Dylan's Visions of Sin (19 page)

The song makes its point about pointlessness, and the title as given in
Lyrics 1962–1985
,
Clothes Line
, was the better for not letting sarcasm have the last
word, as against
Clothes Line Saga
.

It feels like a parody of a way of lifelessness. And so it is, while taking a shot
at a previous shot at this: Bobbie Gentry’s
Ode to Billie Joe
, which had
been a hit with its doggèd tedium, its
Papa said
, and
Mama said
, and
Brother said
. Hard to get flatter-footed than the
Ode
.
¹⁴⁸
Hard, but not impossible. For along came Dylan and levelled it some more, the flatly faithful flat-liner. Full of mindless questions, the song is an answer of a sort, and
something of a parody.

As so often in Dylan, there may be a touch of the nursery rhyme (and nursery rhymes like to accommodate parodies).

The song avails itself of this in its
nose / clothes
lines, but its social setting doesn’t have any maids to help out around here with the chores. And there will be
nothing as penetrating as a peck, although there is a pecking order: “Papa yelled outside ‘Mama wants you t’ come back in the house and bring them clothes.’”

It starts bored, and it stays that way.

To put it mildly. This is classic boredom, the more so because not really admitted to, with not just the vacancy but the vacuum of smalltown small talk. Why are you telling me
all this? “Well, just because”.

Really? And they are bleached of any real wildness, those “old wild shirts”.
The Oxford English Dictionary
has, under “wild”:

U.S. slang
. Remarkable, unusual, exciting. Used as a general term of approbation . . . “amazing range of colours (including some wild marble-like
effects)”.

Exciting? Amazing? Forget it. “It was January the thirtieth / And everybody was feelin’ fine”. (“Feelin’ fine” has never been so evacuated
in the delivery.
Not tonic, catatonic.) January the thirtieth, eh. Why that day? (King Charles I’s deathday? The birthday of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who
had run for Vice-President but had not “gone mad”?) Who knows? Who cares? Just being retentive as to the annals, that’s all. “Hmm, say, that’s too bad”. Sloth,
which shoulders nothing, shrugs its shoulders, shrugs everything off. “Well, there’s nothin’ we can do about it”. Or can do about anything, come to that. Or can do,
period.

The conversation from the start has proceeded apace. A sluggish pace.

The boredom is always edgy, on the brink of bad temper (you might think of the opening scenes of the film
Badlands
, with its smalltown voice-over of incipient family
violence). Everything is a matter of course: “Mama, of course, she said, ‘Hi!’” – the voice flattening the exclamation mark, since not-caring is never marked by
exclamations. “Well, I just do what I’m told / So, I did it, of course”. Everything just takes its course. And nothing courses, least of all through anybody’s veins.

“The next day everybody got up” – No!!?*!?!* You gotta be kidding.

If people ask you pointless questions, you do well to stick to your rights, and to answer with matching pointlessness:

The empty questions, the cagey answers, let nothing out, give nothing away. (Here’s some nothing for you, says the song all the way through.) Nothing to give, nothing
gives. Or rather, not quite nothing, for there is that one surprising yelp or yodel from Dylan, exultation even, of “Yoo ooh” in the last verse just before the end, as though signalling
a way out, an end, an escape from a world in which when “my neighbor, he blew his nose”, that just might be the most interesting thing that you’ll ever hear from him. Hold on to
that little yelp, for it is just about all that might give you a
glimpse of hope. For the end of the song doesn’t sound as though it can imagine much of a way
out:

Faintly sinister? Or would that be paranoid? Just nothing? Yet I’m reminded of the disconcerting close of another parodic piece that achieves more than it bargained for:
A. E. Housman’s
Fragment of an English Opera
(“designed as a model for young librettists”).
¹⁴⁹
Reminded, not just because of
words for music, and not just because of the family: Father (bass), Mother (contralto), Daughter (soprano).

FATHER & MOTHER
:  The coast is clear.

I beg your pardon? Is it curtains for the primal scene?

And then I shut all the doors
. Which shuts the song. And shuts the rhyme-scheme, too, as no previous verse had done. The first verse:
much / touch
;
was / because
;
line /
fine
. The second verse:
dry / Hi
;
mad / bad
;
forget / wet
. But the last verse:
yours
/
chores
;
nose / clothes
;
course
/
doors
. Of course.

Among the undertakings of an artist, there may be the wish “To ease the
pain of idleness and the memory of decay” (
Every Grain of Sand
). Idleness may
be all the worse when it doesn’t rise to pain but sinks into numbness. In British English,
couldn’t care less
, but in American English, oddly,
could care less
. (A sarcasm?
See if I care?) Why? “Well, just because”. Anyway, “What do you care?”

Artists care. And share. This entails their not talking glibly, as institutions like to, about the caring and the sharing. The line about sharing –

We’ve been through too much tough times that they never shared

– may find itself sardonically paired:

Now all of a sudden it’s as if they’ve always cared

(
Let’s Keep It Between Us
)

Artists will on occasion have to give voice to unsentimentalities: “I used to care but things have changed” (
Things Have Changed
).

Lay Down Your Weary Tune

Nobody in the world of
Clothes Line Saga
would know the word “accidie”, but that is what they are suffering from – or perhaps not
suffering
from, just sick with: a spiritual malaise. Such sloth is a malign growth. Cut it out.

