What the Broken Glass Reflects Part 2

You ever seen a ghost? No. But you have heard of them.

Jul 25, 2024

Like an indoor cat peering at the Early Morning Rain through his window pane, Dylan helps us reflect upon all the counterfactual love lost to the @outsideness of it all. Dylan shows us the long-gone horse and rider in THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR; “the awful truth of how sweet life can be”; the woman you didn’t speak to on the Gravitron that may have made it all okay; the “paradise in that home across the road” with its Christmas pie and withered flower forever Going, Going, Gone to where gone away things go, which is to MARIENBAD, not today, but one year ago, where we can’t quite remember Bob Dylan, though he’d “be coming back in a little while.”

In 1991, Jack Nicholson—no longer the hiccupping drunk of EASY RIDER, but the august AVATAR of The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences—thanks Dylan for the loan of his throat with a Lifetime Aggrievement Accord. These sword swallowers and professors with pencils ever ready-at-hand have the temerity to praise Dylan for his

constant state of restlessness that has enabled you to seek newer and better means of expressing the human condition for living your creative life fearlessly and without apology, and leading the way no matter how the times change

even while all but shepherd’s crooking him off the stage after that awkward We Are the World encounter when Stevie Wonder had to remind Bob Dylan how to sound like Bob Dylan again.

Dylan himself seems to have lost all his picnic spirit at this time. “Combing his hair back” to find his future looking “thin,” sitting in the kitchen of his Malibu compound, “no beginning, no middle, no end,” one evening he sees a poor man looking through painted glass. He’s reminded of something. He realizes that time is running backwards and the groom is still waiting at the alter-vu, “that the shepherd is asleep and the mountains are filled with lost sheep.” He’s “searching high, searching low” like a “blind man coming out of a trance” for a style of jazz Lonnie Johnston taught him in the 1960s, “a style of playing based on an odd- instead of even-number system.”

The system works in a cyclical way. Because you’re thinking in odd numbers instead of even numbers, you’re playing with a different value system. […] If you’re using an odd numerical system, things that strengthen a performance automatically begin to happen and make it memorable for the ages. You don’t have to plan or think ahead. In a diatonic scale there are eight notes, in a pentatonic scale there are five. If you’re using the first scale, and you hit 2, 5, and 7 to the phrase and then repeat it, a melody forms. Or you can use 2 three times. Or you can use 4 once and 7 twice. It’s infinite what you can do, and each time you would create a different melody. The possibilities are endless. A song executes itself on several fronts and you can ignore musical customs. All you need is a drummer and a bass player, and all shortcomings become irrelevant as long as you stick to the system. With any type of imagination you can hit notes at intervals and between backbeats, creating counterpoint lines and then you sing off of it. There’s no mystery to it and it’s not a technical trick. […] The listener would recognize and feel the dynamics immediately. Things could explode or retreat back at any time and there would be no way to predict the consciousness of any song. And because this works on its own mathematical formula, it can’t miss. [1]

Dylan is thus returned to his rightful place as the cantor preaching to The Supper Club’s affluent audience smuggled comfortably between The Diamond District and Hell’s Kitchen, Dylan asks—“Have you seen dignity?” Freed from “nursing any superfluous fears” of finitude, this Dylan feels “like a fighting rooster” feels better than he ever felt. The man who eulogized The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carol on The Times They Are A Changin’ and on The Bootleg Series 5: Live 1975 now chants from the same pulpit as the man who developed the one-to-one correspondence of numbers, musical as otherwise, across sets,

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 minds.[2]

Dylan’s own secondary transfinite form re-arrives at Newport in 2002, the developmental stage where the umbilical cord had been severed to let free a 24-year-old Dylan’s electricity. He plays You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere to those living in a town where the trains “don’t bring no gamblers, no midnight ramblers like they did before,” where they booed The Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

