But, although the Dylan stuff is okay, there may be more wit in this dinner table exchange:
Me: I think I've finally understood this beer.
Hilde: What's it about?
This essay is an attempt to explain the usefulness of poetry to one particular student. The objections and distaste that the essay begins with are a version of his. In the course of writing it, I’ve imagined him as older and more sophisticated, and imagined that he shares some of my own history with books, music and politics. Other than that, I’m imagining Jack’s best explanations of his visceral distaste for what he sees as poetry’s excess, self-indulgence and willful idiosyncrasy.
Thomas Mann says that, “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” This might argue that anyone attempting to understand the world and speak clearly about it would do well to stay as far away from writers as possible. And yet I find that my perplexities about works of literature help me with my perplexities about the world, and that my evolving perplexities about the world make certain works of literature different and bigger each time I reread them. Somehow perceiving and reading well, writing and living well, are all interconnected.
Most educated people I’ve talked to about poetry say that it makes them anxious, that it seems needlessly roundabout, that it is difficult to understand, that it makes people feel dumb. In a way this response is peculiar because these same people see things all the time that they don’t understand, of course—they even enjoy seeing new, strange things. Most of us enjoy being at the ocean or in the mountains, in part because the scale of those things scrambles the mind’s ability to understand size and location: certain kinds of disorientation open onto wonder. Maybe it’s harder to have a similar response to language because it’s the product of human artifice and not natural process? We’re too used to being snookered by language to be awed by it?
Most of us can stand in front of an abstract painting and not feel dumb. Maybe this is because when someone gives you directions back to the highway they don’t do it in stylized geometric blobs, they do it in words. If you don’t understand words, you risk missing important information, looking like an idiot, failing at essential tasks. Perhaps this is related to the impatience some people feel with modern art: language is not just important because it conveys necessary information, it also carries social significance. We scan each others’ language all the time for some sense of basic congruence with our own. Certain words and ways of using them mark people as either in or out: ‘Orioles’, ‘organic’, ‘outside the box’. When two people of good will don’t understand each other, it’s perplexing. It’s natural to assume that if someone from your own culture is using language really differently than you, something is wrong with one of you. And yet as important as it to detect malicious obfuscation or pretentious charlatanism or confused thinking, you come willy-nilly upon moments when words are inadequate or tired or incomprehensible, and you must either find new words or give up.
Poetry often puts you in the situation of recognizing the words but not being sure what is meant by them. So do lots of other situations in which language is necessary to understanding another person. One difference between the semantic disorientation of reading poetry and the equivalent experience when talking to your parents is that the poet is often exquisitely aware of the disorientation. The English poet Geoffrey Hill talks about the difficulty of poetry and of people in an interview with The Paris Review from Spring 2000:
INTERVIEWER: What comes up often in reviews of your work is the idea of an overly intellectual bent; in recent reviews of The Triumph of Love, often the word difficult comes up. People mention that it’s worth going through or it isn’t worth going through.
HILL: Like a Victorian wedding night, yes. Let’s take difficulty first. We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most “intellectual” piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it demeaning? I think art has a right—not an obligation—to be difficult if it wishes. And, since people generally go on from this to talk about elitism versus democracy, I would add that genuinely difficult art is truly democratic. And that tyranny requires simplification.
It is important to admit that not all writing is good, and that it is possible to be hoodwinked into devoting great effort to untangling what turns out not to be difficult honesty but sloppy obfuscation. It is also important to admit that writing truly can be difficult because, like some of Geoffrey Hill’s work, it assumes a wide range of knowledge or experience. Mostly, though, this is not the reason that some things are difficult to read. Most notoriously difficult writers—Hill, Arthur Rimbaud, John Ashbery, one could go on indefinitely—require little in the way of footnoting. In fact footnotes can be a misleading way of reassuring a student that lack of understanding is really lack of erudition. Most writers are difficult because they are presenting the world in a different way. The more workable approach is not eliminate difficulties with glosses; the trick is to accept difficult phrases at face value and to continue watching closely for evidence of the poem’s character and perspectives. As if a poem were a country in which one had just landed or a new kind of animal: new but itself, behaving according to the laws of its own nature, different but organized according to an internal consistency demonstrated by its every gesture, however bafflingly remote from the behavior of one’s own countrymen or faithful dog.
