The Artistic Integrity of Bob Dylan
A Salute, on his 85th Birthday, at the Pentecost
The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire
— T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding”
Without fail, in whatever new moment we find ourselves with Bob Dylan—country or gospel or Sinatra, you name it—fans who claim to admire him disparage his motives. Lately, the criticism has centered on his possible use of AI—for exactly what, nobody really knows. Nobody knows. But we have already attacked our fire-bearing hero like eagles, hungry for a taste of liver. We can hardly wait to tear him open. The short stories on Patreon, I read, are “terrible.” They are “bland and pointless garbage.” The entire social media project is “baffling.” Each week, a new and similar piece appears, decrying Dylan’s reasoning. These scribes should have their pencils broken.
In the next chapter of “I Don’t Love Nobody”: Hidden Stories from Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, coming soon, I discuss Dylan’s relationship with his audience, as portrayed in “My Own Version of You.” I show how Dylan’s Frankenstein satire continues the album’s theme of artistic and spiritual inspiration. In this song, however, the philosopher pirate describes the ghastly flip side of becoming a literate rock god. Chapter 8 is titled “I am Bob Dylan’s Monster (And So are You).” In “My Own Version of You,” Dylan, like Mary Shelley’s doctor, grieves his culpability in creating his monsters: his fans. You and I. He asks if we know what it is to be truly alive—if we can say what it is, “to be or not to be.” He asks if we possess the Holy Spirit — if we are able to “cross our hearts and hope to die.” He wonders if we even know how to breathe. And by comparing himself to Victor Frankenstein, he confesses his hubris in making us:
No one can conceive the variety of feeling which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success. Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.
In the 60s, Bob was fantastically inspired. He wished we’d take him with us where ever we went, and we did. We still do. Now we talk all night and we talk all day about nothing much. In “My Own Version of You,” the rawhide lash that rips the skin from Freud and Marx also tears the singer’s own flesh. Each of these cultural titans created a legion of monsters, many of whom are still with us, rampaging over the earth, from the ad agencies of NYC to the hallways of the Kremlin to the towers of the Academy.
Dylan opened our eyes, and now? We are relentless in our demands. We gaze upon our fetish and try to capture his image in cell phone photography. We want to save his likeness and look at him in private. Why won’t he show himself? We think he is just an errand boy to satisfy our wandering desires. How dare he use AI?
Like Frankenstein’s creature, we cry out for his affection and it angers him, because he knows he bears responsibility. He created us and he is bound to us. Even at the end, at the Black Horse Tavern on Armageddon Street, Bob will be waiting. He’ll hear our footsteps, we won’t need to knock. We are always so close.
How does Bob Dylan bear this heavy burden? He stays apart and he maintains his artistic integrity. He keeps making music and painting pictures. He doesn’t owe us a thing, but he makes up his mind to give himself to us, one more time. He keeps touring and transforming old songs, his own and dozens of others, into something new. He just sets up a little further back on the stage. He wears a hoodie.
I go right where all things lost - are made good again
The least we can do is lay off the superficial nonsense and pay attention. The least we can do is stop doubting his motives and his integrity. Sometimes, as with his possible use of AI, that might mean to just wait, watch, and listen. “Stay observant.”
I’ve adopted that credo throughout writing this book, and incredibly, Dylan has confirmed my observations on Instagram, with allusion and pun. The inspiration for many of his posts has been my seven currently published chapters of “I Don’t Love Nobody”: a deeply-researched history of how Dylan transfigured episodes of my memoir, The Golden Bird, into the lyrics of his lovely song, “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” His inspiration has been my 26 sub-chapters, in which he and I have engaged in an artistic dialogue about those transfigurations and my analysis.
There’s no need to be baffled; the evidence is overwhelming. His monsters in academia and Dylanology-lite have not caught up yet, but they will.
In contrast, the short stories and “letters never sent” on Dylan’s Patreon seem to have nothing to do with my tale, beyond a spiritual bent. In general, I won’t be writing about them, because I need to finish the final chapters of “I Don’t Love Nobody.” I need to stay in my lane. Before I let go, however, I have a couple more thoughts.
These stories are simple in the telling, but they are in no way “terrible.” Indeed, they shine with compassion and wisdom, and they contain depths of allusion. Here again, the artist is digging up lost jewels and laying them out before us. I don’t know if other writers, or AI is involved, but I’m not sure it matters. Because Dylan is at the helm.
In earlier articles, I showed how “Bull Rider” and “Frozen Pizza,” are, respectively, allegories for Lent and Easter. These, and all the others, contain keen observation, empathy, and moral reflection—for example, Jonah Mercer’s desire to fix the wrongs of his past in “Goin’ Back to Woodstock.” Fred Bals, in a new article on his Medium page, tells us about some old ideas “Dylan the curator” puts into “Ripgut” and “High Tide.” Fred writes that these stories present a dichotomy: a “listening cosmos” versus an indifferent one.
