One More Cup of Bobby #1: Dylan With the Times

It cannot be doubted: a musician's sense of time and technical skill communicate their most intimate dimensions, their most profound statements. Complex rhythms compel, effortless riffing paired with well-written lyrics have us tapping, singing, and feeling along. Certainly, Bob Dylan is in that rare class of musicians that not only showcases rhythmic, technical, and lyrical richness, but also complicates with an opaque simplicity, transparently lets you know he's playing three-dimensional chess. But he is, among other things, a painter, an author (Tarantula, Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric, Chronicles: Volume 1), an actor (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Renaldo and Clara, Hearts of Fire, Masked and Anonymous), a filmmaker (Renaldo and Clara, Masked and Anonymous), and a sculptor. Though only taking place five years after his public debut, a few questions from the infamous 1965 San Francisco Press Conference touch on these very matters and provide the material of Dylan's most notorious quip:

Interviewer #7: Do you think there will ever be a time when you paint or sculpt?Dylan: Oh, yes. Oh, sure. *chuckles*

Interviewer #8: Do you think there will ever be a time when you'll be hung as a thief? *raucous audience laughter*

Dylan: Oh! You weren't supposed to say that... *laughs*

Interviewer #2: Do you think of yourself primarily as a singer or as a poet?

Dylan: Oh, I think of myself more as a song and dance man, y'know. *thin smile, eyes averted*

Interviewer #2: A what?

Dylan: Song and dance man.

Interviewer #2: Song and dance man. Why?

Dylan: Oh, I don't think we have enough time to really go into that...

The panel, in its attempts to make sense of Dylan is tone deaf towards the evasiveness of art (the too-direct questions voiced in dull, flat tones), or else overly ambitious (earlier, a young man licks his lips and stares wide-eyed telling Dylan the that cover of Highway 61 Revisited definitely has a meaning; later a young lady asks him if he prefers songs with an obvious or subtle message). Visibly frustrated, put-on and put-off by the panel, Dylan tuned out. And if the young, self-actualizing Bob Dylan reveled in playing the epitome of the Tarot's double-speaking archetype "The Fool," his arcane twisting of rhythm and meaning in senectude is derived from a lived, meaningful life wherein he explored the breadth of art at large. He has seen the world, twice married and twice divorced, courted the affections of world leaders and world class musicians, put himself in the spotlight to call out injustice and chafed furiously, openly at attempts to pigeonhole him. Bob has written over 500 songs, will stream the online Shadow Kingdom concert this July 18, and in November his visual art will be showcased in his first American retrospective at Florida International University. The American Bard has kept on keeping on and left a wild path of tracks in his wake, a twisting maze that would make Theseus blush and force the Minotaur to put in a two-weeks’ notice.

It goes without saying that the past 8 months of my own Dylan itinerary have not been dull. The lyrics have floored me, and when I glossed over masterpieces, inevitably, I kicked myself for not having had enough ears. I have writhed over lines like "I and I/ In creation where one's nature neither honors nor forgives" ("I and I," Infidels) and rollicked singing, "Othello told Desdemona, 'I'm cold, cover me with a blanket/ By the way, what happened to that poison wine?'/ She says, 'I gave it to you, you drank it' ("Po' Boy," "Love and Theft"). 39 records, interviews, his vertiginous writings, films, and (the apex of profligacy) meme making. Bob Dylan has, without a doubt, been a mainstay presence in my life during the pandemic and infallibly bends his way into my future, as with the futures of many people, many nations.

How to make sense of such a varied, wild, career? Possibly more relevant, what time period/ works should be highlighted as a subject of discussion and (hopefully) a welcome to newcomers? Spending 4 months of seeming paralysis stuck in these questions, the answer appears to have come while actually listening to Dylan's 2020 album, Rough and Rowdy Ways. Why? Well, the album folds purposefully, reverently, and raucously through the high halls of capital L Literature, the annals of history, the lives of his companion musicians. Reflections of youth stand side by side with the grizzled wisdom of old age. Read (and hopefully hear) the first slew of lines to the album's opening song, "I Contain Multitudes," linked below. An airy blanket of strings softly unfurls: the double bass is being bowed while a reverberating electric guitar supports the dominant acoustic guitar. Bob lowly begins:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgEP8teNXwY

Today and tomorrow, and yesterday too

The flowers are dying, like all things do

Follow me close, I'm going to Ballinalee

I'll lose my mind if you don't come with me

I fuss with my hair, and I fight blood feuds

I contain multitudes

Today, tomorrow, and yesterday the flowers die/will die/died; this, this is where the flowers have gone. Dylan's warm tones firmly plant us in the present, stretch into the future, and draw us into the past. This is a weighty 3rd person reflection voiced by a (then) 79 year old man who has seen much. He then transitions to the imperative and the vocative, calling "you" out and peppering the verses with the 1st person. He roundly voices the third line as the guitar is plucked; the resulting effect is light, rollicking. From this lightness the fourth line is sung with a continued soft humor, now blent with longing pathos: he commands, but commands with a degree of sad affection that "you" follow, at the peril of his mind. The concluding lines are simple statements crooned in the 1st person, parts of an introduction that invites, for all its directness, a degree of befuddlement. The distance between ruffling one's hair and going full-blown Romeo and Juliet on someone seems wide. But the resultant effect, as I hear it, offers a meaningful bridge to understanding the time had with/by Bob Dylan.

