Bob Dylan and the ageing of the West

Contemporary Review, Winter, 2006 by Michael Karwowski

Another difference between the two periods might also be considered characteristic of youth and age, respectively. For the first involved Dylan's invention of a completely new cultural medium, namely rock music, a marriage between poetical lyrics and that music of the rebellious young, rock 'n' roll. In contrast, the second involves a style that is a synthesis of the whole of American popular music from its earliest beginnings: just as the old are said to be more in tune with the distant past than with what happened the day before! This new expression even incorporates songs that are clearly influenced by the Great American Songbook favoured by crooners such as Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. It's as if the more mature Dylan is saying that there is nothing that cannot now be conscripted to his purpose. As he writes in Honest With Me on Love and Theft:

    I'm here to create the new imperial empire
    I'm going to do whatever circumstances require.

So what is the purpose of Bob Dylan's creative renaissance? It is nothing less than to reinterpret the perennial philosophy of mysticism in twenty-first-century terms, to bear witness to the fact that mysticism is not what the dictionary says it is, something related to a sacredly obscure attempt to achieve elevated religious feeling or ecstasy, but a philosophy that sets out to comprehend and explain the nature of reality as it relates to man. In this endeavour, Dylan is perfectly in tune with one of history's most famous mystics, St John of the Cross, who counselled against being distracted from the mystic's true purpose by any transfiguring experiences that might occur along the way.

The way in question is the road of truth, as encapsulated in Ain't Talkin':

    I practice a faith that's been long abandoned
    Ain't no altars on this long and lonesome road.

The word 'faith' here has absolutely nothing to do with religious belief, hence 'no altars'. It relates exclusively to confidence, as in having faith in someone. In terms of the perennial philosophy, this 'someone' is the spirit of truth, which reveals the nature of reality and, hence, the meaning of life, since we cannot know why the world is, without first knowing what it is. As Dylan sings in Spirit on the Water on Modern Times:

    Life without you
    Doesn't mean a thing to me.

Again, on the same album, in The Levee's Gonna Break:

    When I'm with you, I forget I was ever blue
    Without you there's no meaning in anything I do

Bob Dylan's commitment to truth and, hence, to his chosen role as an artist in the true sense of that word, runs throughout his work from 1962's Blowin' in the Wind onwards. But there is no doubt that he lost his way in the 1980s and 90s, his vengeful born-again Christianity of the early '80s being a case in point. Then, three episodes straddling the change of millennium signalled a reformation that led to a renaissance.

The first was the musical return-to-form of 1997's Time Out of Mind, which begins with an eternal triangle of an original kind, Love Sick, in which Dylan reveals a profound world-weariness, a parallel fear of returning to an unconditional commitment to truth, and yet a longing for that return, a triple love-sickness.