Dylan's Visions of Sin

by Christopher Ricks

  It’s just that I ain’t got no watch

  And you keep askin’ me what time it is

  Does that do the trick, make you tick? Not really? Then try this:

  It’s just that I’ll be sleepin’ soon

  An’ it’ll be too dark for you to find the door

  Deft, the move from the opening “There’s something you must see” to the closing, “It’ll be too dark for you to find the door”. Canny, the respect for her sense of humour, her seeing through the tomcatfoolery, that is implied by the obligatory invoking of respect:164

  I am just a poor boy, baby

  Lookin’ to connect

  But I certainly don’t want you thinkin’

  That I ain’t got any respect

  “A guilty conscience, too”? No, because you and I both know that in this particular gamble I am parlaying the innocent. There is no sarcasm in the song, only witty panache (as in Marvell’s complicated compliment To His Coy Mistress), and no self-respecting girl would ever leave a room that housed such self-knowledgeable effrontery. Stay, lady, stay? Stay, baby, stay.

  There is comparable comedy in All I Really Want to Do, another desirous song of seducing or inducing (or educing – let me call out of you an admission of what you too want to do):

  I ain’t lookin’ to compete with you

  Beat or cheat or mistreat you

  Simplify you, classify you

  Deny, defy or crucify you

  All I really want to do

  Is, baby, be friends with you

  Sometimes the question to ask in life is Is this true? Sometimes (again) it should be What truth is there in this? Irony, which disagrees with its single-minded brother sarcasm, enjoys the flesh-brush friction that comes of there being an element of truth in what the other person is maintaining, even when what is said is self-serving and is not simply to be credited. (When it is simply to be discredited, the effect is usually cheap.) The vivacity of the song, which is on the side of life, comes from its meaning what it says, or at any rate kinda meaning it, meaning it in its way. Desire likes the thought of liking those whom it desires. Love and friendship love to curl up. Strictly speaking (but do you really want to speak strictly?), it is not true that All I really want to do is, baby, be friends with you. But nor is score the only thing I really want to do. Far more than the protest song, it is the protestation song that Dylan has always loved. And there is always not only play, but a play within the play, something dramatized. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” The gentleman, on this occasion, not so?

  And I ain’t lookin’ for you to feel like me

  See like me, or be like me

  True, and standing there as the very last thing said in the song before its final assurance,

  All I really want to do

  Is, baby, be friends with you

  “Feel like me / See like me, or be like me”? No. To like me, now that is certainly hoped for, but not those three hopes, “Feel like me / See like me, or be like me”, for the song does not identify with the self-absorption that postulates something called “identifying with”. That is not how the song is voiced on Another Side of Bob Dylan, what with the vocal ogling and the yodelled “do”. There is a counterpointing of the torrential rhyming against the evenness of rhythm and of delivery, the voice throughout self-possessing a sheer comic persistence (I shall no more weary of assuring you than I shall of you, I assure you), heard in his tender laugh at “Frighten you or uptighten you”. Living seems a laugh, and so does loving, especially at – of all places – “uptighten you”. Only someone uptight would object to the slangy creation “uptight”. (From 1934, “in a state of nervous tension or anxiety”; from 1969, “strait-laced”, The Oxford English Dictionary.) But you will look in vain in the dictionary for a verb, to uptighten. This is a turn of the screw, and apparently one that Dylan turned to along the way, for the printed lyrics have “or tighten you”. Relax. You have my word. Sometimes the comedy takes a melodramatic turn:

  I don’t want to meet your kin

  Make you spin or do you in

  – with “do you in’ then giving to what could be an abstract word, “dissect”, a cutting edge:

  Make you spin or do you in

  Or select you or dissect you

  The song constitutes an extraordinary list of all the ways in which you can mistreat somebody: are there any that don’t figure somewhere in it? And yet how benign the whole exhibition is.

  I ain’t lookin’ to block you up

  Shock or knock or lock you up

  Analyze you, categorize you

  Finalize you, or advertise you

  All I really want to do

  Is, baby, be friends with you

  There “Finalize” gets its pouncing power from a sense of how finality fleets away,likeanadvertisement (“Finalize you,oradvertise you”)–from its being such a shrug of a word. And one might, in making a passing, notice Dylan’s dexterity with “knock you up”:

  I ain’t lookin’ to block you up

  Shock or knock or lock you up

  The cunning propriety tactfully, pregnantly, separates “knock” from “you up” for a couple of words; after all, the preceding “shock” would more suggest “shock you” than “shock you up” – though one of the things that Dylan is doing is giving a shake to the phrase “shake you up”.165New Pony shook people up in the 1970s. No way to treat a lady.

  Come over here pony, I, I wanna climb up one time on you

  Come over here pony, I, I wanna climb up one time on you

  Well, you’re so bad and nasty

  But I love you, yes I do

  Oats, wild and there for the having, and animal spirits: these often animated the young Dylan, or (more precisely) his songs. (His life is his business; his art is something else, not being business but a vocation, even while – like Shakespeare’s – it earns his living.) Fun and games, much of this. Not all of it, for there are occasions when the devil and sin have their insinuations.

  Satan whispers to ya, “Well, I don’t want to bore ya

  But when ya get tired of the Miss So-and-so I got another woman for ya”

  That is Trouble in Mind and in body, but only a prig or prurient prude would hiss “the sin of lust” when hearing the knowing words

  I know of a woman

  That can fix you up fast

  (Bob Dylan’s New Orleans Rag)

  – or when hearing of a triste tryst with a good time who has been had by all:

  Well, I took me a woman late last night,

  I’s three-fourths drunk, she looked alright

  Till she started peelin’ off her onion gook

  An’ took off her wig, said, “How do I look?”

  I was high-flyin’ . . . bare-naked . . .

  Out the window!

  (I Shall Be Free)166

  A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed: Jonathan Swift’s poem, “Written for the Honour of the Fair Sex”, reveals how Corinna, back at midnight from the streets, “Takes off her artificial hair” and her eyebrows, takes out her falsies and her false teeth . . . A strip-tease? Jeeze. She can’t find her knees. Don’t even think of what she will look – and worse than look – like in the morning. “Who sees, will spew; who smells, be poisoned”. After Swift’s savage sewerage, I Shall Be Free smells pretty sweet-natured. And that is because, unlike in Swift, there is a man in the song who shall not be free from bodily ridicule: hot-footed perhaps, bare-naked for sure (a compound epithet that, far from being stripped, is tautological . . .). She took off her this, and her that, and her other. And me? “I took me a woman”. And then I took off. (“Out the window!”) “She looked alright”? Serves him right. The real right thing, after the while, is (of course) not lust but desire. No question. Blake posed the question, and poised it with perfect justice.

  THE QUESION ANSWERED

  What is it men in women do require?

  The lineaments of gratified desire.

  What is it women do in m
en require?

  The lineaments of gratified desire.

  I Want You gives voice to a yearning for this reciprocated requirement, this double desirement. Poignant and pained (all the more pained because there is such a prospect of pleasure if only she will want him back), the voice repeats – with patience and with passion – “I want you”, four times in each of four verses, the third time in each verse succeeding the three words with the plea “so bad”, and the last time preceding them with the pleasing “Honey”.

  In the world of Handy Dandy the easy woman can assure him: “She says, ‘You got all the time in the world, honey’”. But not here. There is an aching wait just after we pass the last “because”, for all the world as if there soon will not be all the time in the world.

  And because I want you167

  And in any case time is on someone else’s side.

  For there is a rival, and he sounds too cutely and flutily pleased with his own suitability, and the rhymes get cutting:

  Now your dancing child with his Chinese suit

  He spoke to me, I took his flute

  No, I wasn’t very cute to him

  Was I?

  In due course, “Was I?” will be clinched as a rhyme, a rhyme with a cause (“Because I”) and with a pause:

  But I did it because he lied

  Because he took you for a ride

  And because time was on his side

  And because I . . .

  Want you, I want you

  I want you so bad

  Honey, I want you

  The heartfelt inconsequentiality of this love song (what a game, Truths and Inconsequences) has always made it especially teasing and pleasing. There is a magnanimity evoked in the person of the other woman, the less loved one –

  She knows where I’d like to be

  But it doesn’t matter

  – and magnanimity is in the body of the song, too, when it turns back from the competitive to the appetitive. “I want you”. And I feel the want of you. But a tricky preposition, “of ”. If only I could feel the want of you as a wanting that emanates from you. Not that I’d order you around, even if love could be ordered. There are no imperatives in the song. Many declaratives, and one reiterated declaration, a declaration of love. And of desire.

  I Want You opens with the rhyme of “sighs” and “cries”. It closes with a sigh and a cry still, with “I” audible on its way to “you”: Was I Because I lied ride side I want you.

  The guilty undertaker sighs

  The lonesome organ grinder cries

  Touching, and the more so for the hint of touching oneself. “I want you so bad”. Blake again:

  The moment of desire! the moment of desire! The virgin

  That pines for man shall awaken her womb to enormous joys

  In the secret shadows of her chamber; the youth shut up from

  The lustful joy shall forget to generate and create an amorous image

  In the shadows of his curtains and in the folds of his silent pillow.

  (Visions of the Daughters of Albion)

  To Blake might be added Ecclesiastes, chapter 12, on the time “when desire shall fail”.

  Ecclesiastes

  Dylan

  and the grinders cease

  organ grinder

  the silver cord

  The silver saxophone

  in the streets

  Upon the street

  the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken

  my broken cup

  all the daughters of music shall be brought low

  all their daughters put me down

  “True love they’ve been without it”: not only fathers but sons and daughters. But it is not necessarily too late, which means that it is necessarily not too late.

  Lay, Lady, Lay

  The cracked bells and washed-out horns

  Blow into my face with scorn

  (I Want You)

  Scorn and discomfiture and discomfort have their burlesque part to play. But, in some other room, so do corporeal confidence and the peace of mind that it alone can bring. Such is Lay, Lady, Lay, a comedy of command and demand.

