Nothing Is But What Is Not

I sat in one of my favourite LA haunts doing nothing in particular a couple of days ago. It has been an unusual few weeks; discordancy has been the Lord of Misrule. Surfacing from the depths of disruption I look about me with new eyes; the mists have cleared a little and the landscapes are drawn with clearer lines. A path I had thought to follow turns out to have been an illusory trick of the shadows. A road to be taken suddenly shines forth bright and true.

Speaking of shadows, I’ve been thinking about many things but Shadow Kingdom which I watched in the middle of the usual chaos of Sunday afternoon has been sitting centre stage. Somehow the topsy turviness seemed fitting for such an occasion. Crazy enough to be preparing to watch His Bobness from the jumble of my living room, crazier still to be about to view a live stream, which we already knew was pre-recorded from a venerable artist whom one had presumed was above such antics. 

As the black mirror of the screen shattered into the shapes and sounds of the master and his musicians, my heart fell slightly when I saw that neither Tony nor Charlie, not any of the dearly familiar guys from the Never Ending Tour were present. Nonetheless, I was instantly blown away into a long ago world of smoke and shadows. The advertising had promised an intimate setting and it was true to its word. A small smoky dive bar that was anyone’s dream venue to watch Mr Dylan perform manifested on the screen. But of course nothing here was as it seemed. As I watched the opening song, When I Paint My Masterpiece, it became clear that by some stroke of magic the fleeting essence of a vanishing America was in the room. It’s the power that Bob often conjures in his songs. The audience were obviously actors and so we were instantly in the realm of metatheatre. I grinned inwardly as I realised the man of many masks was up to his usual Jack of Hearts trickery.

Jack of Hearts or the Roving Gambler he may be but as I’ve said before when commenting on his visual art, if there’s one thing you can say about this conjuror of our modern age it is that his love for the land of his birth runs deep, straight and true. In his Kingdom of Shadows it was the audience who were the medium through which he showed us this affection, this affinity, this communion. It’s as though he can synthesise the spirits of the tough men and women whose sweat, blood and tears built this wild land which was and is ruled over by gangsters. As with the land, so with the human fabric of this nation. Bob sees the tracks of the tears of all who have laboured and died in this vast place; he bears witness to them all.

The women wore stylised outfits, cigarettes were smoking throughout the performance and the males in the audience ranged from wise guys to hard working men. In some ways, the audience gave the anchor to the entire endeavour, whether they were in the shot or not. Their sturdily silent presence, world weary, a little indifferent, the women aloof, seductive at times but never stooping to outright flirtation allowed Dylan and his band to take to the stage as shape shifters, players of old if you will. On the breath of the silent viewers I could hear the chain gang on the highway, the cracking of the whip, I could smell the sweet magnolia of the plantations and I could see the slavery ships. And I remember now those lyrics which always make me sigh with tears at the compassion on display

‘Hey, hey Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song

Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along

Seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an it’s torn,

It looks like it’s a-dyin an it’s hardly been born’ (Song to Woody)

While he stands in a lineage of modernist poets, Bob is far more than that. Due to his longevity and faithfulness he has become part of the very material of this world of America. He is able to summon its essence with his fingertips and channel all of its colours through the media of song and painting. And I suddenly think of the Greek tragedy Ajax by Sophocles and of how those Homeric warriors often became protectors of their territory after death and were worshipped as such by the local people. Bob sings for all of us who come with the dust and will be gone with the wind. As the smoke drifted through each person, and as the masked players mimed and the maestro switched jackets I reeled with the intensity of the magic show on display.

In the centre of such a world of shifting smokiness Dylan delivered some of the most beautiful renditions of a select number of his songs that I can remember. Mimed they might have been but wasn’t that exactly the point? Bob turned and gave answer to those who want live streaming, a medium entirely incapable of conveying anything of power. How could anyone have thought that this hero of the road, who understands exactly what is happening in a concert hall would deliver anything close to such a thing? Instead we were given a performance within a performance, a play within a play, mimed, masked and recorded months earlier. In the midst of making such a clear point Bob took an unfamiliar situation and created something beautiful, with deep meaning.

I deliberately chose to only watch Kingdom of Shadows once. I was mesmerised by What Was It You Wanted, a song which has haunted me ever since I first heard it on vinyl. Every nuance of uncertainty, suspicion and pain were captured and brought forth as if Bob was carving an ice sculpture before us. Tombstone Blues, delivered almost as if a poem, was fascinating, exploding all of my assumptions about this song and bringing it firmly out of the Highway 61 album landscape and depositing it somewhere else entirely. And finally, if I’m picking three I would turn my attention to Forever Young. It was sung with such poignancy and kind conviction that I wonder now if it was his farewell to all of us who love him. If that proves to be the case then Mr Dylan, it’s been one beautiful ride.

