Dylan's Visions of Sin

by Christopher Ricks

  How light at heart the song is, to be sure, and what a contrast to the context within which A. E. Housman once imagined what a relief it might be to do (and perhaps feel) nothing at all. His characteristic letter is dated Boxing Day, 1930:

  Between a Feast last night and a dinner-party this evening, I sit me down to thank you and your wife and family for their Christmas greetings and wish you all a happy New Year. Rutherford’s daughter, married to another Fellow of Trinity, died suddenly a day or two ago; the wife of the Emeritus Professor of Greek, who himself is paralysed, has cut her throat with a razor which she had bought to give her son-in-law; I have a brother and a brother-in-law both seriously ill and liable to drop dead any moment; and in short Providence has given itself up to the festivities of the season. A more cheerful piece of news is that I have just published the last book I shall ever write, and that I now mean to do nothing for ever and ever. It is one of my more serious works, so you will not read it.138

  Housman’s is a stoically doleful challenge. The playful challenge is to convey a pleasure in leisure without being too too leisurely about it all. The word “lazy” – the only everyday term hereabouts – agrees to make light of the matter, easy-coming and easy-going. (Sin? “I say, ‘Aw come on now’”.)

  Flowers on the hillside, blooming crazy

  Crickets talkin’ back and forth in rhyme

  Blue river running slow and lazy

  I could stay with you forever

  And never realize the time

  (You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go)

  “Running slow”: it is good of “slow” to be both an adjective and an adverb (The Oxford English Dictionary is no slouch in these matters), for this means that “slow” can preserve the proprieties and at the same time can keep the adjective “lazy” company. Not itself lazy, this, for all the predictable casualness by which “crazy” ushers in “lazy”. For there is plenty quietly going on: in the invoking of rhyme itself,139 and of the crickets working their little legs or wings off (for nature is not slothful, nor is the sloth); in the equable paradox of “running slow” (how slow would it have to be to no longer be running?); and in the assonance that is itself a form of staying, when “lazy” finds itself talking, three words later, with “stay with”. Laziness is prudently acknowledged and very prudently shifted: you’re not to think, my dear, that I’m the one that’s lazy, it’s the river that’s lazy. “And never realize the time”? But always realize the art, with honestly deceptive ease.

  Winterlude, waltzing along on its skating rink, likewise takes its ease, but again not selfishly, since the song is in the unbusied business of giving ease, too, not just taking it. “My little daisy” effortlessly rhymes with “Winterlude, it’s makin’ me lazy”, and the ludic trick upon which the whole song turns – the telescoping of “winter” into “interlude” – depends on the mixed feelings that we have about such compactings. Lewis Carroll took out the patent on portmanteau words: “‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy’ . . . You see, it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word.”140 On the one (iron) hand, you might be sliding one word into another because you’re a busy man, packing for your business trip, in haste and under pressure, no time for both the words in full, economy of effort in the interests of economics (Federal Express takes too long, so FedEx it) . . . Or, on the other (velvet) hand, you might be smoothly idly sliding one word into another in quite the opposite spirit, not seeing why you should be expected to go through the effort of saying both “winter” and “interlude”, given that there is an overlap of the words, one word in the other word’s lap, relax, okay?

  Either way, Dylan has a feeling for how laziness – which is how we prefer to think of sloth these days, making it lighter, less sodden – can be unlazily evoked:

  And yer train engine fire needs a new spark to catch it

  And the wood’s easy findin’ but yer lazy to fetch it

  (Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie)

  Off-hand, the off-rhyme of catch it / fetch it; you catch it, even if he couldn’t quite bring himself to fetch it. “And the wood’s easy findin’” – no excuse, really – “but yer lazy to fetch it”. Two ways of putting it, collapsed into one: You’re disinclined to fetch it / You’re too lazy to fetch it. Then we can hear the reducing of the effort down to the minimum. But you are too lazy to fetch it. Reduced to But you’re too lazy to fetch it. Further reduced, not just you’re to yer but too lazy to lazy. Can’t be bothered to say too right now, since I’m going to have to say to in just a moment. “But yer lazy to fetch it”.

