Home Before Dark?
Dylan had his fallow period after the late seventies. To his great credit, he found new life, starting in the late 1990s with his Time Out Of Mind album and continuing through his recordings of the great American songbook of love ballads, the terrain of Sinatra and Bennett. Listening to him sing these great songs he did not write, I find his masks have fallen away and that a sad, lonely man emerges. A man filled with regrets and melancholia. An old man lamenting in a movingly raspy voice lost loves and haunted by what was and what might have been. A death-haunted man voicing raw emotion that is palpable. An uncaged man.
So much about Bob Dylan is paradoxical, or is it contradictory?
Friedrich Nietzsche, another man of many faces, who advised us to "become who you are," once wrote, "There are unconscious actors among them and involuntary actors; the genuine are always rare, especially genuine actors." I don't know if the man behind the name Bob Dylan is a "genuine actor" (genuine being cognate with genius, both suggesting the act of giving birth, creating), for I have never met him. I hope he has met himself. He hints that someone is missing, whether that is the fictional actor or the genuine one, is difficult to discern. Is he becoming who he is, or is he lost out on the road "with no direction home"? He is always on the go, leaving, moving, restless, always seeking a way back home through song, even when, or perhaps because, there are no directions.
The Rolling Thunder Revue is a nostalgic trip. No doubt, audiences of a certain age will experience it as such. Such an aching for home comes with a cost: the acute awareness that you can't go home again. When the nursing and funeral home beckon, however, one can perhaps take a chance on truth by examining one's conscience to ask if and why one may have betrayed one's better youthful self and settled for a life of comforting conformity and resigned acceptance of the "system" one once raged against.
Younger people, if they are patient and watch the entire film, will experience a profound aesthetic shock that may give them hope. To see through the camera's eye the youthful Dylan's face as he gives some of the most passionate performances of his life will thrill them so that a shiver will go down their spines and their hair will stand on end. "And this is what poetry does," writes Roberto Calasso in Literature and the Gods, "it makes us see what otherwise we wouldn't have seen, through a sound that was never heard before." To watch just a handful of these performances makes the film worthwhile.
Become Who You Are?
At one point, today's Dylan says that he has always been "searching for the Holy Grail." I suppose one could interpret that as meaning eternal youth, happiness, redemption, or some sort of immortality. He has surely created a capitalist's corporate empire, though that doesn't seem to satisfy him, as it never has genuine poets. But maybe to become very, very rich and famous has always been his goal, his immortality project, as it is for other tycoons. One can only guess.
I prefer not to. But without question, Dylan has the poet's touch, a hyperbolic sense of the fantastic that draws you into his magical web in the pursuit of deeper truth. In ways, he's like the Latin American magical realist writers who move from fact to dream to the fantastic in a puff of wind.
He is our Emerson. His artistic philosophy has always been about movement in space and time through song. "An artist has got to be careful never to arrive at a place where he thinks he's at somewhere," he's said. "You always have to realize that you are constantly in a state of becoming and as long as you can stay in that realm, you'll be alright."
Sounds like living, right.
Sounds like Emerson, also. "Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. Thus one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes."
Like Emerson, Dylan creates a sense of restlessness in the listener that forces one to ask: Who am I? Am I? He has said "that a song is like a dream, and you try to make it come true." In a similar way, Scorsese has created a dream with this film. It takes us back and forth in time via an hallucinatory experience. A sort of documentary with a wink.
It is quite a story, powerful enough to bring one to ask: Who are we becoming in this American Dream? Will we keep sleeping through the nightmares we create and support, or will we return home with Dylan and embrace the radical truth he once gifted us with and dare to "tell it and speak it and think it and breathe it/And reflect from the mountains so all souls can see it" that our country continues to kill and oppress people all around the world, even here at home.
Dylan emphatically answered that question with his midnight message to JFK's ghost in late March 2020, when he unexpectedly released a new song. He burst forth from behind his many masks and gifted the world with his incandescent song about the assassination of President Kennedy, with a title taken from Hamlet, from the mouth of the ghost of the dead King of Denmark -"Murder Most Foul." For those who have wondered over the years if Dylan had "sold out," here is the answer. For those who have wondered if he would go to his grave reciting the words of T.S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock - "I am no Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be" - here is Hamlet's booming response. Not only does this song lay bare the truth of the most foundational event in modern American history, but it does so in such a powerfully poetic way and at such an opportune time that it should redeem Dylan in the eyes of those who ever doubted him.
I say "should," but while the song's release has garnered massive publicity from the mainstream media, it hasn't taken long for that media to bury the truth of his words about the assassination under a spectacle of verbiage meant to damn with faint praise. As the media in a celebrity culture of the spectacle tend to do, the emphasis on the song's pop cultural references is their focus, with platitudes about the assassination and "conspiracy theories," as well as various shameful and gratuitous digs at Dylan for being weird, obsessed, or old. As the song says, "they killed him once and they killed him twice," so now they can kill him a third time, and then a fourth ad infinitum. And now the messenger of the very bad news must be dispatched along with the dead president.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