For Hill, language admits simplification only at great cost. Not only, as he points out, do people often object when treated as if they were simpler than they are, but simplification of human nature is a tool of subjugation: “tyranny requires simplification.” The mass manipulation of people—the sale of a ‘final solution’, or ‘happiness’, or ‘duty’— requires that much of what is difficult and various in human nature be left out or somehow ruled out of bounds. As a Mormon, I was often told that human suffering was a consequence of sin. This explanation takes attention away from the particulars of suffering—because of mental illness, say, or economic exploitation—and refocuses it on the message: the Gospel. And although difficult art may have deserved the reputation of focusing disproportionately on what is unpleasant in human experience, advertising and bad movies leave out much of what is actually pleasurable. Art that flatters our public assumptions can depict ‘triumphs of the human spirit’ and ‘affirm life’ (I’m not quoting anything in particular here but a quick Google search for ‘movie, triumph of the human spirit’ will bear me out) but they can have nothing to say about the subtle ordinary pleasures of good food, parenting, learning, rest.
There are practical reasons to regard writers and other artists and technicians who find themselves in great perplexity about some aspect of the world as useful guides. Assumptions about the world, even accurate and useful ones, can keep us from seeing the world as it is. One of the roles of art is to present something in the world to us in such a way that we experience it not as we expect to but as we would from a particular existential and sensory perspective. I remember being surprised when first seeing Gauguin’s “Two Tahitian Women” at the National Gallery that the shadows were not just ‘dark’. I was irritated at first that Gauguin would strain reality in that way in order to get an effect. His shadows were various greens and blues, yellow-browns and—in one patch in the lower left where colors from a shaft of sunlight bleed into the adjacent darkness—nearly red. But this irritation was also a grudge that I carried around for a while, and the grudge was also a question. It finally made me look differently at the shadows under the magnolia in my front yard and discover that they had color and that the color was different depending on time of day and year, and depending what was growing in the yard. And then of course I realized that what I saw had a lot to do with my own degree of openness to what was there to be seen. It began to make sense to suppose that things were different colors for me depending my own thoughts and moods. I finally asked my eldest daughter whether shadows had color. She said, ‘duh’. It’s not that I’d never thought of it: I had thought of ‘shadow’ as a near synonym for ‘darkness’. I’d never seen shadow.
The consequences of being blinded by words multiply painfully when dealing with other people. During my two years in Taiwan as a Mormon missionary, I was constantly unable to understand Chinese people because of my own assumption that we meant the same thing by some word or phrase. Mostly I wasn’t aware of this, and thought it was a difference of opinion or degree of attention to the topic under discussion. I was trying to convince Chinese people of the ‘truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ’, as I would have put it at that time. The problem, among others, was that I wasn’t aware that there weren’t exact equivalents for any of those essential words. The Chinese word I was taught to use for “truth,” for instance, would have been more accurately translated as ‘sincerity.’ An essential aspect of the word I had in mind connoted ‘accuracy to the underlying structures of reality’. But the claim that I was being understood to make was about the sincerity and social honesty of Christians—which was never at issue for most of the people I spoke with. Most Chinese people I talked simply pointed out that Christianity was an aspect of my culture, and so of course I was quite sincere in my belief. What did this have to do with them, though? I wanted to say that I had had truck with a deeper level of reality. What didn’t occur to me until much later was that my sense that it was possible to be accurate about reality on a deeper level is in fact a scientific one—or at least a product of the Western Enlightenment assumptions about a reality that reveals simpler and more general causes as one gets closer to the heart of it. The Chinese as moderns of course also share this assumption about the physical world. I really don’t think most Chinese extend it to the social world. Instead, they maintain a distance between ‘sincerity’ and ‘truth’. In retrospect this seems wise.
But this failure to agree on the definition or implications of a word can cause just as much mischief between members of the same culture. My memory of the first week after 9/11 is that people were still much more sad and shocked than they were angry. People smiled sadly at each other, and were much more likely to let others merge in front of them in traffic. Clearly there was cause for anger, but it was still unclear against whom one might direct ones anger. Anger has a way of dispersing unless there is an object against which it can be directed. Few people can be angry at a hurricane. Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people and wounded 450 more when he bombed government buildings in Oklahoma City in 1995, aroused more shock and pity than anger. His violence seemed without rational cause, unconnected to anything substantially human. His trial and execution seemed somehow not to the point, not satisfying; it answered none of the questions inspired by the event of his violence. The collective response in the first week after September 11, 2001 was very similar: helplessness, grief, shock. Not anger.
