Dylan's Visions of Sin (40 page)

Matthew 19:30: “But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first.” This is the last verse of the chapter, even as it is the last admonition of the
song.
²⁹⁶

The song has its pattern, and – as T. S. Eliot knew – the crucial thing for the artist is the “recognition of the truth that not our feelings, but the pattern which we may make
of our feelings, is the centre of value”.
²⁹⁷
Dylan: “Anyway it’s not even the experience that counts, it’s the attitude
toward the experience” (
Biograph
). Things not only may but must change, but the refrain at the end of each verse is itself unchanging: “For the times they are
a-changin’”. In performance, the song is free to be always changing. Dylan knew better than to heed his own sombre warning in
Advice for Geraldine on Her Miscellaneous
Birthday
:

The capital
N
on “Not” is Notoriously the only capital letter in the
hundred-and-more lines of
Advice
, and Dylan did well Not
to obey it but, instead, to be beyond his own command. Children of the sixties still thrill to
The Times They Are A-Changin’
, kidding themselves that what the song proclaimed was that
at last the times were about to cease to change, for the first and last time in history. Was not enlightenment dawning, once and for all?

But the times they are still a-changin’, and for decades now when Dylan sings “Your sons and your daughters / Are beyond your command”, he sings this inescapably with the
accents not of a son, no longer perhaps mostly of a parent, but with grandparental amplitude. Once upon a time it may have been a matter of urging square people to steel themselves to accept the
fact that their children were, you know, hippies. But the capacious urging could then come to mean that ex-hippie parents had better accept that their children looked like becoming yuppies. And
then Repupplicans . . .

The Fourth Times Around Are A-Changin’.

We Better Talk This Over

“We better” is more magnanimous than “You better”, in that anyone who says “We better” doesn’t, on the face of it, exempt himself (or
herself) from the advice that is recommended or commended. But magnanimity is well advised to stay sober. The first rhyme of
We Better Talk This Over
is furrily slurred:
over /
sober
.

It matters that the song is not called, cumbrously and with a touch of the pretend-tentative,
I Think We Better Talk This Over
. This would have been the wrong first line
to take. The words “I think” are decent of him (don’t want to press the point) but are not about to weaken into any doubt on the matter. The same goes for “Maybe”,
which amounts to “really” really. “It really would be prudent of us to leave it till we both get sober”. (Both? The hint may be that one of us is already sober. Me, I take
it.) And the run of the words and of the voice is prudently precise about where to place that “Maybe”. Not “We better talk this over, maybe” – no, that we’d
better talk this over is a sure thing, for all the courtesy of “I think” – but “Maybe when we both get sober”. It is only the “when” that is in question.
Delicately done, again. It would be quite a different story if the song were called, as in those vibrant moments in films,
We Need to Talk
.

“The
best
that I can” seizes the chance to justify itself, to feel that it really does follow climactically, by following the words “we
better
”. Meanwhile the pronouns are doing “a downhill dance” of a sort:
I we we / You I I
. There could easily have been a “he”: “I’m only a
man / Doin’ the best that he can”. But this would have been too easy. This man won’t duck. “Only a man”, which is engendered by the sexual situation, both is and is
not gendered (someone, this particular someone, then, speaking from a man’s eye view all right). “Only a man” is not asking for a fight, it is on this occasion gender-pacific. And
the phrase both concedes and intercedes: come on, there’s a limit to the best you should hope from a man, given the run of men, to say nothing of original sin. Anyway, maybe you’re only
a woman, doing the best that you can.

Twos and threes: these are set before us in this first shaping of pronouns and in the verse-form itself. It looks as though it is constituted of twos, pairs, couplets or couples whether happy or
not. The song is about coupling, “the bed where we slept”, and about uncoupling:

Couplets, then, from the start:
over / sober
,
man / can
. And this isn’t only a matter of the look on the page but of the weight in time and in speed in the singing. But the
verse-form could be lineated on the page as a supple couplet followed by a tripping triplet:

Or, in verse 2, there can be felt both this shaping spirit of imagination:

and this different unauthorized lineation:

The one verse-form goes its own different ways.

The bridge then takes the form of a duly undulating couplet:

Yet even here, two and three are heard to interplay, for laced with the rhyme
face / erase
there is the strong assonance
afraid / face / erase
. And this sound,
too, is followed up in the downhill momentum of the song, in the very next phrase, “I feel displaced”.

The “low-down feeling” (he is feeling low, his spirits are down, because she has behaved in a low-down way) will be felt to be warranted when he gets down to
“a downhill dance”, but on the way he will let her know that he knows, letting us in on a fact: “You been two-faced, you been double-dealing”. Two-faced, so maybe it
isn’t altogether true that “You don’t have to be afraid of looking into my face”. My one face. My integrity,
your duplicity, your double-dealing.
You and I have ceased to be a twosome. Two and four, now, perhaps, since the verse’s opening couplet might now take the lineated shape of a foursome:

And from such a two-cum-four to three again:
chance / trance / dance
.

