DYLAN'S DIFFERENT, All RIGHT

Why has it been the rule that so many...all...other performers, singers, musicians who work with and know Bob Dylan say, “He's a very private person” when asked to talk about him?

My take on it is that what he is about, has always been about, is so alien to others, even ones who do what appears to be the same work as he does, that they can only express it as, he's different. That much is clear to them. Among the paid commentators, and critics, who philosophize, disgrace, and criticize all fears, some try to go deeper and settle on reporting that he was able in the space of a performance to enter into a song and live through it and that is what the audience who got him saw and heard and felt, and to an extent it's true, but, the real power of Dylan, the private person, lies in the fact he is singing what he lives all day in the hope you, the listener, will also know you are what he is telling you you ought not be...do not have to be, and that telling is not in the music nor the words of the song but from the core of it, making use of music and lyrics, live, onstage, to arouse his audiences- arouse us on our own behalf….for example, the early Dylan, known as the folksinger, sang a song entitled No More Auction Block For Me. For many it is a disagreeable noise that goes right past them and does not apply to them, they believe. For the rest it is heard as a song calling on white people to recognize the plight of black slaves and rise up to the cause of abolition. A very few realize this singer knows about real freedom and knows we, the white folks, do not have it, but could, and just as the black person who has thrown off his chains sings, we could sing. Dylan never served the music business. All those others did...and do still. In closing, is it not so that the slaveholder is as much a slave as the ones he believes to be his human property? Have you never watched a dog train its master on a walk in a city park? Or, watched a child train a parent? An employee train an employer? For Heaven's sake, have you never realized even for a moment how much you serve your cell phone? Your watch? To me, Dylan sings that none of these relationships are real, just a waste of precious time.

Dylan is a true friend. Oscar Wilde said, “A true friend will stab you in the front.” I sometimes miss my true friend. I miss the gifts sent my way. The music. The images. The messages from a secret heart cavern. I thought these things this morning early while watching dawn break in an imperceptible motion of lights. Decided to tell you. Please stab me some more.

NOTHING 3

There was this one wild Monkey and everybody called him the Human Race. He started typing one night 'cause he never could sleep; and kept it up. Eventually, he typed all the works of Shakespeare. Then he started knocking out songs. Soon he made up the entire Dylan collection and Carol King's, too. People who called the Monkey a race of people were actually those people. It may be that the fingers wanted credit for what the whole Monkey did. Not a few of them caught on to what was happening and the credit for that phenomenon is due to some of the writings the Monkey made up. I believe it was when the Monkey heard about them that they really took off, though. This is funny. The Monkey hears through the ears of the people. Somehow, there' s a little Monkey in everybody.

Nothing 2

I am watching a science fiction film where a single astronaut is stranded in orbit over Earth with no radio communication with earthlings. Alone, he is told via a prerecorded message to which he cannot reply that there has been some mess on Earth since he left it and the necessary personnel to bring him out of orbit are unavailable for the indefinite future. The recording wishes him Godspeed.

By voice over I am told that if we humans are cut off and deprived of the ability to talk to anyone else our view of reality becomes very warped. Immediately, I am struck by the fact that the view of shared reality in society at present is very warped, anyway. So, might sanity actually be recaptured in solitude? We seem to have tried everything but what we most fear...being alone with only me; telling myself the truth; and yet, could there be a great surprise awaiting its own discovery? Something resilient? More importantly, something that unites all people in a profound enough way to end competition and war on Earth?

This lone astronaut is in a bad situation. It is like a Devil tells the first man and woman that the Real God is a fake. Sound familiar? Your parents, or some other adult may have told you such a story when you were too little to defend yourself. And that tale started trouble. And you have been complaining ever since.

If I were Satan would I not do the same? Of course, I would, and I did. I told it to myself. In the film, the voice over tells us we are listening to something warped of reality when everything else is silent. Now, this next part is so important, and yet, so difficult for you to hear. So, pay close attention...

so, I gotta thing to add and it is this: the real devil is a fake.

Who, in the final show, you gonna have to depend on? Mommy? You have an unsuspected resource. It is an innate ability. Know who you are.

