Dylan's Visions of Sin (55 page)

Words ask trust, and they can keep faith. They are built upon faith, the faith that people will tell the truth – or at any rate that people may betray themselves when they are failing to
do so. The distress of lying is sharply evoked in
Fourth Time Around and Ballad in Plain D
. “The truth is true whether you wanna believe it or not, it doesn’t need you to make it true .
. . That lie about everybody having their own truth inside of them has done a lot of damage and made people crazy.”
³⁸⁷

Social life could not exist if it weren’t believed that people are to be believed. Sometimes this faith is misplaced, but this is not as corrosive as it would be for us not to place faith
at all. And language itself is built not only
upon
but
of
faith. A language is a body of agreements and acts of trust. A word is not a matter of fact or a matter of opinion, it is a social
contract. Like all contracts, its life is a pledge and a faith. (And, like all contracts, it can be dishonest, suspect.) Songs and poems likewise keep faith alive. They “strengthen the things
that remain” – words of the Book of Revelation, the force of which is revealed anew in
When You Gonna Wake Up?

Faith in Dylan: this needs to encompass his having faith and our having
faith in him. There are sure to be occasions when we are not sure. For he has written very many
songs, has sung them very variously, and has lived thoroughly in the world of an art the nature of which is that it reaches its particular heights by not being “high art”. By being,
rather, an intensely popular art – where anything might (sometimes) go? Was that weird wording of his a slip of the lip or was it his speaking in tongues? Did he make a dextrous move, or am I
– when I exclaim at how intriguing some turn of phrase is – just going through the critical motions?

The choice can be stark.

Faith or unbelief: Dylan characteristically places the words in a pair of scales that we must ponder. For there isn’t any longer
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a noun “unfaith” to match “faith”(despite
unfaithful / faithful
), and though Dylan’s word “unbelief ” does have an antithesis,
“belief ”, and although the opposite of a believer is an unbeliever, the word “belief ” wouldn’t make the true fit that he needs, for to have belief is something very
different from having faith.

Again and again, confronted with one of Dylan’s quirks of wording or phrasing or cadencing or sentencing, you find yourself having to choose between having faith and having unbelief, and
there’s no neutral ground. For the words insist that either Dylan is a sloven or he is up to something, something unexpected, diverting.

On
Planet Waves
, the song
Going, Going, Gone
goes like this:

At the Budokan concert in 1978, he can be heard to slide a slyness into this:

What was that? We shouldn’t take this from Dylan unless we take it as seizing a double-take. For in front of your cart is exactly where you’d better put your horse.
Straightfacedly in blinkers, with equine equanimity Dylan does not nag you about putting the cart before the horse. This is comically preposterous of him. Preposterous: before / after,
“Having or placing last that which should be first” (
The Oxford English Dictionary
).

Or there is the mid-stride footing in
Trouble in Mind
as it moves:

Take this with a pinch of salt, or a column of it.

For Dylan has a great ear for these swerves and shifts that keep a mind – and a language – not only alive but up to the mark. T. S. Eliot praised as the accomplishment of Jacobean
drama “that perpetual slight alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations, meanings perpetually
eingeschachtelt
[compactly ordered] into meanings, which
evidences a very high development of the senses, a development of the English language which we have perhaps never equalled”.
³⁸⁹

One development of the English language has been American English: its licence and liberties and liberty. Don’t follow leaders? But you cannot lead yourself, except perhaps by the nose.
And as to trust:
Trust Yourself
urges you to be vigilant about the very thing that you are listening to, but he does sing it trustworthily, whatever it may say:

“Don’t trust me to show you beauty” – except insofar as Keats (or his Urn) is right to hope that beauty is truth, truth beauty.
Philip Larkin: “I have always believed that beauty is beauty, truth, truth, that is not all ye know on earth nor all ye need to know.”
³⁹⁰

“If you need somebody you can trust, trust yourself”. But don’t be too trusting even there, or particularly there. For if you really never trusted anyone or anything other than
yourself, you’d not in fact be in any position to trust yourself.

Precious Angel

Should you ever be visited by an angel, first make sure that a fallen one has not befallen you, and then trust yourself as to its trustworthiness.
Precious Angel
yearns to
express immediately its gratitude to a loved woman who is loved moreover for having brought the singer to the love of God. Perhaps he can enfold these double thanks, human and divine, by calling
her an angel. So at once, “Precious angel”: words upon entering that are sung by Dylan with a tauntingly expressive flat-tongued unexcitement, as if doing no more than giving her her
due.

But does this grateful paean have a strong foundation? Are not “precious” and “angel” too weak as words, too usual, to be the ones?