In the weeks after September 11, 2001, a number of words, ‘freedom’ and ‘terror’ among them, turned the inchoate feelings of our shared grief into anger. I believe that it is possible to pinpoint the moment this happened. Whereas the nationalistic edge of ‘freedom’ had been, to my ear anyway, a subtle undertone when used by certain speakers, within a few weeks of 9/11 ‘freedom’ very clearly denoted resistance to the violence and hatred of a faction of militant Muslims who were plotting to kill us. The assumption underlying this particular definition of ‘freedom’ was that the plotters of the crimes of 9/11 were motivated by their fanatical commitment to Islam, and that this commitment caused an unreasoning hatred of Americans. The corollary to this logic was that what came to be routinely called the Twin Towers were attacked not because they were a major New York landmark, nor because many of the elite of the world financial industry worked in them, but because they contained Americans-who-defend-freedom.
On September 20th, President George W. Bush gave a speech in which ‘freedom’ and ‘terror’ were defined very clearly and used to rally American resolve. Bush argued that we were attacked out of hatred and because of our freedom—in fact the attackers were ‘enemies of freedom’:
They hate our freedoms -- our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other… These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life. With every atrocity, they hope that America grows fearful, retreating from the world and forsaking our friends. They stand against us, because we stand in their way.
One assertion here is that Americans are hated not for what they believe or do but for their freedoms. In fact it is not merely the occupants of the World Trade Center who were attacked: they were attacked in order to attack their freedoms. And the freedoms that elicit terrorist hatred do not amount to the mere liberty to do as we please, they are something particularly American. The plural here, ‘freedoms’, makes freedom not primarily an existential condition but a series of political prerogatives granted by legislation, specifically the First Amendment. The tendency of Bush’s rhetoric is to identify ‘freedom’ with the particular laws and political structures of the United States. He goes on to argue that the ultimate aim of attacking our freedoms is to end our ‘way of life’. This image is at once stark and vague. Americans certainly do have a way of life, (and in many respects it is one that I believe in) but the idea that the attacks on the World Trade Center could be that ideologically specific is a bold claim.
Having connected the attacks to ‘freedom’, Bush goes on to suggest the proper political response at home.
Americans are asking: What is expected of us? I ask you to live your lives, and hug your children. I know many citizens have fears tonight, and I ask you to be calm and resolute, even in the face of a continuing threat. I ask you to uphold the values of America, and remember why so many have come here. We are in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them. No one should be singled out for unfair treatment or unkind words because of their ethnic background or religious faith. I ask you to continue to support the victims of this tragedy with your contributions. Those who want to give can go to a central source of information, libertyunites.org, to find the names of groups providing direct help in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
Here Bush very quickly establishes the connection between the desire for affection and comfort, between the desire to ‘hug your children’, and the ‘resolute’ posture necessary to ‘fight for our principles’. The web domain, ‘libertyunites.org’ is a nice summation of this part of his argument. One might reasonably suppose that liberty to hold various opinions would divide opinion. Despite the contention earlier in the speech that one of our freedoms is the right to disagree with each other, liberty, properly understood, obligates one to oppose those who would destroy the way of life that sustains freedom. This logic that certain curtailments of practical freedom were a necessary means of protecting freedom as a way of life quickly took legislative form in the provisions of the Patriot Act.
I now find myself unable to agree with my family about what freedom is. Not that we don’t both feel free a kind of freedom when we get in our cars or go to the polls. But because ‘freedom’ has become a kind of jargon that brings a great many other assumptions along with it. From my perspective its use has been corrupted; from theirs it has become obligatory. To me it has been co-opted by a particular ideology; to them I seem cowardly or blind in my dereliction of clear patriotic duty. It doesn’t seem possible at this point to have a conversation about 9/11 that isn’t dominated by the language and logic of Bush’s speech.
