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christopher rollason write:
'the valley of dry bone dreams' For some reason, this seems to hark back to Jewish mythology for me. Isn't there a place called Sheol where all was dust and dry bones? Of course, it's a vision of the Underworld...or the world of Death.
jh writes:
We read of the "valley of dry bone dreams" at Ezekiel 37:1-14. I believe the "dry bones" symbolize a state of spiritual lifelessness, (as opposed the dead carcase which would rest in Sheol: the grave.) I think many interpret this chapter as prophecy of bodily resurrection at the end of days, but I personally think it addresses spiritually dead souls walking upon the earth in lively but temporal flesh & in need of regeneration. An excerpt from the opening of the chapter follows:
"The hand of the LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley, which was full of bones. And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry. And He said unto me, "Son of man, can these dry bones live?" And I answered, "O Lord GOD, Thou knowest." And again He said unto me, "Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, 'O ye dry bones, hear the word of the LORD.'"
The dialogue continues on. Highly recommended reading. -jh
Some thoughts on 'Dignity'.
'Dignity' is, I believe, a fine and important song, which is given special prominence as the only 'new' song on Greatest Hits III, and then again on 'Unplugged' (although, according to the sleevenotes to the latter album, it was actually written in 1989 and is therefore from the 'Oh Mercy' period).
One of the places Dignity is sought is in 'every masterpiece of literature', and one literary masterpiece with which the song has been linked - by Rob Zorn - is T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land'. Eliot's poem famously abounds with images of cultural chaos and fragmentation ('empty cisterns and exhausted wells', 'this decayed hole among the mountains'), and ends with the sharp vignette of the Fisher King: 'I sat upon the shore/Fishing, with the arid plain behind me'. Indeed in many ways the dream landscape of 'Dignity' seems a veritable wasteland - 'chilly wind sharp as a razor blade', 'down where the vultures feed', 'the valley of dry bone dreams', 'the border towns of despair' (John Henry has connected the 'hollow man' image with another apocalyptic poem by Eliot, 'The Hollow Men'). The wasteland aspect suggests a further possibility. The narrator seems to me to be a manifestation of an archetype, namely the Seeker (as too the Jokerman is). It is curious here that in the Who's song 'The Seeker' (1970?), the searcher of the title says 'I asked Bob Dylan'!! ('they call me the seeker/I've been searching low and high' - cf. 'Dignity', 'searching high, searching low').
In this context of searching, the search for Dignity could actually be a version of the search for the Holy Grail. As in that medieval/Arthurian quest, Dylan's seeker knows he is one of many in the search. Some of the fellow-seekers he describes: the fat man, the thin man, the hollow man and the rest. Others of them he meets on the road: these are, at least, people who claim some knowledge experience of Dignity (Mary Lou, Prince Philip). In the Grail myth - the versions vary - the chalice is revealed, either to one knight only (the Grail Knight, or Parsifal), or, at best, to a select few (in Sir Thomas Malory's version, to three knights - Perceval, Bors and Galahad - of whom Galahad alone is seen as the Grail Knight per se). Will Dylan's seeker ever find Dignity? Is he one of the chosen few, or not?
It is curious that in this song Dylan uses the time-honoured literary
technique of personification (treatment of an abstract concept as a
person) - a device which recalls the medieval morality plays or
eighteenth-century English poetry (a period from which Dylan does
quote Alexander Pope, in 'Jokerman': 'Fools rush in where angels fear
to tread'). Dignity at first appears to be a person ('they say Dignity
was the first to leave', 'have you seen Dignity?'), but by the end the
seeker seems persuaded that it is nothing so tangible or concrete.
Dignity is certainly _not_ an image:
'Someone showed me a picture and I just laughed:
Dignity never been photographed'.
Dylan here seems, as in 'TV Talkin' Song', to be rejecting the late C20 tyranny of the image, and suggesting that, whatever the visual media may try to tell us, truth is _not_ to be found on the surface. Dignity is surely not a mere abstraction either: the Englishman may not find it 'within', but perhaps his stiff-upper-lip attitude ('bites the bullet') was the wrong path anyway. One can also discount Prince Philip's claim to have been 'abused' by Dignity - whoever the prince is, be he the real dweller in Buckingham Palace or not, he must be one of those seekers who have not understood Dignity's true nature, and who will therefore, like Lancelot or Gawain in Malory, never find the Grail. In the end, is Dignity not - as the Sufi mystics would say - hidden within the heart?
By the end, the narrator has traversed the length and breadth of the wasteland - a territory which may extend over the whole earth. He has been to the 'land of the midnight sun' and found no illumination; experienced wealth and poverty ('the red' and 'the black') and met the enlightened and the secular (heard 'the tongues of angels and the tongues of men'), both those who claim to be saved and those content to be damned (the sons of darkness and light).
If Dignity exists at all - if the Grail is ever to be found - it may be at the moment when the song ends. The seeker may at first sight appear desperate ('so many roads', 'so many dead ends'); but perhaps he is at last walking down the road which will, as in 'Blowin' in the Wind', make him 'a man', a truly realized human being of whatever gender. He may himself now be the 'blind man breakin' out of a trance', at last managing to decipher the 'note somebody wrote about Dignity' - able to see beyond the 'blackheart wind', to get out of the dark Calvinist world of 'Man in the Long Black Coat' where 'not even a note' is left in explanation of anything.
We leave the seeker standing 'at the edge of the lake'. Here as in 'Lay Down Your Weary Tune' or 'In the Summertime', an expanse of water conceals a revelation. The lake image connects once again with the Grail and Arthurian themes. It was by a lakeside that the dying King Arthur awaited the boat that was to bear him to the magic realm of Avalon, and the lake of Glastonbury, England (today disappeared) was believed to be the lake of Avalon itself. The legend says Joseph of Arimathea brought the Holy Grail to Glastonbury, and now at last, after all the 'dead ends', it will not be long before Dylan's quester finds the grail of dignity. 'What it's gonna take' to find it is, I suggest, integrity: dignity is that truth of the heart, that fidelity to one's own potential, one's own inner being which Dylan spoke of long ago, in 'To Ramona':
'Everything passes, everything changes - just do what you think you should do'.
Chris Rollason
Any ideas, please email me!
Christopher Rollason
Metz, France
home: [email protected]
work: [email protected]
'but would not change my free thoughts for a throne' (Byron)
Christopher Rollason wrote:
Some thoughts on 'Dignity'.
'Dignity' is, I believe, a fine and important song, which is given special prominence as the only 'new' song on Greatest Hits III, and then again on 'Unplugged' (although, according to the sleevenotes to the latter album, it was actually written in 1989 and is therefore from the 'Oh Mercy' period).
One of the places Dignity is sought is in 'every masterpiece of literature', and one literary masterpiece with which the song has been linked - by Rob Zorn - is T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land'. Eliot's poem famously abounds with images of cultural chaos and fragmentation ('empty cisterns and exhausted wells', 'this decayed hole among the mountains'), and ends with the sharp vignette of the Fisher King: 'I sat upon the shore/Fishing, with the arid plain behind me'. Indeed in many ways the dream landscape of 'Dignity' seems a veritable wasteland - 'chilly wind sharp as a razor blade', 'down where the vultures feed', 'the valley of dry bone dreams', 'the border towns of despair' (John Henry has connected the 'hollow man' image with another apocalyptic poem by Eliot, 'The Hollow Men'). The wasteland aspect suggests a further possibility. The narrator seems to me to be a manifestation of an archetype, namely the Seeker (as too the Jokerman is). It is curious here that in the Who's song 'The Seeker' (1970?), the searcher of the title says 'I asked Bob Dylan'!! ('they call me the seeker/I've been searching low and high' - cf. 'Dignity', 'searching high, searching low').
In this context of searching, the search for Dignity could actually be a version of the search for the Holy Grail. As in that medieval/Arthurian quest, Dylan's seeker knows he is one of many in the search. Some of the fellow-seekers he describes: the fat man, the thin man, the hollow man and the rest. Others of them he meets on the road: these are, at least, people who claim some knowledge experience of Dignity (Mary Lou, Prince Philip). In the Grail myth - the versions vary - the chalice is revealed, either to one knight only (the Grail Knight, or Parsifal), or, at best, to a select few (in Sir Thomas Malory's version, to three knights - Perceval, Bors and Galahad - of whom Galahad alone is seen as the Grail Knight per se). Will Dylan's seeker ever find Dignity? Is he one of the chosen few, or not?
