Dylan's Visions of Sin (70 page)

“But the song it was long”: yet this present song, as against that past one, is not long (a mere five verses of eight short lines), and it has now fulfilled its reminiscential arc.
“But the song it was long”: the internal rhymes of this are at last brought to external life, are reversed, and are finally folded. And this, with the words “so long”
hovering around the thought of saying goodbye (too good a word), and with “the next song” saying goodbye to this one:

This final verse is different, first, because “guitar” rhymes with itself: “I laid down the guitar” lays down the word, and
then “So I picked up my guitar” picks it up. Then “long” rhymes with “song”, and “missin’” is in the vicinity of “searchin’”
(something for which it is searching, which is missing?). Although this last pair is not the verse’s rhyme (which is
long / song
), “But her shadow was missin’ / For all of my
searchin’” touches upon a rhyme. The strings are plaited here.

“As the tune finally folded”: finely folded, too, given how much the word “fold” may enfold. Came to an end, came to its end. Did so by means of a spiral or sinuous form,
coiled and wound. Did so with a particular arrangement, where one thing lies reversed over or alongside another, doubled or bent over upon itself. Reversed: as the rhymes in “But the song it
was long” came to be, happily – for if this is a reversal, it isn’t one in the sense of a defeat, just as the thought that “the tune finally folded” is not an
admission of defeat, since – and this is the point – it is not that the tune (which has finished its unfolding) folded in the sense that it gave way, collapsed, failed, or
faltered.
⁵⁰⁸
But (sadly, this time) likewise not
folded
in the sense of an erotic glimpse of being folded in someone’s arms, embraced. For
“her shadow was missin’ / For all of my searchin’”. Nor was it only her shadow that was missing. She, too. Not that you can take in your arms a shadow anyway.

And not that he then immediately “began the next song”.

When in the end he released
Eternal Circle
from the studio demo tape, he ended with a few chords. This performance is the only one we’ve got, apparently, and there is something at once
endearing and eerie about having only one performance of a song about performing. On the illegitimate bootleg that was out before his
bootleg series
, he was heard to play more than those few final
chords, leading into them with the whole tune again instrumentally. Whether with that fullness or as officially released and reduced, there is no equivalent to such effects when a poem ends. The
words of
Eternal Circle
come to an end, but its music does not at that moment, or does not altogether. But since a poem consists of nothing but words and their punctuation, a poem can end with
something that is both like and unlike “And began the next song”. Take John Berryman’s
Dream Song
number 168,
The Old Poor
, which ends:

Berryman’s colon at the very end presses you to presume that the next Song is the one that follows, number 169. But you will never really know for sure. Yet how different
it is at the end of a page to write and read

I pass to the next Song:

turning the page to the words of a next song. For the next sound after Dylan’s concluding line “And began the next song” is not words but music, the guitar
and at least a snatch of the past tune.

There are many moments when Berryman and Dylan are akin. Berryman: “He stared at ruin. Ruin stared straight back”. Dylan: “i accept chaos. i am not sure it accepts
me”.
⁵⁰⁹
But much more than a moment is constituted by Berryman’s
Dream Song
number 118. The scene is a poetry reading, not a concert, but
there stands a performing artist: Henry, who both is and is not Berryman, rather as the singer, past and present, in
Eternal Circle
both is and is not Dylan. (The Dylan “I”, while it
holds certain things in safe-keeping, is less evasive, more accountable, than the bluff “he” of Berryman.) The performer is likewise involved in – involved with? – a
stranger out there imagined or imaginary.

Like
Eternal Circle
, this poem has to risk self-pity. Berryman may even court it, but neither of them is wedded to it. D. H. Lawrence thought that human beings should be ashamed of this mawkish
weakness of theirs:

Both Berryman’s poem and Dylan’s song are about self-pity, as against merely manifesting it, but Berryman – even if we acknowledge that he knows he is
fantasizing – does rather enjoy his concluding plangency:

The American turn with the phrase “and all” differs from British English, which often has an air of strong impatience (“and so on and so forth”) or of
specificity (“Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all” – all of them available to be named). These lack the sidling sliding sidelong movement of the American “and all”. In
Visions of Johanna
, Dylan can turn the acquiescent helplessness and uselessness of “and all” into the far-from-hopeless or -useless energies of aggression and baffled anger:

– where “and all” is itself a kind of muttering but is not small talk; threateningly, it is talking big.
⁵¹⁰

Berryman proffered himself as little boy lost, and he liked to live dangerously, and he sure had a lotta gall. In
Dream Song
number 118, does he brag of his misery? We might set the tone of his
scene against the candidly healthy word “pretendin’” in
Eternal Circle
:

One impulse that, when not resisting self-pity, may endorse self-pity is aggression. The
Dream Song
is explicit about such feelings both towards the listeners (“the stupid questions asked
me / move me to homicide”) and from them: “while the mob / was at him like a club”. Just because it is a fan club doesn’t mean that it won’t beat you to death. (A
reader of the
Dream Song
may think of Berryman’s friend Dylan Thomas.) But in
Eternal Circle
the possibility of aggression is entertained but rescinded. It is felt, for instance, in
“the pierce of an arrow” (the guitar string vibrating to the bow-string):