And as I sit drifting in and out of the shadows it occurs to me that somehow, something about the nature of Bob’s audience, coupled with his garb of a master of illusion and fantastical spectacle marks a moment of supreme significance. Hasn’t he just displayed for us exactly what America is? A land part incredible toughness part illusion and chicanery? Perhaps it’s also the arrival of our American passports a week or so ago which has forced me to stare into the face of America once more and consider the passage of time and the road I have travelled. Or perhaps that Lord of Misrule’s mischief is to blame, but whatever the reason, hosts of the memories we have made during our time on these foreign shores have been unleashed and are roaming free.

And my memories are physical in their intensity, overpowering in their ability to reignite the sensation of overwhelming harshness and vast scale that was my introduction to these United States. There is the rough toughness of Manhattan- untamed to its very edges, jaggedly bleak, a place of harsh harsh weather and terrain. This is what remains once the glamour and excitement of the towering city has dissipated and why I would at times have to seek shelter in the company of a soothing aquamarine artistic refuge. These concrete reminiscences take me further back; like the dream workers in Inception I’m down one level deeper to my first visit to America to San Francisco.

There it is again that sense of an utterly alien place. I guess we all operate in our own ways and encounter the apparently external world through different signifiers but for me, I am always, always seeking harmony. And when I don’t find it I will do my best to discover it, even if self deception sometimes has to become the name of the game. When I ride the elevator back down to San Francisco all I remember is the cold indifference that emanated from the place. People often say that this city is the most European of American destinations. When compared to the rest of America that might be true but I recall a location completely lacking in the soft rootedness and beauty of Europe.

I fully appreciate that mere words are in the end just too blunt a tool to capture the essence I am trying to convey here. The best I can offer is that my experience of Europe versus America and indeed of trying to survive in the New World is rather like the difference between a pebble and a fresh chunk of granite. The pebble’s edges are rounded; smooth from many years of existence and of bumping up against other stones. Perhaps it has lain on a river bed for a thousand years or more, perhaps it was found by some seeking young hand and selected for a skimming contest or two before resting once more beneath the rushing bubbles of a stream. The pebble has known time. The chunk of granite, massive in its diameter has just been hewn from the rock of the quarry, it is minutes into its existence, untamed and completely and utterly fresh.

There are times when I feel like a pebble which was accidentally picked up by a giant skimmer and hurled across the ocean into a granite quarry rather than onto a comfortable river bed. As a humble pebble, there’s no way to stop the change or impact that becoming part of such a granite environment will have on you. The force of collision is there whether you acknowledge it, bury it or run. It will catch you in the end and one will be forever changed. You’d better get ok with that fast or disaster will follow.

The trick is in deciding which direction you take next. You can take the path of least resistance and allow yourself to be subsumed into the vast granite machine or you can stay true to the place of your birth and become impenetrable in your ability to preserve and embody everything of value and meaning. The longer I live in this land of power, greed and corruptible seed the more I understand that the road forks right or left, there is no middle ground to be had. At least not in my case. The pebble is not what it once was, it has lost some of the softness it had when it was one pebble among many but its survival is guaranteed by the granite with which its nature is now infused. 

It need hardly be said that the road towards this goal is far from straightforward! There are many stumbling blocks, chimeras to slay and seductive sirens songs to ignore along the way. These past few weeks have involved some siren songs for me. Out of nowhere I was catapulted into grasping for something that was not at all what it had first appeared to be and I was left in not inconsiderable distress and confusion. It wasn’t until I sat with a friend in a quiet oasis and spoke about matters of importance that I realised the root cause of all of the discordancy. Becoming a powerful chunk of memory free granite can sometimes be a fate which pulls you against your better judgement. Of course this is exactly the diabolical power of the siren song. It captures you at a elemental level accessing those deep imprints which the reasoned mind cannot grasp or comprehend. However it leaves severe disturbance in its wake, and for me that disturbance manifests pretty immediately nowadays. Pebble is as pebble does.

I always return from the kingdom of shadows to silence and space, the best weapons against the relentlessness of this environment. Sometimes I think of this vast city as a collection of the places I sit and beat back the noise with solitude. My fertile oases in a desert of sound. From our beautiful Buddhist centre in Santa Monica through the French Conservatory to my white chair and the ocean I am fortunate enough to have found places of beauty, space and tranquility where all that is important and true shines forth.

When all is said and all is done, I know the heartfelt sorrow of the exile who looks back across the ocean at his former self and understands that while he can go back he can’t go back all the way, forever changed as he is by his experiences. At one and the same time I also feel the bloodied and resolute awareness of the boxer, who will fight forwards for the truth of the things which remain through as many rounds as the future allows him, battling through the world of shape shifters, grifters and tricksters where nothing is but what is not.

Image from the series ‘Koku’ courtesy of Ed Heckerman