But there are examples in the history of American politics of people eluding just this sort of language. One of the most often repeated stories about 20th rock music is about the outrage inspired by Bob Dylan’s first electric tour in 1965. Dylan had been widely accepted as a kind of folk prophet visiting justice on the powerful on behalf of the disenfranchised. It mattered very much that Dylan was not a rock musician—that he played an acoustic guitar alone on stage, that he cut his hair short in back in scruffy emulation of Woody Guthrie and wore blue jeans and plaid flannel, that he worked in largely in the shared images, stories and verse forms of the ‘folk music’ that had come to be associated with American socialism by a large and influential minority of the American academy. In contrast, rock music was associated with matching showbiz uniforms, with slick travelling showcases, with the aggressively promoted hit machine that was already well established by the late 50’s, and with an urban world that was opposed to the pastoral innocence and self-determination of the rural worker. This image remained important, even as Greenwich Village, and not some bucolic outpost, collected and produced politicized folk singers.
During his ’65 tour, audiences listened in rapt silence to the mostly familiar songs that Dylan played during his first, acoustic, set. When the rock band joined him for the second set, and Dylan began to play his new material, they grew restive. Many booed and jeered; some left. And then people lined up in the next city to reenact the same scene, even after they read the reviews from the last city. One scene in D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary of the tour, “Don’t Look Back,” shows a young Englishman in the packed Royal Prince Albert Hall concert yelling above the jostling and chatter before one song: “Judas!” Dylan, who has turned around to discuss the next song with his band, walks back to the microphone in skinny jeans and shades. “I don’t believe you,” he says in a slow nasal snarl: “You’re a liar.”
The episode sticks, with me anyway, because the anger about Dylan’s ‘going electric’ has precisely to do with truth and fidelity. Rock music and electric instruments seemed to betoken a political renunciation, as well as a stylistic shift. And as Dylan began to seek for possibilities beyond the folk songbook and the ideological orthodoxy that claimed it, his songs and his personae changed rapidly and dramatically. A song like “The Times They Are A-Changin” (1963-64), despite moving rapidly between scenes and straining at the limits of words, still seemed like folk music—in part because the strain on words seems to lean so heavily on the cadences, parallelisms and eschatological urgency of the Hebrew Bible, as well as notions of ultimate justice. This is still a voice that gets its authority from its belief in social justice:
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’
The warning not to ‘stand in the doorway’ or ‘block up the hall’ has resonances of New Testament apocalyptic parables like the story of the foolish virgins who go to meet their bridegrooms without oil for their lamps, and upon returning from having fetched oil find that they are locked out and have missed the nuptial night. One convention of the biblical parable and the folk song, though, is the explanation at the end. Jesus ends this one, “Keep awake, then, for ye know neither the day nor the hour.” (Matthew 25:13). In “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, although it’s not clear exactly how the times will change, it’s clear that the warning not to “stand in the doorway” is part of a single vision of the future that the entire song is concerned with.
By the time Dylan writes “Mr. Tambourine Man” there is no longer this sense that metaphor is unified by a single concern or that vision is the vision of social justice. Vision seems to have reverted to the wild:
Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow
There is still a sense of seeking contact with another power in the song, but it’s certainly not Yahweh coming in power and glory to judge the quick and the dead. Instead there are suggestions that the power being courted has to do with something more like drug visions or half-sleeping hallucinations. And the impediments to realizing this vision aren’t the guardians of an outworn power structure—not senators and parents and others who don’t heed warnings of the apocalypse. Instead the speaker is trying to free consciousness from some aspect of itself or its language. Why would it help to have “all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves”? Maybe because it’s hard to see visions in the middle of a difficult and mundane world that is expert at forming you to its own purposes. Elsewhere in the same song: “My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet/ I have no one to meet/And the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming.” The street walked by numbed millions is no place to dream dreams.
