Dylan's Visions of Sin (41 page)

There is something very wasteful about what has happened to the word “share” in modern English, whether American or British. Hardly a day goes by without your
reading somewhere that they share something in common, or that they both share it. So I hope that I am right in feeling grateful for Dylan’s line “Be grateful for what we’ve
shared together and be glad”. Not the usual unthinking redundancy, but a sense of the overflowing gladness of what was once the case. “Shared together”: we have shared a bed,
“the bed where we slept” (as he sang a moment ago), and we have slept together, and we have been in bed together. “Be glad”.

Rhyme can be a magic wand. I wish. The rhyme
transition / magician
is saucy sorcery, audible, too, in the swish of
wish / magician
, unsentimentally aware
of all the things that no amount of rhyming can effect or affect. The finality of this consummation is there in the triplet’s fourfold rhyming, the first and last such patterning, going
beyond its previous bonds of rhyming:

“Oh, babe”. It’s all talked over now.

Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others)

Couched both as plea and as pledge, all the admonitions in
Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others)
are addressed to a woman, but they start by invoking an admonition from
the Lord, his having counselled prudence. He had said “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be
measured to you again” (Matthew 7:1–2). The first words of the song, courting blasphemy with their tone of casual indifference, as good as tell the Lord not to worry: “Don’t
wanna judge nobody”. No need to counsel me not to do it, don’t wanna do it. So the question doesn’t arise, except that of course it does. For the terms of the divine advice do
beckon him on, and “Don’t wanna judge nobody” is succeeded by “don’t wanna be judged”. Except, again, that this isn’t quite how the impulse of the song
impels the two halves of the thought. For whereas Christ gave it as the
reason
why it would be, to say the least, imprudent for us to go around judging (you don’t want to
be
judged, do you?), in the song’s case any such argumentation is presented as another of the things he doesn’t wanna bother with. There is no counterpart in the song to the train of
reasoning that is “Judge not,
that
ye be not judged.
For
with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged.” Think ahead. “A prudent man foreseeth the evil”
(Proverbs 22:3). “I wisdom dwell with prudence” (Proverbs 8:12).

“Don’t wanna judge nobody, don’t wanna be judged”. Here the second thought, instead of following from the first, merely follows it, and this flatly, fatiguedly.
Do
Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others)
is apparently in no mood
for mounting arguments or surmounting them. All it really wants to do is run through – or trudge
through – the long list of all the things that it don’t wanna do. If it weren’t for the pluck and luck of the blithe light-fingered music, twinkling like light on water as it
flows (it is the first thing we hear, instrumentally and mentally alert, not lethargic in the least), you might fear that what stretches in front of you is an unremitting teen-age reiteration of
Don’t wanna
, a phrase that, by the end, we shall have heard thirty-three times, a phrase that might seem doomed to be leaden or sullen. The wannabe may be bad news but is not as bad
company as the don’t-wannabe.

But hang in there, there will be a “But”.

It’s a deal.
Don’t
, seven times, but then
Do . . . do . . . do . . . do
: a done deal.

“Do unto others . . .”: is this the worse for sounding like a deal? Is it, like any other quid pro quo, a double-dealing, a temptation, a lapse into accountancy?

There hangs about any such thought that we should “do unto others . . .”, even though it has behind it the authority of Christ,
³⁰⁰
the suspicion that it
may come down to no more than
You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.
³⁰¹
The challenge, then, when it comes to embodying “Do unto others . . .” in art, is how to cleanse it of any such whiff of the reduction of love and morals to
calculating-machine machinations. An unsanitary whiff, if not worse. Milton, in
Lycidas
, had to practise an imaginative hygiene when it came to acknowledging the motive, or rather, one of
the motives, moving him to honour a dead friend.

What protects this against any merely grubby reciprocity is, first, the tender tone of the turn, and then the exquisite modesty of the wish, the wish that a later poet, in
passing, might in turn wish – for Milton, who will have passed away – not (as you might have anticipated) fame, but peace, fair peace.

Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others)
is not concerned to be exquisite. Instead, it finds its hygienic turn in humour, turning to those small unsettling thwartings of expectation in which
humour teasingly delights. The humour is not frivolous, for serious matters are at stake, salvation and damnation, that sort of thing. The good words of the good book are touched upon from the
start.

From the Sermon on the Mount (“Judge not . . .”), to the garden of the sepulchre (John 20:17), where Mary Magdalene hails the resurrected Jesus as master:
“Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not.” Don’t wanna be touched. It sounds better perhaps in Latin:
Noli me tangere
. Dylan’s moving at once from
judging to touching (his off-rhyme, the putting-off-rhyme
judged / touched
, is well judged) owes something to this biblical moment, and something perhaps (given that this is so
bodily a song) not only to Thomas’s wish, later in this same chapter of St John, to verify Jesus’s resurrection by touching His body, but also to Mary Magdalene’s having formerly
lived by prostitution. Her eternal life, she earned quite otherwise, by (for instance) hailing Jesus as master.

