A Far Off Sweet Forever

In the far off sweet forever
The sunshine peeking through
We should have walked together
I can't escape from you (Can’t Escape from You, Bob Dylan)

There’s a Bob Dylan song that’s been rolling along the tracks of my mind for some time. Even now, as I’m walking on a slowly sunny Los Angeles afternoon with the hound, I can hear it, faint but true. But for the moment the train of song is far off down the tracks, perhaps it’s a slow one, stopping at every station. And so I meander with my stubbornly beloved creature and live in the moment with what’s right in front of me.

The neighbourhood I walk around on a Tuesday afternoon, while my daughter is lost in the beauty of Russian ballet, is special to me. Unassuming and tucked away between West Pico and Olympic, it’s quietly orthodox in parts. On a sleepy afternoon you might happen by a mother playing in the garden with her children or stumble across a gaggle of Hassidic kids selling lemonade. The houses murmur of quietly traditional family life and I always breathe a little easier here. I walked around it with my father a couple of times during a recent visit and the streets are touched by his presence.

But I digress. As I’ve been wandering and wondering, that train has been picking up speed and the song is almost ready to be sung.

It’s been a little while since the words of the Bard of Hibbing have featured directly on these pages of mine but I have loved the song Can’t Escape from You for many years. It sings hauntingly of the sadness of lost love, wistful and bitter by turn. The imagery is so beautiful and somehow vast in scope, that I’m usually lost inside the words within seconds of the opening line.

Recently however, an encounter with the work of WB Yeats has lead me to think about the song a little more carefully. In our memorization efforts, my daughter and I have absorbed a couple of his shorter poems this year, one of which being When You Are Old. Upon arriving at the second stanza of this three verse poem I was struck with recognition: here is the origin of my favourite verse of Dylan’s song. And look how, with his usual sleight of hand, he takes the original material and reworks it. So much fun.

Here’s Yeat’s verse,

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you
And loved the sorrows of your changing face

Just splendid! That phrase, pilgrim soul! Suggestive at once of hidden depths to this lady which only the poet can perceive.

Now, here’s Bob,

I’ve been thinking things all over
All the moments full of grace
The primrose and the clover
Your ever changing face

Notice how Bob subtly shifts the emphasis. In his verse, it is the time they shared together that he is reliving, the graceful moments are no longer solely the possession of the lady. The echoes are undeniable, particularly when they are as insistent as those of the last line of the verse!

Of course, in many ways, the scope of Can’t Escape from You lies outside of Yeat’s poem which is a short and direct address to a faithless lover. However no matter, knowledge of the one informs the other. I can’t listen to Can’t Escape without also living with that faithless lady of Yeats, now old and lamenting the loss of love as Yeats portrays her at the close of the poem

Murmur a little sadly how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars

Can’t Escape from You was written in 2005 and has never been played live. It was released on the Tell Tale Signs bootleg in 2008, an album that is overflowing with spectacular unreleased songs. Think of Ol’ Bill, Red River Shore, Across the Green Mountain to name a few. Then there are the beautiful versions of released songs, some studio some live. Take a listen to both versions of Mississippi on offer, to Born In Time and to Ring Them Bells. I read somewhere that Can’t Escape from You was commissioned for a movie that was never made unlike Huck’s Tune, another great song on the album which is played at the end of Curtis Hansen’s underrated Lucky You.

The song itself is a classic example of Bob’s ability to work within tightly structured form. There are sixteen quatrain verses, each with a strict ABAB rhyme scheme. The verses are divided into four groups of four and the chorus refrain, ‘I can’t escape from you’ is the last line of each group.

I’ve spent many a happy moment musing over the meaning of this song. Clearly on one level it’s a world weary story of lost love but, when you dig into it, it’s hard to find a singular developed narrative.

We begin with a train:

Oh the evening train is rolling
All along the homeward way
All my hopes are over the horizon
All my dreams have gone away

This sets the tone for the entire song. There is restless movement; the train is rolling, we’re at the end of the day, at the close of the relationship, in the end years of life perhaps. It’s evening, and hope is gone, lost beyond the horizon with the singer’s dreams.

One could write a lengthy piece about trains in Dylan’s songs and album titles. Without mining too deeply I can call up about five, let’s take a whistle stop tour.

We have the mail train of Takes a Lot to Laugh (Takes a Train to Cry) and the train wheels of memory in When I Paint My Masterpiece. Then there’s Blood on the Tracks, Slow Train Coming and the eponymous song itself Slow Train. And don’t forget that Duquesne whistle blowing right on time. It occurs to me that trains are one of the archetypes of Dylan’s own personal American landscape, evocative as they are of the hobos of time past, crossing from East to West and symbolic of the immense nature of its terrain. We can look outside his songwriting to his art and to his radio show. Don’t forget that Theme Time had an entire episode dedicated to trains.

