Dylan's Visions of Sin (66 page)

Which leaves “And see the lights surrounding you” as the only unshadowed use of “surround” in Dylan’s songs, so there may be at least the
possibility that “surrounding you” contains – or rather, might ill have contained – a threat, such a threat as would make sense of an immediate move to “May you always
be courageous”.

The final verse, too, may have a glimpse of a faint threat to our hopes, in the knowledge that such a conceivable shadow may do something to make unsentimentally real the benevolence that is
being prayed for.

A good wish, that your hands may always be busy, and yet possibly hinting at what it is that goodness may be up against:

It is likewise a high hope, that your feet may always be swift, one that might be associated not only with hope (“True hope is
swift”
⁴⁷⁹
) but with love: “Love is swift of foot”.
⁴⁸⁰
And yet this again is
possibly a wish that acknowledges the existence of dark alternatives. Of the six things that the Lord hates (Proverbs 6:18), one is “feet that be swift in
running to mischief
”
(mischief again), and when feet are swift in the Epistle to the Romans (3:15), it is that “their feet are swift
to shed blood
”.

But last things last, the lasting things.

The song’s last wish remains what it has been throughout. And the one-but-last wish? “May your song always be sung”. You have a song of your own, you know
(sings this unique singer to a child of his, and to us, and to himself),
your
song. Your song, as the one that you will have as your own, everybody having his or her song, even those of us who
don’t write songs or can’t sing. Your song, as this one of yours, this one for you, this one –
Forever Young
– in which I do for you. (May I always do so.) Always be sung,
as continue to be sung (may it always find itself sung). Always be sung, there being – as earnest of this hope – two versions of this song on this one album.

A prayer is not an end in itself. Those of us who are old enough (though forever youthful) to remember the sweet startlement with which in 1974 we first heard
Forever Young
will never forget
what it was like to turn
Planet Waves
over (something that is lost in the single-sidedness of a CD) and discover that the first track on the second side was a discovery, an utterly – no, an
utteredly – different version of the song we had just heard as the last track on the first side. Forever indeed. The reprise was a feat of modesty and pride. Modesty, in acknowledging that
even Dylan himself couldn’t sing one of his songs so that
everything
about it was
realized in one performance.
⁴⁸¹
Pride, in this same fact, that he could create a work of art that greatly escapes even the artist’s power over it (like a child, really), pride that here was to be heard the living witness of
what it is for a work of art to be forever young – and forever new.

To hear the song is to realize how much Dylan, the happy melodist, unwearied, can realize. There is the staying power that waits so patiently after the word “stay”, so that the line
is not

And may you stay forever young

but

And may you stay          forever young

– with “stay” extending its stay. And there is what we hear in the close of the refrain, which is not what we might read (“Forever young, forever young
/ May you stay forever young”) but something audibly true, something that the eye cannot fathom, something in the timing that cannot be rendered by placing and spacing, however much we
exercise our liberties:

Even as the nymph Melisma stays forever young . . .
⁴⁸²
The longing is in the
elongations, as well as in
the complementary rhyme (“May you stay . . .”), even as the shift “When the winds of changes shift” is a shift in how a word is voiced by the wind that is breath, and
thereby changed.

When young, or when even younger than he was when he wrote
Forever Young
, Dylan had set down
Bob Dylan’s Dream
, a dream that had gone but had left a memory at once happy and sad:

Our songs were sung: May your song always be sung. We never much thought we could get very old . . . forever in fun: forever young. And behind
Forever Young
there may be a deep
memory not only of the memory that is
Bob Dylan’s Dream
but of Isaiah 26:1–4:

In that day shall this song be sung in the land of Judah; We have a strong city; salvation will God appoint for walls and bulwarks. Open ye the gates, that the righteous nation
which keepeth the truth may enter in. Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee. Trust ye in the Lord for ever. Trust ye in the Lord for
ever.
⁴⁸³

“May God bless and keep you always”.

Charity

Watered-Down Love

At Stanford University in California, the Memorial Church is decked with allegorical figures: Faith, Hope, Charity, and Love. Designed by the great architect Maximus Crassus
Ignoramus (of Soloi, birthplace of the solecism), the Memorial Church is certainly a memorial to something. A memorial to the railroad millionaire Leland Stanford’s wish to railroad St Paul
by erecting not just the Christian trinity of graces, Faith, Hope, and Charity, but a quadrangle that can then grace university expansion. Fourfold! Billfold! A memorial to institutional
indifference towards the English language as well as towards history, including the history that it purports to honour. For charity
is
love, or certainly was so (and therefore is so, if you respect
the enduring life of the tradition that you are invoking), within the supreme sequence voiced in St Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 13: “And now abideth faith, hope,
charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”

But now abideth in an educational establishment not just these three but these four. And once Love is to be granted a separate spot, what is left for Charity to undertake? Up there on the
fac¸ade of the Memorial Church, she is apparently doling out soup to the unfortunate. Well worth doing, and the great virtue that is Charity does not disdain such compassionate doing of good.
But this is not because she is distinct from Love, it is because she incorporates such love within the many kinds and kindnesses of her patient love. “Charity suffereth long, and is
kind.” Charity is pure love.