But so, to return to the questions at the beginning of this essay in a different form, why are dreams worthwhile? How are they useful—especially given that they seem to disrupt language? In the case of the Hebrew prophets, and of the folk troubadours who borrow aspects of their voice, the answer has to do with another sense of ‘dreams’—the one that Martin Luther King means when he says, “I have a dream.” The prophets are trying to reach beyond the voice of political power to a divine source that will reorder the political world. But the dreaming of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” is not that. Instead the source of power is somehow obscured by the habits and damages of a corrupt world but is nevertheless internal—waiting only to be worked through or scraped away. And beginning in 1964 we see Dylan working towards a set of practices for doing this work. He sings in “My Back Pages” (1964):
Crimson flames tied through my ears
Rollin’ high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads
Using ideas as my maps
“We’ll meet on edges, soon,” said I
Proud ’neath heated brow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
Here the source of power is associated with youth. But it isn’t a naïve youth. It’s something that can be returned to—or perhaps can only be achieved by first moving through disillusionment. The use of ‘ideas’ here is new. The whole way of speaking in this poem resists ideas. Instead it encourages a moment-by-moment multiplying of images, feelings, possibilities—each layer of which makes it more difficult to say what is and isn’t real or possible in this world. ‘Ideas’ here aren’t synopses of arguments; they aren’t necessarily even coherent. Instead they are a means of going beyond the confining habits and assumptions of a corrupt world. And the style that Dylan is inventing here is a technique for getting out of deadended conversations.
The context of “My Back Pages” still seems to have to do with social justice but now the voice mistrusts the critiques of political structures as much as it mistrusts the structures themselves:
A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty
Is just equality in school
“Equality,” I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not that I’d become my enemy
In the instant that I preach
My pathway led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking
I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
In each verse, someone proposes a definition or diagnosis that is unequivocal, and in each verse the refrain undermines faith in ideas with faith in this particular kind of youth. The inability of the professor to ‘fool’ (to play? to joke?) somehow makes him unable to get at the truth. The earnest preaching of the speaker and the clarity of his definitions are also not solutions but problems. What are we supposed to do, then, if our best attempts to think and speak clearly are counterproductive? What else is there?
At a press conference in Los Angeles in the middle of the 1965 tour, Dylan was asked for the umpteenth time the reasons for his popularity, and finally erupted in frustration. The incident is famous in part, again, because Pennebaker caught it on film, and part of what makes it absorbing cinema is the contrast between the slow, innocent presumption of the TIME magazine reporter who asks the question and the aggressive, hyper-aware young writer who answers it. To the reporter, Dylan is a story because his popularity with young people makes him a kind of clue to a mysterious or outrageous youth culture. From his professional perspective, his question makes perfect sense. From Dylan’s perspective, the agenda of his songs and the agenda of TIME magazine cannot even occupy the same conversation.
Dylan: You know the audience that subscribes to TIME Magazine, the audience of people that want to know what’s happening in the world week by week: the people that work during the day and can read it. It’s small, alright, and it’s concise and there’s pictures in it, you know? It’s a certain class of people: it’s a class of people that take the magazine seriously. I mean, sure, I can read it, you know—I read it. I get it on the airplanes but I don’t take it seriously. If I want to find out anything, I’m not gonna read TIME magazine, I’m not gonna read Newsweek, I’m not gonna read any of these magazines— I mean, ‘cause they just got too much to lose by printing the truth. You know that.
TIME: What kind of truths are they leaving out ?
Dylan: Well anything, even on a worldwide basis, they’d just go off the stands in a day if they printed really the truth.
TM: What is really the truth?
Dylan: Really the truth is just a plain picture. A plain picture of, of, let’s say a tramp vomiting man into the sewer you know? And then and uh, next door to the picture you know, is Mr. Rockafeller or you know, Mr. C.W. Jones on a subway going to work, uh you know, any kind of picture. Just make some collage of pictures. Which they don’t do. There’s no ideas in TIME Magazine, there’s just these facts, which too are serious, even the article on which your doing the way it’s gonna come out, but you see It can’t be a good article because the guy that’s writing the article is sitting at a desk in New York, and he’s not even going out of his office, he’s just gonna get these 15 reporters and there gonna send him a quota.
The scene is arresting. Dylan is either making a devastating point or being cruel to a defenseless innocent. The Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert, looking back at “Don’t Look Back” in 1998, writes, “What a jerk Bob Dylan was in 1965. What an immature, self-important, inflated, cruel, shallow little creature, lacking in empathy and contemptuous of anyone who was not himself or his lackey. Did we actually once take this twirp as our folk god?” Ebert then hastily decrescendos by describing this frenzy of pen-stabs as one of the ‘observations’ that he jotted down while rewatching the movie. These are not ‘observations’. But why is the scene so absorbingly awful? Or, to put in another way, why do Ebert and others get so exercised about it? Isn’t it that Dylan’s condescension and frustration implicates him (and me, certainly), too? And for that matter, Dylan is himself a child of the middle class, a one-time dilatory college student. Hardly an outsider by origins.