That night I had a dream that I was a little boy. I was in bed in my room, lying on my tummy, under the covers, the lights were on and I could see plainly a very large spider, one bigger than me, on my bedroom wall. My mother was in the room with me and she was about to kill that spider when, suddenly, I turned to see another huge spider was crawling over my back on top of the covers. And a third one was crawling onto my uncovered head. Petrified in fear so strong I could not move, I screamed as loud as I could for my mommy to save me; but she seemed too busy chasing and swatting at the spider on the wall to pay attention to my outcry. When I awoke, I was completely safe.

Very soon, though, I was reminded of the film from the day before about the astronaut cut off in space from all the people on the Earth he had been depending upon to save him from harm and to return him safely to Earth. Hmmm. In some sense we are all aliens. Eventually, we each shall face that truth. We are depending on something to return us back home safely, but what? And where is home? And what are we doing here, lost in space?

I have depended upon many things in my life. First, my parents and family ties. As a young man, I depended upon a career, one of those where I am licensed by the government to do a line of work in great demand in which people have to pay me large sums of money to save them (which I cannot do); and a lovely wife and two healthy children (I cannot save); and a fine house in the burbs; and a couple of automobiles; and a bunch of close friends; and many colleagues in my field of expertise; and the laws of the country where I live; and the army and navy and marines and cops and doctors and insurance salesmen and retirement and social security benefits and expensive retirement homes; and my fear did not get better for me as time went by, but worse! And, I drank alcohol and smoked tobacco for relief. And, things got worse. And I drank more and smoked more; and, still, they got worse; and I drank and smoked more and more...until I found myself in a state worse than Hell, a place so bad it cannot be imagined; it has to be experienced for anyone to know the nature of this place I lived in...it is so bad...terror… outrage...terror...outrage...I wished for my death, and I was still young, and it would not come...

It is coming. We know it is coming.

Do we imagine that the things money can buy will save us then? Can it take us safely home? Money that buys politicians and educators and movie stars and rock stars and priests, is that going to save us? If so, like the voice over in that movie I watched I wish you Godspeed and success in your endeavors to obtain as much as you think you will need. Grab it fast. Yonder stands your orphan with his gun. If you are honest you will admit you are living as if that is your ultimate hope. In some way unexpressed I felt the isolated astronaut in the movie had been callously abandoned by the unreliable, unstable society of which he believes he is a member. And I further felt that because such a strategy so denies reality it had to happen that way.

For me, I am not counting on that. I am not, however, defenseless. I have been there, you see, and returned...safely...home. And now am writing these nothings for you... writing them for nothing...and counting on nothing to save us all. What is offered is a difficult quest by each individual, in solitude, now.

For me, it was a choice between a turning within and further preparation for another mad flight deeper into the abyss.

Nothings

'Tis happy and it is sad. The two play off each other as a melody that pleases heart. They stretch, I believe, what wants stretching. Like a muscle. To become larger to hold more love. Takes a bit of strain to make a baby. Why any strain at all? Why don't babies pop out of a toaster on time? I see us trying to make that happen. Is it good? Is it foolish? I favor leaving life be and canceling the cell phone subscription as quickly as possible. Eat a grasshopper. Whooper

I have been all balled up in what I had been taught to call Art.

But what is that?

I do not really know. What it means.

I want to abandon that world, vague, arbitrary, indistinct, talked to its death by fools, who are self-appointed experts and whose voices are recorded only because there is thought to be a need for somebody to tell the rest of us what to think and the fools are available with credentials. It is as if the world of art thinks seriously thinks that you and I not hammered with data shall not realize the worth of Da Vinci or Mozart nor Buddy Holly.

There is no culture at all and never has there been such a thing in reality, and friends, reality counts more than its opposite.

Upheaval!

There is going to be.

Hard rain is a name for it in real art.

Upheaval!

People who make a living in leadership positions are going to have to find another way. Leaders are liars. The word is out. We think. We think very well. We think very well without being told what.

Upheaval!

Da Vinci lives! Not in a museum but in the very souls of human beings! Trust what is. Not what was. Not what should be. Not what is hoped for. No. What is!

If the message of the Sermon on the Mount delivered tomorrow on a hilltop anywhere by a perfect stranger who is also despised by the leadership of the place is not fresh enough to carry the moment it is never going to be and if it is not it remains what it is now and that is just a faint symbol of what someone dreamed who now lives far away from us in time and space and so must be related to as a Saint Different and Unique from ourselves who will save us after we die. Funny, how He saves us from nothing but our own self doubt which seems to indicate we are already with it.