It is curious that in this song Dylan uses the time-honoured literary
technique of personification (treatment of an abstract concept as a
person) - a device which recalls the medieval morality plays or
eighteenth-century English poetry (a period from which Dylan does
quote Alexander Pope, in 'Jokerman': 'Fools rush in where angels fear
to tread'). Dignity at first appears to be a person ('they say Dignity
was the first to leave', 'have you seen Dignity?'), but by the end the
seeker seems persuaded that it is nothing so tangible or concrete.
Dignity is certainly _not_ an image:
'Someone showed me a picture and I just laughed:
Dignity never been photographed'.
Dylan here seems, as in 'TV Talkin' Song', to be rejecting the late C20 tyranny of the image, and suggesting that, whatever the visual media may try to tell us, truth is _not_ to be found on the surface. Dignity is surely not a mere abstraction either: the Englishman may not find it 'within', but perhaps his stiff-upper-lip attitude ('bites the bullet') was the wrong path anyway. One can also discount Prince Philip's claim to have been 'abused' by Dignity - whoever the prince is, be he the real dweller in Buckingham Palace or not, he must be one of those seekers who have not understood Dignity's true nature, and who will therefore, like Lancelot or Gawain in Malory, never find the Grail. In the end, is Dignity not - as the Sufi mystics would say - hidden within the heart?
By the end, the narrator has traversed the length and breadth of the wasteland - a territory which may extend over the whole earth. He has been to the 'land of the midnight sun' and found no illumination; experienced wealth and poverty ('the red' and 'the black') and met the enlightened and the secular (heard 'the tongues of angels and the tongues of men'), both those who claim to be saved and those content to be damned (the sons of darkness and light).
If Dignity exists at all - if the Grail is ever to be found - it may be at the moment when the song ends. The seeker may at first sight appear desperate ('so many roads', 'so many dead ends'); but perhaps he is at last walking down the road which will, as in 'Blowin' in the Wind', make him 'a man', a truly realized human being of whatever gender. He may himself now be the 'blind man breakin' out of a trance', at last managing to decipher the 'note somebody wrote about Dignity' - able to see beyond the 'blackheart wind', to get out of the dark Calvinist world of 'Man in the Long Black Coat' where 'not even a note' is left in explanation of anything.
We leave the seeker standing 'at the edge of the lake'. Here as in 'Lay Down Your Weary Tune' or 'In the Summertime', an expanse of water conceals a revelation. The lake image connects once again with the Grail and Arthurian themes. It was by a lakeside that the dying King Arthur awaited the boat that was to bear him to the magic realm of Avalon, and the lake of Glastonbury, England (today disappeared) was believed to be the lake of Avalon itself. The legend says Joseph of Arimathea brought the Holy Grail to Glastonbury, and now at last, after all the 'dead ends', it will not be long before Dylan's quester finds the grail of dignity. 'What it's gonna take' to find it is, I suggest, integrity: dignity is that truth of the heart, that fidelity to one's own potential, one's own inner being which Dylan spoke of long ago, in 'To Ramona':
'Everything passes, everything changes -
just do what you think you should do'.
Chris Rollason
Any ideas, please email me!
Metz, France
home: [email protected]
work: [email protected]
'but would not change my free thoughts for a throne' (Byron)
Martin Grossman wrote:
I don't know if it's exactly "Dylanesque" or not, but I always liked "Marriage," which contains the lines: "Should I get married/Should I be good?/Astound the girl next store/With my velvet cape, my Faustus hood" -- something like that.
