Dylan's Visions of Sin (30 page)

The effect of the doubt (doubts or darts?) is a very dramatic one, not only in its subdued intensity but in being characteristic of drama as a medium, for within a performing art –
Shakespeare’s tragedies, Dylan’s songs – the ear possesses an extraordinary compensation for its sacrifice of the particular certainty that the eye can command. (“You have
given me eyes to see”, yet once more.) For the eye can see at a glance whether the word is “doubts” or “darts”, with the page then being the gainer by this. And the
loser by it.
For the ear that hears the echoes within recesses may be blessed as well as cursed by the doubt as to the very words. This, too, may be a two-edged weapon.
Macbeth cries out that he should be the last person to murder Duncan:

Not bear the knife, and not bare the knife. “Is this a dagger which I see before me? . . . I see thee yet, in form as palpable / As this which now I draw . . . / And on
thy blade, and dudgeon, gouts of blood” (II, i).

When Dylan draws upon our doubts as to whether the word is doubts or darts, he is sounding a traditional doubt as to the word “doubt”: that, being sturdily foursquare, it
doesn’t sound as though it doubts a bit, unlike (say) the breathy undulating word “hesitate”. Samuel Beckett fastened on the discrepancy between what the word “doubt”
sounds like and what it means, in arguing that the English language stands in need of James Joyce, the abstraction-buster:

It is worth remarking that no language is so sophisticated as English. It is abstracted to death. Take the word “doubt”: it gives hardly any sensuous suggestion of
hesitancy, of the necessity for choice, or static irresolution. Whereas the German “Zweifel” does, and, in lesser degree, the Italian “dubitare”. Mr Joyce recognises how
inadequate “doubt” is to express a state of extreme uncertainty, and replaces it by “in twosome twiminds”.
²²⁷

It is the song’s progress that contains and releases these local movements of twimind as to darts and doubts. What the singer, like any devout lover, cannot but
crave is entire reciprocity – and yet entire reciprocity with God is unimaginable, unthinkable, even blasphemous. It would be an act of pride, incompatible with the humility that occupies not
the high moral ground but its opposite, the honourably low moral ground. From
the very beginning, we are taken down into a yearning for the perfect matching reciprocity of
an answer, for a true fit: the divine justice of the true, the wholly true, and the nothing but the true, fit. And continually the song has the honest patience to deny us this. “Patience,
hard thing”, as Hopkins understood. Hard, as difficult to achieve, and as being a steeling of oneself.
²²⁸

So the first line, “You have given everything to me”, is not followed by – not matched with – the hollow insecurity of an echo (which would be “What can
I
give to
You
?”), but by the unremitting question that is central and yet at a tangent: “What can I do for You?”

It is this imperfect alignment that (throughout the opening verses) animates the relation of statements (“You have . . . You have . . .” – where Dylan divides the cadence and
the words at exactly that point, repeatedly) to the succeeding question, “What can I do for You?” But then Dylan varies this pattern (as he so beautifully does, just when he would seem
to have settled into cordial parallels and reversals, in
Do Right to Me, Baby
). For in these succeeding instances, he now comes very near to finding the reciprocity that he hungers for
– and yet still not quite there. So near and yet not achieved so far. The second quintain ends with:

– this offering a new parallelism in the return: “You’ve done it all” / “What can I do for You?” And then this is itself succeeded, in the
third quintain, by a phrasing that varies the terms of this while repeating its shape:

But still neither of these is the exact, the exacting, fit, the perfect returning of a question to its acknowledgement, that is aspired to. For the move is neither (in the
former instance) from “You’ve done it all
for me
” to “What can I do
for You
?”, nor (in the latter) from “You have given
me
all there is to
give” to “What can I give
to You
?”

It is at this point that Dylan reaches for – better, reaches – the realization that the question itself must be turned so that it will, in its very
questioning, return a true answer:
²³⁰

Not “
What
can I
do
for You?” – or “give to You?” – but “
How
can I live for You?”

The deepest question turns out not to be a
what
question but a
how
one – which is one true way of seeing the truth of gratitude and of a due humility, a due abstention from
pride. “How can I live for You?” It is with this recognition that Dylan can then legitimately return to asking the good old (not the even better new) question, with his mild matching of
“Whatever pleases” with “What”:

The key question, the one that unlocks the heart, has proved to be “How can I live for You?”, but it is good that the other question, the question that gives the song not only its
title but its refrain, is never shucked or shucksed: “What can I do for You?” In this, it resembles the words that come and go before the arrival at the best that (spiritually) the song
can do. For instance, weight should be given to the fact that, alone of the three quatrains, the middle one is given no “given” (the others have it twice):

Or, as to recurrences, there is the fact – which asks some explaining – that the final verse, the one in which the singer comes closest to achieving the
unegotistical state not just of mind but of soul that is sought, is the
one that most goes in for
I, me, my
: “me” and “my” once each, and
“I” six times.

How can this “I” be at one with humility, with the repudiation of egotism? Because any such presence or absence of, say, the first-person pronoun is always an axis,
not a direction. “I don’t care how rough the road is”, and it is characteristic of roads that they run in two opposite directions. Sometimes the reluctance to say “I”
may be the sign of humility, sometimes the very opposite. (“I think” may be much less egotistical than “we think” – or than “one thinks”.) The reiteration
of
I, me, my
is frank in its plea, its prayer, its acknowledging that self-attention is inescapable and is not necessarily only self-serving. “Show me” is not mealy-mouthed.
“And You’ve chosen me to be among the few”. Matthew 20:16: “So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.”

