Searching for Phrases

‘Rage:

Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ rage,

Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks

Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls

Of heroes into Hades’ dark,

And left their bodies to rot as feasts

For dogs and birds, as Zeus’ will was done.’ (Iliad 1, lines 1-5 translated by S.Lombardo)

Whenever I reflect on the role played by song and poetry in Western culture I always come back to origins. As a Classicist this usually means I turn to Homer, whose two epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey, are the foundation upon which the entire edifice of the Western literary tradition rests. In the opening lines of the Iliad there is an invocation to the Muse Calliope. This supplication to an otherworldly force is a direct acknowledgement that the work is not the author’s personal creation. With the verb ‘sing’ there is a reminder that a poet such as Homer, working within an oral tradition in a pre-literate society, would indeed have ‘sung’ his words to the accompaniment of the lyre. And so we have that miraculous fusion of music and words right there at the beginning of culture.

As Rainer Maria Rilke knew well, one cannot ignore the constant presence of Orpheus in any endeavour involving song and poetry. The spirit who haunts each generation anew in a different guise but always with the bleeding sorrow of his eternal loss, the beauty of his song and the music of his lyre, which possessed a power so mighty that it shook the implacable will of the underworld gods. It really does seem to be the case that poetry had its origins in song. The advent of writing and subsequently printing, which meant that the poet could begin to compose for an absent audience, may have heralded the beginning of poetry appearing without the accompaniment of music. To my mind this development was not necessarily a positive one.

Looking back into my childhood, I can’t really remember when the magical landscapes of song and poetry revealed themselves to me. It seems as though their gates have always been open, prior to conscious thought and thus pre-dating my earliest memories. In the truest sense I am referring here to the words and music of Bob Dylan. In the first piece in this occasional series on song and poetry, I thought I would spend a little time giving a glimpse of the realms in which I have travelled in the company of this extraordinary artist. It’s a world which is too vast, too mercurial and too evasive to be willing to be captured in a single sitting. Rather like the hapless and harried artist who fills his canvas with an initial outline and returns to work up the painstaking detail at a later date, I will offer some brief ideas here which will in time re-emerge with greater contours and definition.

When you have grown up with the songs of an artist and engaged with them deeply you realize, somewhere along the line, the wondrous nature of the gift which is in your possession. I think it’s certainly true to say that repeated and consistent encounters with the characters and terrain of the Dylan universe have shaped my experience in ways too fundamental to comprehend completely. Looking back at my very early childhood I feel an immense sense of colour, warmth and love. I know that we played the album Shot of Love during that period. An album whose cover illustration is an explosion of riotous colour and whose song Watered Down Love with its beautiful lyrics remains one of my favorites to this day.

‘Love that’s pure ain’t no accident

It knows that it knows, is always content

An eternal flame, quietly burning

Never needs to be proud, loud or restlessly yearning

And so, when I look at the album and its list of songs today and hear their music or remember their words I can’t separate their cadences or the colours that they conjure from any aspect of my being.

As a teenager, abrim with fire and enthusiasm,  I stood in a gallery in France with my father looking at an exhibition of Picasso’s Blue Period. I gazed at a painting and listened intently as he talked of how cubism can, by shocking your unconscious assumptions about the way the world operates around you and your place within it into silence, create momentary space and of how Tangled up in Blue is working with the same currents. I spent more time than I can remember with the song, looking at it from every angle, fascinated by how the protean narrator will escape you at every turn and thrilled by the impossibility of offering a final definition or untangling the endless blue of the lyrics. 

These days, in our new neighborhood of Culver City, I often feel as though I’m a character in a Dylan song. By a curiously serendipitous turn of events, a renewed interest in the album Tempest has coincided with our living parallel to Duquesne Avenue. Of course, I am immediately transported to that train whose Duquesne Whistle is blowing on the opening song of the album. I drive around frequently, listening to the song which I have loved ever since I first heard it in 2012 in our Upper East Side apartment. Its jaunty opening prepares you for the full power to come which kicks in when the drums enter a couple of bars before the voice and so, as ever, we hear the alchemical symbiosis of music and lyrics. At the time of the album’s release, back in Manhattan, Duquesne Whistle spoke to me of a forward momentum which I thought would find its culmination in our move Westwards to California. Now I hear other more insistent voices in the song. I hear the voices of memory, of the past calling and of the inevitability of death and the hope for redemption. 

It has never occurred to me to get off the slow train of the Dylan journey. I’ve been given cause to reflect about this recently and I have come to the conclusion that my faithfulness can be traced back again to an engagement whose beginning predates opinion. I simply love all of his work from all of the periods of his career and will listen happily to any song; usually hearing something new in the process. Such open mindedness is in no way a suspension of critical judgment about the relative merits of various songs and is a gift for which parental direction is of course responsible and for which I am more grateful than I can say. Without it, there’s every chance that the usual human traits of narrow mindedness and fickle laziness would preclude me from engagement with certain areas of his canon. As it is, I’m often surprised by a new discovery as I was a couple of months ago when I found a rare fairly recent version of Bob performing Tomorrow is a Long Time in concert. This is a song which has somehow eluded me up until now and whose pain Orpheus himself could have sung,

‘I can’t see my reflection in the waters

I can’t speak the sounds that show no pain

I can’t hear the echo of my footsteps

Or remember the sound of my own name’

Simply beautiful. A great way to appreciate the vast scope of the song is to listen to the original which was recorded in 1963 and then to this version. A youthful performer and then the older man looking back. I have to say that it was the older version that caught me. Age captures us all in the end! Reading some of the comments on the YouTube video, I was struck by the sheer affection and love which many people voiced. It occurred to me strongly that it’s important to say thank you for the wonderful gift which this indomitable artist has given to all of us who love him. It’s been over 41 years since I first heard Mr Dylan in concert. I was at Blackbush in 1978 albeit still in the womb! Thank you Bob for every single one of the wonderful years and here’s to many, many more.