Godiva

About to descend to the kitchen world

I remember slipping into another state of grace,
words kept in a tiny tin of alabaster sheaths
held by invisible selves, mustachioed and grave,
who steady their taut arms against willow bark
to snip the bronze tips of Madame Godiva's mane.

John Collier painting of Lady Godiva

Verlaine and Rimbaud

"Situations have ended sad
Relationships have all been bad

Mine’ve been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud

But there’s no way I can compare
All those scenes to this affair

Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go"
Bob Dylan, You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go


I’ve been reading Verlaine and Rimbaud who, by the way, did scarcely censure underbelly fare.

Here's some morning verse de moi à toi.

Ignore the glial pundits
Analysis assaults the brain
exhausting bright ideas that turn
to excavate the breach.

Cobwebbed attic 'musements
There's gold that looks like rat poop in these rafters.

Now that's a pretty taste

of what's to come!

Arrival
Scorn the chilling splendor

of your youth.

Disenfranchise feelings
of despair.

Aristocrats await you
in their shady goal

emboldened by their shame.

Gustave Courbet painting of Paul Verlaine

Digging Dylan

A 34 year old Yale paleontologist appreciates good music as he scrutinizes origins:

For inspiration I listen to Dylan while reconstructing fossils.
Nick Longrich, Discover December 2010

Playwright Sam Shepard has pondered Dylan’s original gifts from time to time:

Watch the transformational energy which he carries... the kind that brings courage and hope and above all brings life pounding to the foreground... it’s no wonder he can rock the nation.
Sam Shepard, Rolling Thunder Logbook

What is this strange, haunted environment he creates on stage, on record, on film, on everything he touches? What world is he drawing from and drawing us all on as a result? It is right here in front of us but no one can touch it.
Sam Shepard, No Direction Home

Dylan’s contribution to poetry, music and the muse within us all garners critical acclaim merged with urgent gratitude.

Dylan reminds me of an American Brecht, the Brecht whose poems were meant to be sung. There is the same cold humor, the same ironic warmth, the same violent and splintered imagery, the same urgent idiomatic involvement in the way things actually are.... Dylan returned poetry to song.
John Clellon Holmes, Books 1965

By leaving things out, he allows us the grand privilege of creating along with him. His song becomes our song because we live in those spaces. If we listen, if we work at it, we fill up the mystery, we expand and inhabit the work of art. It is the most democratic form of creation.
Pete Hamill, Blood on the Tracks liner notes 1974  

Dylan’s instinctive distinction between polity and poetry has fed the sensibilities of many a fan. A distant poet forebear of the bard understood this well.

Yes, Art is independent of Morals and politics, Philosophy and Science.... The end of Poetry is beauty, Beauty alone, pure Beauty, with no alloy of Usefulness, Truth or Justice.
Paul Verlaine in his 1865 study of Charles Baudelaire

Dylan, world class icon, has reminded us to be thankful for pleasure large and small:

People don’t value their obscurity. They don’t know what it’s like to have it taken away.
Bob Dylan, No Direction Home

He respects the demands on his dueling spheres of expertise:

The writing part is a very lonely experience, but there’s strength in that loneliness. But I’m a performer too, and that’s an outward thing. One is the opposite of the other, and it makes me crazy sometimes because I can’t write with the energy I perform with. I can’t perform with the energy I write with. There just has to be time for both.
Bob Dylan, No Direction Home

Today let us eat, drink and appreciate the appreciators of beauty, unpretentious and unabashed.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Photo of Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg by Elsa Dorlman, GNU Free Documentation License

The ten cent rule

When I was a kid, my dad had a standard question when he handed out my 10 cent allowance. ‘Are you going to spend it or save it?’ he asked.

If I said, ‘spend it,’ that was that. But ‘save it’ produced another dime from his pocket. I used to think my depression-era parents had ruined me for life with thrift. But today I’m grateful for the capacity to relish life in slow motion.

I don’t know how his Hibbing folks approached fiscal education, but ‘madman-jester’ Dylan’s ‘hilarious love of the wisdom and idiocy of words' (Gabriel Goodchild in Robert Shelton’s ‘No Direction Home’), in a canon vast and deep, let his pen wildly savor experience.

Dylan’s ebullient wordage pulls emotion and meaning from a culture where words are a dime a dozen. I think about this in a metro hospital waiting room, TV set to the winter boot parade, a new survey of pop celebrities and a Chase Bank app for mobile deposits. Talky words chase out rare thoughts; show hosts twitch their mega-switches at our helpless minds.

The other occupant of the room has his nose in a paperback as I turn off the babbling box. New arrivals consist of a little girl reading the funnies and a mom with her morning coffee. The receptionist ventures from her desk to readjust the strangely quiet noise scene but agrees to leave it be when I lobby for the peace. A small man of carved cheeks sits down across from me, two tired eyed women at his arm. They discuss the prospects of the morning in Chinese. Now we hear the little girl’s sneakers pad the carpeted hallway through a squeaky door between her mama and the warm tones of a cotton clad nurse. The stillness sounds like freedom.

Dylan’s early Village expertise juxtaposed him to folk shows, poet rants and boozy giggle fits. He spun records and read volumes filled with worlds of sound. He fed the syllables erupting in his mind with morsels of observation, void of TV gibber jabber.

Do mad potions flood the streets of New York while our parochial hinterlands stand desolate and dire? What if Dylan had stayed in Hibbing or got as far as Cleveland and retired? The ten cent rule applies. For every dime’s worth of real time humanity, you can either savor it gladly or choke on the smoke screen of easy distraction.

It doesn’t take a madman-jester to make that call.

Original photo Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, adapted by Susan Weber