There is a feeling that “her thoughts” may be not her thinking about him but his thinking about her (the performer may be tempted to flatter himself), the thought of
her, with the thought of an arrow certainly having been prompted by the existence of his silver strings. This, and the effect, tilted
sideways, of “the pierce of an
arrow”: first, the penetration that comes from having “pierce” be a noun as against a verb (a piercing effect that is unusual but not unprecedented
⁵¹¹
), and second the coincidence that would advertise “the pierce of an arrow” compacted as the car that is called a Pierce Arrow.
⁵¹²

As so often with the company of strangers, danger may be glimpsed in a cryptic turn of phrase:

“Through”? Danger, then, perhaps. Or danger as the thing that might have been expected to arise but then is not permitted to. For the equanimity of the song is such
as to suggest that the hope within it, or the fantasy if you wish, is proof against any such bullet or any such arrow or any such accidental automobile. The final resignation in the song is felt as
endorsing the all-too-human wish that, for the two of them, this intense way of being together without being alone together, this meeting at a public distance (a long distance, looking to be
bridged by the communion of song), might somehow have been succeeded by a meeting that would have been deeply private, not only personal but individual. And not at all to be grouped with
groupies.

No such meeting was to be. And yet not just eyes had met, or mouths and ears, but hearts, too? You can hear a related hope in the words with which Dylan entered upon
Oh Sister
on the
John
Hammond Show
(10 September 1975): “I want to dedicate this to – er – someone out there watching tonight I know – she knows who she is.”

When paying tribute to another singer (Dave Van Ronk), Dylan was able to imagine an enamoured stranger most tenderly:

And Dave singin’ “House a the Rising Sun” with his back leaned against the bricks an words runnin out in a lonesome hungry growlin
whisper that any girl with her face hid in the dark could understand –
⁵¹³

For his own part, he sometimes needs to keep both feet on the ground, not drifting (however hauntingly) into any such fantasy: “When I’m up there, I just see faces.
A face is a face, they are all the same.”
⁵¹⁴
On another occasion, when he needed to give vent to his vexation with the reviewers of
Renaldo and
Clara
, he leapt to these terms:

Look, just one time I’d like to see any one of those assholes try and do what I do. Just once let one of them write a song to show how they feel and sing it in front of
10, let alone 10,000 or 100,000 people. I’d like to see them just try that one time.
⁵¹⁵

His thoughts pounded hard there, as you can tell from the likeness not only to
Eternal Circle
and
Dark Eyes
but to
Positively 4th Street
: “just one time”,
“for just one time” (more than one time), with its compacted repeated impact.

The eternal triangle is as nothing compared to the eternal circle. “The stage is the only place where I’m happy.” But this has its own sadnesses, like so much love. He is the
one person who has to be at a Dylan concert and the one person who can’t go to a Dylan concert.

Acknowledgements

Jeff Rosen could not have been more generous in granting permission to quote the songs and writings of Bob Dylan; the freedom that he made possible has no precedent for me in
any such professional dealings. Others, too, have been good friends to the book. For criticisms large and small, for apt advice and sheer information, and for not only giving ear but lending ears,
I am thankful for Jim McCue, as well as for many others: Tim Dee, Roger Ford, Mark Halliday, Kenneth Haynes, Steven Isenberg, Marcia Karp, Michael Madden, Julie Nemrow, Lisa Rodensky, Frances
Whistler, Glenn Wrigley, and Bret Wunderli. My further indebtedness to Lisa Nemrow incorporates not only her reading these pages with sympathetic stringency, but her imaginative promptings as to a
good many Dylan songs where I had despaired of ever noticing enough; sometimes, then, I managed to surprise myself, though never as much as the songs surprise me. Tony Lacey, as publisher, and
Donna Poppy, as copy-editor, cooperated entirely; my thanks to them, to Zelda Turner for her handling of permissions, and to Steven King for the thorough skill of his index.

The Publishers wish to thank the following copyright holders for permission to quote copyrighted material:

A. E. Housman: excerpts from a letter to Percy Withers, 1930,
Fragment of an English Opera
and
A Shropshire Lad
. Reprinted by permission of the Society of Authors as
the Literary Representative of the Estate of A. E. Housman.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.
Words by Otto Harbach, music by Jerome Kern. © Copyright 1934 T. B. Harms & Company Inc., USA. Universal Music Publishing Ltd. Used by
permission of Music Sales Ltd. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured.

Lonesome Road
. Words by Gene Austin, music by Nathaniel Shilkret. © Copyright 1927, 1928 Paramount Music Corporation, USA. Campbell Connelly & Company Ltd. Used by
permission of Music Sales Ltd. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured.