NOT DEAD YET

Wondering why Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize? Perhaps this is the reason:

Darkness at the break of noon

Shadows even the silver spoon

The handmade blade, the child's balloon

Eclipses both the sun and moon

To understand you know too soon, there is no sense in trying

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn

Suicide remarks are torn

From the fool's gold mouthpiece the hollow horn

Plays wasted words proves to warn

That he not busy being born is busy dying

Temptation's page flies out the door

You follow, find yourself at war

Watch waterfalls of pity roar

You feel to moan but unlike before

You discover that you'd just be one more person crying

So don't fear if you hear

A foreign sound to your ear

It's alright, Ma, I'm only sighing

As some warn victory, some downfall

Private reasons great or small

Can be seen in the eyes of those that call

To make all that should be killed to crawl

While others say don't hate nothing at all, except hatred

Disillusioned words like bullets bark

As human gods aim for their mark

Made everything from toy guns that spark

To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark

It's easy to see without looking too far that not much is really sacred

Our preachers preach of evil fates

Teachers teach that knowledge waits

Can lead to hundred-dollar plates

Goodness hides behind its gates

But even the President of the United States

Sometimes must have to stand naked

An' all the rules of the road have been lodged

It's only people's games that you got to dodge

And it's alright, Ma, I can make it

Advertising signs that con you

Into thinking you're the one

That can do what's never been done

That can win what's never been won

Meantime life outside goes on all around you

You lose yourself, you reappear

You suddenly find you got nothing to fear

Alone you stand with nobody near

When a trembling distant voice, unclear

Startles your sleeping ears to hear

That somebody thinks they really found you

A question in your nerves is lit

Yet you know there is no answer fit

To satisfy insure you not to quit

To keep it in your mind and not forget

That it is not he or she or them or it that you belong to

Although the masters make the rules

For the wise men and the fools

I got nothing, Ma, to live up to

For them that must obey authority

That they do not respect in any degree

Who despise their jobs, their destinies

Speak jealously of them that are free

Do what they do just to be

Nothing more than something they invest in

While some on principles baptized

To strict party platform ties

Social clubs in drag disguise

Outsiders they can freely criticize

Tell nothing except who to idolize and say, "God bless him"

While one who sings with his tongue on fire

Gargles in the rat race choir

Bent out of shape from society's pliers

Cares not to come up any higher

But rather get you down in the hole that he's in

But I mean no harm nor put fault

On anyone that lives in a vault

But it's alright, Ma, if I can't please him

Old lady judges watch people in pairs

Limited in sex, they dare

To push fake morals, insult and stare

While money doesn't talk, it swears

Obscenity, who really cares propaganda, all is phony

While them that defend what they cannot see

With a killer's pride, security

It blows the minds most bitterly

For them that think death's honesty

Won't fall upon them naturally

Life sometimes must get lonely

My eyes collide head-on with stuffed graveyards

False goals, I scuff at pettiness which plays so rough

Walk upside-down inside handcuffs

Kick my legs to crash it off

Say, "Okay, I have had enough, what else can you show me?"

And if my thought dreams could be seen

They'd probably put my head in a guillotine

But it's alright, Ma, it's life, and life only.

Obscenity, who really cares propaganda, all is phony. That line alone is worth a Nobel Prize.

Poetry I think is what other people make of it. But with Dylan it is often the dry, bitter quality of his voice that supplies the dimension that written/narrated poetry cannot always reach. Not for a moment am I suggesting that his work doesn’t stand up to being read, rather than performed but it doesn’t  have to rely on meter, assonance and consonance that say Auden or Heaney must do to achieve the same impact. Do we need the tunes? Mr Tambourine Man is a lovely tune and the lyrics are exceptional too but there is a guy whose name I can’t remember, who takes every interview opportunity he can find to say, ‘Dylan never wrote a tune in his life’.

Me, I couldn’t care less. He is and was a sponge, soaking up tunes, structure, devices that could be used to express himself. Girl from North Country is note for note the same as Scarborough Fair: no acknowledgement of course. Boots of Spanish Leather, probably my single all-time favourite Dylan song is a note for note copy of a song he heard Martin Carthy sing around the time of his visit to London in 1962, called Black Jack Davey. But better: better phrasing: better lyrically; more melodic [its faster] and quite possibly despite Carthy’s outstanding vocal talents, deeper and sadder . . . Lord Franklin, another song from Carthy’s repertoire became The Times They Are A’Changin’. Again, no acknowledgement. After England, Carthy and the English folk scene he went home and composed the second half of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan: Masters of War, with its Brendan Behan structure that he probably got from seeing the Clancy Brothers in London; Hard Rain, from possibly, probably, Louis Killen, an older traditional practitioner around the clubs at that time.

One more thing: Americans are not allowed to criticise America, not even covertly and I wonder, in fact I always wondered if the reason he gave up singing protest songs was not that there were other things in life he needed to explore, Watch Towers, etc but that he had taken protest to the edge of all-out criticism of his country. In some ways it became a discipline, show not tell rather than naming names but as it happened, it was a brilliant career move.

I don’t take much interest in him now. He is probably still writing great stuff, more apposite for his generation. The fault is all mine and one of these days I intend to correct it.

So, I am glad we are celebrating his achievements this weekend, not his death as we seem to have been doing with so many others this year.