The subsequent words are likewise simple enough, and so is the pivotal equilibrium that they maintain – “Don’t wanna hurt nobody, don’t wanna be hurt” – but
all this, too, may carry biblical weight. Isaiah 11:9: “They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain.” Even what might seem the most down-to-earth of such moments,
“Don’t wanna treat nobody like they was dirt”, may be compounded not only of the everyday idiomatic contempt but of the everlasting biblical punishment (God and His ministers
having retained the right to hurt) that awaits the enemies of the Lord. Psalms 18:42: “Then did I beat them small as the dust before the wind: I did cast them out as the dirt in the
streets”.

Yet it would be uncharacteristic of Dylan, even in so religious an album as
Slow Train Coming
(watch out,
Slow Train
urges: be prudent), to make his words gain their authority
solely from the word of God. “Don’t wanna touch nobody, don’t wanna be touched”: this is rightly, in human terms and for two reasons, the first of the senses of which the
song speaks, though the song itself does, naturally, engage us by virtue of hearing.

The sense of touch has been traditionally (and unjustly?) rated below the sense of sight and the sense of hearing, touch having been rated and berated as basely bodily. Any chance of redeeming
this? The line may sound negative to the point of monkishness, “Don’t wanna touch nobody, don’t wanna be touched”, but we know from the title and from the refrain that
nobody
does carry the courtesy “present company excepted”. Don’t wanna touch nobody else, baby. “But if you do right to me, baby . . .”

Moreover, touch is the only one of the senses that is reciprocal or mutual. I can see you without your seeing me, or hear you without your hearing me, or taste you without your tasting me, or
smell you without your smelling me – despite the fact that the verb “to smell”, like the verb “to taste”, can be in this particular way either transitive or
intransitive: I can smell you, or I can smell (pure and simple), and I can taste good things, or I can taste good. But alone of the five senses (the sixth sense is a touch more mysterious), to
touch
is
to be touched. I cannot touch you without my being touched. So that although “Don’t wanna touch nobody, don’t wanna be touched”
may
sound as though it is exactly parallel to “Don’t wanna judge nobody, don’t wanna be judged”, the thought about judging simply juxtaposes its constituents, whereas the
thought about touching can establish its elements as inseparable, as symbiotic, as each inconceivable without the other. As, in short, a doing unto others as you would they should do unto you.

The song may disavow, or make a show of disavowing, a good many of the sins. Pride: “Don’t wanna judge nobody”. Covetousness: “Don’t wanna cheat nobody”, as
well as “Don’t wanna marry nobody if they’re already married”. (“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife” – here lust gets a look in.) Anger:
“Don’t wanna shoot nobody”. These sins, and perhaps envy: “Don’t wanna defeat nobody who’s already been defeated”. There is nothing about greed, who is
presumably dining out, and sloth is still in bed. But the song’s impetus is not exactly to do right, in itself, as God does (Genesis 18:25): “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do
right?” (Wanna judge everybody.) “God is still the judge and the devil still rules the world so what’s different?” (
Biograph
).

Do Right to Me Baby
ought to set us half wondering what it is to do right to somebody –

– as against doing right by somebody, or (in the good old phrase) doing somebody right (granting them “just or equitable treatment; fairness in decision;
justice”), or doing (say) justice to somebody. Do right to me: this looks like a very small deviation from the wording that might have been expected. But then the whole song is founded on
such deviations, where a pattern is created and respected but then finds itself modified – modified, should this turn out to be the way to do right by it and to it. So in the opening verse,
after three lines that balance equably the enterprise that is activity against that which is passivity:

– the fourth line wants, not to be a swaying pair of scales, but to exercise its sway, and to do so by waiving any such antithetical predictability: “Don’t
wanna treat nobody like they was dirt”. This singularity in the last line of
the quatrain then becomes expected, naturally, as part of the pattern. So in the second
verse (following the refrain quatrain), there is what might seem to be the same trick again: the move from this –

– to this: “Don’t wanna marry nobody if they’re already married”. But then this is not really the same structure as “Don’t wanna treat
nobody like they was dirt”, even while it might remind you that one way of treating people like dirt is running off with a spouse. For this time the fourth line might look as if it has the
antithesis that we are used to (“shoot” / “be shot”, and so on), for it does play “marry” against “married”. The banter is in the fact that you
couldn’t have had a hinged line this time,
Don’t wanna marry nobody, don’t wanna be married
, not unless you didn’t mind the mindlessness of putting it like that. To
marry somebody, like it or not, is thereupon to be married. You can’t marry somebody and not be married, though admittedly people are in a sense trying it all the time. “Don’t
wanna marry nobody if they’re already married”: this respectfully takes a turn for the better.
³⁰²

Then in the third verse, a further liberty is taken, pattern-wise. This time, there turn out not to be three hinged lines –

that are followed by a single sweep of a line: