Dylan's Visions of Sin (18 page)

Marlowe staged a parade of the Seven Deadly Sins in his
Doctor Faustus
. And what is the first thing that Sloth wants to tell you? “I am Sloth. I was begotten on a
sunny bank, where I have lain ever since.” And the last thing he wants to say? “I’ll not speak a word more for a king’s ransom.”

A word more: perhaps in the recesses of the song’s few words there is something else that is worth a king’s ransom. Or am I alone in flirting
with the
thought that if we had a crossword clue,
All the –––– horses
(5), the word we might wish we could ink in would be
King’s
?
¹⁴⁴
Dylan, who loves to make play with nursery rhymes, might enjoy playing the energetic pointlessness of “All the King’s horses and all the King’s men”
(pointless because
How were they s’posed to get any repairs done?
whereas the Dylan women are all getting the singing done) against the unenergetic pointedness of

A good question (with no question-mark), though not exactly a question, really. A quasi-querulousness, rather, the weary aggrievance of someone who can’t muster the energy
to mount an argument, let alone a horse.
How’m I s’posed
. . .: So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold. (To invoke the music of Browning’s
A Toccata of
Galuppi’s
.) “How’m I s’posed . . .”: with, perhaps again, some pleasure derivable from this striking a chord, if we happen to know that “supposed” was
for ages a helpful musical term, as
The Oxford English Dictionary
records:

Mus
. Applied to a note added or introduced below the notes of a chord, or to an upper note of a chord when used as the lower note (
supposed bars
) etc.

Passivity rules? But Dylan’s words have their unobtrusive activity, as does his syntax, his articulate energy. There is no verb in the first line, as if unable to
bring itself to do more than just point to, point out: “All the tired horses in the sun”. Blankly, as though a verb (for the verb is the activating part of speech) would be too much of
a bustle or hassle. And then no syntactical relation between the first line, which just adduces those horses, and the second line, which is nothing but a fatigued remonstration. “How’m
I s’posed to get any riding done”. I ask you. Not that you need take the trouble to answer. It is in vain for any of us to kick against the pricks – and anyway kicking would be
more of an effort than I’m prepared to make, I don’t mind telling you. Forget it. But don’t forget the song, even though
Lyrics 1962–1985
does.

Self Portrait
doesn’t leave it at that. For there are other occasions when
the album puts us in mind of the lure of sloth, easy though queasy.
Wigwam
is happy to undertake its instrumental operations, its ineffable wordlessness, for three minutes, just singing over and over again “la” and “da”. If you were
to complain about this, you would only come across as la-di-da. And there is
Copper Kettle
(attributed on the album to A. F. Beddoe), which Dylan sings with an exquisite slowness that
languorously lingers in the knowledge that “sloth” is a noun from the adjective “slow”. So easy and so slow.

“And never more you’ll toil”. Dylan, working against the grain of his own character and disposition, has found a way of imagining this with affection –
thanks to another. (Maybe Beddoe didn’t have to toil at it, but he must have had to work at it, which is how it manages to sound so effortless.) “They toil not, neither do they
spin”: those are the gospel words that Keats chose as epigraph for his
Ode on Indolence
. Dylan isn’t the type to envy the lilies of the field, but he knows why you and I
might.

Time Passes Slowly

Whereas the cadences of
All the Tired Horses
are entirely at one (vocally, musically, verbally),
Time Passes Slowly
sets itself to set your teeth on edge. On the
page, it looks at first entirely equable in its setting, at its setting out:

It never becomes a nightmare exactly, but it assuredly isn’t voiced as happily idle, a happy idyll. From the start, the song evinces the kind of
contrariety that characterizes
Watching the River Flow
;
Time Passes Slowly
, too, is rhythmically and vocally bumpy, jagged, pot-holed, unsettled and unsettling, straining its musical
strains, not soporific at all, at all. And more and more the song commits itself to the implications of the words that follow that first verse. “Once I had a sweetheart, she was fine and
good-lookin’”. Time passes slowly; this love has passed but not the wrenched and wrenching memory of it. The rhymes refuse to stay right, and the voicing then does nothing to ameliorate
this (the way of Dylan’s comedy, but then this is tragedy), rather it skewers the rhymes askew:

On the page, you are likely to glimpse the having to try so hard; in performance, you are sure to hear it, compounded vocally and musically so that it really won’t stay
right. “Up here in the mountains”, from the opening, has become, here at the closing, “up here in the daylight”, which is perfectly calm, but the rhyme of
“daylight” with “stay right” is tense: you have to stay cautiously with “stay” for a moment, and you have to make sure that you get “right” right
when it comes to the run of the words or rather to their halting.

