Dylan's Visions of Sin (63 page)

“The smoke rings of my mind” is a figure of speech that makes amiable relaxed sense by an airy movement of mind. (The impassive smoking might have been a vaporous lounging in a brown
study.) The figure is evanescent, a bright exhalation. The prepositional movement (“of my mind”) conjures up a settled inwardness altogether different from “the sounds inside my
mind” that mount the untoward pressure within
One Too Many Mornings
. By contrast with those drifting smoke rings, the line “From the crossroads of my doorstep” is not airy at all.
It is a stumbling block, blocked and blockish, scowling as though set to thwart any attempt to make sense, relaxed or otherwise. A doorstep, yes, and a crossroads, yes, especially in the figurative
application that
The Oxford English Dictionary
defines as “a point at which two or more courses of action diverge; a critical turning-point”. But “the crossroads of my
doorstep”? Can a doorstep be a crossroads?

Yes it can, when you put your mind (that smoke-free zone) to it, given the dictionary’s “a critical turning-point”.

You can set off from the doorstep to left, or to right, or straight ahead. From the T-junction of my doorstep? But don’t forget the fourth dimension, for there may be
nothing to stop you from turning not only your head but your
whole self back to the room where your love and you have laid (or lain, if you prefer) – and where
perhaps she lies still wondering whether you will come back. The word “back” comes back again in two lines’ time, its simple longing unappeased:

Just how unpredictable, how free from Parnassian mannerism, is the line “From the crossroads of my doorstep” may be seen from a differently pained Dylan song that
brings together the crossroads and my mind,
Mama, You Been on My Mind
:

No risk of stumbling at those crossroads, straightforward even if the decision may now have to be to go other than straight forward. The impassive calm of mind in “the
crossroads I’m standing at” is completely different from the impasse “From the crossroads of my doorstep”.

Light fades, and has been felt to do so at the start of the song. Memories will fade, not only precious memories but bankrupt ones too – this being a hope glimpsed off the
end of the song. “My eyes they start to fade”. Though a sight may fade from one’s eyes, one doesn’t usually think of eyes as fading, but there is a sad scene in Keats
(“As when, upon a trancèd summer-night . . .”) that arrives at a glimpse of something divine, terribly beautiful:

One aspect of the gloom and sorrow of
One Too Many Mornings
is the self-saturation of this middle verse. The crux is this: that whereas the first verse speaks only twice in such
terms (“my”, “I’m”), and the final verse three times (“I’m”, “I’m”, “mine”), this middle verse eight times fixes its
I’s upon itself: “my doorstep”, “My eyes”, “I”, “my head”, “my love”, “I”, “I”,
“I’m”.

Is this a self-absorption succumbed to by the song? So I used to think (or feel). But why should it not be a succumbing that is dramatized, “placed”, within the
song?
⁴⁵⁸
The lapse would then be not a lapse by the song but one within the song’s setting, a sinking into self, moreover, that recovers its
better self as the song moves on. One hesitates to say
move on
these days, so often have the words been glibbed. But the voice, the consciousness within the song, does move its attention, so as to
do right not only by the word “I” but by “you” and “we”:

If I am right in having come to believe that in due course
One Too Many Mornings
rescinds the state of mind that dominated the middle verse, then I need to rescind my adverse
judgement on what I took to be a lack of judgement. The same may go for my having taken against the interplay of “crossroads” and “my eyes”:

My eyes they start to cross? I still see the sequence as inviting this grotesque squinny, but does this disconcerting glimpse of crossed eyes
have to
be a “worse than unwanted suggestion”? Couldn’t it be an insight at a tangent? For what is so hoped for is a brave gaze at their plight, but this falters:

Things are crossed, thwarted, must be seen simultaneously from two angles, two sides (your side and mine). His head is on straight, but in the circumstances he can’t
always see straight. He may be forced to squint. Of love, it was said long ago that it is a mistake to draw Cupid as a blind boy, “for his real character is a little thief that
squints”.
⁴⁵⁹

And it looks as though I may have been squinting at (glancing at with dislike or disapproval)
⁴⁶⁰
the rhyming in the middle verse. Just as this
verse is different from the others in the matter of “I”, so it is in its rhyming. My restless hungry feeling went like this: something slips out of Dylan’s hands here, instead of
escaping from his lips. The rhyme-scheme is no more than the rhyme-skeleton,
fade / laid
,
sign / behind
. Unimaginative: “fade” against “laid” has nothing wrong with it, but
nothing particularly right, either, and the other words at the line-endings, setting aside the refrain (with which the others have no contact, whereas in the first and third verses there are
tendrils twining from the refrain), are nothing more than the topography of the song:
doorstep / room / street
. Painfully faithful, perhaps, but sadly flat.