  All the Tired Horses

  There is comedy in the thought that someone as up and about as Dylan might settle for what Keats called “summer-indolence”. Such comedy is in the air, even if the air is thick and heavy, in the first song on Self Portrait: All the Tired Horses. The wish to take the day off, surlily glad of the excuse of the heat (which even gets to the animals, you know), comes up against the faintly guilty acknowledgement that some activity or other does have a claim on you. The song consists of two lines of words, followed by a musing hmm sound that might be one line or two:

  All the tired horses in the sun

  How’m I s’posed to get any ridin’ done

  Hmm141

  – or rather

  hmmmmmmmm hmmmm hmm hmm-hmm

  This sequence arrives gradually from silence, and departs gradually into silence, and you hear it fourteen times. It’s that and that only. Oh, the orchestration of it varies and does some mock-pompous clowning around, but nothing changes, it’s just a matter of shifting weight while having to rest rather restlessly.

  Dylan, who believes every word of it, doesn’t sing a word of it. With endearing effrontery, he leaves it to the back-up singers – except that it doesn’t make sense to call them back-up singers in the absence of any full frontal voice of his. Dylan has not backed down exactly or backed out, but he has backed away – from the very first song on an album called, of all things, Self Portrait. Where is Dylan’s self now that we need it? But then you don’t need it. The song gets on very beautifully without him, thank you. A good Self Portrait may begin with Self Abnegation. Of a kind. Or, if you think putting it like that is too grand, the man is still on holiday – not back for this opener of a song, one that turns upon mildly cursing that the day isn’t sheer holiday.

  Not away for long, though: in the two songs that follow, Alberta and I Forgot More than You’ll Ever Know, Dylan gets some writing done (as he had hinted he would like to), though not all that much, since Alberta is a traditional song slightly adapted by him.142 Some writing done, and some singing, too, with backing from the serene women. After that, he is on his own, in Days of ’49. The women will never again on the album find themselves left frontless. Our man wouldn’t want to make a habit of such amicable sloth.

  Genial relaxation hangs about All the Tired Horses, this plain-spun plaint, in some other respects, too. Attributed to Dylan on the album, the song doesn’t make it into the Lyrics 1962–1985. Someone couldn’t be bothered, was slothered?

  And then again, with that receptiveness of leisure that may amount to creative sloth, the song cocks an ear for coincidences, or at any rate might not resent our wondering (mustn’t be heavy) about a possible coincidence or two. That word “tired”, for instance. It just happens that this is the word crucial to the musical drowsiness of The Lotos-Eaters:

  Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,

  Than tir’d eyelids upon tir’d eyes.

  Tennyson on how to pronounce “tir’d” there: “making the word neither monosyllabic nor disyllabic, but a dreamy child of the two”.143 This dreaminess in The Lotos-Eaters is from within the “Choric Song”, and there is something about song that often finds itself drawn to such relaxation in the sun. Dylan, dawdling drawlingly into “All the tired horses in the sun”, wouldn’t have to have known this; all he would have needed was to be in sympathy with its sympathies. The Oxford English Dictionary�
��s first definition of “in the sun” is “free from care or sorrow”. The phrase “in the sun” likes to close the line when figuring in a song. In The Pirates of Penzance, there is an instance within a song that finds pleasure in contemplating the leisure of another: “He loves to lie a-basking in the sun”. A good old tradition, this, for in As You Like It the three-word phrase (likewise in conclusion) had been at play in a song that happily invoked the person “Who doth ambition shun / And loves to live i’ the sun”. In Twelfth Night there is a song of which we hear before we actually hear the song itself, one woven by those who weave, “The spinsters and the knitters in the sun”. Dylan’s “All the tired horses in the sun” is interknitted with such a feeling for it all, placing and timing. A very different feeling from the energetic aggression that can be felt in It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue:

  Yonder stands your orphan with his gun

  Crying like a fire in the sun

  Marlowe staged a parade of the Seven Deadly Sins in his Doctor Faustus. And what is the first thing that Sloth wants to tell you? “I am Sloth. I was begotten on a sunny bank, where I have lain ever since.” And the last thing he wants to say? “I’ll not speak a word more for a king’s ransom.”

