Dylan's Visions of Sin (42 page)

This had been the pattern of the next verse, too:

– into:

But what now ensues is a different pattern, an alternation of a hinged line with a single direct one, one by one, a couple of times, not three to one.

What keeps the song on its toes, and us on ours, too, is the feeling, gradually forming, that all these frustrations of expectation can be trusted to become the source of new
satisfactions. The course of true love songs never did run smooth. So “Don’t wanna burn nobody, don’t wannabe burned” is followed by “Don’t wanna learn . .
.” – at which point, thinking for yourself, you’d better hear in a flash that it can’t possibly move on to anything resembling “don’t wanna be learned”.
Time to realize that you may need to unlearn some habits. (But then, “Study means unlearning”.
³⁰³
) “Don’t wanna learn from
nobody what I gotta unlearn”. Whereupon the quatrain does the same again, this not being the same as what the previous verses had done:

It isn’t (I admit) that I don’t want to defeat anybody, it’s just that there is no challenge in defeating someone who is down, who has been downed.

Patterns are habits forming. The fourth verse finds a different way of being different. It starts as though it might be going to repeat the previous verse’s
shape, antithesis of active and passive followed by a straightforward jet:

But then, with a wink, the lines are used, not as a doormat, but as a launching pad. For the shaping that then ensues is one that we have not had before, with the
closing
two lines having the antithetical form of every quatrain’s
opening
lines – and with the added amusement (no confusement) of the particular tone with which they rhyme, both within
themselves and with one another, happy to mount from the simple truth to an outrageous untruth that nevertheless has a serious truth ensconced within it:

I Don’t Believe You (He Acts Like We Never Have Met His Expectations).

Which leaves only the finishing end, the verse that comes up with yet more ways of being itself while not snubbing the other verses and their selves.

First line, as expected or even agreed: “betray” into “be betrayed”. But the second line, with its “play” into “be waylaid”? This
last rhyme-word (double, really,
way-laid
) is a comical breach of faith, way out. Not till now had we ever been given to understand that when the active verb changes to the passive, it would
be permissible, would be fair play, to change the verb, too. A dozen times we had accepted that we were being trained to shape up. But now, “Don’t wanna play with nobody” –
fine, only to be succeeded,
not by “don’t wanna be played with”, but (waylaying us) by “don’t wanna be waylaid”. Clearly, he
does
wanna play with somebody. With her. But fortunately with us, too. Love is teasing, love is pleasing.

But we know where we are with “Don’t wanna miss nobody, don’t wanna be missed”. (A thought of which we will miss the range unless we call to mind the very different
things that the word “miss” may mean.) And then the last line of the song (followed by the final refrain): “Don’t put my faith in nobody, not even a scientist”. Again
we know where we are with this: that is, in a place where we haven’t been before. For this
Don’t wanna
song has suddenly changed what it most needs to say. No longer what he
doesn’t want to do, but what he doesn’t do. “Don’t put my faith in nobody, not even a scientist”. The song, which had begun with the Christian faith, rounds in the end
upon the presumptuous gullible faith that believes itself to have taken the place of religion or to have put religion in its place. “Not even a scientist” – the phrase arrives
from outer space. “Don’t put my faith in nobody”, but again, with the tacit “present company excepted”. Have faith in me, as I have in you. Be faithful, he says to her
but also to himself. For such is one of the ways in which you do right to somebody.

And in doing right to one another, they will have a good chance of doing right by others, even as the song in its well-weighed comedy does right by us.

Temperance

I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine.
I dreamed I heard him, too. When (wide-awake) you chance to read his Confessions, which amount to more than a sad complaint, it is a voice with restraint
that you hear. With passion, yes, and with convictions, but not without restraint. In Dylan’s evocation, the very rhyme acts – as rhyme often does – as a restraint, as a way of
containing emotions.

A voice without restraint would be a voice without Temperance. This virtue, like its sister Prudence, may not seem robust enough to be more than an associate member of The Cardinals, but one
should never underestimate the power that derives from not overestimating things. The family of words to which temperance belongs may not appear to claim very much – moderation, measure,
sobriety, self-control, self-restraint – but then not claiming very much is part of their point. And as to the forms that may be taken by knowledge, one of the best is knowing when one has
had enough. Also known as temperance.

The practice or habit of restraining oneself in provocation, passion, desire, etc.; rational self-restraint. (One of the four cardinal virtues.)

Self-restraint and moderation in action of any kind, in the expression of opinion, etc.; suppression of any tendency to passionate action; in early use, esp. self-control, restraint, or
forbearance, when provoked to anger or impatience.

(
The Oxford English Dictionary
)

Temperance is a virtue that, though not worldly, knows the world.

Benjamin Franklin: “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” Benjamin Jowett: “Cheat as little as you can” (to a grocer who said it was
impossible for an honest tradesman to live). Benjamin Disraeli: “Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forgo an
advantage.”
³⁰⁴
And that’s just the Benjamins.