But what if the painful, the faithful, the sad and the flat, are the truth that is levelled? The lines, then, would be an evocation of a flattened emotional world, in which an “I”
does this and does that and does the other, all as though mechanically, ineffectually, and affectlessly.

That there is at the line-endings
no
“constant appeal to Memory and Hope”, only the flattened hopelessness of the locations,
doorstep / room / street
: such is one of
the uses of adversity. Adversity is not simply triumphed over in the final verse, not put in its place. But it is placed, and held in place:

I am not the only one, and you are not the only one. Come to that, we are not the only ones. For this song of memory rings a bell with thousands.

Moonlight

Never send to know for whom the bell tolls. “For whom does the bell toll for, love? It tolls for you and me”. It is a mercy that, long after
One Too Many Mornings
,
there proves to be a world elsewhere, in which
Moonlight
is attuned in love to an air so light.

“Won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone?”

One answer to this pleaful refrain, especially once its plea has been entered six times, might be a counter-question: Are you, for your part, ever going to refrain? How long are you going to go
on asking me this? Hope springs eternal in the human breast, yes, but songs, or lovers’ wishful wistfulnesses, do not have all the eternity in the world.

A nineteenth-century song along the same lines, by Joseph Augustine Wade, gained an entry in
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: Meet me by moonlight, alone
. But this reiterated request was
cast as an enjoining, not as a question.

How much longer? Dylan has always been fascinated with the question of how you may intimate that something is, or soon will be, all over, or how you bring something to an end: a song or a
song-book, an interview or an album, a concert or the first half of a concert or even
the pretend-conclusion of a concert, when a staged pause (for a wile), a finale known
to be unfinal, is calculated to prompt our imploring an encore, beseeching “bis bis!”

There is a moment near the beginning of the unapologetically extensive film
Renaldo and Clara
when the man on the radio warns drivers about the wet road: “Hydroplaning can seriously impair
your stopping-ability.” At which moment, something unseriously impairs the music in the background. Dylan has always been on the
qui vive
when it comes to stopping-ability. Ninety miles an
hour (down a dead end street). Brake, brake, brake.

How long can you go on saying the same thing? Say, assuring someone:

You can issue this assurance a few times, but there’s a point at which it wears out or thin. How long can you go on urging, “Don’t think twice, it’s all
right”? More than twice, agreed, but seventy-times-seven? Or there is pretending to urge:

How much longer, the shuddering in
Desolation Row
. The needling, in
Ballad of a Thin Man
. The exulting, in
Like a Rolling Stone
. The steeling, in
Positively 4th Street
. The consoling, in
To
Ramona
. The shaking the dust off – off of – your feet (don’t look back), in
My Back Pages
. The jeering, in
Down in the Flood
. The prosecuting, in
Hurricane
. The avenging, in
Can
You Please Crawl Out Your Window?
The begging: “Please, Missus Henry, Missus Henry, please! / I’m down on my knees”. (Till you have calluses?) The quidding pro quo, in
Cry A
While
: “Well, I cried for you, now it’s your turn, you can cry awhile”. Or the nagging about being nagged, in
Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35
.

“I keep asking myself how long it can go on like this” (
Million Miles
). “And I don’t know how much longer I can wait” (
Can’t Wait
).

Then there is
Silvio
, up and away, “I gotta go” – but just hear how reluctant the song is to end, repeating over and over again that it’s gotta go, a tearaway song that
just can’t tear itself away. “Looks like tomorrow is a-comin’ on fast” – brisk, at risk. “One of these days and it won’t be long”.
Days aren’t. And the last prophecy before the last chorus? “Going down to the valley and sing my song”. And? “Let the echo decide if I was right or
wrong”. Just like that, right or wrong. Listen to the difference between the last lines of
Silvio
and those of
Ring Them Bells
:

Breaking down the distance, not (as you might have expected) the
difference
between right and wrong. This makes all the difference in the world and in the other world. Observe
the distance that Dylan puts here, in the singing, between right and wrong, by his clasping his breath for part of a second, a second that is split between the two words.

There are some words of his that don’t get printed in the lyrics, when the women in
New Pony
sing in chorus, many a time, “How much longer?” This may be mostly a question about
how much longer you will be satisfied with your new pony-woman and not have to shoot her to put her out of her misery so that you can get some other new pony, but soon the words do come to mean, as
well, how much longer is the song itself going to go on.

“Won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone?”

Either she will accede, or the moon will set and in due course the day will dawn, truth then dawning.