This final verse plaits its rhymes as no previous verse had done: “daylight”
“stay
right”
“the day”
“away”. But this
conclusiveness is not that of a love-knot.

This is no love song, a no-love song. It would all feel less hopeless if things were over and done with. But. “Time passes slowly when you’re searching for love”. This
entailing some sour soul-searching.

Those three words, “Time passes slowly”, open the song, open it up. They open the first and last lines of the first and last verses, and of the second (the remaining) verse they open
the last line. They are perspicuously absent
from the song’s bridge. Five lines of the verses’ twelve begin with “Time passes slowly”, five times
the bridge rings no changes on a different tedium of words, five of them:

This is obdurate, blockish, an evocation of a dangerous state of mind. Indifference can harden, before long, into something damnable: “accidie”, sloth, torpor.
The Oxford English Dictionary
says that this is “the proper term for the 4th cardinal sin,
sloth
,
sluggishness
”, and that when its Greek origin (= non-caring-state,
heedlessness) was forgotten, the Latin
acidum
, sour, lent its harsh flavour to the word. Not-caring: or, Ain’t no reason to go in a wagon to town, or to go to the fair, or to go up, or
to go down, or to go anywhere. No go. You name it, I’ll disclaim it. Can you reason with someone who just keeps saying
Ain’t no reason to
? It might even vie with the vista of the
child’s
Why?

“Apathy’ is a word that drifts to mind, but apathy doesn’t carry the bone-deep surrender that is the accent of accidie. “Her sin is her
lifelessness”.
¹⁴⁵
Beckett could joke about “a new lease of apathy”; you can’t pull that off with accidie, the extremity of
not-caring that has been characterized as “an acquiescence in discouragement which reaches the utmost of sadness when it ceases to be regretful”.
¹⁴⁶

The lines of the song’s bridge do have their equanimity all right, but it is an emptied equanimity that has persuaded itself (as Satan did) that it will be able to say farewell to despair
if it says farewell to hope. It acquiesces, yes, but so grimly as to bring home that it constitutes no bridge from this not-caring to any other state of mind. Thank Somebody that there is,
elsewhere in Dylan, a world elsewhere:

So sings
Waitin’ for You
,
¹⁴⁷
and very happily, too. But unhappinessis convicted, convinced that there is nothing,
nobody, to wait for. And it has long ceased to see any point in making an effort. “Ain’t no reason to go anywhere” – and that includes going across the state line into the
state of mind that is happiness.

“Time passes slowly and fades away” – this, too, is an estranging thing to say. There is a glimpse of the lethal state of mind that asks only to kill time. But old Father Time
never dies, he only fades away, or rather fades from our fading sight.

Clothes Line Saga

The not-caring, the nothingness, the depths beyond apathy even, at the heartland of
Time Passes Slowly
is as nothing compared to the vacuity of
Clothes Line Saga
,
which raises small talkative mindlessness and affectlessness from down there in the Basement. Family values, of a sort, flat, faithful, not careless, just not caring. The two things that make it
possible for us not to scream (“Why aren’t they screaming?”, in the words of Philip Larkin,
The Old Fools
) are that the song is stringently straight-faced and that it does
give an adolescent’s-eye-view. The adolescent, after all (it may be a long time after – the song begins with the words “After a while”), usually turns out to be a worm that
turns. (“Well, I just do what I’m told” – Do you now . . .) Time passes slowly, and so does adolescence but it does pass. Teenagers age. Meanwhile here is a vinegary
vignette, the vinaigrette dressing that is
Clothes Line Saga
. It is sung levelly at a steady sturdy rhythm of monumental unconcern.