A Light Within Reach, A Time Out of Mind

Bob Dylan Revivals Dissapearing Everywhere You Look in Erie Toronto Akron

Nov 02, 2023

In Akron we walk into the room beneath the moon and stars. In the Erie light of a Golden Chorale we see Bob Dylan’s tour bus. In Toronto, Elvis Costello and Diana Krall pose for pictures, the CBC anchor wears her multi-thousand dollar gown, and the Shark Skin Pseuds arrive late to the parité from Bay Street.

In the cool breeze, under the Autumn Leaves, we have arrived at a place and Time Out of Mind. Congregated without phones for a few hours, freed from A Nice Derangement of Epistemes, freed from Digital Contagions, freed from nursing any superfluous fears, we begin to see “such stuff as dreams are made on1” dreams of St. Augustine’s “fiery breath,” of Love and Theft, of the watchman’s “golden age foretold,” of the Outlaw Blues, when it’s nine below zero and three o’clock in the afternoon and we’re left bereft at a Crossroads we cannot comprehend—the gateway called Moment where “Everything straight lieth, […] [a]ll truth is crooked” and “time itself is a circle.2” which is to say, Watchin’ The River Flow. Which is to say, “It gets so hard to care.”

All the time telling who has fell and who’s been LEFT BEHIND, Dylan paints his rhapsody-smooth masterpiece of “the awful truth of how sweet life can be,” of the “paradise in that home across the road” with its Christmas pie and withered flowers forever Going, Going, Gone to where gone away things go, which is to MARIENBAD, not today, but one year ago, where most forgot what Bob Dylan was meant to mean.

WHO WAS IN ATTENDANCE???

From October 21^st to October 27^th those who’d herd Dylan’s lyrics had become less scrutable after Chinese gov’t censorship, that he might not be properly registered to vote let alone sing, or could be holding perverse Bear Mountain picnics in his bathroom, those who’d thus commenced to do what they’d been doing before he’d turned their heads, which was to de-sanctify Real Live revivals as an appropriate sonic space to opine on cafeteria lines of their recent sense impressions—even those friends were possessed of ears to hear, for a spell, it seemed, including:

A grey-haired regressor to this mean interrupting Mother of Muses to ground the communal offer wafer into the blight that tedium shivs her personne-elle experience.
The whole human race, all right there, carved into your face.
Men of contradictions.
Blind Lemon Gin and Son predictably roilin’ and stumblin’ down that eternal lane back to the Bleak House Tavern for Cynar Sours stirred by the egg white divination sounding to an unattenuated era as a system of stray dischords.
Lusty old mules.
Men of moods. :(
Rounders searchin’ high, searchin’ low-key for post-show Alicia Keyes bumps.
Roughians sizable—as not—of cock.
Rowdydowdy one-upsmen forgetting to challenge Reddit-tier compeers, “Do you even contain multitudes, bro?”
Ghost seers.
My new doomsday cult The Rochesterians hoping the immanent eschaton might be soundtracked by the best ’leg of the tour thus far. Our motto: “You can call me Peter, you can call me Pall, just don’t call me, when we’re down on Armageddon Street, late for the fall.”
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Knee Play #1

If according to Georg Cantor, “the fear of infinity is a form of myopia that destroys the possibility of seeing the actual infinite, even though it in its highest form has created and sustains us, and in its secondary transfinite forms occurs all around us and even inhabits our minds3” then,

Question 1: What is a record collector, anyway?

Question 2: What does one fear when experiencing a loss of fidelity?

Question 3: What’s to be done Of Time and Lamentation, then?

Answer 1: Someone pleading, “Redeem the time so idly spent.” “Redeem The unread vision in the higher dream.4”

Answer 2: Long and Wasted Years.

Answer 3 : Listen for the Thunder on the Mountain-sighed.

HOW WAS BOB DYLAN, THOUGH???