  A word more: perhaps in the recesses of the song’s few words there is something else that is worth a king’s ransom. Or am I alone in flirting with the thought that if we had a crossword clue, All the –––– horses (5), the word we might wish we could ink in would be King’s?144 Dylan, who loves to make play with nursery rhymes, might enjoy playing the energetic pointlessness of “All the King’s horses and all the King’s men” (pointless because How were they s’posed to get any repairs done? whereas the Dylan women are all getting the singing done) against the unenergetic pointedness of

  All the tired horses in the sun

  How’m I s’posed to get any riding done

  A good question (with no question-mark), though not exactly a question, really. A quasi-querulousness, rather, the weary aggrievance of someone who can’t muster the energy to mount an argument, let alone a horse. How’m I s’posed . . .: So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold. (To invoke the music of Browning’s A Toccata of Galuppi’s.) “How’m I s’posed . . .”: with, perhaps again, some pleasure derivable from this striking a chord, if we happen to know that “supposed” was for ages a helpful musical term, as The Oxford English Dictionary records:

  Mus. Applied to a note added or introduced below the notes of a chord, or to an upper note of a chord when used as the lower note (supposed bars) etc.

  Passivity rules? But Dylan’s words have their unobtrusive activity, as does his syntax, his articulate energy. There is no verb in the first line, as if unable to bring itself to do more than just point to, point out: “All the tired horses in the sun”. Blankly, as though a verb (for the verb is the activating part of speech) would be too much of a bustle or hassle. And then no syntactical relation between the first line, which just adduces those horses, and the second line, which is nothing but a fatigued remonstration. “How’m I s’posed to get any riding done”. I ask you. Not that you need take the trouble to answer. It is in vain for any of us to kick against the pricks – and anyway kicking would be more of an effort than I’m prepared to make, I don’t mind telling you. Forget it. But don’t forget the song, even though Lyrics 1962–1985 does.

  Self Portrait doesn’t leave it at that. For there are other occasions when the album puts us in mind of the lure of sloth, easy though queasy. Wigwam is happy to undertake its instrumental operations, its ineffable wordlessness, for three minutes, just singing over and over again “la” and “da”. If you were to complain about this, you would only come across as la-di-da. And there is Copper Kettle (attributed on the album to A. F. Beddoe), which Dylan sings with an exquisite slowness that languorously lingers in the knowledge that “sloth” is a noun from the adjective “slow”. So easy and so slow.

  Get you a copper kettle

  Get you a copper coil

  Fill it with new-made corn mash

  And never more you’ll toil

  You’ll just lay there by the juniper

  While the moon is bright

  Watch them jugs a-filling

  In the pale moonlight

  “And never more you’ll toil”. Dylan, working against the grain of his own character and disposition, has found a way of imagining this with affection – thanks to another. (Maybe Beddoe didn’t have to toil at it, but he must have had to work at it, which is how it manages to sound so effortless.) “They toil not, neither do they spin”: those are the gospel words that Keats chose as epigraph for his Ode on Indolence. Dylan isn’t the type to envy the lilies of the field, but he knows why you and I might.