The reporter seems, is, so innocent: just doing the journalist’s job of just asking. Dylan points out, though—and it seems this is a difficult point—that the very format of TIME is antithetical to truth as he, Dylan, is thinking about it. TIME is designed to appeal to people from a particular class who value particular things and who read it in a particular context. The problems as Dylan sees them are precisely with this set of constructs: the middle class and the ubiquitous, nearly invisible structures that keep us in the middle. The question he’s being asked ad nauseum during these several weeks of the ’65 tour is a series of variations on ‘why have you changed?’, ‘why have you become so difficult?’, ‘what are you talking about?’ But the context in which the question is being posed makes the answer incomprehensible because the answer for Dylan is that what he wants to say is being muffled by TIME Magazine’s form of address, this context for which answers are packaged as entertainment for commutes and coffee breaks. And at this moment in ’65, Dylan is searching for a set of practices that take him beyond the terrible vulnerability he feels at the center of TIME Magazine’s professional fascination and hostility. He sits slumped on a sofa a few scenes later and says in reference to the travel and the questions and the booing: “I’m going to have to get me a new Dylan.” And the reporter is baffled and tired, too. At one point in the exchange he looks back tentatively at Dylan: “Do you care what you say?” Dylan returns, “How can I answer that if you got the nerve to ask me?” Impasse.
Dylan is quite serious about the alternative he proposes to the highly genre-specific TIME version of truth-as-news. A quick glance at a song like “Desolation Row” (1956) reveals something very much like the collage he describes to TIME: “A plain picture of, of, let’s say a tramp vomiting man into the sewer you know? And then and uh, next door to the picture you know, is Mr. Rockafeller or you know, Mr. C.W. Jones on a subway going to work.” The strategy here is to avoid the selective version of the world that you get when you decide what you’re looking for, rather than trying to just look. Just catalog, he says, don’t interpret, don’t filter anything out. It’s quite scientific, really, and yet hard to understand—maybe because in order to write this way you need to suspend the devices that normally order writing, like narrative and argument. This strategy comes out Dylan’s discomfort with orthodoxies, left and right—out of his sense that he was being pushed from both sides.
Specifically, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the strategies of montage and visionary catalogue that he used from the mid- to the late-60’s come in part from his reading of the 19th century French poet, Arthur Rimbaud. Dylan describes in his memoir, Chronicles, how he was handed a letter of Rimbaud by his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo:
Someplace along the line, Suze had also introduced me to the poetry of French Symbolist poet, Arthur Rimbaud. That was a big deal, too. I came across one of his letter called “Je est un autre,” which translates into “I is someone else.” When I read those words the bell went off. It made perfect sense. (Chronicles, p. 288)
Dylan doesn’t much trouble himself to explain what the phrase meant to him but it has a long and important history in 20th C thinking about poetry and the self. The letter he’s referring to was written by Rimbaud, then an aspiring 17 year-old poet, to a teacher of his, Georges Izambard. The passage reads,
I wish to be a poet, and I am working to make myself into a seer: you will not understand at all, and I would not nearly know how to explain it to you. It's a question of coming to the unknown through the disordering [or ‘dissoluteness’] of all the senses. The suffering is enormous, but one must be strong, be born a poet, and I have come to terms with my destiny as a poet. It's not at all my fault. It's wrong to say "I think"; one ought to say "I am being thought" - Forgive the play on words - I is another. Too bad for the wood which finds itself a violin, and brush off the oblivious, who quibble over things they know nothing about!
What Rimbaud means by ‘seer’ has little to with visions, let alone hallucination. In fact, earlier in the letter he chides his teacher for writing ‘subjective poetry [that] will always be terribly insipid.’ So what’s wrong with subjectivity? And isn’t subjectivity just a fact?—the product of looking in one direction and not another, if nothing else?—whether we like it or not? Rimbaud would agree with this objection, and in fact the random and hallucinatory qualities of Rimbaud’s later verse seem to celebrate a kind of subjectivity of perspective, the happenstance version of the world assembled by a single observer. But Rimbaud aims to write ‘objective poetry’, by which I think he means something very much like what Dylan means by ‘the truth is just a plain picture.’ Each of us will have a different collage to assemble but nevertheless we either succeed to assemble an accurate picture of what we’ve seen or we fail. The suggestion, then, is that objectivity isn’t easy. It required not only accurate observation but also a ‘derangement of the senses.’
