floppy socks -- the holy terror of the basketball world -- high
flyin' -- magician of the court. The night I saw him he dribbled
the ball with his head, scored a behind the back, no look basket --
dribbled the length of the court, threw the ball up off the glass
and caught his own pass. He was fantastic. Scored something
like thirty-eight points. He could have played blind. Pistol Pete
hadn't played professionally for a while, and he was thought of
as forgotten. I hadn't forgotten about him, though. Some people
seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it's like
they didn't fade away at all.
Dylan has the poet's touch, of course, 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 goes on to write that after hearing the news of Pistol Pete's sad death playing pickup basketball, he started and completed the song "Dignity" the same day, and in the days that followed song after song flowed from his pen. The news of one creative spirit's death gave birth to another creative spirit's gift to life. (I am reminded of Shakespeare writing Hamlet after his father's death.) "It's like I saw the song up in front of me and overtook it, like I saw all the characters in this song and elected to cast my fortunes with them ". The wind could never blow it out of my head. This song was a good thing to have. On a song like this, there's no end to things."
One can hear echoes of Hemingway, another artist obsessed with death, in those last few sentences. Unlike Hemingway, however, Dylan's focus on death is in the service of life and hope. For him there is no end, while Hemingway is all ending - nada, nada, nada -- nothing, nothing, nothing -- "it was all a nothing and a man was nothing too," he writes in his haunting story, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." Dylan's focus on the shadow of death is seen within the light of life -- todo -- all or everything. The darkness is there but is encompassed by the light. Nada within todo. As he told the AARP magazine last year in a fascinating interview, he's been singing about death since he's been twelve. And out of that singing -- year after year for fifty plus years and counting -- he has found and expressed the light of hope.
Dylan is our Emerson. His artistic philosophy has always been about movement in space and time through song. Always moving, always restless, always seeking a way back home through song, even when, or perhaps because, there are no directions. "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.
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