Fortunately, blessedly, there are the other (benign) forms that stretched-out leisureliness may take, with no need for all of us to be at full stretch every waking minute of every day. (Even
January the thirtieth.) We owe it to ourselves sometimes to heed the gentle admonition,
Rest yourself
. And music, given how often it takes a musical rest, is in its element in such a fluent
urging.

So it opens, this tender pitying admonition that is sung with sweet solemnity and yet has its own implicit comedy. For there must be something rueful about starting a tune by
saying that it is time to stop it. Andrew Marvell
began his great poem about war and peace,
An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland
, with the
paradox that this is no time to be writing poems or even reading them:

Dylan sings that ’tis time to sing his numbers languishing no longer. But his strings weave so many exquisite variations on this that we find ourselves wanting the song to
go on for ever saying that it should not go on. For ever? So it has seemed to some.

Joan Baez: “He could never resist singing what he had just written, and he had just written
Lay Down Your Weary Tune
, it was 45 minutes
long.”
¹⁵⁰

Scaduto: “The one that somebody called ‘
War and Peace
’?”

Baez: “Right, it was just endless. Of course, I was perfectly happy, except I was concerned. I’ve always had an audience conscience. I’ve always worried about
making them tired or whatever, and he wasn’t.”
¹⁵¹

Or whatever.

Dylan has a note on
Biograph
: “I had heard a Scottish ballad on an old 78 record that I was trying to really capture the feeling of, that was haunting me. I couldn’t get it
out of my head.” Not only could he not get it out of his head, he could not get it out of our heads once he had started to put it into them.

The song both begins and ends with its refrain or chorus, and is describing an eternal circle – as does another of his songs about singing,
Eternal Circle
. An eternal circle not
infernal but paradisal.

The refrain or chorus is at once utterly simple and unobtrusively intricate in its utterance. The modulation quietly changes what it urges: “Lay
down your weary tune” is one thing, and the immediately ensuing “lay down” both is and is not the same thing. Is, in that it may simply urge again that you lay down your tune; is
not, in that as a unit on its own it may be – in American English, in
Lay, Lady, Lay
– an intransitive verb: not lay down your tune, just lay down. The next one, “Lay down
the song you strum”, is transitive again all right, but then “And rest yourself ” not only calls back to “lay down” (lay down and rest), but gives us something that
ought sometimes to trump both a transitive and an intransitive verb: a reflexive verb, “rest yourself ”, five times in the song. Fifteen times there comes the injunction “lay
down”, which mostly means “relinquish” but is alive to the wish still to
play
, since – in the usual weird way that language has – “lay down” can
mean “set up”:
The Oxford English Dictionary
, 51, “To set up or establish (a certain beat).” The dictionary lays down “beat”, “stomp”,
“rhythm”, and this: “The soloist can play anything he chooses to play on the time that I lay down for him” (from
Melody Maker
, 6 April 1968). The song lays down a
tune, unwearyingly.

Dylan’s voice swells and elongates the word “weary” with what feels like stoical resilience. The schoolbook would tell you that in the phrase “your weary tune” the
word “weary” is a transferred epithet – you are the weary one, not the tune. (You are thirsty for blood, not your sword.) Poetic licence, but we need to ask what the poet does
once he has gained his licence, and what he does here could not be more apt. Weariness is just the right thing to transfer, a musical burden to lift from your own shoulders and transfer to the
tune. This, in the confidence that the tune will not grow weary really, and that the listeners will not weary of it.

As often in Dylan’s songs about singing, he is sensitive to the need to acknowledge gratefully such powers as are not his own (whether a person’s, say, Woody Guthrie’s or Blind
Willie McTell’s, or a creature’s, say, birdsong), and so to rise above envy or the wrong kind of competitiveness. This is effected here by means of the telling words “no voice can
hope to hum”. Not even my voice, gentle listener. For the natural kingdom is a divine orchestra, and Dylan’s strings evoke the other instruments and their indispensability: the breeze
like a bugle, the drums of dawn, the ocean like an organ, the waves like cymbals, the rain like a trumpet, the branches like a banjo (an instrument that puts on no airs), the water like a harp.
(Like both kinds of harp perhaps, living from hand to mouth, and with such different class associations.) And “like a hymn”, since there are not only
kinds of
musical instrument, there are other kinds of musical and poetical form.
Lay Down Your Weary Tune
itself both is and is not a hymn.

It plays its own sounds with unostentatious dexterity. Oh, “strum” into “strength” into “strings” – and then into “Struck by the sounds before the
sun”. No hiding of the alliterative litheness, and no brandishing of it, either. No competitiveness, for the preposition “against” is not in opposition when it sets the breeze
“Against the drums of dawn” (sets musically, not combatively), or the waves “Against the rocks and sands”. And no vanity: “The cryin’ rain” – which
was not in tears, though raindrops may look like teardrops – “sang / And asked for no applause”. A lesson to us all, the singer included. But not
too
saintly, for there is
a little room for manoeuvre: “And asked for no applause” might mean
asked positively that there be none
, or might mean
did not ask that there be any
. Anyway “The
water smooth ran like a hymn”: no applause in church, please. Meanwhile, when it comes to an audience, you can’t better the winds: