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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Dylan and Zimmerman10/03/2005 00:47:50In the wake of the PBS special on his life that I didn't happen to see, there was this article I came across in a Jewish publication that came out about Bob Dylan's spiritual life. It portrays the man's strange wandering through religious claims and expressions and language, just barely intelligible to the author. Really the thing, what it suggests, is merciful beyond belief about the man, that he falls into the American prophet-bard tradition of Whitman. In the sense that all the trauma of denomination that this country is obsessed by means nothing to him, who is pleased to go about saying he is a Jew and then a Christian and then a Jew as if the names mean nothing and everything at once. With his life he is a plea for sense, madness, and mere singing, for that is the job of people rather than putting words in the mouth of God. There are good songs in gospel so he sang it, and then also in Lubavitch too. And like Whitman of course, Dylan has been no stranger to deification by his fans. In the Varieties, James writes about the religious movements that formed around the poet and whatever ways of life they could extract from his poetry. Dylan's been spending his life lately writing whole books about why he isn't what they say he is. And then of course that too is part of the prophet's mold. You're not a prophet unless you spend as much time proving that you're not one as demonstrating that you are one. That's a beautiful recursive definition, the master private joke among those whose own self is their art. Jesus knew it too. As a bit of everything myself, Dylan is a nice thing to know. It is possible to say anything, to claim anything... the strangest paradox is that saying a paradox does not make the world explode, it is ambivalent to logic. You can be a Jew or a Sunni or a this or a that and it doesn't really change what the person is or what God is or is not. Which is why the best thing to do is sing. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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