Rings on his fingers sparkling immutably, $2000 shirt from Dan Flashes fresh and clean as wind for the sailboat, the baby grand positively forthward facing now, Bob Dylan, that patternmind, that paradigmatic ear, practices his systemysticism for telling, thinking, speaking, and breathing the Heraclitian fire regarding postmodernity’s Brokedown Palace, for playing the piano just like Leon Russel by employing Lonnie Johnston’s “different value system […] memorable for the ages” in which a band leader can hit “2, 5, and 7 to the phrase and then repeat it” so that “a melody forms. Or use […] 2 three times. Or […] use 4 once and 7 twice.5” As Bob Dylan writes in Chronicles. “It’s infinite what you can do, and each time you would create a different melody. The possibilities are endless” prompting Vish Khana to ask,

“What if ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ and ‘Mother of Muses’ and ‘That Old Black Magic’ and ‘Every Grain of Sand’ might now stand for the creative connection between an artist and their audience and the mystical forces that bind them for as long as possible? And what if ‘Crossing the Rubicon’ and ‘Key West (Philosopher Pirate)’ and ‘Stella Blue’ and ‘Brokedown Palace’ tell stories about how time passes until it doesn’t anymore […]”6

Nearly every FACE IN THE CROWD expressed this long-sought laity prayer, e.g, ‘I belong here, in time, yet also outside of time, a mein of contradictions and multitudinous moods, soul distressed, mind at war, but still here, always and only for now, everything flowing all at the same time.’

And if the possibilities are endless, and “the fragmentation of time, its division, is the fall of eternity7” then the only means for The New Music to will itself into the Eternal Circle is for Dylan’s audience to believe that the cards Dylan holds are indeed from another world, and that the chords we’re hearing have become “true to life, true to” Monoimus advice to make yourself “the starting point. Learn who it is within you who makes everything his own and say, ‘My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body.’ Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate…If you carefully investigate these matters, you will find him in yourself.”

I feel the holy spirit inside
See the light that freedom gives
I believe it's in the reach of
Every man who lives

It’s not enough, however, for A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’s Prophet to have perfect faith in Hank Williams singing I Saw The Light when the path is ever winding towards that crummy little Hilbert’s Grand Hotel over Washington Square where there’s always room for a little more Time and Propinquity, whether it’s a Bear-themed picnic, or a national identity sent to the Garrison after another mediocre marksman’s Manichean-Carcano sprays brain matter all over a pink Chanel suit straight from the atelier. Dylan knows that after all this Murder Most Foul and all these My Lai massacres, “nobody can sing the blues” sufficient to “the avowed sense of inferiority” required to say much of anything After the Catastrophe. Hence the second half of the verse preceding:

Keep as far away as possible
It's darkest 'fore the dawn (Oh Lord)
I turned the key, I broke it off
And I crossed the Rubicon

And so Bob Dylan connects his thoughts in a pattern, moving from place to place, from Montrieux through to Perugia, rolling into Clarksville, crossing The Green Mountain back into Vicksburg so that “the hidden future [is] revealed, and the revealed present becom[es] a hidden past” infirming what some style innocence and purity and others only the PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE of the Palace of the Parking Lot of Me. Before singing on The Isle of White Dylan realized this I’ll of I’s is a place of pain, nothing but sclera and cornea to accommodate the landing cormorants who eat time; consequently, having previously climbed a mountain of souls in his bear feet, Dylan’s still on the wrong side of the railroad tracks, gambling with Will O'Connelly and Pascale that he might well ramble where only the Lord can go.

As ghosts live on in arrearview mirrors, Dylan recollects these perceptions we Kant quite shake: that even as things in themselves apparently change, “the next 60 seconds could feel like eternity.” Dylan, then, this martyr we might call our own, devises us something in his will—some Key West real end state where the long-gone horse and rider can be foreseen “coming out of Luxembourg and Budapest” and back into the Cantor.

The Causal Tentacle

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