Bob Dylan: Ageless sage

A little kid at my school assembly grinned up at me after the show. ‘You remind me of somebody I know!’ he chirped. ‘Who?’ asked I. ‘My Gramma!’

It wasn’t the first time my internal chronometer got a jolt of sudden aging. My dad’s friend told me one day I looked more and more like Frieda, my paternal grandmother he’d known as a child.

All this grandma talk can get a girl cranky in the bones.

Music, as usual, to the rescue. Fan of anything Bob Dylan (Verlaine, Rimbaud, Steinbeck...), I ran across this Guthrie quote:

I just reared back and soaked in every note and every word of their singing. It was so clear and honest sounding, no Hollywood put-on, no fake wiggling. It was better to me than the loud squalling and bawling you’ve got to do to make yourself heard in the old mobbed saloons. And, instead of getting you all riled up mentally, morally and sexually - no, it done something a lot better, something that’s harder to do, something you need ten times more. It cleared your head up, that’s what it done, caused you to fall back and let your draggy bones rest and your muscles go limber like a cat’s.
Woody Guthrie, Bound for Glory

I'm a whole lot better off than the dust bowl refugees Woody put his mind to. I've got work, respect, food and home for which so many yearned (and still yearn). It’s the ode to musical truth I can relate to best in his words.

The Grammys’ red carpet is a gawker’s paradise of swank primp and tasteless swagger. You can almost see the cogs reel behind the brittle eyes: ‘To be heard I must be herded.’ The term ‘cattle call’ does come to mind.

I didn’t see Dylan on this year's carpet squares, but he of silk shirt and suave shoes dignified the Grammy stage when he broke out with Maggie’s Farm, backed by a dozen prize contenders and his own jokerman shadow dance. True to Woody, Dylan eschewed the fake wiggling and got down to it, the point of it all, the crux of art, the pith of poetry. The good bard applauded his humanity and ours with his ageless delight in the moment’s rich élan.

Now, with an artist like that at work to clear my mind, how can I stop singing?

This just in: As I looked up a clip of Dylan’s Grammy performance, I felt tingles up and down watching Mumford & Sons, the next generation of artists in the Guthrie-Dylan tradition.

Photo njnnetwork, Bob Dylan at the 2011 Grammys

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