There is, it need hardly be said (a temperate idiom, this), a countering culture that sees Temperance as no more than a
nom de guerre
for temporizing, weakness, flight. Temperance
fugit.

Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling.

And being restrain’d, it by degrees becomes passive, till it is only the shadow of desire.

(
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
)

William Blake, who constitutes the greatest Intemperance Society, may exclaim “Enough! or Too much”, and may aver that “If the fool would persist in his folly
he would become wise”, and that “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” But he did have the grace to call these provocations Proverbs of Hell.
³⁰⁵
And he might have acknowledged that W. H. Auden was within his rights to retort that “The road of excess leads to the slough of despond”.

Even when a Dylan song pleads for more, it will often plead, not for more and more and more, but for “one more”:
One More Weekend
,
One More Cup of Coffee
,
One More
Night
, or (one more instance)
Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance
. Get along with you.
³⁰⁶
It is all a matter of
setting a limit to what is asked. And the song that has the word “limit” within its title, though crucially never within the limits of the song itself, is a temperance
song:
Love Minus Zero / No Limit
.

No limit: this must sound intemperate, and is so, consciously, when Dylan sings (in
Sugar Baby
) “There ain’t no limit to the amount of trouble women bring”. The line is
sung most sadly, with the sadness deriving not really from the truth or falsity of the charge itself but from any such sad complaint’s needing to be resorted to when there never turns out to
be any comfort in such blame-shifting. Is there no limit to the amount of blame we all try to cast?
Sugar Baby
broods on this, limitlessly.

No limit: as when the sky’s the limit. (“And but for the sky there are no fences facin’”.
³⁰⁷
) But the title
Love Minus
Zero / No Limit
, while remaining mysterious, was clarified a fraction by Dylan when, just for once, he uttered the title of a song, and uttered this one as “
Love Minus Zero
over
No Limit
”, calling it “sort of a fraction”.
³⁰⁸
The song engages with temperance, which becomes fractured, divided.
Love
Minus Zero
being divided by
No Limit
? It defies explaining or even imagining, but does itself thereby set limits to what one can explain or imagine. And is a joke of a curious sort.

Auden proposed that one tantalizing distinction is between poems whose titles you could guess from the poem, and poems whose titles you couldn’t. Not that the one kind is superior to the
other, simply that they may be of crucially different kinds. There would be something wrong with you if you were unable to guess from the words of the particular song the title
Blowin’ in
the Wind
, say, or
Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
or
If Not For You
. Then along the way there are some songs where you might need luck to guess the title with precision (
Slow
Train
, given that its title is not
Slow Train Coming
, and
Abandoned Love
). And then, at the other end, there are those songs where, let’s face it, there would be something
wrong with you if you supposed even for a moment that you could ever have guessed the title. No way, when it comes to
Love Minus Zero / No Limit
. Not only that,
but
it is rare for you to hear a title. For the title of a song almost always goes unuttered, and this means that it is not at all the same as the title of a poem, which is there for the eye to take in
exactly as the eye will then proceed to take in the poem. Even when the poem is offered to the ear (at a poetry reading), the poet will vouchsafe the title.

Positively 4th Street
.
Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues
. And
Love Minus Zero / No Limit
. These titles, in their variously bizarre ways, are off-limits. Off the limits of
the song proper. Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. Unheard titles to heard melodies, titles unheard on the album and rarely heard in concert, titles (moreover) undivinable,
have a way of being sweet and sour.

William Blake once more:

Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.

The contraries are at once necessary to the existence of
Love Minus Zero / No Limit.

A deep rhyme, for all kinds of reasons. Rhyming on such a word as “silence” is likely to intrigue, because a rhyme is a sound; there’s something askew about
the criss-crossof the meaning of the word and the fact that you’re using it for a sound effect.
Silence / violence
: it’s not exactly a violent rhyme (exactly not a violent
rhyme?), but you can hear that it isn’t a perfect rhyme, either. (
Is
there a perfect rhyme for “silence”? This song has a way of making you want to ask questions
parenthetically.) So the nature of violence is brought up at the very beginning, and yet the rhyme fits or kinda fits. As, with its own violence, does Ben Jonson’s tour de force,
A Fit of
Rhyme against Rhyme
.
³⁰⁹

Silence and violence: and do ideals and violence fit together, too, and unexpectedly, too? Robert Lowell said that “Violence and idealism have some occult
connection.”
³¹⁰
Asked about the violence of the USA, Lowell spoke of an idealistic crusading history, a nation “founded on a
declaration”, but he admitted that there is no knowing: “I think that it has something to do with both the idealism and the power of the country. Other things are boring for these young
people, and violence isn’t boring.” Lowell, like Dylan, knows that the difficulty comes when something more than silence is called for, when you must speak.