Dylan's Visions of Sin (43 page)

At the beginning of
King Lear
, Cordelia does not know how she will be able to reply to her father’s insistence that his three daughters announce their love for him. She has an aside
(an aside being a combination of speech and silence, as speaking to oneself is): “What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent.” Her love, it speaks like silence. Or she hopes it
will. But this, in the unjust upshot, does not satisfy Lear. Her silence, which becomes her refusal to placate him (let us not talk falsely now), moves him to violence.

True like ice, like fire, and true moreover as love. When Dylan puts a question and answer, the exchange may find itself harboured within parentheses, themselves carrying a
suggestion of the unspoken, the silent.

Or, in the words said by Blake:

The rhyme of “silence” and “violence” is at once forced and easy enough, and it is a rhyme that Lowell needed in his translation of Racine’s
Phèdre
.
Lowell gives a greater strain to the rhyme than Dylan does, by insisting metrically (Dylan did the opposite) on the extra syllable in “violence”:

The edge or edginess is different from Dylan’s opening couplet:

But both Dylan and Lowell invite you to think about, even if not to speak about, the occult connection between idealism and violence. A much later Dylan song,
Union
Sundown
, an overtly political song that scowls at violence, is closer to Lowell’s sense of the world:

The dark comedy here is not that of rhyming “silence” with “violence”, waywardly yet gently, but of positioning (with a grimace) “violence”
so that it leads, not to silence, but to “But I guess that’s better left unsaid”, as though by a rhyming of sense, not of sound. The word that is better left unsaid, and
unsounded, is “silence”, for all its willingness to make up to “violence” elsewhere. And when “territory” is reached, there is a feeling, given the insistence
that “This world is ruled by violence”, that territory there
may be tinged with terror. As the head becomes the mouth, and as the Milky Way breastfeeds the
hungry mouth,
³¹²
the world of
Union Sundown
(“From Broadway to the Milky Way”) widens voraciously. Fortunately, prudence has put
in a word, has put in the words that come naturally to it: “You’d better” and “I guess that’s better left unsaid”.

The loved one in
Love Minus Zero / No Limit
leaves things unsaid:

The rhyme-scheme is simplicity herself. The first and second lines rhyme (
silence / violence
); so do the fourth and eighth lines (
fire / buy her
); and so do the
sixth and seventh lines
(hours / flowers
). Which leaves only the third and fifth lines not rhyming. A tacit intricacy is set up so that nothing rhymes with “faithful”, and
nothing rhymes with “roses”. (And yet the roses and the flowers, paired at their line-endings, clearly chime in sense.) This ought to lure us into wondering about the relationship not
only between the lines that rhyme (we are used to doing this), but between the lines that don’t. Her being faithful doesn’t have anything to do with roses. Anyway, it doesn’t say
– it doesn’t have to say – she’s faithful, any more than she has to. It’s written all over her. And all through this praise of her.

“People carry roses”: “carry” there suggests a certain gait, and something of an errand, and even perhaps weapons in the war between the sexes, a war that may entail
winning women over. But it isn’t because people carry roses (to her or in the wider world of their amorous solicitations) that she’s faithful. It doesn’t turn on that. Anyway,
people in life often carry roses because they have been – or have been tempted to be –
unfaithful
. The bouquet bought on the way home. Nothing in her has any wish that
roses
should rhyme, or that
faithful
should, either. An end in itself, in herself, being faithful. People carry roses. She carries it off.

Flowers laugh in the classical application of such words as “laugh” or “smile”, in that they not only make you happy but look happy themselves.

All three pairs of rhymes in the first verse have something in common, an undulation, a hesitation as to exactly how many syllables they ask. There is a play of the two syllables of
“silence” against the two or three of “violence”, and of the two syllables of “buy her” against the one or two of “fire” – with then a
variation on this with “hours” and “flowers”, hoverers both.
³¹³
There is another kind of hovering here, too, in the
unobtrusive word “by”: “Make promises by the hours”. What begins as the “by” of “in terms of swearing or adjuration” – “make promises by
. . .” – becomes in time the “by” of time: “by the hours”.

But it is time for the second verse. Whereas in the first verse, lines one and two had rhymed:

the next verse varies this, so that the third line maintains the initiating rhyme, with “repeat” to make sure that although this may surprise us, it will not startle
us:

But it is not only that the double rhyme becomes a triple one (
stations / situations / quotations
), and not only that “situations” so completely engrosses or
swallows up “stations”, but that the abstract suffix,
-ions
, keeps pressing on,
until it reaches “conclusions”. People (again this faintly
dismissive locution: people carry roses, people talk of situations) read the writing on the wall, and among the quotations that they repeat there is one that is itself a conclusion that speaks of
the future.

