Dylan's Visions of Sin (52 page)

What is painful in the song, in its comprehension of pain, is how hideously much must be being conceded, all the way through, with those words “most of the time”. For the admission
within “most of the time” is that some of the time – perhaps even much of the time – he is
not
clear focused (not that anybody can be clear focused
all
around
), and
can’t
keep both feet on the ground, or follow the path, or stay right with it, or handle whatever he stumbles upon. Or – as the assurances to himself mount
(self-assurings, not self-assurance) – make it all match up, or hold his own, or deal with the situation, or (with fortitude fully explicit)
survive
or
endure
. And so it goes,
unadvancingly, a chilling marshalling of all that cannot be denied: that he does (at least some of the time) cheat on himself, and run and hide, and compromise, and pretend – and
care
.
This is the horror upon which all these asseverations insist. The horror is not the whole story, for there is nothing hollow about the counter-insistence, that most of the time he has the fortitude
to survive and to endure. He knows his own strength, which means acknowledging its limitations: “Most of the time / I’m strong enough not to hate”. (The immediate
time /
I’m
rhyme at the turn of the line is prosecuted three times in the song.) “I’m strong enough not to hate”: this is not nothing. But it has to be understood as conceding
that some of the time he is not strong enough not to hate. Only enough is enough.

The measured language of the song – measured as metre, and measured as grimly temperate – is a tissue of tensions. Eleven times, “I can”, but not a
single time in the bridge or in the final verse; “I can’t”, once only. Ten times, “I don’t”; never, “I do”. Three times, “I am”; once,
“I ain’t”. The state of mind, and of heart, is one that is necessarily self-absorbed as it tries in vain to absorb the pain. Again and again we hear “I”,
“my”, “mine”, “me” (nearly forty times in the forty-four lines); very seldom, for all her unignorability, “she” or “her”. And
“I”, “my”, “mine” all throb through
the song because of their assonance with the refrain that opens and closes each verse,
Most of
the time
. Exactly half of the lines, twenty-two of them, toll this.

Just so, to be sure. To assure. To reassure, or – as this song reiterates – to re-re-re-reassure. It is others that we assure (let me assure you, or I assure you),
but then the state of mind in
Most of the Time
is one in which
I am
, or as Rimbaud put it – albeit in French –
I is another
(or an other). And “sure”
has long been a curiously unsure word, since it has to be both
Oxford English Dictionary
, III, “Subjectively certain” (“Certain in mind; having no doubt; assured,
confident”), and IV, “Objectively certain”. One would have thought that these two meanings would not lie down happily together in the one word. Added to which, there is that
tricky little colloquialism by which “Sure” both intensifies and slackens. (Another drink? Sure.) “Used to emphasize
yes
or
no
”, quoting Lady Bird Johnson in
1970: “If it had been a request to chop off one’s right hand one would have said, ‘Sure.’” “I can handle whatever I stumble upon.” Sure.

What is so well judged is that the word “content” is itself already a halfways thing, so that what is being drawn may amount to being quartered.
The Oxford
English Dictionary
is more than usually acute and illuminating here, quoting the dictionary of Samuel (not to be confused with Lady Bird) Johnson:

content
   Having one’s desires bounded by what one has (though that may be less than one could have wished); not disturbed by the desire of anything
more, or of anything different; “satisfied so as not to repine; easy though not highly pleased”.

It is only most of the time that the man in this long black song succeeds in being
not disturbed
. But he is halfways there. On the other hand, “She’s
that far behind”. One too many mornings and a thousand miles behind, to be exact.

Not Dark Yet

Apocalypse Now may be less disturbing than Apocalypse Soon. The former does at least promise a prompt
No more
: over and done with (
former
, really). The latter
mutters “Later”, and just gets on (in its own good time) with doing away with. In this waiting game, the stakes may be higher – and sharper. That cardinal virtue Fortitude may be
even more called for.

Dylan has always been alert to the dark spectre and spectrum of imminence, the different time-scales where we are weighed in the balance and found wanting. There is the apocalyptic-cryptic
A
Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
. There is the scorpion song that stings itself to death, rounding fierily on itself, as
All Along the Watchtower
. “Two riders were approaching, the
wind began to howl”: at which conclusion, it is as if the song bizarrely begins at last, and as if the myth began again.

Or, altogether other, there is the bone-deep acquiescent fatigue in
Going, Going, Gone
. Never has the auctioneer’s cutting-off point sounded more gravelled, less gavelled. No more
auction block. Only writer’s block. “There’s not much more to be said”: you can say that again. Or sing it again. But was it prudent to grant this so early in a song, in the
very first verse? Prudence is another of the cardinal virtues, but that doesn’t stop Prudence from sometimes being, as Blake had it, “a rich, ugly, old maid courted by
Incapacity”.

