Wisdom,  Your View

It’s alright, Ma. A few remarks on Bob Dylan

By Jurek Molnar

 

O sages standing in God’s holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium

In the recently released film “Like a Complete Unknown”, Timothy Chalamet plays Bob Dylan in the early stage of his career between 1961 to 1965. The film depicts Dylan’s rise as a folk singer who gets involved with the civil rights movement, appears on stage with Martin Luther King in Washington in 1963 and manages to alienate the whole folk scene, including fans and main protagonists, like Joan Baez and Pete Seeger. I personally can recommend the film. It’s got great performances, and the set design is terrific. The mood of early 60’s Greenwich Village is perfectly displayed, making it a nice journey to a historic period only few alive can personally remember. Dylan himself, who becomes 84 in May, certainly can.

The story behind this movie, Dylan breaking away from the folk scene has been historically documented very well. In most versions Dylan was disturbed by attempts to make him a leading figure of the civil rights movement. In others his decision to go electric created artistical differences between him and the whole genre, and allegations of selling out made him a persona non grata. Whatever reasons one may prefer, Dylan decided in the summer of 1965 to go a different way than the rest of his peers. His style, which was formed by topical song writing, had created immortal themes like “Blowing in the wind”, but turned into mysterious symbolism like “Gates of Eden” and “Visions of Johanna“. The three albums between 1965 and 1966, “Bringing it all back home”, “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Blonde on Blonde” represented artistic qualities popular music has never reached before.

My personal favourite from this Dylan era is the 1965 on “Bringing it all back home” released track It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding), which was originally written in the summer of 1964, when Dylan was still a celebrated star of folk music. His website tells us that Dylan played this song live 772 times, while the last performance was recorded 2013. There are several great live versions on YouTube or Vimeo available, which are fascinating in their own right, displaying the great musical intellect of Dylan’s interpretation of his own songs.

The song can be understood as a generational conversation, between a narrator, who talks to someone he calls “Ma”, who never answers directly, but reacts to her son’s emotions by noticing them. The examples and observations during the 20 stanzas, are concerned with phenomenological iterations, facts of human nature, common attitudes, moral commandments and philosophical statements, relating to the heated atmosphere of its time, but not from a political point of view. It is rather an intense subjective reflection about human nature, done by a very serious grown up. It is the voice of an experienced and intelligent human being, nothing like a rolling stone, making precise observations about the world around him.

Dylan was only 23 years old, when he wrote it and to this day the lyrical tone is so intense, that few other texts of the 20th century can match its depth and poetic range. This song by its own is the complete justification for the Nobel Prize he received in 2016. The greatness of Dylan’s achievement is something like this: a 23-year-old, very successful and self-confident, rises his head, takes a good look around him and comes up with a brilliant analysis of human nature, put into very simple blues chords weaponized with incredibly sharp observations and poetic punch lines. One must consider the situation of Dylan inside the realms of folk music: his fans, fellow musicians and promoters, they wanted more topical songs, more politically pinpoint poetry, more damnations of the military industrial complex, more civil rights stuff. He was under some pressure to play “Blowing in the wind” forever, as the Dylan character in the movie at one time complains. Joan Baez invited him to sit-ins and demonstrations, to which he never came. His interests went into reading Shakespeare, Rimbaud, Brecht, Yeats, Elliot and the Bible. He became withdrawn from the idea to become a leader of the movement. He wanted to do something different. Something artistically interesting. Many of his contemporaries regarded this desire as selfish and the result of commercial, political and artistic corruption. Dylan’s perspective was, that he simply didn’t take any interest in a political career and cared mostly about his own music. He got away with it, nevertheless, in the same way he got away with his religious phase, 15 years later.

Bob Dylan is the rare example among great artists, who does not owe his parents anything regarding his career. He came from a small mining town, where his father Abraham Zimmerman sold washing machines until his death in 1968. There is no record that any of Robert Zimmerman’s Russian or Ukrainian Jewish ancestors were exceptionally talented. The relationship to his father was neither close nor hostile, it was more mutually indifferent. He had a warm and sincere relationship to his mother Beatrice Zimmerman, née Stone though, who died in 2000. And while his mother encouraged him to engage in music and art, she had no relevant influence on his musical upbringing. Neither had his father, who was at best unaffected by his son’s talents. All that Dylan achieved, created and performed is the result of his own effort. He had no father figure to overcome, no big shadow to escape from, no super ego disguised as an “evil system” to address. In fact, one of Dylan’s greatest features is the simple absence of Oedipal conflicts in his work. His songs do not yell for the fall of “the man”. There is no particular preference for dethroning all authority or any political concept besides American constitutional democracy, in his lyrics. Dylan did not try to convince “Pa”, in It’s Alright, Ma. He decided to go into the generational conversation with a mother figure and this meant something in this particular place and time. Dylan never hated his father, or had grudges against him, his father was just not that important. This indifference separates him for better or worse from his peers and contemporaries, who had a particular “We want our fathers dead” attitude, which most rebellious fashionistas practise as a creed. For some reasons, conscious or not, he rejected the vicious circle of Oedipal revolts, which can end with the dead father or the son or daughter falling into obedience. And this is all the more interesting, because the 60’s and the civil rights movements were Oedipal revolts against the old white man, the patriarchy, the unjust authority and they were mostly the struggle of sons and daughters with their parents and also here mostly with their fathers.

