Dylan's Visions of Sin (67 page)

“You wanna drown love” – which does not then form, as you might have
expected, an exact parallel with “You wanna watered-down
love”, for then it would have had to be “You wanna drowned love”. And “wanna” is compact in more than one way: “you want a . . .” (which is how the
previous line spelt it out) plus “you want to . . .” But circulating throughout the song is this contrast of the pure with the watered-down, the strong drink with the drowning of the
drink. Too much tonic. Love that’s pure might even have been love’s that neat, if it weren’t that this would have been too neat by half. Love that’s proof (against
temptation)?

But love that’s pure doesn’t have to insist on purism, on pure English. The song has as usual the unusual feats that characterize the true claims of Dylan’s words.

– ’stead of casting it as you might have expected, namely “’stead of casting the blame on you”. Or might it have been “’stead of
casting you as the one to be blamed”? Either way, I’d like to intercede on behalf of “casting you blame”. Or there is the
transgression / confession
rhyme, grilling you (at
the police station or through the confessional’s grill) about the transgression without which you wouldn’t have to be coming to confession:

– an ugly conjunction of the police and the priest.

“Will not” do this, “Won’t” do that: these are all among the negative things that are positively negated by “love that’s pure”, and this way of
establishing the positive power of love by setting it against the negatives that it defies and defeats is itself fully in the spirit of St Paul, however different its idiom may be. Has the small
inexorable word “not” ever been called upon to do more sterling positive work than in St Paul’s celebration of this, the most positive virtue of all?

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 . . .

There is a cascade of heartening negatives throughout the Dylan song, too:

It is the pressure of all the negatives, some of them working positively (“Won’t hold you back”) and some of them negatively (alas, “You don’t want
a love that’s pure” – would that you did), that explains why such force attaches in the song to the utter simplicity of the greatest praise that Dylan gives to love that’s
pure: “It knows that it knows”. Now there’s something entirely positive for you, for you not against you, as against the repudiation of all those ways of being bad. A positive
good: “It knows that it knows”.

The words as printed in
Lyrics 1962–1985
had been “Always on time, is always content” – a good thing to be, certainly, for punctuality is the politeness
of princes, and to speak in a song of being “Always on time” is to be alert to the musical humour of putting it like that. But “Always on time” didn’t attain the
utterly unmisgiving rightness, the repudiation of all misguided sophistication, that is the justified confidence of “It knows that it knows”. With, behind it, the authority of this same
chapter of St Paul on charity: “For we know in part . . . now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” We know in part, and I know in part, but “It knows
that it knows”. With consummate assurance. And yet
– so that the whole thing not repose in complacency – this, too, is set against the warning with which
the song comes to an end, the warning that you (by which the song means all of us, the speaker included) are always going to be tempted by the lesser love, the watered-down love. A more insidious
temptation than anger, say, for watered-down love isn’t one of the sins, after all. The song ends, not with the words as printed, but with the addition of something newly admonitory, the
reminder over and over again of the human propensity to lapse, to settle for the diluted or the polluted:

– this repetition itself being then repeated. From “It knows that it knows” to “Yes you do, you know you do”.

The song doesn’t sermonize or speechify, choosing instead to avail itself of the angled accents of speech. One discreet skill here is the song’s ways with parts of speech, and with
one part of speech in particular: the adverb. Deftly, unobtrusively. The enterprising song is, as you would expect, happy to accommodate a wide range of different parts of speech: verbs as tonally
different as “sneak up” and “intercede”, nouns as different as “strings” and “transgression”, adjectives as different as “foolish” and
“eternal” . . . The other members of the family are there, too: prepositions (“up” and “down”), conjunctions (“and” and / or “or”),
interjections (that undulating “ooh-ooh-ooh” near the end), pronouns (“Yes you do, you know you do”). But one part of speech does take some time to arrive. You don’t
want adverbs? Despite all the verbs (seven in the first verse alone) that might enjoy the company of an adverb? After a while, I find myself starting to feel hungry for an adverb – granted,
the other linguistic dishes are fine in their way, but not in
its
way. What is keeping it? So there is gratification for me, halfway through the song, when “astray” strays into the
song: “Love that’s pure won’t lead you astray”. But not fully satisfying, this, since a fully satisfactory adverb has a way of ending, as “fully” does, with
-ly
.
Patience will be rewarded, though, for the last verse of the song (before it enters its final refrain and coda) is rife with adverbs: first, “always”, and then two adverbs that are
manifest
ly
such:

Quietly, never restlessly. And then it is the very last word, “yearning” (the last asseveration of the song proper), that Dylan sings less in exhortation, than in
exaltation and exultation. His voice ripples the word out so that it does itself become an eternal flame.

The effect is thrillingly contrarious, for in the very moment when it is being insisted that love that’s pure “Never needs to be proud, loud or restlessly yearning”, there is
to be heard in the very word this unassuageable yearning. Do you understand this? “Yes, you do, you know you do”. For although we may aspire to being beyond such yearning, we cannot
fully achieve this (any more than we can entirely extirpate the deadly sin that is pride). Moreover, what is to be heard in the yearning with which “yearning” is voiced is not the false
claim that charity suffers from yearning (for it “Never needs to be proud, loud or restlessly yearning”), but our yearning for it.

