, his troubadour's traveling art, seems to me to be more
meaningful than ever. I thought, listening to these songs, of the words
of Yeats, walker of the roads of Ireland: "We make out of the quarrel with
others rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry."
Dylan is now looking at the quarrel of the self. The crowds have moved
back off the stage of history; we are left with the solitary human, a single
hair on the skin of the earth. Dylan speaks now for that single hair.
If you see her,
Say hello.
She might be in Tangiers...*
So begins one of these poems, as light as a slide on ice, and as dangerous.
Dylan doesn't fall in. Instead, he tells us the essentials; a woman once
lived, gone off, vanished into the wild places of the earth, still loved.
If you're makin' love to her,
Kiss her for the kid.
Who always has respected her,
for doin' what she did...*
It is a simple love song, of course, which is the proper territory of
poets, but is about love filled with honor, and a kind of dignity, the
generosity that so few people can summon when another has become a parenthesis
in a life. That song, and some of the other love poems in this collection,
seem to me absolutely right, in this moment at the end of wars, as all
of us, old, young, middle-aged, men and women, are searching for some simple
things to believe in. Dylan here tips his hat to Rimbaud and Verlaine,
knowing all about the seasons in hell, but he insists on his right to speak
of love, that human emotion that still exists, in Faulkner's phrase, in
spite of, not because.
And yes, there is humor here too, a small grin pasted over the hurt,
delivered almost casually, as if the poet could control the chaos of feeling
with a few simply chosen words:
Life is sad
Life is a bust.
All ya can do.
Is do what you must.
You do what you must do,
And ya do it will.
I'll do it for you,
Ah, honey baby, can't ya tell?**
A simple song. Not Dante's Inferno, and not intended to be. But a song
which conjures up the American road, all the busted dreams of open places,
boxcars, the Big Dipper pricking the velvet night. And it made me think
of Ginsberg and Corso and Ferlinghetti, and most of all, Kerouac, racing
Deam Mariarty across the country in the Fifties, embracing wind and night,
passing Huck Finn on the riverbanks, bouncing against the Coast, and heading
back again, with Kerouac dreaming his songs of the railroad earth. Music
drove them; they always knew they were near New York when they picked up
Symphony Sid on the radio. In San Francisco they declared a Renaissance
and read poetry to jazz, trying to make Mallarme's dream flourish in the
soil of America. They failed, as artist generally do, but in some ways
Dylan has kept their promise.
Now he has moved past them, driving harder into self. Listen to "Idiot
Wind." It is a hard, cold-blooded poem about the survivor's anger, as personal
as anything ever committed to a record. And yet is can also stand as the
anthem for all who feel invaded, handled, bottled, packaged; all who spent
themselves in combat with the plague; all who ever walked into the knives
of humiliation or hatred. The idiot wind trivialized lives into gossip,
celebrates fad and fashion, glorifies the dismal glitter of celebrity.
Its products live on the covers of magazines, in all of television, if
the poisoned air and dead grey lakes. But most of all, it blows through
the human heart. Dylan knows that such a wind is the deadliest enemy of
art. And when the artists die, we all die with them.
Or listen to the long narrative poem called "Lily, Rosemary And The
Jack of Hearts." It should not be reduced to notes, or taken out of context;
it should be experienced in full. The compression of story is masterful,
but its real wonder is in the spaces, in what the artist left out of his
painting. To me, that has always been the key to Dylan's art. To state
things plainly is the function of journalism; but Dylan sings a more fugitive
song: allusive, symbolic, full of imagery and ellipses, and by leaving
things out, he allows us the grand privilege of creating along with him.
His song becomes our song because we live in those spaces. If we listen,
if we work at it, we fill up the mystery, we expand and inhabit the work
of art. It is the most democratic form of creation.
Totalitarian art tells us what to feel. Dylan's art feels, and invites
us to join him.
That quality is in all the work in this collection, the long, major
works, the casual drawings and etchings. There are some who attack Dylan
because he will not rewrite "Like a Rolling Stone" or "Gates of Eden."
They are fools because they are cheating themselves of a shot at wonder.
Every artist owns a vision of the world, and he shouts his protest when
he sees evil mangling that vision. But he must also tell us the vision.
Now we are getting Dylan's vision, rich and loamy, against which the world
moved so darkly. To enter that envisioned world, is like plunging deep
into a mountain pool, where the rocks are clear and smooth at the bottom.
So forget the Dylan whose image was eaten at by the mongers of the idiot
wind. Don't mistake him for Isaiah, or a magazine cover, or a leader of
guitar armies. He is only a troubadour, blood brother of Villon, a son
of Provence, and he has survived the plague. Look: he has just walked into
the courtyard, padding across the flagstones, strumming a guitar. The words
are about "flowers on the hillside bloomin' crazy/Crickets talkin' back
and forth in rhyme..." A girl, red-haired and melancholy, begins to smile.
Listen: the poet sings to all of us:
But I'll see you in the sky above,
In the tall grass,
In the ones I love.
You're gonna make me lonesome when you go.***
-- Pete Hamill, New York, 1974
*from "If You See Her, Say Hello," ©1974 Ram's Horn Music. Used
by Permission. All rights reserved.
**from "Buckets of Rain," ©1974 Ram's Horn Music. Used by Permission.
All rights reserved.
***from "You're Gonna Make Me Lonseome When You Go," ©1974 Ram's
Horn Music. Used by Permission. All rights reserved.