The opening words of
Watered-Down Love
are themselves an act of hope and of belief: in the simplest way, the hope that those who hear the song will recognize (in both senses of recognize) what
is being alluded to, together with the belief that St Paul is to be believed when (in the words of that glory of the language, the King James translation) the saint speaks with
such divine eloquence of this the highest form of Love, the form that the English language then called Charity so as to distinguish it from, for instance, the love that is erotic
love. (Love that’s pure “Won’t sneak up into your room, tall, dark and handsome”.
⁴⁸⁴
) Charity gives way to none of the sins,
least of all pride.

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily
provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

Those closing clauses constitute one of the most noble progressions ever realized. Dylan’s song does nothing to demean this but does have the courage to play
mischievously with it (as against competing with it) when calling it into play. Instead of “endures” and “bears” along with “believes” and “hopes”,
there is this at the very start:

Allusion always pulls strings. And the more so when there may be a stringed instrument (contributing to the medium) in the immediate vicinity. One shouldn’t harp on this,
but allusion may itself be thought of as a stringed instrument. Love that’s pure “won’t pull no strings”: this strings us along by means of the plain-spun double negative,
the grammatical solecism (“Won’t pull
any
strings, Master Dylan”) that then strings together “to pull strings” (“to exert influence privately”) and
“no strings attached”:
string
, “a limitation, condition, or restriction attached to something. Freq. in phr.
no strings attached
.”

Charity “beareth all things” and “endureth all things” – including bearing and enduring this sort of thing, this taking of a liberty to the point of
blasphemy. But then religious art has to be willing to risk the accusation of blasphemy.
⁴⁸⁵

Every tongue, not just as deploring blasphemers but as including all who ever venture to speak of religion, even the bells (for a bell has a tongue).
⁴⁸⁷
If the charge of blasphemy were never even to arise, that could only be because the art were playing safe. What saves the song from being blasély blasphemous or
shallowly sacrilegious is its conviction that these are strings that can be plucked in plangent comedy. This, which is implicit in the song, is explicit in an interview. Dylan is considerate of
God: “He’s got enough people asking Him to pull strings. I’ll pull my own strings, you know.” An assurance that sounds a different note when it comes from a
guitar-player.

Are there any heroes or saints these days?

“A saint is a person who gives of himself totally and freely, without strings. He is neither deaf nor blind.”
⁴⁸⁸

What strings of saintliness, within a Christian song, might connect “deaf” to “strings”? The miracle in Mark 7:30–35:

Be opened. And straightway his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain. And he charged them that they should tell no man: but the more he
charged them, so much the more a great deal they published it; and were beyond measure astonished, saying, He hath done all things well: he maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to
speak.
⁴⁸⁹

And in this as in so many miraculous Dylan songs, straightway our ears are opened. So much, pure love can do, charity, or loving kindness, or
“love that’s pure”. The song sets itself to rescue the idea and the ideal of charity from the slightly archaic colouring of that word, a colouring that has come to make people
mistake its largest meaning.

“Love that’s pure, it don’t make no false claims”. What kind of false claim might charity ever be accused of making? Admittedly, there is the dangerous pasture
“Where charity is supposed to cover up a multitude of sins”. But
Something’s Burning, Baby
knows the difference between covering up and covering. St Peter’s First Epistle
does not speak of covering up when it promises that “charity shall cover the multitude of sins”. (To cover, as benignly to protect, to clothe, and so – by extension – to
forgive.) Psalms 32:1: “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered”. Proverbs 10:12: “Hatred stirreth up strifes: but love covereth all sins”.
Charity is the opposite of any covering up.

Charity firmly sets its gentle face against sin, the sin of envy, for one. Charity envieth not. Charity thinketh no evil. Love that’s pure

But the song is not content either to update or to endorse St Paul, for those would be presumptuous as well as needless.
Watered-Down Love
takes up its own enterprise when it
sets “love that’s pure” against love that isn’t.

Such a contrast was no part of St Paul’s undertaking in chapter 13 of the First Epistle to the Corinthians. Plainly, one enemy of the charitable is the uncharitable. Less plainly, another
enemy of the love that is charity is the love that falls short because it is diluted or impure. Love that’s pure is to be contrasted with love that’s watered-down.