A truer version of the objective world must begin with ‘derangement’ because the self is not so static or so inevitable and we are accustomed to think. Rimbaud says that it would be more accurate to regard the self as the product of habitual thoughts and words: “It's wrong to say ‘I think’; one ought to say ‘I am being thought’ –Forgive the play on words – I is another.” What one experiences as ‘I’, in other words, does not think a world; instead, thoughts create the experience of an ‘I’. And a corollary of this idea about the self that has huge importance in 20th C poetics is the sense that the self is malleable. If I am not only the creature of God or of my genetics, but am also in part the product of thoughts, then I can change myself by changing my thoughts. In part this seems merely common-sensical. But Rimbaud means something more radical—and part of what he means is that this thinking of the self can have not only different sources (values, beliefs, classic texts, etc.) but a different way of ordering the senses. Rimbaud’s later work tends towards frequent and rapid shifts in setting, scale, social context and tone. The poems are ordered less by character, plot and theme, more by sensory stimuli: he writes what he sees. Again, though, this is not just a matter of faithful secretarial work. The way that I was being thought kept me from seeing shadows as having color. What else is the I currently being thought unable to see? And what to do about it?
The discipline that Rimbaud entered into did indeed involve both dissolution and derangement. As part of his poetic aspirations, he cultivated not only unedited experiences of the senses but also scandal and violence both to himself to the canons of taste, manners and virtue. He was convinced that the desire for social belonging occludes vision of the objective world. So he rebels both inwardly and outwardly. He says near the opening of A Season in Hell, ‘One night, I sat Beauty on my knee.—And I found her bitter.—And I hurt her.’ It would be hard to conceive of a more distasteful blackguarding of beauty, and most of the poem continues in delightfully lurid and inventive ways to shit-spatter everything lovely and dignified. And yet later in the sequence, in a poem called ‘Hunger’, he makes his goals plain:
O happiness, o reason: I finally chased the blue from the sky, this blue that’s really black; and I lived, a gold spark, forged from natural light. Full of joy, I expressed myself as ridiculously and strangely as possible.
Rediscovered!
What? –Eternity.
Sea and sun
As one.
My eternal soul,
Heed your vow
Despite empty night
And fiery day.
Break
From earthly approval,
And common urges!
And soar, accordingly…
Although the visionary scope is cosmic and the moral alternatives are stark, this begins to seem more like ‘keep an open mind.’ But no one teaches you how to keep an open mind; they mostly just scold you when you seem to have closed it. You often get the sense that ‘keep an open mind’ is something people say because they haven’t yet closed it in the particular way they would like. Rimbaud’s letters and verse document his process of opening his mind in the pursuit of beauty and a vision of eternity—that is, in pursuit of clarity and peace despite finitude, deadlines and death. This is very practical stuff, actually. Elsewhere in Rimbaud’s mature poetry (all written before the age of 21) we find the same pattern: assaults on logical and social convention that open onto beautifully clear scenes, plain pictures that invite the reader to see the world clearly.
Plain pictures are hard won.
Rimbaud’s life and language may seem willfully weird, easy to dismiss, but he’s in good company in the history of literature and art—and, I would wager, in the history of science and mathematics, too. Rimbaud is self-consciously following in the pattern of Baudelaire. Both sought out poverty, bad reputation and hallucination in the interest of clarity. In the English tradition, so much of poetry flows from William Blake, who gets his particular version of literal-world-through-derangement-of-the-senses through Jacob Boehme and Emmanuel Swedenborg. He breaks with both philosophically but he becomes a poet through their visionary methods. Blake says in a letter, attempting to clarify for the hundredth time that what he means by ‘vision’ is not supernatural transcendence of the mundane but something much closer to a radical openness to the senses: “I see through the eyes, not with them.” He is constantly warning us that, because of our socialization and in the interest of practical expedition, the mind doesn’t necessarily attend to something just because it falls into the frame of the senses. We see things all the time that don’t make their way into our thinking. In fact, the visual field is full of tiny gaps caused by damage to the eye. The mind creates the useful illusion of an unbroken visual world. It is useful to remind ourselves, even to learn techniques of unknowing, that the “world” is not the moment-by-moment image created by the senses; the ‘world’ is the product of all of our assumptions. Our assumptions can be wrong.
