Bob Dylan and the ageing of the West

Contemporary Review, Winter, 2006 by Michael Karwowski

    I'll say this, I don't give a damn about your dreams.

To give way to the desire for altruism is to give way to the desire for power--since altruism bears no relationship to truth--and hence to be as lost in illusion as the person you are trying to save:

    'Don't reach out for me', she said
    'Can't you see I'm drownin', too?'
    (High Water)
    Try to make things better for someone, sometimes
    You just end up making it a thousand times worse
    (Sugar Baby--Love and Theft)

The artistic or mystical attitude to suffering is that it must be accepted as a corollary to freedom from illusion:

    Well, my sense of humanity has gone down the drain
    Behind every beautiful thing there's been some kind of pain
    (Dirt Road Blues--Time Out of Mind)

Similarly, the idea of vicarious sacrifice on mankind's behalf--a central tenet of established religion--is another illusion. Where the imprisonment in illusion is concerned, each individual must free himself from the attachment to his desires for power by himself. That's where free will comes in. There is no other, easier, way.

    Gon' walk down that dirt road until my eyes begin to bleed
    'Til there's nothing left to see, 'til the chains have been
    shattered and I've been freed.
    (Dirt Road Blues)

In contrast to the road of truth, Dylan characterises the straight and narrow way of established religion as a 'railway line' or 'train', precisely because it is viewed as an easy alternative--'the easy chair' of You Ain't Goin' Nowhere on 1975's The Basement Tapes--to the vocation of the artist or mystic, who trudges his weary way along his road. Dylan, however, sees established religion as merely another illusion, with the inevitably destructive consequences of illusion, which he characterises in terms of 'rain', as in A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall on 1963's The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan album, or:

    The midnight rain follows the train
    We all wear the same thorny crown

    (When the Deal Goes Down--Modern Times)

The artist or mystic's vocation need not be all doom and gloom, however. Witnessing the bloody mess that is the consequence of the world's entrapment in illusion from the detached point of view of truth, it's also possible to draw attention to its absurdities with humour.

In this respect, while the title of Dylan's latest album, Modern Times, seems a misnomer, since the songs are so heavily influenced by old traditions of American popular music, it actually fits perfectly when we realise that it echoes Charlie Chaplin's famous film, which celebrated its 70th anniversary in 2006 and visualises absurdity in a modern, mechanistic setting, precisely Dylan's intention in the album.

In line with Charlie Chaplin or, indeed, the Zen Buddhists or the Theatre of the Absurd, Dylan's last two albums are full of such humour; indeed, it is the most memorable characteristic of many of the songs. Harmonising with the perennial philosophy, this playfulness often works by turning accepted standards onto their head, such as in Floater (Too Much to Ask):