  LAY, LADY, LAY

  Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed

  Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed

  Whatever colors you have in your mind

  I’ll show them to you and you’ll see them shine

  Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed

  Stay, lady, stay, stay with your man awhile

  Until the break of day, let me see you make him smile

  His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean

  And you’re the best thing that he’s ever seen

  Stay, lady, stay, stay with your man awhile

  Why wait any longer for the world to begin

  You can have your cake and eat it too

  Why wait any longer for the one you love

  When he’s standing in front of you

  Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed

  Stay, lady, stay, stay while the night is still ahead

  I long to see you in the morning light

  I long to reach for you in the night

  Stay, lady, stay, stay while the night is still ahead

  How much longer? The old question in many a Dylan song is how long you can go on urging.168 Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right. Here it’s how long you can go on asking somebody to lay across your big brass bed. Or, Anglicè, lie across it. Everyday American English, with its established divergences from the old-country matters, is what enforces this way of putting it to her. Still, lay across my bed? Yet if you were to say, with Queen’s English correctitude, “Lie, lady, lie”, this would open up an ungentlemanly possibility: “Lie, lady, lie – you usually do on these occasions”. And so on. Men accusing of mendacity the fair sex. It is true that the American usage might permit of its own ludicrous train of thought (“Lady, lady, lay the table – or, if you prefer, an egg”), but at least there wouldn’t be the casting of aspersions. Remember another opening of Dylan’s, the first words of Fourth Time Around, positively fourth:

  When she said

  “Don’t waste your words, they’re just lies”

  I cried she was deaf

  She was deaf, or – in the case of Lay, Lady, Lay – will she be deaf to his importunate cries? There’s a certain point at which she either does lie across your big brass bed or she does not. You would sound fatuous if into the small hours you continued to urge “Lay, lady, lay”. The repetition is there, very strongly, from the beginning, but there’s a real question about how, with dignity, you extricate yourself once you’ve issued this injunction. So rhyming (which can be a way of effecting release or relief) becomes a distinctive part of the story. Added to which, rhyming is sure to be crucial to any song that begins with words such as “Lay, lady, lay . . .”, where “lady” feels like or feels for a relaxedly languorous and open and welcoming expansion of “lay”. Expansion and contraction constitute the movement of the phrase “Lay, lady, lay” and of the song that bears those words as its title. Less common than you might think, in Dylan, to have the words of the title be absolutely identical with the opening words of the song. A perfect congruity is intimated, as it is in one of the other instances, If Not For You, which begins, yes, with the words “If not for you”.

  The expansion and contraction are simply evoked in the relation of two words: “long” and “longer”. Ah, but the first is a verb, not an adjective. Exactly.

  I long to see you in the morning light

  I long to reach for you in the night

  – where there are not only the parallel syntax and the rhyme but the internal assonance (see / reach), with “I long to see you” reaching across to “I long to reach for you”.169 The couplet is for a couple and a coupling, and it reaches back (we should see and hear) to two earlier parallel lines:

  Why wait any longer for the world to begin

  Why wait any longer for the
one you love

  It is as though “longer” were a longer form of the word “long”, and so it is, but not of this yearning meaning of the word. The feeling of longing is evoked, of longing and waiting. But how much longer?

  That phrase might float in from a burlier song, New Pony, where the women’s voices interject “How much longer?” – how much longer would your new pony satisfy you before she, too, needed shooting? The blunter-spoken world of New Pony might accommodate the embittered dismay of the ageing man (imagined by the man Hilary Corke) who looks at himself physically and emotionally: “My lust grows longer and my lunger shorter”.170 The line is a lunge, with the word “lunger” inviting the thought that, gee, that’s a soft g that you have there. But in Lay, Lady, Lay the continuing question is: How much longer can you continue to invite or solicit or plead?

  Dylan has spoken of how Lay, Lady, Lay came, came to him:

  The song came out of those first four chords. I filled it up with the lyrics then, the la la la type thing, well that turned into Lay Lady Lay, it’s the same thing with the tongue, that’s all it was really.

  “The la la la type thing” is a nice way of putting it because so indifferent to the niceties; the phrase has the casualness of just a way of getting amiably or amatorily started on a song. But the bit about its being “the same thing with the tongue” might remind us that the occasion for the song is immediately erotic. Erotolalia: sexual excitement that is intimate with the linguistic tongue’s taking things into its head: “lalia: terminal element representing Greek speech, chatter, used in forming words denoting various disorders or unusual faculties of speech”.171 Try erotolayladylaylia. The chatter might be just the thing for a chatter-up of someone. There’s a song on New Morning in which Dylan has a blithe delight in making a prompt start, not in words but through la la la: The Man in Me opens with la la la accompanying a whole verse of the tune, more than forty of them, before he gets over his sheer exuberance and into the words “The man in me”, and the song ends with the return of this glee that finds and expresses its pleasure in the mouth but not in words exactly.