Unrecognizable to the I’ll of their eyes, Dylan wears “the wolf man’s disguise” and introduces his set with the words, “I am a roving gambler.” Dylan rambles and gambles, having learned his song well enough before he started singing on The Isle of White that the Isle of I’s is a place of pain: nothing but sclera and cornea to accommodate the landing cormorants who eat time. Despite his Long Time Gone, Dylan would lay his money down with Charlie Sexton and Larry Campbell so that “the poet laureate of rock ‘n’ roll. The voice of the promise of the ‘60s counterculture. The guy who forced folk into bed with rock, who donned makeup in the ‘70s and disappeared into a haze of substance abuse, who emerged to ‘find Jesus,’ who was written off as a has-been by the end of the ‘80s, and who suddenly shifted gears and released some of the strongest music of his career beginning in the late ’90s” could return to the cave, asking for so little as a G Harmonica to sing the Hero Blues that sacrifice the hero in himself as he did at Radio City Music Hall upon receiving that lifetime achievement award from THE JOKER and the thief in 1991,

Bob Dylan: Well, um ... yeah ... my daddy, he didn’t leave me much, you know he was a very simple man, but what he did tell me was this, he did say, son, he said ...
[long pause, nervous laughter from the crowd]
He said so many things you know.
He said, you know it’s possible to become so defiled in this world that your own father and mother will abandon you, and if that happens, God will always believe in your own ability to mend your own ways.

Six years later he played for the Pope. The apostolic blessing works in reverse. Mickey Rourke’s crucifix in THE POPE OF GREENWICH VILLAGE regains its lost lustre. This actor who Dylan thought “could break your heart with a look. […] Just seeing him act gave me the inspiration”[3] received when another WRESTLER, Gorgeous George winked and “seemed to mouth the phrase, ‘You’re making it come alive’” at a young Bob Dylan, who “never forgot it” who wrote that Gorgeous George’s wink “was all the recognition and encouragement” he “would need for years.” [4]

This is not Dylan’s first run-in with Perfect Faith. First it was in himself. Then it was in Jesus. And now, Dylan “empties the ashtrays on a whole other level” by alerting us to a collective presque-vu of a timeless time and placeless place knowable only as an open field of divinity where “eternity might be not the stopping of time, but precisely its resurrection and gathering.” [5]

I had perfect faith in this system and knew it would work. Playing this way appealed to me. A lot of folks would say that the songs were altered and others would say that this was the way they should have sounded in the first place. You could take your pick.[6]

It’s not enough for A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’s Prophet to have perfect faith in the light that freedom gives however. Knowing what he knows, Dylan rambles towards where only the Lord can go, having learned his song well enough before he started singing on The Isle of White that the Isle of I’s is a place of pain: If “the fragmentation of time, its division, is the fall of eternity” [7] then the only means for The New Music to soundtrack THE HOURS AND THE TIMES of our last dance at a Barthelmean “means of bumping into being” [8] 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 me” which is why by the time I’d started seeing Bob Dylan live in 2006, it was typical for adherents to respond to Spirit on the Water’s goading: “You think I’m over the hill? You think I’m past my prime?” by shouting back the word, “No!” at Bob Dylan like the response to the call of a Born Again revival or the Chatimah that concludes and seals a Jewish blessing.

As a weatherman or Robert Bresson aren’t needed to know that THE WIND BLOWETH WHERE IT LISTETH are only alternatives for the words A MAN ESCAPED, the songs break free from the prison of the past “like a bullet of light,” like a prism of a vast “rosy-fingered dawn” [9] sounding like

the cutting edge of life […] polar bears crossing Arctic ice pans […] like a herd of musk ox in full flight […] like male walruses diving to the bottom of the sea […] like fumaroles smoking on the slopes of Mt. Katmai […] like the wild turkey walking through the deep, soft forest […] like beavers chewing trees in an Appalachian marsh […] like an oyster fungus growing on an aspen trunk […] like a mule deer wandering a montane of the Sierra Nevada […] like prairie dogs kissing […] like witchgrass tumbling or a river meandering […] like manatees munching seaweed at Cape Sable […] like coatimundis moving in packs across the face of Arkansas? [10]