The album
Shot of Love
was unlovingly shot down by the reviewers. And
Watered-Down Love
(which is not a watered-down song at all, being a variant on the thought of a shot of love, “I need
a shot of love”) was among the targets. Which is where the vexatious question of what a song actually sounds like must become central. “Be opened. And straightway his ears were
opened”. Stoning the album in
Rolling Stone
,
⁴⁹⁵
Paul Nelson managed to hear its Christianity as seething with “hate” (his word, and
not just word), and then had no difficulty in hating it:

Dullards that we are, we can’t understand God. We don’t understand Dylan. Our love is no damn good (
Watered-Down Love
) . . . Therefore, each and every one of us can
go to hell.

In
Watered-Down Love
. . . the singer’s so mad that he can barely manage his splutters of spite.

For my part, I don’t think that
Watered-Down Love
says anything like “Our
love is no damn good” or that “each and every one of
us can go to hell”, but more crucially I don’t think that the song
sounds
anything like those damning sentiments. From its opening notes and its opening words, it moves more jauntily
than jouncily, a series of acts of serious jesting, not a solemn commination. This song recital is no recital of divine vengeance against sinners. “Splutters of spite”? But Nelson,
blind in at least one eye: I see no spite. I hear no evil. And I don’t think that I am the one who has his hands to his ears. If there should be love that’s pure, so there should be
hate that’s pure, too, unpolluted by injustice and inattention. Nelson sounds as though it is he who needed a shot of hate.

A shot of scepticism, fine. “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” “Doubt, Despair and Scrounging, shall I hitch my
bath-chair to the greatest of these?” The question is pondered by one of Samuel Beckett’s delinquents.
⁴⁹⁶

Yet there is a moral, hereabouts, in a vital change that Dylan made to the song. The change brings home how hideously easy it can be to lapse from charity, from a love that’s pure, and to
fall into what does sound all too like spluttering and spite. The studio out-take (which is the performance that was released but with a final verse that was edited out when released) ends its
assurances not with the rising delight felt in the confidence that love that’s pure “Never needs to be proud, loud or restlessly yearning”, but with a further verse that would
have demeaned the song into the self-serving, the self-pitying, and the self-praising:

I don’t mean that we would have had to take this as autobiographical; not that it would save the artistic situation to make the claim (false or not) that Dylan is
imagining and dramatizing another’s betrayal in love. For the move out from the large love that is charity to a love-affair about which one of the parties now feels uncharitable, this move is
in itself a false move artistically. Whereas the song as released, and as blessedly released from its final verse, does not have even once any of the words “I”, “me”, or
“my” (and not because Dylan is exempting himself from the need to give and to
receive such love as is charity), this misjudged verse that so enjoys passing
judgement has in its four lines
me / I / me / I / me / my
.

This was itself a miscalculation, a mistake, mistaking unkindness for strength. Its excision proved to be one of Dylan’s best revisions. For “charity vaunteth not
itself ”.

Centuries ago, a preacher named Hill was not allowed to become a priest because he was an itinerant preacher. But he won a place in dictionaries of quotations for these good words: “He did
not see why the devil should have all the good tunes.” Dylan is an itinerant non-preacher.
Watered-Down Love
doesn’t preach. It has a good tune, thanks be not to the devil but to God,
and it is aware that “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.”

If Not For You

Charity is love, Christian love in the main, whether as God’s love to man, or man’s love of God and of his neighbour. But a love not restricted to the Christian.
The Oxford English Dictionary
extends such love: “Without any specially Christian associations: Love, kindness, affection, natural affection: now esp. with some notion of generous or
spontaneous goodness.” In short, such a love as might come esp. with some notion of
If not for you
. . .

If charity be love, can there be a love song that is a charity song? If so, it would be characterized by its shaping spirit, not by any shapely body, and it would move with and be moved by
affection, natural affection, and by loving-kindness, the lovely compound that Coverdale in the sixteenth century, in praise of his Creator, created from the two words “loving” and
“kindness”. Coverdale translated Psalms 25:6 as “Call to remembrance, O Lord, thy tender mercies and thy loving kindnesses, which have been ever of old.” So the dictionary,
thanking Coverdale, promotes
loving-kindness
: “Affectionate tenderness and consideration; kindness arising from a deep personal love, as the active love of God for his creatures.” God,
to whom a believer would most wish to say
If Not For You
. “Without your love I’d be nowhere at all”. Those words of Dylan’s are addressed to one of God’s
creatures, such a one as the “lady of unbounded loving-kindness” whom Washington Irving praised in the America of his day. Just such a lady or woman is praised in
If Not
For You
, an unbounded love song of which the kind of love is loving-kindness, affectionate tenderness and consideration received with thanks and reciprocated with thankfulness.

The spirit of
If Not For You
, in so very far as its words are concerned, is realized in rhyme. From the start it sets itself to make a good end. For dear life.

The song will have to come to an end, but there must not be the feeling that the affection of gratitude has come to an end, or been switched off or faded out. “If not for
you”: if your heart sings this to someone, and then immediately starts listing things –