I hope that with this set of aims and practices in mind, more people would be able to approach poems that are at first alien and threatening and find instead a companionable temporary derangement of the senses—an incitement to attempt new kinds of accuracy, honesty, openness to the pleasures of the senses. Poetry does not necessarily make us accurate or happy or moral, but it does offer a discipline of looking closely, with fresh eyes. It makes us capable of more outlandish misapprehensions and unexpected clarities. It can teach us to assume that each iteration of a familiar thing will be different, and make us question the accuracy of familiar words by sending us back to our senses. Much of skill in problem-solving, as well as much of pleasure in being alive, lies in an openness to the senses, and through them the world.
With this attitude towards poetry, I have found that I can pick up a poem by a poet who intimidated and annoyed me for years—bored me, too—and the poem repays my attention handsomely. John Ashbery’s much-anthologized “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name” will do nicely. Ashbery, by the way, has just published a translation of Rimbaud’s last poems, Illuminations. Be forewarned that my aim here is not to explain the poem, but only to enjoy it a bit.
You can’t say it that way any more.
Bothered about beauty you have to
Come out into the open, into a clearing,
And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you
Is OK. To demand more than this would be strange
Of you, you who have so many lovers,
People who look up to you and are willing
To do things for you, but you think
It’s not right, that if they really knew you . . .
So much for self-analysis. Now,
About what to put in your poem-painting:
Flowers are always nice, particularly delphinium.
Names of boys you once knew and their sleds,
Skyrockets are good—do they still exist?
There are a lot of other things of the same quality
As those I’ve mentioned. Now one must
Find a few important words, and a lot of low-keyed,
Dull-sounding ones. She approached me
About buying her desk. Suddenly the street was
Bananas and the clangor of Japanese instruments.
Humdrum testaments were scattered around. His head
Locked into mine. We were a seesaw. Something
Ought to be written about how this affects
You when you write poetry:
The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind
Colliding with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate
Something between breaths, if only for the sake
Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you
For other centers of communication, so that understanding
May begin, and in doing so be undone.
There are a hundred places to begin, partly because the poem offers so little in the way of an obvious centering character, plot or theme. The title, from Horace: ‘as is painting, so is poetry’: it’s odd that ‘you can’t say it that way anymore’ because Ashbery’s poems are often very like paintings: they place a number of things on a canvass at a level of detail and animation and intention that the reader begins to perceive stories. Ashbery’s poems are visual, painterly—in their composition and their logic. But ‘you can’t say it that way in anymore’: the poem begins in discouragement and ends having travelled some distance to renew discouragement and find it useful. Ashbery begins with discouragement, and then he goes on to say a great deal, ending with ‘so that understanding/ May begin, and in doing so be undone’. Imagine how different it would have been if he’d said, ‘all understandings are superseded and are therefore useless’ or ‘the attempt to understand is a fool’s game’. Is it the same thing? I don’t think so. In part because the poem takes the desire to say as a fact: ‘the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate/Something between breaths’. And the poem assumes that the speaker knows that speaking is the beginning of relinquishment. We speak not despite but because of this:
if only for the sake
Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you
For other centers of communication, so that understanding
May begin, and in doing so be undone.
Do my questions seem to have more to do with me than with the poem? I think that no matter what questions I pose, if I return to the words of the poem again and again I’ll be changed by it. That is, what I want to do is not to regard the poem as having a paraphrasible message, although it may well. What I really need is not always advice but a new environment for my senses—some experience of my expectations being (mostly pleasantly) challenges and reordered. Again, whether or not I’m convinced that a mind can be ‘almost empty’ or that two heads can be locked together or any other usage or contention of the poem—whether or not I am satisfied that I know what the poem argues—I can say something about what a poem is doing. And I know this because I’ve tested it with my own questions, allowed it to disorder my senses a little.
So I allow Ashbery the role of reposing my questions to me, rather than burdening him with the task of coming up with answers. It is ultimately myself as reader whom I burden. Isn’t that the reason we end up feeling dumb?: we feel obliged to ask a poem for answers that we mostly don’t want? We want not only—maybe not even mostly—to understand the world. We want to be alive in it.