At yet at other times they sounded like what Richard Preston anticipated in “each occurrence of an apparently-ordered string in pi, such as the words ‘Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,’” such as the sermon on the mount reflected in broken glass, such as

A guide to the pawnshops of Lubbock. The book about the sea which James Joyce supposedly declared he would write after he finished “Finnegans Wake.” The collected transcripts of “The Tonight Show” rendered into Etruscan. “Knowledge of All Existing Things,” by Ahmes the Egyptian scribe. [11]

From Brooklyn to Babylon we heard Bob re-arrange his aces backed with eighth notes and give them all another aim. We heard the “cry to the end of time” [12] redeeming each song through NIGHT AND FOG as its own “complete unknown.” We sat by Watchin’ The River Flow and hearing the sad babbling Brook Benton singing that “it’s raining all over the world.”

We wandered the rubbled streets, heard the songs anew, outside of melodic order yet recognizable as “pretty maids in a row all lined up.” We were reminded that love feels like remembering a timeless place, like recognizing something from the before end after even when no one remembers us there. Bob Dylan “came along in a time of strife” to complete unknown numbers of unlived meaningless lies. As I sat there, in my parents’ basement, in the palace of the parking lot of me, left holding the LCBO bag, “drinking red whiskey like it was sadness medicine,” Bob Dylan alchemized the Rolling Stones’ Silver and Gold into “what man cannot hold” until I could finally shudder over those Gaslight Café Reorderings and accept that “memory needs to be healed not destroyed.” [13]

This is the “strong foundation” Dylan consecrates for we unborn grandsons of a generation brought to ruin by Altamont’s progress accident. With “nothing but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me” he echo and offer waves a clearing “back and forth in rhyme” that allows us to repeat the Motorpsycho Nightmare of the 20^th century, to repeat that selfsame summer of love without The Hells Angels this time, to be THE WAY WE WERE, to be still In the Summertime with “the first real friends I had,” where “you can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way” and so we must learn to repeat the past, but differently.

Like his alter-ego Jack Fate, Dylan arrives and re-arrives shot-reverse shot, his voice Ragged and Dirty but still pure enough to advise us that, “It’s a hard road. It’s a long and narrow way”; and to “stay on the road, follow the highway sign” because “somewhere down the road someday” we all must see “the rising sun” return to its eternal home. That home across the road where “such stuff as dreams are made on[14]“; 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.” [15]

Dylan knows “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 Mannlicher-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” [16] required to say much of anything After the Catastrophe. And yet, miraculous as someone who “died and was dead” being brought back to life, “though they killed six million” With God On Our Side in the Second World War, Dylan can recognize the miscalculations and “turn the dynamic around architecturally in a second[17]” by looking forward, back, and parallaxed, yet Temporarily Like Achilles into those Summer Days when Time Passes Slowly because we’re lost in a dream of being In The Garden again. Dylan thus pays for our sins by enumerating Every Grain of Sand, the same penalty James Joyce paid when “starting out past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay” [18] on his Royce map only to end up “a lone a lost a last a loved a long the” road to MARIENBAD by way of Mauthausen all over again.

You can manufacture faith out of nothing and there are an infinite number of patterns and lines that connect from key to key - all deceptively simple. You gain power with the least amount of effort, trust that the listeners make their own connections, and it’s very seldom that they don’t. Miscalculations can also cause no serious harm. As long as you recognize it, you can turn the dynamic around architecturally in a second.

As ghosts live on in arrearview mirrors, Dylan, whose “heart is not weary, it’s light and its free” arrives just in time to tell us, “You will not die” after a fan threw a crucifix on the not-so hallowed grounds of the San Diego Sports Arena. Looking backwards and forwards from the millenarian Vineyard, Dylan remembered his 22yo self-singing that the times could change; older then, but younger by 1978, he remembered to accept the Changing of the Guard; by the turn of the millennium, Dylan recollected the core of Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason, the perception 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, devised 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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