Bob Dylan as a singer and a person is, by turns, cantankerous, welcoming, gentle, brutal, flippant, and deathly serious. And while this summary comes from a specific look at only the introductory verses of "I Contain Multitudes," it also applies to Rough and Rowdy Ways and, quite arguably, to each other microcosmic record and the macrocosmic universe of his entire career. Leaving the rest of the song to your listening pleasure, only consider that in it he goes on to invoke Edgar Allen Poe, Anne Frank, Indiana Jones, The Rolling Stones, William Blake, Beethoven, and Chopin. However, I do want to take the façade of the song a few steps forward, as a preface to everything that came before.

"I Contain Multitudes" is a direct reference to the 51st section of the American master poet Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." What does Dylan intend by such a weighty comparison with the perpetually revered Whitman, who revised Leaves of Grass (the volume containing "Song of Myself") unto the bitter edge of death? Understandably they both recognize human frailty along with the dream of carrying art generally into the hearts of people and specifically carrying it into the heart of the American people. But this does not imply uncontested American mastery. Leaves of Grass catalogues the baseness and glory of the United States, its slums and cities, its natural beauty that cradles the people of every race, a magisterial, sprawling tell-all of the soul of the nation. Whitman laments the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln and, as a nurse during the Civil War, attempted to heal firsthand the crushing horror occurred when families murdered families, when humans suffered in bondage. Discord for blood. The entire 51st section of "Song of Myself" reads thusly:

The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them,

And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?

Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,

(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?

Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?

Whitman proceeds through times past, present, and future. But the times "wilt." This pun, taken for its double meaning (wilt [as a flower that droops dying]/ willed [ordered, arranged]) highlights the passing of all things and the rigidity of fate. Like Dylan, Whitman directly calls to the person witnessing his art. But let it not be missed that he calls out the "listener." Not reader, not observer, but listener. He wants the texture of his words to fold in your ears and (the dream of all poets) on top of your mouth. Whitman is no-nonsense about the matter though. Come on, speak up, I'm gettin' outta here anyways, so get to talking or get to walking. At the center comes a tercet as simple as it is mystical. A question, a statement, and an aside (possibly a private thought; this is the "Song of Myself," after all). Containing multitudes is the essence of practiced individuality, the animating impetus of the nation that Whitman described. It is the fussing of hair along with the pitched warfare cruelly enshrined by blood feuds. Just as Whitman dealt with a nation in the throes of pain after a president's death and the atrocities committed against African Americans and Native Americans, so too did a young Dylan who played for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Million Man March, who saw the nation contract at the death of President John F. Kennedy (subjects respectively of two songs from Rough and Rowdy Ways: "Mother of Muses" and "Murder Most Foul"). Dylan elegantly comments on and with Whitman, leaves little doubt as to his place and purpose.

Dylan's fellow Nobel Laureate, Derek Walcott, knew what the score is between great writers, especially the poets. When asked how he himself related to Homer (The Iliad; The Odyssey), Vergil (The Aeneid), and Dante (The Divine Comedy), Walcott called them contemporaries. Sensibilities, languages, and technical preference will always be in flux, but the hexameters of Homer are no less rigorous than the tercets of Dante, the humans of Derek Walcott's Omeros are no less worthy than the gods of Vergil. The impetus behind Bob Dylan's songs are multifarious and expressed in a variety of tones. He bookends and continues the craft of Walt Whitman and, indisputably, champions the bearded poet's fondest prophecy.

Whitman's hopeful, contradictory proclamations for the United States reach fever pitch in the preface to Leaves of Grass when he describes the coming work of the poets. Corralling a few complementary statements, we may read the following:

Of all nations the United States with veins full of poetical stuff most needs poets and will doubtless have the greatest and use them the greatest. Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall. Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from him things are grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity.

In war he is the most deadly force of the war. Who recruits him recruits horse and foot... he fetches parks of artillery the best that engineer ever knew. If the time becomes slothful and heavy he knows how to arouse it... he can make every word he speaks draw blood

The poet sees for a certainty how one not a great artist may be just as sacred and perfect as the greatest artist... The power to destroy or remould is freely used by him but never the power of attack.

The American bards shall be marked for generosity and affection and for encouraging competitors... They shall be kosmos... without monopoly or secrecy... glad to pass any thing to any one... hungry for equals night and day.

Whitman could not have truly known that so many of America's greatest poets, its greatest ambassadors of the multitudinous spirit would be folks whipping around electric guitars (Dylan jamming out on a Stratocaster at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 was just another Whitmanian example of "singing the body electric"). But looking behind him from the vantage of wisdom, Dylan concurs explicitly with the aspirations of Whitman. His is a life ripened with wordcraft, a personally compelling odyssey that invites inquiry and pays its dues, often with blood. He sings the common man, Achilles rubs shoulders with pop culture and fellow Nobel Laureate T.S. Eliot duels in a tower, all at Dylan's invocation. Drawing from the past, determined to be active in the present, he carves into a future upon which he shall indelibly leave an impact.

Thus, it would feel absolutely impossible to continue writing about Bob Dylan without touching upon the whole of his life. A life of such breadth provides much to say and, yes, even more to quizzically scratch our heads over. And what I hope to have shown here is that Dylan could offer ways to fortify our language, personhood, and emotional capacity. Underwritten in his lyrics is a guiding life principle I once heard phrased, "Take it easy, but take it." Live your own life, walk with Dylan and Whitman, meet the many people in their wor(l)ds, contain your own multitudes. And of course, don't forget to have one more cup of Bobby for the road.

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Image: Bob Dylan in the Trailer to the Shadow Kingdom Concert