So, Can’t Escape from You is located securely within the vast parameters of the American landscape, both in terms of its geography and also its resonances, historical and cultural. The more I think about it, the more I realize that the song itself is a train, flashing along the tracks. We, the audience, are passengers along with the singer, following his route. As we hurtle through the landscape of America and of the singer’s life we see the images of the song from the window of the train.

The hillside darkly shaded
Stars fall from above
All the joys of earth have faded
The night's untouched by love

I'll be here 'til tomorrow
Beneath a shroud of gray
I pretend I'm free of sorrow
My heart is miles away

The dead bells are ringing
My train is overdue
To your memory I'm clinging
I can't escape from you

We see the dark hillside, falling stars and the singer wrapped in a shroud of grey lamenting his lost heart. All the while he fixes a smile to his face as he listens to the sound of the dead bells. We wonder, shaken, at the story behind such a wellspring of grief.

Each verse is only a flashing scene from a much longer story. Were we to pull into the station and disembark perhaps we could flesh it out and discover more about the particular memory or moment. But, as it is, we have the merest of glimpses.

Well I hear the sound of thunder
Roaring loud and long
Sometimes you've got to wonder
God knows I've done no wrong

You've wasted all your power
You threw out the Christmas pie
Now you're withering like a flower
You'll play the fool and die

I'm neither sad nor sorry
I'm all dressed up in black
I fought for fame and glory
You tried to break my back

In the far off sweet forever
The sunshine peeking through
We should have walked together
I can't escape from you

Perhaps the train slows, just for an instant. From the window we see a storm through the singer’s eyes. We hear the crashing thunder and see his lost love withering. With all spiritual power cast aside, her potential greatness has shrunk to a trivial and secular foolishness. We see the singer, black clad and indifferent, returning from a noble war, perhaps the civil war, only to meet with betrayal at the hands of his beloved. And then, in spite of it all, the poignant sweetness of his longing and regret. It shouldn’t have ended this way. We wish desperately for more time, for the opportunity to truly understand, but the train rolls on and the tableau is left behind, tantalizingly out of reach.

I find the best way to enjoy the song is simply to sit back and let it wash over you, to experience the images of the verses as they fly by,  rather than to seek a sustained linear narrative. The singer is musing on all the ways things went wrong. Situations that should have been different, ways in which he could have turned events around. Ways indeed in which he was betrayed and times when his lover fell far short of the mark. As in life, so in art, these memories flash in and out, there is no rhyme or reason to their order of appearance. Each verse is beautiful, bewitching or staggering in turn.

All our days were splendid
They were simple, they were plain
It never should have ended
I should have kissed you in the rain

I've been thinking things all over
All the moments full of grace
The primrose and the clover
Your ever changing face

You can’t really beat the simplicity here. So much is said, with so little. Incidentally, the irony is, were you to look up the official version of this song, you would find that the final four verses (from which the above, the best in my opinion, are drawn) have simply been excised from the song! Vanished without trace as if the memories were false and we’d never seen those lightning flashes of simplicity, a longed for rain drenched embrace and graceful changing moments full of flowers, to begin with. Ah the universe of Dylan with its continually evolving, fragmenting and re-forming brilliance!

As if by some mischievous stroke of magic, another track was suggested when I was playing this song on Spotify recently: I Can’t Escape From You by Hank Williams. As I listened to this deceptively straightforward song, an overwhelming sense of deja vu crashed around me. Hank, of course, the master of saying a great deal with a few, spare words. It’s impossible to imagine that Dylan didn’t  know about this song.

These wasted tears are souvenirs
Of a love I thought was true
Your memory is chained to me
I can’t escape from you.

And then there’s that midnight train, too lonesome to cry, crawling by beneath a hiding moon.

As the Duquesne whistle blows, I surface from the land of love’s lost memories. I hear the fading train heading off down the tracks and the dog pulls, impatient to move beyond the grassy knoll he’s been lolling around on. Our walk continues to its inevitable conclusion. The gentleness and quiet humility of this neighbourhood leave me thinking, long after I’ve moved back into the everyday, about the necessity of such quiet interludes. Of time for reading poetry and listening to beautiful songs to nourish our hearts in the midst of times where the mystery of madness abounds. With such solitudes, the best of what we’ve inherited in our small corner of the world lives on, its brightness undimmed and the possibility of a far off sweet forever suddenly doesn’t seem so very far away after all.