Born in Time: Conditional Tenses and the Changin’ Lyrics of Bob Dylan

Upcoming Presentation at Bob Dylan Institute's World of Bob Dylan Conference

I’m pleased to announce that I will be presenting my paper on Bob Dylan and conditional tenses at the same World of Bob Dylan conference that I have attended to my enormous edification in years past.

Alongside 150 Bob Dylan scholars esteemed as Greil Marcus and musical guests talented as Margot Price, I will present ideas around conditionals and counterfactuals in the lyrics of Bob Dylan by drawing on the work of Gottlob Frege, David Hume, Paul Grice and other philosophers and linguists.

From If Not For You to If Tomorrow Wasn’t Such a Long Time many Bob Dylan lyrics contain conditional or if clauses. Dylan’s own mythology further establishes a liminal world in the unreal conditional, i.e. “If we were different people, we could…” He replaces his middle-class upbringing with Woody Guthrie’s. Renaldo And Clara projects by colour schema and strata loves Going, Going, Gone differently. In Brownsville Girl, the titles of Gregory Peck films await the narrator’s memory in uncertain states.

As Dylan interlocutes the past by re-imagining familiar lyrics, conditional tenses escape philosophical and grammatical parameters to consequent themselves with real-world dimensionality. It’s as if Dylan, foreseeing his 60-year career, built literal escape clauses into his songs. In the year between Blood on the Tracks and The Rolling Thunder Revue, the loved object in If You See Her, Say Hello no longer might be in Tangiers, but now in North Saigon. We don’t question this shift, because she was never concretely in Tangiers, she only “might” have been. As he accuses the over-determined waitress at the diner counter(factual) in Highlands, “How would you know/and what would it matter anyway?”

Drawing on philosophy, linguistics, and Dylan’s corpus, I will illustrate how conditional sentences contribute to Dylan’s singularly extra-temporal oeuvre, and a performative embodiment of what might have been, and what still could be in the foggy web of destiny should the ifs and whens “Born in Time” remain indeterminate for Bob Dylan and his audience.

Sorely lacking in academic bona fides myself, it will be a new challenge for me. However, as an extension of my fictional and non-fictional ruminations upon the broad subject of time, I have spent the past few years contemplating the counterfactual and conditional mysteries, even writing my forthcoming novel from Montag Press, How to Market Your Grief Blog, almost entirely in conditional tenses, e.g.,

If as time passes memories delude us with their transience and telescopy, be pleased that the only change in Catherine is a faint grace added to the fundament of her beauty. If eye contact proves too powerful for everyone’s tastes, look away then immediately look back again. And if your glasses cloud the knowing before you, crush them underfoot.

One: If here comes her ghost again and her peacoat is free of detritus as her peacoats somehow always are, and you wear a younger man’s clothes, and there you stand on Bleecker Street in the fixity of your fiction suits, press your palms against her hips, which hips you once complimented as “ample,” and while she’d said this was not a compliment per se, you’ve forever remained unconvinced.

Two: Should a joke seem necessary to leaven the tension of a reunion fifteen years in the making, speak the words, “Our long national nightmare is over—Abraham Lincoln said that. It sure is nice to see you again—I said that.”

Three: Though you find the substance neurotoxic, get unethically-traded coffee in a multinational franchise, and while no more cosmopolitan than all the franchises from Seoul to Sault Sainte Marie, it is in Manhattan and contains the girl to whom all your longings speak, thus fulfilling a promise once trod into the soil of a St. Joseph’s Island farm with her as sundress’d Juliet and thee as the holy fool, Balthazar.

Four: If still at a loss for words, but in a high comradeship of spirit, do not be romanced by the ceilings of the NYPL’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. Don’t pontificate on man, blessed man, 19^th century Giuseppe or whomever, up on some literal latter to the stars sculpting those ceilings to resemble the Sistine Chapel’s. Because if you get distracted photographing the ceilings you may lose her again. She could step away and leave you nothing but the ceiling, and then the pictures of the ceiling, which is one of the most photographed ceilings in America, meaning it’s there but no one can really see it.

Three: Do not have a religious experience at a Bob Dylan concert lest those similarly-afflicted congregate at The Dublin House where she will make friends, as her winsomeness not only allows but dictates, where if her past precarity is any indicator, she will flit maddeningly on the periphery like a ‘floater’ caused by clumped vitreous in the agèd.

The World of Bob Dylan Conference will run June 2-4 out of the Hyatt Regency in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma. If you see me there, say hello.