[lit-ideas] Re: Anisotropic Time: It was 47 Years Ago Almost Today
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 1 Sep 2012 13:12:20 +0100 (BST)
________________________________
From: David Ritchie <profdritchie@xxxxxxxxx>
"Now he [Dylan] sounds like a Rolling Stone singing Immanuel Kant."
>Searched my memory banks, trying to make sense of this metaphor. Nope.
Imo, David is right to treat this metaphor with caution. Its sense is perhaps
no more than this (a) Kant = something profound and difficult and abstruse
intellectually, so it is like those oiks in the Rolling Stones singing
something intellectually profound etc. (b) there is something incongruous about
this.
It is a poor metaphor if taken seriously, for in H61R Dylan is not seeking to
be more profound, difficult or abstruse intellectually than the folk and blues
tradition from which he is drawing his strength:- though widely thought, it is
more a matter of appearance than reality if Dylan appears to express himself in
a difficult or abstruse way - for while he is more difficult and abstruse than
the typical 'popular song', he is not much more abstruse than folk or blues,
since the reality is that folk and blues often work with a kind of coded
language that is perhaps not clear to the uninitiated (a particularly ripe
example is how sexual desire and mores and acts are expressed, even in
something as innocent sounding as Hares On The Mountain; a ballad like Matty
Groves is a typically coded critique of the loveless hypocrisy and cruelty of
the powers-that-be). Dylan takes this to further levels of complexity and
development of form and expression, framing his
language in the codes of contemporary slang and 'cultural references'; but it
is a mistake to take his POV as intellectually superior, or seeking to be - it
is more a matter of artistic and moral development of the form. The achievement
of H61R remains artistic and moral rather than intellectual.
For example, to view Like A Rolling Stone as Dylan speaking down from a
position of intellectual superiority [a common impression] is to mistake the
POV of that song which is that everyone is like a complete unknown, on their
own, a rolling stone etc. [i.e. the outlook of ancient folk and blues is here
correct]; and the excoriated mistake - moral and intellectual - is to think you
are or should be one of the "pretty people, drinkin', thinkin' they got it
made". Throughout H61R Dylan uses the persona of a cynical streetwise hipster
to attack cynicism and hipsterism as well as a host of other false idols; to
unmask that "you're just like me/I hope you're satisfied" as he put it later in
Memphis Blues. One of the reasons Dylan's view remains fresh is that, at the
point he was the most important single voice of the counter-culture, he was
railing against the counter-culture's own self-importance, pretension,
self-deception and snobbery - as much as against
the straitjacket, hypocrisy and corruption of straight society. What is
intellectually alert, and morally alert, is that Dylan's art confronts how
difficult it is not be corrupted either from within or without - and in this
way these songs are politically more serious than some of his earlier protest
songs in avoiding the suggestion that there are pat solutions to our problems
or that moral wrongs arise from a 'them' being bad to 'us' etc. We might debate
whether Dylan paints in an overly pessimistic way on H61R, but at least he
cannot be accused of naive optimism or finger-pointing.
Among the things that happened was that Dylan's impact led to 'message-hunting'
in his lyrics of a vain kind ["Who is Mr. Jones?" etc.], and that a song like
Desolation Row offered much more material for the poseur than How Much Is That
Doggy In The Window? [albeit post-modernism may have led the poseur to latterly
argue Doggy is in fact better, on every level, than Row]. These things weren't
Dylan's fault and they cut against both the intent and immense achievement that
is H61R, which happened to be in the eye of fashion but was putting a POV that
was against the fashionable, the "phoney" and the corruption of chasing false
idols. Michael Gray's description gets it right in pointing out how Dylan was
allying the poetic power of folk and blues idioms with the raw energy of rock
and roll: it was a great alliance but no one had done it before and no one has
surpassed it. At a time when many self-imposed barriers existed in music, it
opened the door to many
other important 'alliances' that came after [some also became fashions] from
psychedelia to country-rock to punk. What is staggering is how
undated/contemporary H61R seems: from its opening salvo against the complacency
of its likely audience to a world where merchants "heave their plastic" or the
"blind commisioner" has "one hand..in his pants".
That last line is from Desolation Row which begins:-
They're selling postcards of the hanging
They're painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor's filled with sailors
The circus is in town
Whether this is poetry or not, it is better use of language than the vast
majority of poetry: to those who feel it is sixth-form poetasting and clumsy
surrealism, they should at least know it moves from historical fact when it
speaks of "selling postcards of the hanging", as indeed they did at the last
lynching near to where Bob Dylan grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota. Not so
incongruous then.
Donal
Almost losing his thread
London
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