Marriage - Gregory Corso, from the 1960 New Directions
collection called The Happy Birthday of Death
nate responded (and incuded the text of the poem):
Should I get married? Should I be good? Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustus hood? Don't take her to movies but cemeteries tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries and she going just so far and I understanding why not getting angry saying You must feel! It's beautiful to feel! Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky -- When she introduces me to her parents back straightened, hair finally combed, strangled by a tie, should I sit knees together on their 3rd degree sofa and not ask Where's the bathroom? How else to feel other than I am, often thinking Flash Gordon soap -- O how terrible it must be for a young man seated before a family and the family thinking We never saw him before! He wants our Mary Lou! *1 After tea and homemade cookies they ask What do you do for a living? Should I tell them? Would they like me then? Say All right get married, we're losing a daughter but we're gaining a son -- And then should I ask Where's the bathroom? O God, and the wedding! All her family and her friends and only a handful of mine all scroungy and bearded just waiting to get at the drinks and food -- And the priest! he looking at me as if I masterbated asking me Do you take this woman for your lawful wedded wife? And I trembling what to say say Pie Glue! I kiss the bride all those corny men slapping me on the back She's all yours, boy! Ha-ha-ha! And in their eyes you could see some obscene honeymoon going on -- Then all that absurd rice and clanky cans and shoes Niagara Falls! Hordes of us! Husbands! Wives! Flowers! Chocolates! All streaming into cozy hotels All going to do the same thing tonight The indifferent clerk he knowing what was going to happen The lobby zombies they knowing what The whistling elevator man he knowing The winking bellboy knowing Everybody knowing! I'd almost be inclined not to do anything! Stay up all night! Stare that hotel clerk in the eye! Screaming: I deny honeymoon! I deny honeymoon! running rampant into those almost climactic suites yelling Radio belly! Cat shovel! O I'd live in Niagara forever! in a dark cave beneath the Falls I'd sit there the Mad Honeymooner devising ways to break marriages, a scourge of bigamy a saint of divorce -- But I should get married I should be good How nice it'd be to come home to her and sit by the fireplace and she in the kitchen aproned young and lovely wanting my baby and so happy about me she burns the roast beef and comes crying to me and I get up from my big papa chair saying Christmas teeth! Radiant brains! Apple deaf! God what a husband I'd make! Yes, I should get married! So much to do! like sneaking into Mr Jones' house late at night *2 and cover his golf clubs with 1920 Norwegian books Like hanging a picture of Rimbaud on the lawnmower *3 like pasting Tannu Tuva postage stamps all over the picket fence like when Mrs Kindhead comes to collect for the Community Chest grab her and tell her There are unfavorable omens in the sky! *4 And when the mayor comes to get my vote tell him When are you going to stop people killing the whales! And when the milkman comes leave him a note in the bottle Penguin dust, bring me penguin dust, I want penguin dust -- Yet if I should get married and it's Connecticut and snow and she gives birth to a child and I am sleepless, worn, up for nights, head bowed against a quiet window, the past behind me, finding myself in the most common of situations a trembling man knowledged with responsibility not twig-smear nor Roman coin soup -- O what would that be like! Surely I'd give it for a nipple a rubber Tacitus For a rattle a bag of broken Bach records Tack Della Francesca all over its crib Sew the Greek alphabet on its crib And build for its playpen a roofless Parthenon No, I doubt I'd be that kind of father not rural not snow no quiet window but hot smelly tight New York City seven flights up, roaches and rats in the walls a fat Reichian wife screeching over potatoes Get a job! And five nose running brats in love with Batman And neighbors all toothless and dry haired like those hag masses of the 18th century all wanting to come in and watch TV The Landlord wants his rent Grocery store Blue Cross Gas & Electric Knight of Columbus Impossible to lie back and dream Telephone snow, ghost parking -- No! I should not get married I should never get married! But - imagine If I were married to a beautiful sophisticated woman tall and pale wearing an elegant black dress and long black gloves holding a cigarette holder in one hand and a highball in the other and we lived high up in a penthouse with a huge window from which we could see all of New York and ever farther on clearer days No, can't imagine myself married to that pleasant prison dream -- O but what about love? I forget love not that I am incapable of love it's just that I see love as odd as wearing shoes -- I never wanted tmarry a girl who was like my mother And Ingrid Bergman was always impossible And there's maybe a girl now but she's already married, And I dont like men and -- but there's got to be somebody! Because what if I'm 60 years old and not married, all alone in a furnished room with pee stains on my underwear and everybody else is married! All the universe married but me! Ah, yet well I know that were a woman possible as I am possible then marriage would be possible -- Like SHE in her lonely alien gaud waiting for her Egyptian lover so I wait -- bereft of 2,000 years and the bath of life. *1 note that Corso also brings up the wedding of Mary Lou as Dylan will much later in Dignity.... *2, *3 recognize? *4 vaguely like the fortune telling lady in Desolation Row?
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