This knows all about the sin that is Sloth (the Sloth that may be in or beneath the tree), but it knows too that Sloth long ago came to an understanding with Fortitude. Sloth
doesn’t really care what happens next, but then nor does stoical Fortitude. This exquisitely threaded song has no place for anger, being all languor. Once again, it’s got to be done
sometime so why not do it then? “Now, I’ve just got to cut loose / Before it gets late”: on purpose this doesn’t try to effect any purposeful impact of
cutting
(on
the contrary, there is a furrily blurred edge), and what do you mean, before it gets late? It isn’t only the world of
All Along the Watchtower
that ought to remember “the hour is
getting late”. The self-attender in
Going, Going, Gone
takes his time, not least by expanding those three words into “I’m just going, I’m going, I’m
gone”. But is the time his to take, exactly? Philip Larkin hovers at the brink of dismay: his poem’s title is
Going, Going
, with
Gone
either already gone or not yet quite
gone. “Well the future for me is already a thing of the past” (
Bye and Bye
).

Many of Dylan’s songs issue a penultimatum. Looking through the telescoped:
Whatcha Gonna Do When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky
. Or, “Only a matter of time ’til
night comes steppin’ in” (
Jokerman
).

One of the most enduring of Dylan’s only-a-matter-of-time songs will be
Not Dark Yet
. But anyone who gets his or her kicks from biographizing Dylan’s songs is likely to end up
with a medical condition:
Dylan’s heart-trouble at the time
. . . It wasn’t “at the time” (
Time Out of Mind
was recorded before the illness), but then it is
true that poets are often very good at premonitions. Anyway, what a fun thing heart-fungus can be for the song-explainer! But you don’t have to be near death to fear death. Philip Larkin saw
that these things go beyond the biographical and the medical, saying of death in his poem
Aubade
: “Most things may never happen: this one will”. Still, the newspaper
USA
Today
had a right word, without knowing all the reasons (but who could ever do that? not even the man himself), when it announced: “Heart-ache. The word literally and figuratively defines
Bob Dylan in 1997.” Presumptuous, plainly – defining Bob Dylan, or anybody else for that matter, is nobody’s business, and as for the idea that one word, even a compound word such
as “heart-ache”, could
define
him . . . But heart-ache does catch. It is a memento mori. “My heart aches”: so it is that Keats opens the
Ode to a
Nightingale
.

I don’t believe that Keats’s poem is
alluded to
in Dylan’s song. That is, called into play, so that you’d be failing to respond to something crucial to
the song unless you were familiar with, and could call up, Keats’s poem. Dylan enjoys allusion all right (those lovely mermaids in
Desolation Row
, where the captain’s tower housed T. S.
Eliot, are both more and less desolate because they have flowed over from
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
), but
Not Dark Yet
doesn’t seek any such crystallizing by name. I’d not
mind the likeness between
Not Dark Yet
and the
Ode
being called a coincidence, provided that it wasn’t called a mere coincidence. For coincidences can be deep things, and if two artists were
to arrive independently at so many similar turns of phrase, figures of speech, felicities of rhyming, then my sense of humanity might go up a plane. We might learn something about what is behind
every beautiful thing (a thing of beauty is a joy for ever), about the ways in which the minds of Keats and of Dylan have large movements of mind behind them. But I don’t myself believe that
the likenesses are coincidental; I believe that Dylan knows the famous more-than-anthology-piece, and that he had it in mind, even if not consciously or deliberatedly in mind, when he created his
own re-creation of so much of it. After all, he did once rhyme “owed” with the line “He examines the nightingale’s code”.
³⁷⁰
Not Dark Yet
is owed to a nightingale. And Dylan has given advice: “To the aspiring songwriter and singer I say disregard all the current stuff, forget it, you’re
better off, read John Keats, Melville, listen to Robert Johnson and Woody Guthrie” (
Biograph
).

The memories of
Ode to a Nightingale
in
Not Dark Yet
come from throughout the
Ode
, diffusedly there. The parallel passages are dark passages, to take up the term (itself repeated, in parallel)
of Keats’s profound letter on Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth – and on fortitude:

However among the effects this breathing is father of is that tremendous one
of sharpening one’s vision into the heart and nature of Man –
of convincing ones nerves that the World is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression – whereby This Chamber of Maiden Thought becomes gradually darken’d and at the
same time on all sides of it many doors are set open – but all dark – all leading to dark passages – We see not the ballance of good and evil. We are in a mist –
We
are now
in that state – We feel the “burden of the Mystery,” To this point was Wordsworth come, as far as I can conceive when he wrote “Tintern Abbey” and it seems to me that
his Genius is explorative of those dark Passages.
³⁷¹

Heartbreak, heart-ache. The “burden of the Mystery” was to weigh in and weigh upon Dylan, too: “Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear”.
Forbearance, and even perhaps fortitude, may now be asked of the reader who is about to be confronted with a tabulation. For the parallels may be more audible if spelt out.