Conclusions
on
, not conclusions
from
, though the latter will be drawn soon enough. The Book of Daniel, chapter 5:

In the same hour came forth fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace.

And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. TEKEL; Thou art weighed in
the balances, and art found wanting.

Later in the song, “the candlestick” furnishes Dylan not only with “the candles” but with “matchsticks” to light the candles, and the word
“numbered” may have its relation to
Minus Zero
. This same chapter of Daniel has “people”, “tremble”, “wise men”, and “gifts”; also
“spake” (“speaks”), “said” (“say”), and “that night” (“the night” and “at midnight”). “The king” is
reduced to “the pawn”.
³¹⁴

“Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting”. Who, in the end, in the song, will be weighed in the balances and found wanting?

In this verse, the rhyme-scheme – since “wall” and “all” rhyme, and so in their hollow way, disconcertingly, do “future” and “failure”
– leaves only the fifth line not rhyming: “My love she speaks softly”. It is a lovely touch, this not rhyming (so hushedly) on “softly”, and yet the line in other
respects rhymes with, pairs with, something elsewhere, since it picks up “My love she speaks like silence”, and “softly” is after all both more and less
hushed
than
is silence. The sequence of thought remains elusive, or even illusory:

“Some speak of the future”: this does not proceed to usher in any anticipated contrast by way of what my love speaks of.
Of the future
as against what,
exactly? “My love she speaks” – wait for it – “softly”. Is it that people who speak of the future speak with hardness and with loudness? Yes, actually, they
often do, in the self-gratifying heat not just of prophesying but of prophesizing. So my love, she speaks not of the future but – softly.

No limit to the amount of trouble generalizations about women bring. Lear, in his recovered love as he stands over the body of Cordelia, speaks of the past. She, who at the
beginning of the play, could say “Nothing”, can now say nothing.

“My love she speaks softly”: softly, because the past and the present may have some power to hush us into speaking more quietly, more temperately. The future, on the other hand, is
up for grabs, and grabs can be noisy. A friend of mine, Mark Halliday, once proposed, a quarter jokingly, a sequence of thought that might have met one’s expectations:

– a burlesque that does bring out how powerfully inconsequential these alignments may be.

The third verse of
Love Minus Zero / No Limit
has always baffled and delighted me. One of Dylan’s most suggestive surrealist sequences, it eludes paraphrase and translation, and it
teases us into and out of thought – and back into thought again.

My love winks, and an equivocal wink it is, too, and an equivocal thing a wink is, too. Like the lines themselves, with all their secretive nudges, she seems to be sharing a
joke with us while not actually letting us in on the joke. Could it be that she is conniving? Powerfully attractive women sometimes are. “Connive”: from the Latin, “to
wink”.
The Oxford English Dictionary
brings out the disconcerting shifts and shiftiness of the word “connive”, from

To shut one’s eyes to a thing that one dislikes but cannot help, to pretend ignorance, to take no notice

(“My love winks, she does not bother”) – through to a really rather different sense of what is going on:

To shut one’s eyes to an action that one ought to oppose, but which one covertly sympathizes with; to wink at.

This verse of the song winks, tipping us the wink and advising us likewise to know too much to argue or to judge, or perhaps reminding us that we know too little to be able to
do either. The rhyme
dangles / candles
has the melting touch of Salvador Dali; the rhyme
grudge / judge
returns us promptly to the real world of solid sullenness; and the other rhyme,
another / bother
, very appropriately does not bother and should not bother us. Imperfect, but what’s so good about being perfect? Such is the rhyme’s air. Which leaves, as the
only line-endings that are left unrhymed, “horsemen” and “matchsticks”. I have no idea what to make of the teeming and the provocation here, or what Dylan made of them
except mischief and glee and shadows. The “ceremonies of the horsemen” suggest the chessboard knights (lording it over the pawn) as well as the Changing of the Guards, but what game or
ceremony is going on here? “The cloak and dagger” is transformed by “dangles”, as though by a conjuror, into a medal or decoration, like the Star and Garter (he was awarded
the Cloak and Dagger; there it is, dangling or daggling from his breast). At a leap, the world of the song has become “espionage, secrecy, intrigue, etc.” (a good dark etc.), a world
–
The Oxford English Dictionary
reminds us – of “drama or stories of intrigue and romantic
or melodramatic adventure, in which the principal
characters are taken from that class of society which formerly wore cloak and dagger or sword”.
³¹⁵
And which formerly frequented brothels:
“Madams light the candles”. A sinister business.

It is all a dreamscape in which there is much to be felt and little to be learnt.