Dylan's Visions of Sin (26 page)

For the poor white, the caboose of the train. For the black, whether poor or not, the back of the bus. And the name of the game that realizes in art this refusal to blame the
poor white? The game is play that is in earnest: assonance laced with rhyme –
complain . . . explain . . . name . . . plain . . . gain . . . fame . . . remains . . . train . . . blame . .
. game
.

The first line of the song ends in “blood”. No rhyme is ever forthcoming, though off in the distance there is to be a glimpse of the hood that masks the Ku Klux Klan. “To hide
’neath the hood”: “hide” rotating menacingly into “hood”.

The second line of the song, “A finger fired the trigger to his name”, establishes as the song’s finger the rhyme-word “name”, triggering the cumulative obduracy of
the sequence
aim . . . brain . . . blamed . . . game
. This same sound is then pressed to the point of explosion in the second verse (ten of these assonances running). Then, still
unignorable, it is the sound that opens and closes the third verse, from the opening “paid” and “same” to the pinioning at the end:
hate . . . straight . . . blame . . .
game
. And it is the assonance that then does almost the same for the fourth verse, “brain” into the closing accumulation:
pain . . . chain . . . name . . . blame . . . game
.
And that then, in the final verse, after first of all allowing a few lines to be released from the pain of this assonance, has the duty of reverting at the end – from the word
“grave” – to this tolling insistence again:

See it
, he won’t. “Two eyes took the aim”: but now death has taken aim and taken their life. “He’ll see by his grave . . .”: the
shadowy sun may see the scene, but he the killer will not. He will no longer be in a position
to see anything. Unless, of course, death is not the end. “But he
can’t be blamed”? He shall see. God only knows.

There is, as there should be in the whereabouts of these hatreds, a great deal that we shall never know. “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” The question is
a king’s, King Lear’s.

Lowered down, as even a king will be in the end, and yet for Evers there is the ceremonial dignity of a royal burial, too. He is a king, not a pawn. Black and white. Black
against white. In 1963 there was, as it happens, a king, Martin Luther King, whose name must have meant a great deal to the man named Medgar Evers. Five years later, when another killer had been
taught “To keep up his hate”, Martin Luther King was buried from the bullet he caught.

Pride

Like a Rolling Stone

The performers of the dance of death in
Tarantula
include tragedy. Or rather Tragedy. Or even perhaps (the actor’s throbstuff) Taragedy. But be warned, there is a
caveat.
Caveat
: let him beware, or at least be wary. For although tragedy can be profound in its understanding of pride, tragedy becomes shallow as soon as it does itself fall into pride. It
should not presume to look down on comedy, its otherwise inclined brother.
Tarantula
contemplates “tragedy, the broken pride, shallow & no deeper than comedy”, tragedy in
line for “the doom, the bending & the farce of happy ending”.
¹⁸⁹

Like a Rolling Stone
, which looks into the depths of such comedy as is savage farce (and yet is not without a happy ending of a weird kind), is an achievement in which Dylan takes
pride.
¹⁹⁰
The song takes pride as its target.

“Once upon a time”: do remember how fairy-tales sally forth, but don’t
forget how soon the darkness encroaches. For this nursery
formula enters not as a sarcasm but as an irony.

The song bides its time before releasing “proud” (getting on for the sixtieth word), but we have got the picture. The posture, too, there in “Once upon a time you dressed so
fine”. (Of pride, the proverb says: “be her garments what they will, yet she will never be too hot, nor too cold”.
¹⁹¹
) There, too,
in “Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?”, with its evocation of small-minded largesse (all change was small change to her in those days). Averse to advice, she saw no
need to heed. “People’d call, say, ‘Beware doll, you’re bound to fall’”. And why was she bound to fall? Because of what famously comes before a fall. This
thought itself, within the song, comes before “proud”.

Her misguided insouciance is guyed in the rhyme “didn’t you?” / “You thought they were all kiddin’ you”. (A rhyme? That? You must be kidding.) “Now you
don’t talk so loud”: but the song is, in its way, a talking song, a good talking-to. “Now you don’t seem so proud”: “seem” partly as a further rounding on
her, but partly as an admission that he can’t really be sure what is going on inside, as against how she seems.

Not at all the same thing as a meal, this phrase “your next meal”. We know where “your next meal” is coming from. Scrounging your next meal means
swallowing your pride.