Paul Williams, who was quick to see the power of Dylan’s Christian songs, was too quick to condemn what had become the song’s ending, preferring the earlier wording that Dylan had
sung in the concerts of late 1979 (“I don’t deserve it but I have made it through”):
²³¹

On
What Can I Do for You?
, which is either a song of total humility or else it’s nothing, an indication of the problem with the whole vocal (the attitude of the
vocal) can be found when Dylan sings, “I don’t deserve it but I
sure did
make it through”. This bit of boasting shifts the focus of the song; the original lyrics and
performance here conveyed the subtly (but extremely) different message that “I didn’t deserve to survive, but You chose to bring me through and so my life is Yours, please help me find
a way to begin to show my devotion”. Instead the new vocal almost suggests that Dylan made it because he was smart enough to buy a ticket on the right train. Ouch.
²³²

To this, I would vouchsafe a counter-ouch. (“‘How are you?’ he said to
me / I said it back to him”.) For one thing,
“almost suggests” is almost weasel-wording. For another, Williams mis-listens. “This bit of boasting”? Not so, for what is audible is not the squeak of pride (I knew it, I
knew it) but the stilled voice of surprise (this, I could not have known, even though “I know all about poison, I know all about fiery darts”). “The new vocal almost suggests . .
.”: evasive. If it only
almost
suggests . . . then it doesn’t suggest any such thing, does it? But anyway, where Paul Williams most goes wrong is exactly at the point where he
announces – with pride – what is for him an indisputability:
What Can I Do for You?
is “either a song of total humility or else it’s nothing”. Rather the
reverse, for the beginning of wisdom when it comes to humility will be the acknowledgement that
total
humility is totally out of the question. Anyone who believes that such a thing is
possible to human beings, to say nothing of believing that he or she has achieved such a state, may proudly look forward to being in a very select circle of hell. Proudly, and conceitedly. “I
do know that God hates a proud look” (Dylan, on
Biograph
).

Proverbs 26:12: “Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? there is more hope of a fool than of him.”

Isaiah 5:20: “Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes.” Proverbs 3:7: “Be not wise in thine own eyes.” To be wise in your own eyes is one thing; to
get wise in your own eyes gets a further charge, a smouldering resentment ignited to aggression: Don’t you get wise with me. The smouldering is anticipated by those sparks, where again Dylan
both respects and recharges a biblical warning.
²³³
Job 5:7: “Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.” The sparks fly
upward. Extinguished. The sparks begin to fly?
The Oxford English Dictionary
: “heated words are spoken, friction or excited action occurs”.
American Speech
(1929) :
“It was also said of an angry woman that ‘she will make the sparks fly’.” The sin of pride incites the sin of anger.

Dylan not only opens his Bible, he opens up its radiations and its
revelations. Revelation 3:8: “I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut
it.”

So wide a line, this, in the singing, opened so extensively.
What Can I Do for You?
is as deep as it is wide. And never wide-eyed.

When Robert Shelton reviewed
Saved
, he (even he who had, from the first, heard Dylan so well) announced that “three of the slower numbers” – one of them being
What
Can I Do for You?
– “frankly don’t touch me at all”.
²³⁴
A blasphemous thought rises up, about Shelton and those three
numbers: thou shalt deny me thrice. “You have given me eyes to see”. Ears, too. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. And having ears, hear ye not?

Disease of Conceit

Comes right out of nowhere

And you’re down for the count

The pugilistic punch in
Disease of Conceit
does itself come right out of nowhere, suddenly, not even “
It
comes right out of nowhere”, a right hook
thirty-five lines into the song. (Where are we now, all of a sudden? In at the killing of Davey Moore?) But no amount of ducking or weaving will stop the blow from landing. “And you’re
down for the count”. Eight . . . Nine . . . Ten. Not just down but out.

Who killed Davey Moore? “‘Not I,’ says the referee”, and every other participant promptly joins in the chorus of refusals to think ill of oneself.

What kills? The disease of conceit,
I
and
I
again. Is it a coincidence that the lines of each verse in
Disease of Conceit
count to ten?

The verse’s closing line, the line that reaches the “it’s all over now” number that is ten, finds itself pounding away at the same spot, the four words
that end both the second line and the fourth line of each verse: “The disease of conceit”. But Dylan makes a final point of the final words of the song by having them take up into
themselves not just those four words “The disease of conceit” but the deadly preposition “from” that so often introduces those words, right down the highway of the song:
“From the disease of conceit”. This five-word line tolls through the song, being the second and fourth line of all four verses. And yet in the tenth and closing line of the first three
verses it doesn’t take exactly this form, for there it doesn’t insist, as the word “From” does, on the fatal infection, the cause. “The disease of conceit”: that
is how the first three verses end. But the termination of the song is the moment that records the infection’s having spread terminally from the “From . . .” lines, and it presses
this on us unrelentingly by pressing the “
from
= the cause” use of the preposition “from” against the other kind of “from”, “
from
= the
starting point”. From starting point to finishing point.