The nature of aging, time, and creativity has been on my mind a good deal lately. When the 25-year-old Bob Dylan was interviewed concerning his 1966 masterwork “Visions of Johanna,” he claimed that he wanted each line to be the beginning of a new composition. This statement has always intrigued me. Think about how “Sooner or later foul is fair, fair is foul to the man the gods will ruin” from the Chorus from the 5th century BCE’s Antigone became the core theme for Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The following lines from Macbeth’s act 5 soliloquy: “[Life] is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing” are essential. This provided the spark for William Faulkner to pen his early 20th century masterpiece The Sound and the Fury (a profound meditation on interwovenness of past, present and future). This novel’s “…until someday in very disgust he risks everything on a single blind turn of a card” became the kernel for Paul Auster’s late 20th century’s The Music of Chance. I would like to suggest that genius and creativity do not occur in a vacuum. Art and literature, like all things, have conversations with each other, especially through time. This is an example of how the ancient world is still very much a part of our present literary framework.
In “Ballad of a Thin Man,” Dylan introduced us to ‘Mr. Jones’ (1960’s look at suburbia). This sparked David Byrne from The Talking Heads to compose “Mr. Jones,” a 1980’s commentary on suburbia. These inspired Adam Duritz from The Counting Crows to speak about the new “Mr. Jones” as he saw him in the 1990’s. Once again, we see that art never exists in a vacuum, borrowing is there for inspiration. Folk Music is entirely centered around the notion that nothing about human beings is new; rather, our pain, our joy, our situations, and our intellect are eternal. Folk music’s tradition, one at least 600 years old, allows / demands the singer-songwriter connect the past to the present. Dylan took this musical form, borrowed from everything and everywhere and told specifically “topical” stories in a way that “felt” ancient, timeless.
In my Dylan class, students must pick an essay from several possibilities that examines the impact he has had across many disciplines. Many students want to take a closer look at borrowing because they think it has a lot in common with the nature of sampling. I suggest that borrowing has little in common with sampling, but this is not the place to debate the difference. I would like to provide a close reading of Bob Dylan’s “Dignity” (my comments are inspired by reading Timothy Hampton’s book on Dylan’s poetics) to see how he combined several literary sources and composed something new and inspired. Then I will illustrate how the Nigerian Irish rap artist and poet, FeliSpeaks, borrowed “Dignity,” updated the emotional quality of Dylan’s poem to provide her own creative piece.
Just as Shakespeare is meant to be seen, Bob Dylan’s poems are meant to be accompanied with music; however, I think the reading of “Dignity – complete lyrics” illustrates that many of his creations come to life as pure poetry. Dylan’s Private Eye (I) is a noirish one seeking in all kinds of places the woman “Dignity” just as he is seeking dignity as such. Dylan’s work feels deep and dense, often what is meant by the term Dylanesque—achieved through mastery of art of combination, collage. Dylan uses the relationship between now and future on one hand and archaic, premodern, the quaint on the other.
“I” in “Dignity” is a Sam Spade character looking in Los Angeles at night for a person or something titled Dignity. Our protagonist moves from a tattoo parlor to a fancy party, a cheap bar, to an abandoned apartment, “Asking cops wherever I go, ‘Have you seen Dignity’.” Leaving Dignity vague provides intrigue since it combines a seedy crime story with a philosophical quest (a combination of high and low culture). Our seeker private eye (I) moves through a series of misadventures (“So many dead ends / I’m at the edge of a lake”). “Fat man lookin’ in a blade of steel / Thin man lookin at his last meal / Hollow Man lookin’ in a cotton field for Dignity” speaks to T.S. Eliot. “Wise man lookin’ at a blade of grass” alludes to Walt Whitman. “I heard the tongues of angels and tongues of men / Wasn’t any difference to me” issues in St. Paul, and Book of Ezekiel is quoted in the lines: “I went into red, went into black / Into the valley of dry bone dreams.”
This is how the feeling of density is created. Dylan’s “citations” are embedded in the fabric of the songs, not a part of the plot. It matters not if the protagonist has read Eliot; rather, it suggests that the quest for Dignity is not just a mystery to tell, which is what the narrator thinks. Instead, it is also a quest for meaning in a meaningless world. Whitman and St. Paul are also looking for Dignity. “I heard the tongues of angels and tongues of men / Wasn’t any difference to me.” It is not essential to know that this line alludes to St. Paul’s claim in I Corinthians 13 (without charity, the voices of men and of angels are nothing but clanging gongs) because it has the effect of, “I’ve heard it all.” This allows us to “sense” that they come from somewhere, even if we do not know specifically. By making normal phrasing strange, it provides a signature for Bob Dylan’s presence. This is also Dylanesque.
This masterwork borrows from a great many sources, but he clearly makes it his own through collage. I hope I provided you a few things to meditate on: the nature of creativity, the co-mingling of past, present, and future, the nature of “borrowing,” and why Bob Dylan earned his Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016.