So she
had it coming
? But Dylan knows that those who take pleasure in the words “had it coming” are themselves likely to be guilty of the complacency that they impugn. Or the
callousness, dressed up so fine. Dylan’s voice can be heard to disown the phrase at the heinous end of
Black Cross
, the story of Hezekiah Jones:
¹⁹²

Not that a religion guarantees a good god. Samuel Butler transubstantiated the piety of “An honest man’s the noblest work of God” into a provocative
proverb: “An honest God’s the noblest work of man”. There are dishonest gods and goddesses. William James deplored “the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the
bitch-goddess
success
. That – with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success – is our national disease.”
¹⁹³
The woman in
Like a Rolling Stone
has been down upon her knees before the bitch-goddess, the goddess that failed and that made her fail. Fail, fall, feel.

Yet this relentless pressure (the drill of “How does it feel”), though it will not give up, is not without misgivings. They are what saves the song. Saves it from being – in
all its vituperative exhilaration – even more damnably proud than the person whom it damns and blasts. For in the end the song doesn’t only chastise, it finds itself chastened by its
recognition of more feelings than it had at first bargained for. But perhaps not so much
more
feelings (I am thinking of the good old gibe, “I’m afraid this will hurt X’s
feelings, but then he has so many of them . . .”) as different ones, feelings more at odds with themselves and with the revenge comedy that is the song.

But the song eventually turns around, in the way in which Kipling’s masterpiece of revenge, his story
Dayspring Mishandled
, turns around in some of its sympathies by the time it is
through with the monstrous trick that the revenger plays upon someone who had it coming – someone who then turns out to have something more than a cruelly practical joke coming: the final
fatal it.

The right characterization of the animus within the song, in my judgement, is not gloating but exulting. Dylan’s judgement in the song, by the end, feels different from the one he was
moved to make before it, outside it, about it. What do we really feel about its question “How does it feel?”? (A question within a question there.) How does it feel? Mixed: is that not
how it feels? Not to be confused with Mixed-Up Confusion, but mixed feelings, nixed feelings.

Those several questions amount to – they mount to – one question. Just how many questions the song puts is itself in question. “Threw the bums a dime in your
prime, didn’t you?”: is that a question, exactly?

Doesn’t this report a question rather than put one?

It’s not just the lack of a question-mark on the page that makes “Ain’t it hard” feel obdurately uninquiring, beyond question. Still, the final verse is
the only one of the four to have no question or question-type solicitation other than the single-minded tireless inquisition, “How does it feel?”

And does this question permit of a single-minded answer? If the song were nothing other than a triumph of gloating, then the hoped-for answer would be reduced to the broken admission,
“Terrible, that’s how it feels, if you must know.” But there can be felt in the refrain an exhilaration and a further exultation, not just the one that is being bent upon this
Princess (proverb: “Proud as a prince”), but a different one, some exultation that she herself may have come belatedly into possession of and be feeling even now. Allen Ginsberg caught
Dylan’s catching this, Dylan who is loved (Ginsberg said) “by every seeker in America who’s heard that long-vowelled voice in heroic ecstasy triumphant. ‘How does it
feel?’”
¹⁹⁴

Does the answer have to be
terrible
,
terrifying
? Is there nothing about being
without a home that could be, even if far short of
terrific
, at least freed from certain pressures or oppressions? (Ask any artist whose life, by and large, is on the road.) Or freed from certain sadnesses? Ask Philip Larkin.

Not that the music in the piano stool was likely to include
Like a Rolling Stone
.

Again:

The point isn’t that a positive answer can shove aside the negative one; rather, that if you acknowledge any possibility of a positive answer, you immediately grant mixed
feelings as to how it feels, you concede that the song is alive to more than one kind of exultation, and your imagination reaches well beyond gloating. True, she lost a great deal of what had
constituted her being, this princess. But did she gain nothing?

The refrain gains something. At first, it lacked this taunt or tint that subsequently comes to colour the song and make it its own:

It would be stubborn to acknowledge no thrill whatsoever when this arrives. You don’t have to have led the life of the young Dylan to sense that something of power arrives
with “To be on your own”. And you have
only to imagine the flash-lit life of a celebrity (goldfish-bowled) to feel a touch of yearning in “Like a
complete unknown”. Dylan’s voicing of this includes something of relief, release, as though the exchange might, just might, have gone like this:
How does it feel? Good of you to ask,
not at all bad, or at any rate not all bad.

“Tragedy, the broken pride”: her pride may have been broken (“Now you don’t seem so proud”), but she may not have been. She is not altogether to be bullied into
abjection by the school-bully named Life. Bully for her.

For in the end the finest school is the Little Red School of Hard Knox, the school that by the end may have taught you how to live out on the street. Like all of us, Miss Lonely
bridles at the thought of being taught a lesson, but she may not be above learning her lesson, provided that it is hers, provided that it is something more than an exposure (though never less than
that), an exposition in the song, not an imposition by the song.