Bals asserts that the name of “High Tide’s” purported author, Reuben Bond, may be significant, and cites the Biblical reference of Reuben, son of Jacob, who was “unstable as water.” (A few author names in other stories are certainly meaningful. Bals gives the example of “Roger Fairweather” as the ironically named scribe of a story about ecological catastrophe, and in a previous article I told about the existence of a real world “Marty Lombard,” a dancer, who has a twin that he works with artistically—this, in the very first story, “Bull Rider,” “curated” by the famous Gemini Dylan.)
Dylan may indeed be citing the Genesis story of Jacob and Reuben, with its metaphor of a son who has betrayed his father, a son who cannot be relied upon. Men like this, who are unstable as water, can bring ruination. The allegory of this sort of flood is apt for our current political moment. Dylan, however, often brings more than a single allusion to a line or an image, or in this case, a name. A Google search for Reuben Bond reveals a young man who published an article in the British newsletter of The Salvation Army, The Salvationist. Bond describes his grief at the loss of his beloved father, his initial anger at God, and how he eventually began to recover:
I realized I knew nothing and cannot guess God’s plans … I’m no longer angry at God, because I’ve accepted that he knows best. That doesn’t mean my pain is gone, but I’ve learnt to live with it … It’s OK to question God, because even Jesus did …
The Genesis Reuben, who betrays his father, is faithless and unstable. The Reuben Bond of The Salvationist loves his God so much that despite a terrible human loss, despite his pain and questions, he keeps his faith.
“High Tide” is the story of a helpless man caught by a rising water that he sees coming. He is a victim, as we all are, to the power of nature and the reckless and often evil machinations of men.
God, Dylan once said, is “arbitrary.” As he sings in “Tempest”:
When the Reaper’s task had ended
Sixteen hundred had gone to rest
The good, the bad, the rich, the poor
The loveliest and the best
They waited at the landing
And they tried to understand
But there is no understanding
On the judgment of God’s hand
Christians, however, do not settle on despair. We settle on faith. On Mystery Street, with faith, we believe in grace and salvation despite our lack of understanding. Despite the rising water. We believe in a loving, listening God, despite all.
Recently, I’ve been finishing Robert Polito’s After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace. Polito brings together all the elements of Dylan’s second half brilliantly; as one example, he shares a staggering amount of detail on the songwriter’s integration of ancient and 19th Century poetry in the lyrics of Modern Times and Tempest. Dylan has been astoundingly productive in the last 35 years, never mind the full 65. As I mentioned in an earlier article, however, although Polito is good overall on Rough and Rowdy Ways, he only skates the surface of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” His book relies heavily on research at the Tulsa archives, which, in my understanding, do not yet contain any documents about Rough and Rowdy Ways.
In “I Don’t Love Nobody,” I’ve shown that the final song on Dylan’s last album conceals a horde of buried treasure, all to do with the life-changing inspiration that passes between artists, and between artists and fans. I’ve shown how the song presents Dylan as a fan himself, and how he used the story of one of his own, one of his monsters, to create some of his imagery. I didn’t need the archives to discover the connections, but one day, I’m confident that Dylan’s documents will confirm my story. I’m sure they will also reveal allusions to other works that I’ve missed.
My tale, however, is less about interpretation and more about how we live our lives. In After the Flood, Polito quotes Sam Shepard on Bob, who says, “the point isn’t to figure him out but to take him in. He gets into you anyway, so why not just take him in?” Shepard says that “Dylan” is an invention of the artist, meant to be used, like an airplane or a freight train, “as a means to an adventure.”
Dylan transposed episodes from my memoir into his song because I experienced his music as the means to an adventure, and that’s how I describe it in my pages. The story is about my own life.
Bob Dylan is an artist of great power and integrity. He ain’t no false prophet. I am his monster, one of legions, and he’s still inspiring me to new adventures. I’m just trying to stay upright and keep my head on straight. Just trying to stay observant.
Speaking of which, today, Bob Dylan’s 85th birthday, is also the Feast of Pentecost, a day on which Christians celebrate the Holy Spirit descending upon the disciples. Dylan refers to the Pentecost in “Murder Most Foul,” with the Wolfman “speaking in tongues.” The Pentecost also features in the episode of my memoir from which I believe Dylan derived his phrase “Hindu rituals,” in a passage from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, that I have included at the top of this page. I shared my ideas about this in Chapter 6, the essay, as some of my readers may recall, that I claim precipitated Dylan’s Instagram project, as alluded to in several of his posts. Check it out!
Happy Birthday, Bob! See you in Woodinville, in a couple weeks!