  Time Passes Slowly

  Whereas the cadences of All the Tired Horses are entirely at one (vocally, musically, verbally), Time Passes Slowly sets itself to set your teeth on edge. On the page, it looks at first entirely equable in its setting, at its setting out:

  Time passes slowly up here in the mountains

  We sit beside bridges and walk beside fountains

  Catch the wild fishes that float through the stream

  Time passes slowly when you’re lost in a dream

  It never becomes a nightmare exactly, but it assuredly isn’t voiced as happily idle, a happy idyll. From the start, the song evinces the kind of contrariety that characterizes Watching the River Flow; Time Passes Slowly, too, is rhythmically and vocally bumpy, jagged, pot-holed, unsettled and unsettling, straining its musical strains, not soporific at all, at all. And more and more the song commits itself to the implications of the words that follow that first verse. “Once I had a sweetheart, she was fine and good-lookin’”. Time passes slowly; this love has passed but not the wrenched and wrenching memory of it. The rhymes refuse to stay right, and the voicing then does nothing to ameliorate this (the way of Dylan’s comedy, but then this is tragedy), rather it skewers the rhymes askew:

  Time passes slowly up here in the daylight

  We stare straight ahead and try so hard to stay right

  On the page, you are likely to glimpse the having to try so hard; in performance, you are sure to hear it, compounded vocally and musically so that it really won’t stay right. “Up here in the mountains”, from the opening, has become, here at the closing, “up here in the daylight”, which is perfectly calm, but the rhyme of “daylight” with “stay right” is tense: you have to stay cautiously with “stay” for a moment, and you have to make sure that you get “right” right when it comes to the run of the words or rather to their halting.

  Time passes slowly up here in the daylight

  We stare straight ahead and try so hard to stay right

  Like the red rose of summer that blooms in the day

  Time passes slowly and fades away

  This final verse plaits its rhymes as no previous verse had done: “daylight” “stay right” “the day” “away”. But this conclusiveness is not that of a love-knot.

  This is no love song, a no-love song. It would all feel less hopeless if things were over and done with. But. “Time passes slowly when you’re searching for love”. This entailing some sour soul-searching.

  Those three words, “Time passes slowly”, open the song, open it up. They open the first and last lines of the first and last verses, and of the second (the remaining) verse they open the last line. They are perspicuously absent from the song’s bridge. Five lines of the verses’ twelve begin with “Time passes slowly”, five times the bridge rings no changes on a different tedium of words, five of them:

  Ain’t no reason to go in a wagon to town

  Ain’t no reason to go to the fair

  Ain’t no reason to go up, ain’t no reason to go down

  Ain’t no reason to go anywhere

  This is obdurate, blockish, an evocation of a dangerous state of mind. Indifference can harden, before long, into something damnable: “accidie”, sloth, torpor. The Oxford English Diction
ary says that this is “the proper term for the 4th cardinal sin, sloth, sluggishness”, and that when its Greek origin (= non-caring-state, heedlessness) was forgotten, the Latin acidum, sour, lent its harsh flavour to the word. Not-caring: or, Ain’t no reason to go in a wagon to town, or to go to the fair, or to go up, or to go down, or to go anywhere. No go. You name it, I’ll disclaim it. Can you reason with someone who just keeps saying Ain’t no reason to? It might even vie with the vista of the child’s Why?

  “Apathy’ is a word that drifts to mind, but apathy doesn’t carry the bone-deep surrender that is the accent of accidie. “Her sin is her lifelessness”.145 Beckett could joke about “a new lease of apathy”; you can’t pull that off with accidie, the extremity of not-caring that has been characterized as “an acquiescence in discouragement which reaches the utmost of sadness when it ceases to be regretful”.146

  The lines of the song’s bridge do have their equanimity all right, but it is an emptied equanimity that has persuaded itself (as Satan did) that it will be able to say farewell to despair if it says farewell to hope. It acquiesces, yes, but so grimly as to bring home that it constitutes no bridge from this not-caring to any other state of mind. Thank Somebody that there is, elsewhere in Dylan, a world elsewhere:

  Happiness is but a state of mind

  Anytime you want to you can cross the state line

  So sings Waitin’ for You,147 and very happily, too. But unhappinessis convicted, convinced that there is nothing, nobody, to wait for. And it has long ceased to see any point in making an effort. “Ain’t no reason to go anywhere” – and that includes going across the state line into the state of mind that is happiness.