A century ago, Gerard M. Hopkins, disapproving of his friend Dixon’s lines of verse (“Each drop more precious than the gems that stud / An angel’s crown”), said that this
“strikes me as poor, indeed vulgar; I think angels are the very cheapest things in literature.”
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How, then, does Dylan redeem this from cheapness, and justify our faith in him and in bandied words like “precious” and “angel”? By a
simple
profound stroke of imagination, this sequence: “Precious angel, under the sun”.
The Oxford English Dictionary
, “under the sun”: on earth, in the world. Her angelhood is in
no respect diminished by being “under the sun”, for she can descend to earth without condescension, and this is very endearing of her. It is not so much that the phrase humanizes her as
that she humanizes herself. (As, within Christian history, did a spirit greater even than the angels.) Moreover, “under the sun” gives to her something superlative, unique, and
complete, without ever having to trumpet it. For you don’t ordinarily say “under the sun” without a large explicit claim. As the instances in
The Oxford English Dictionary
show,
“under the sun” invites the superlative (no braver soldier under the sun), or the unique (the only honest man under the sun), or the complete (every single nation under the sun).
“Using all the devices under the sun” (
Solid Rock
). “Don’t you know there’s nothing new that’s under the sun?” (
Ain’t No Man Righteous, No Not
One
).
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But make it new, as when a form of words succeeds in invoking a superlative that it need never mention, a supreme praise yet understated to
the point of being unstated. Tact tucked into the tacit. Word perfect. No one under the sun can create these felicities better than Dylan.

Yet, as the word “felicities” implies, and as is true of any artist who seizes an opportunity, the effect is not one that is of his making alone, or such that it could simply be
willed into being. For the line “Precious angel, under the sun” has something else stirring under it: the interplay of this unspoken superlative that informs
under the sun
(with its
particular preposition, “under”) against a different preposition and so a different stationing of the angel in relation to the sun: “And I saw an angel standing in the sun”
(Revelation 19:17).

The song asks with insistence “Sister, lemme tell you about a vision that I saw”, and this chapter 19 of Revelation is a vision of the evil forces “gathered together to make
war against him”. Gather from this what may underlie the song’s conviction that “Now there’s spiritual warfare”.

Precious angel, shine your light on me. Revelation 21:11: “and her light was like unto a stone most precious”. “I believe in the Book of Revelation,” Dylan
said.
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The terms that most matter are those of his art, not those of
proselytizing, for his mission has never been that
of a missionary. Even songs of conversion (his, he believed, and others’, he hoped) are converted by him from faith healing to art healing. So that his believing in the Book of Revelation
comes to include comprehending that his revelations will need to make manifest some quite other vista. Hear how differently he delivers his opening line, “Precious angel, under the sun”
(in utter quietude), from how the line from Revelation evoked its ensuing voice: “And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice.”

Precious Angel
, being voiced, enters us through our ears, not our eyes, and all the more insinuatingly because it is of the eyes that it persistently elects to sing. This vision will be
heard and not seen – except that the human imagination (a visual word, “imagination”: “Can they imagine the darkness that will fall from on high”) is amazingly able to
gather one sense under the aegis of others. Faith, which resists sin, welcomes synaesthesia.
The Oxford English Dictionary
:

“Whatever colors you have in your mind / I’ll show them to you and you’ll see them shine”: not “arbitrary” when within art. The artist is
not arbitrary but is an arbiter.

Not since
King Lear
has there been so tensile a tissue of eyes and seeing (of being blinded or blind, of the bodily and the spiritual) as is woven through
Precious Angel
. “To
show me I was blinded”: this should not be seen as the same as being blind (“I was blinded by the devil”,
Saved
), any more than “to show me” should be seen as
the same as, say, “to tell me”. “Shine your light, shine your light on me”: this should not be seen as the same as shining it
for
me. (For I understand the risk of shame in
the prospect that who I am and what I am will be seen in the naked light.) “I’m a little too blind to see”:
this should be seen as enlisting the
understatement with which stoicism understandably keeps its courage up. Understatement has two cousins in the dictionary,
meiosis
(“A figure of speech by which the impression is
intentionally conveyed that a thing is less in size, importance, etc., than it really is”) and
litotes
(“A figure of speech, in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative
of the contrary”). Both of these relate to the sort of laconic admission that puts something aside, or puts it mildly: “Ya know I just couldn’t make it by myself / I’m a
little too blind to see”. Not precisely
Shine your litotes on me
, but
Shine your light on meiosis
.

There are, out there, some terrible casualties of spiritual casualness. The song eyes them.

Complacency could not be better caught than in that “Well . . . well” self-satisfaction,
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where the final assurance
– “Well, all is well” – is reduced to little more than the lubricating “Well” of facile conversation.
The Oxford English Dictionary
:

well
:   Employed without construction to introduce a remark or statement, sometimes implying that the speaker or writer accepts a situation, etc., already
represented or indicated, or desires to qualify this in some way, but frequently used merely as a preliminary or resumptive word.

“They look me squarely in the eyes”: square eyes are what you get from watching too much television,
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and it
is intriguing that in
T.V. Talkin’ Song
the scene in Hyde Park – “where people talk / ’Bout all kinds of different gods” – should have the soap-box orator
seeing things in quite the way that he did: