Dylan's Visions of Sin (56 page)

Don’t shine your light, don’t shine your light on me. Or in my eyes. Or in “anybody’s eyes”. Fortunately, blessedly,
there is in
Precious Angel
the benign counterpart to too bright a light: “You’re the lamp of my soul, girl, you torch up the night”
³⁹⁷
– and then, immediately following this faith in her, there comes the recognition of what such faith is up against, with “the eyes” frighteningly unspecified
(whose, exactly? we don’t know where to look):

“Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands unto God. Sing unto God” (Psalms 68:31–2). And so he does. “Lo, he doth send out
his voice, and that a mighty voice” (says the next verse).

It is in its way a violent and yet enticing rhyme,
enticed
/
Christ
, by way of being a judgement hall itself, and a judgement call. Choose between these two words that rhyme, the
one the temptation to sin, the other the overcoming of sin in the face of judgement. There is a poem by George Herbert called
The Water-Course
.
³⁹⁹

We are to wonder for a moment whether there are before us ten lines or twelve lines: does the insistence that there are two very different destinations mean that we should hear
the last line of each verse ring twice in our ears until it arrives at the choice that it sets before us?

Threading through
Precious Angel
, we may wonder about its arrival at “the judgment hall of Christ” as its destination and destiny, and in particular about the inescapability
of
judgement
. Might there be a memory of a twofold saying of Christ, of promise and of threat? “And Jesus said, For judgement I am come into this world, that they which see not, might
see; and that they which see might be made blind” (John 9:39). This chapter of John, on the miracle that heals the blind man, is one that gained Dylan’s attentive respect, even if his
memory couldn’t then place it:

I get very meditative sometimes, and this one phrase was going through my head: “Work while the day lasts, because the night of death cometh when no man can work.”
I don’t recall where I heard it. I like preaching, I hear a lot of preaching, and I probably just heard it somewhere. Maybe it’s in Psalms, it beats me. But it wouldn’t let me
go.
⁴⁰⁰

And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?
Jesus answered, neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night
cometh, when no man can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.

(John 9:1–5)

Shine your light, shine your light on me, who am a little too blind to see; even as Christ – the light of the world – once did on him, the man who was from birth
too blind to see. “To show me I was blinded”: these are words heard elsewhere with a difference:

I was blinded; the eye was blind. To the ear, although not to the eye,
I
and
eye
are as indistinguishable as
I and I
. “How was I to know”,
“I was blinded”, “I was gone”, “I was standing upon”: the first four lines of the song will lead to the thought that there’s violence in the
I
’s.

The sinner in Herbert’s
Love
tries in his shame to disown the generosity gently offered by Love:

(Hear, within this sweet questioning, how “eyes” in this verse is three times preceded by and then succeeded by “I”.) The shamefaced sinner tries to
avert his eyes, but Love looks him squarely in the eyes, and says – not “Well, all is well” – but rather, in the words of Julian of Norwich that T. S. Eliot made his own and
everyone’s, words recalling that although sin is inevitable we must not despair:

Saving Grace

“My faith keeps me alive”. And will keep me alive past death. Thanks to the Redeemer.
Saving Grace
must itself then exercise a power to redeem, to bring to
life or back to life (“then come the resurrection”) what are otherwise only religious lip-services, too easily passing for faith.

Start with how each verse ends. Once upon an eternity, “saving grace” was a term of deep redemption, alive to damnation and to salvation, “that saving grace of
imputation which taketh away all former guiltiness” (Richard Hooker, 1597). Back then, “saving” had not spent its force. “
Theological
. That delivers from sin and
eternal death by the power of God’s grace” (
The Oxford English Dictionary
).

But the concept of salvation can suffer attenuation, and “saving grace” was gradually weakened into meaning merely “a quality, ‘redeeming’, exempting from
unqualified condemnation or censure”. And so, in due slack course, “saving grace” turns into just a turn of phrase, amounting to no more than “Well, I suppose there is this
at least to be said for it . . .” Such a redeeming quality amounts to all but nothing, and certainly not to redemption. The instances of “saving grace” from the dictionary verge
on the blasphemous in being so devoid of spiritual seriousness.

Native good humour is a good thing, but it is not a saving grace. Except in a world of very low ideals.

Dylan’s song seeks to redeem the quality of the term, though not to spurn the everyday use of it, the negligent demeaning of its meaning.
Such wide-open songs as
his cannot afford not to save what can be saved. They must not sound superior to how we have got into the way of putting things. So he sets the timbre of the ancient phrase “saving
grace” against our modern casualness. The phrase is not reached in the song until we have passed through the downmarket place, where can be heard the betrayingly uneasy shuffle of
“Guess I owe You some kind of apology”. That is no way to speak to Almighty God – except that it may be, provided that it is understood to be only a stage in learning how to speak
to Him, to You (not you). The capital Y in “You” from the start of the song (“If You find it in Your heart, can I be forgiven?”) is a supreme ineffability of the kind that
religious faith acknowledges with humility; the eye can see, all but effortlessly, the difference between “You” and “you”, but the voice cannot indubitably voice this
difference, though the voice may be able to intimate it in awe. A world will separate (faith knows) the pronoun in “If You find it in Your heart . . .” from the one in “The wicked
know no peace and you just can’t fake it”.
⁴⁰¹
The voicing of a true song about God and man will carry within itself the admission that
the voice of God puts the voice of even a genius to shame, that
vox Dei
is not to be identified even with
vox Dylani
. But then art often delights in creating something from a sense of
the limits of its own possibilities as a medium. A song may be proud of all that voicing can accomplish while being humble as to all that it cannot. Confidence in the voice (a word in your ear)
will bring it about that the words “sole” and “soul” will be one, as they cannot be to the eye that sees a poem on the page:

By the same token, the ear must yield to the eye when it comes to “eye” as against “I”, or to “You” as against “you”. Meanwhile,
“confidence” has faith at the heart of it, the Latin
fides
.

And then “some kind of apology” is another case for redemption. The word “apology” might itself seem to call for some kind of apology when addressed to God, since it
falls so far short of contrition’s depths. It sounds offhand, even, as though not mindful that “The Lord shall judge his people.
It is a fearful thing to fall
into the hands of the living God.”
⁴⁰²
Guess I owe you some kind of apology: this really does sound as though it might not be much more than a
social shrug. We would, for instance, be surprised to find the Psalmist telling God that he owed Him some kind of apology. And yet (once upon that time, again) there was a sense of the word that
had dignity and gravity. The citations in
The Oxford English Dictionary
establish this. The saints used it so. (“Defence of a person, or vindication of an institution, from accusation
or aspersion”.) St Thomas More, for one:
Apology of Sir Thomas More, Knight; made by him, after he had given over the Office of Lord Chancellor of England
(1533). Baxter’s
Saints’ Rest
, for others: “Now they shall both by Apology be maintained just” (1650). St Paul, for yet another: “And before the same great court of Areopagites Paul
made his Apology” (Sherlock, in 1754). Even
An Apology for the Bible
, by Bishop Watson (1796).

The point, not for the first time, isn’t that Dylan gives his days to the dictionary, but that he does know what the dictionary is worth.

“But if we know anything about God, God is
arbitrary
. So people better be able to deal with that.”

Is there something about the word “arbitrary” that you would like to clarify or perhaps that I’m not understanding?

“No. I mean, you can look it up in the dictionary.”
⁴⁰³