It is immediately following this accusatory verse that there comes the only other one that sets itself to the two-cum-four rhyming of the opening couplet. A sudden pang is felt, a wish that
there had been no need to accuse, a longing for what had been fantasized but could not be realized:

Or:

This is cryptic, as though unable to bring itself to declare all that it is feeling. There is no difficulty in understanding “I’m exiled” – she has done
this to him, has banished him, even though she may not have known that this would be the upshot of the downhill dance. And there is no difficulty with “You can’t convert me”. A
lost soul, “I’m lost in the haze”. Lost time is not found again, nor is lost faith. But what is the relation between “I’m exiled” and “You can’t
convert me”? Exiled afar to another country, another continent? Beyond the reach of conversion, beyond the reach of even the best-positioned missionary? The elusiveness fascinates.

He admits it, he sees the haze clearly, he even sees that his eyes are glazed. This, too, is delicately done. “Both eyes”: no one-eyed jack
or jill. If he needs a third eye, he just can’t grow it. “Why should we go on watching each other through a telescope?” The days when each was under the other’s loving
microscope have gone.

The acknowledgement that their number is up comes when he breaks into this dusty answer:

Or in this lineation:

Three in the bed of rhyme. There were three in the bed, and the little man said, Roll over, roll over. So they all rolled over, and one fell out. The little man, for once,
before the end. Displaced. There were two in the bed, and the little man said, “I guess I’ll be leaving tomorrow”, leaving the other two to it. The eternal triangle? No, not
eternal, for time is the mercy of eternity. “Oh, babe, time for a new transition”.

The song, which gambols and gambles, is one form of a numbers game. “Two-faced” will face off, not only against “my face”, but against “this universe”, both
of these being variants on the old one-two, or on two to one.

This universe may be vast but it is one, a single whole, or it would be a multiverse.
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One is one and all alone, and evermore
shall be so. But you don’t have to be alone. “Somewheres” is a word that is happy to play its part or parts, feeling plural while being singular. This form of the word
has come to feel singularly American, and it is true that
The Oxford English Dictionary
, which introduces it with a quotation from
Bartlett’s American
Dictionary
(1859), does label it
dial.
or
vulg.
But “somewheres” doesn’t mean exactly the same as “somewhere”, any more than the American
“quite a ways” means quite the same as “quite a way”, and Robert Louis Stevenson was safe in employing it in
Treasure Island
: “I know you’ve got that ship
safe somewheres.” Not just some place but a great many possible places. “Somewheres in this universe there’s a place that you can call home”.

Throughout the song, Number One (“one’s self, one’s own person and interests”,
The Oxford English Dictionary
) is being looked after, reasonably enough, while
looking towards two, even as two can look towards three. So that when the rhyme of “half” with “laugh” arrives, it is not only comic relief but fun and games with
numerations.

The couplet
tomorrow / borrow
tucks up within itself a borrowing of the notoriously unscrupulous triplet, “beg, borrow, or steal”. A borrowing, but a
twisting, too: Dylan’s “beg, steal or borrow” has a happy ending, or at any rate what may be an honest one. (“Neither a borrower nor a lender be”, in Polonius’s
words, but if you do borrow, please return.) “If I have to beg, steal or borrow” does not, unlike “beg, borrow or steal”, descend to a life of crime, it just flirts with
stealing and then steals on. Dylan doesn’t borrow things without making them his own. But the telling stroke is “in a day and a half”. It’d be great to cross paths in a day
or two, surely . . . A day and a half? The divisive calculation is perfectly calculated to lead into the inexorable “But” which introduces a further subtraction:

Zen and the art of rhyme. What would it be, in the total absence of any other word, for one word to rhyme? What is the rhyme-sound of one rhyme-word when it does “haveto
be alone”? The amiably impudent rhyme
happen / clappin’
conveys the truth that a worthwhile rhyme is a happenstance worthy of our applause, while wittily confirming the
impossibility that it sets
itself to imagine – and of which it speaks with a becoming tentativeness (we better not be too sure about those Masters of Zen):
“But I don’t think . . .” On the other hand, we can not only imagine but we can see and hear “one hand waving free” in
Mr. Tambourine Man
.
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Yes: “Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free”. No downhill dance, this glimpse.

The song is about making an end, or rather, about not flinching from the fact that a love has ended. That the end draws near is intimated to us by Dylan’s changing what had been the
manifest pattern within the song. Three times there has been unfolded for us a particular pattern: two quatrains, followed by the bridge-couplet. But on the third occasion, this trio is succeeded,
not by a quatrain but by the bridge-couplet again, a bridge having led not to a destination but to a further bridge. And only after that is there a final quatrain, standing alone as no previous
quatrain had done. Not four, four, two, but two, two, four. The word “Eventually” earns its placing, as does the invocation of “a new transition”. The sequence is by no
means tangled, but this end is twisted and turned and justified.