It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) as a text can be seen as a collection of 20 unrelated parts, which draw conclusions from observations. Every part can be read (and understood) by its own in any particular order. The specific order of the poem itself is nevertheless purely based on rhyme and rhythm, or as Alan Ginsburg put it: “his breath”. The last line is the marker, which gives this poem a simple and smart structure. The first four verses end with the words “trying”, “dying”, “crying” and “sighing”, the next four use “hatred”, “sacred”, “naked” and “make it”, the next four “you” and “to”, then another four with “in” and “him”, and then the last four, which finish by “phony”, “lonely” “show me” and “only”. The last verse of every group contains “It’s Alright, Ma” as a refrain, closing the series.

A full in-depth analysis of the lyrics can be found here: https://www.keesdegraaf.com/media/Misc/9578itsalrightmaimonlybleedingfullversion.pdf

I just want to put your attention on a single verse, which in my view is often overlooked, but accurately represent Dylan’s great literary mind. It reads:

Temptation’s page flies out the door
You follow, find yourself at war
Watch waterfalls of pity roar
You feel to moan but unlike before
You discover that you’d just be one more
Person crying

What happens when a temptation’s page flies out the door? The picture, a page flying out the door itself dictates that we follow, where it leads us. Temptation, which stands mighty at the beginning here, is something one follows. So, it follows: You follow and find yourself at war. It was a page or a leaflet flying out the door, you followed, but it was actually a temptation. People follow temptations, not because it is good or bad, but because it is a general human behaviour. The temptation’s page Dylan was reading, led conscripted soldiers to follow, who found themselves in war, watching waterfalls of pity roar. Or at least that is the most common interpretation, since this was written in the most heated political climate of the Vietnam war era. But it still puzzles me what kind of temptation led these soldiers to war? The nature of the temptation is carefully omitted, but the fact that it is temptation and not “evil’s page flies out the door” for instance, tells us a lot. Temptation is a very subjective and isolated emotional event. Temptation as a political term does not scale very well upwards, because the nature of a temptation is that it specifically addresses the inner core of an individual. Temptations must be personal to be temptations. So, the political agency that conscripts soldiers, must rely on something different, than sheer power. There must be a specific individual temptation for every one of them, who will conscript, to be part of something greater, something which is worth dying for. The temptation can be the promise to be a hero.

In “John Brown”, a song that was written by Dylan in 1963, the hero of the same name goes to war “on a foreign shore” (at the time of WWI), frenetically supported by his mother, who tells her neighbours proudly, her son will return as a hero with a lot of medals. Again, the generational conversation takes place between son and mother. A father is absent. John Brown comes home as a shattered and disfigured survivor, while his mother is in shock.

He whispered kind of slow, in a voice she did not know
While she couldn’t even recognize his face!

In the last line, John Brown drops his medal into his mother’s hands. The temptation he was following, was to keep the love of his mother and the war was an opportunity to satisfy the requirements for that love. But let’s go back to “It’s Alright, Ma”.

Whatever the temptation might be, on which desire it preys, and all the waterfalls of pity roar it creates, there is a straight line to the conclusion:

You feel to moan but unlike before
You discover that you’d just be one more
Person crying

What a downfall in just six lines! Temptations made you feel important. You paid the price for wanting to be a hero, and then you moan, but unlike before, you are isolated and unremarkable. The page that was flying out the door and you followed, has disappeared. You do not matter anymore. There is a temptation in almost all human beings to matter, to gain attention and attraction. Social media are witness to this temptation that commands billions, believing oneself to be special or at least individually interesting. Or as Dylan writes only a few lines later:

When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks they really found you

Temptation comes back, preying on your weaknesses and insecurities. Will you follow again? Dylan is never judgemental. He observes human behaviour, because he understands these weaknesses, but has no intention to exploit them. He is never indifferent, but also not partisan at any given moment. His art has the quality that he observes and distinguishes like an experienced and incorruptible grown up. All his observations come from a distance; a distance one must keep for taking a good look around.

Human beings are incentivised to follow and from this point on, everything goes down the drain, until you discover that nobody cares, what you do, appreciate or think. There is no judgement here, because it is an observation of human nature under specific circumstances. Dylan expresses no pity or is throwing accusations against an “evil system”. Temptation is a personal situation, which requires a decision to surrender or to resist. By surrendering nevertheless, one ends up being just one more person crying. Temptation is personal and individual, and so is the consequence. I was always impressed by this grown up and serious outlook written by someone who couldn’t have collected so much life experience at this point, but without a doubt understood instinctively the emotional abyss of his fellow human beings. What a legend!