A Complete Unknown or No Direction Home: The Enigma of Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan is back in the news again. A countercultural hero to people who grew up some five decades ago, yet also, perhaps not surprisingly, given his paradoxical character, someone who hated the role into which he had been cast and someone who has been incorporated in the literary establishment by virtue of his Nobel Prize, he seemed nonetheless irrelevant in the age of Taylor Swift—until only last month, when Jerry Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, the second biopic filmed about Dylan, was released. A much more conventional, linear film than is Todd Haynes’s postmodern I’m Not There, it is also one with which Dylan has collaborated, even suggesting, true to form, that the movie contain at least one entirely fictitious scene. And Mangold’s new offering just might actually perform the neat trick of making the bard of the 1960s relevant to the 2020s—if only Dylan had, to put it charitably, a somewhat less paradoxical character.

That paradoxical, sometimes repellent character is on display throughout A Complete Unknown, most obviously in Dylan’s cavalier treatment of the two main women in his life at that time, Suze Rotolo (thinly disguised, this at the request of Dylan to protect her privacy, but also poorly realized in the film, for the viewer would not readily know that it was Rotolo who introduced Dylan, a college dropout, to progressive politics, to symbolist poetry, and to the work of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill) and Joan Baez, so it is well to remember two things about this latest film portrait. First, the notion of Dylan as a shapeshifter, as someone who wants to sing his own songs in his own unconventional voice while remaining unknown, is actually now an old one that originates with the foundational 1967 Cheetah article on him by the pioneering feminist rock critic Ellen Willis, an article that led to her becoming the first rock critic at The New Yorker; we have Willis to thank for this insight. Second, especially because musical tastes are so strongly determined by the music to which one was exposed in youth, it is essential to demonstrate what exactly it was that made, and makes, Dylan great, the first great songwriter of his generation and deserving of his Nobel Prize.

Dylan as Writer, Moralist, and Shapeshifter

Nowadays, the celebrity culture is filled with petty rivalries over all kinds of internet-generated slights. It would take little work to multiply examples, although there is no question that Dylan, in a very different age, could be equally petty, even vindictive, as songs like “Positively 4^th Street” or “Ballad of a Thin Man,” not to mention his most celebrated track, “Like a Rolling Stone,” so easily demonstrate. Consider, however, these words, the conclusion of “When the Ship Comes in,” composed in 1963 by a 22-year-old Dylan after he had been treated poorly by a hotel clerk and had required the intervention of his more famous traveling companion, Joan Baez, to secure a room:

Oh the foes will rise
With the sleep still in their eyes
And they’ll jerk from their beds and think they’re dreamin’
But they’ll pinch themselves and squeal
And know that it’s for real
The hour when the ship comes in

Then they’ll raise their hands
Sayin’ we’ll meet all your demands
But we’ll shout from the bow your days are numbered
And like Pharoah’s tribe
They’ll be drownded in the tide
And like Goliath, they’ll be conquered

In other words, Dylan’s young adult self, when slighted, produced not a complaint at having been mistreated but one of his best freedom songs, a call for justice and righteousness laden with Biblical imagery and powerful enough for him to sing it without embarrassment at the 1963 March on Washington. In 1963, Dylan was a pioneer in writing in this manner, and the short list of people who might have done better would have included Dylan’s hero Woody Guthrie, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, who wrote “Pirate Jenny,” a clear influence on “When the Ship Comes in,” and Abel Meeropol, author of “Strange Fruit.” Very few other writers could have created this song, either then or now, and a year later, when he was supposedly no longer a political songwriter, he would do even better, as the first stanza of “Chimes of Freedom” shows:

Far between sundown’s finish an’ midnight’s broken toll
We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing
As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds
Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashing
Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight
An’ for each an’ ev’ry underdog soldier in the night
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing

Somewhere in the mixed-up confusion that is Bob Dylan, there is an attention to righteous justice, the mishpat tzedek of his Jewish upbringing, that few songwriters can match but that is expressed artfully enough that these songs are still meaningful after 50 years. His later work, as apolitical and even antipolitical as it sometimes is, combines complex, sophisticated imagery with an empathy, a compassion, for the dispossessed (“the luckless, the abandoned an’ foresaked” of “Chimes of Freedom”) that very few songwriters can match. One good example from later work would be the opening verses of “Dignity,” written in 1989 but not released until 1994 on Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Volume 3:

Fat man lookin’ in a blade of steel
Thin man lookin’ at his last meal
Hollow man lookin’ in a cottonfield
For dignity

Wise man lookin’ in a blade of grass
Young man lookin’ in the shadows that pass
Poor man lookin’ through painted glass
For dignity

 Another would be the opening verse of “Workingman’s Blues #2” on Modern Times (2006):

There’s an evening’s haze settling over the town
Starlight by the edge of the creek
The buying power of the proletariat’s gone down
Money’s getting shallow and weak
The place I love best is a sweet memory
It’s a new path that we trod
They say low wages are a reality
If we want to compete abroad

And by now, I think that any of us who grew up with Dylan’s classic records of the middle and late 1960s would say that things like “Chimes of Freedom” or “Motorpsycho Nightmare” or “Subterranean Homesick Blues” or “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” or “Gates of Eden” or “Bob Dylan’s 115^th Dream” or “Maggie’s Farm” or “Desolation Row” or “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” might not be topical songs but that there is nothing apolitical about them. As Phil Ochs said about his frenemy’s renunciation of his political songs, “I don’t think he can succeed in burying them. They’re too good. And they’re out of his hands.” And so the songs endure.

Meanwhile, about the unknowability of Bob Dylan, so much has been said about Dylan as shapeshifter that only a few highlights of his biography need be mentioned to demonstrate it. Most important, of course, is that Robert Allen Zimmerman became Bob Dylan while still in Minneapolis, a freshman at the University of Minnesota trying to establish himself in the local bohemian-folkie culture, or possibly before then, Bob Dillon, as a high school student in Hibbing, and arrived in New York with a completely manufactured past involving his having ridden the rails and having lived in New Mexico, among other details entirely inconsistent with the actual middle-class Jewish background from which he came. There is abundant evidence of the many ways in which Dylan, although not without some reasonable motive, given the demands of fame, has tried, as an adult, to stay unknowable. His having kept secret for some 15 years not only a second marriage, to Carolyn Dennis, one of his backup singers, but also a child with her, seem to me to be the facts most consistent with his continuing adoption of a series of personas, of masks. Still, Dylan was presenting himself as someone else well before he understood the toll that fame can take, so the mask, the persona, must be regarded as part of his carefully hidden identity, although I think that the mask is not identical with this identity because it would be hard to produce a body of work like Dylan’s if he truly had no core.

No Direction Home

Thus, as I have struggled with Dylan’s biography and his work, and with the paradox of his writing and singing authentic songs through a mask, I am struck less by the phrase “a complete known” in “Like a Rolling Stone”; instead, like Martin Scorsese in his documentary on the early Dylan, I am more impressed with the rhyme that precedes it, “with no direction home,” albeit with the proviso that, as Dylan’s lyric suggests, being on your own, having no direction home, and being a complete unknown are highly related things. Dylan, who apparently knows that an odyssey is not a journey away from home but an attempt to return there says, at the outset of Scorsese’s No Direction Home:

I had ambitions to set out and find . . . like an odyssey of going home somewhere. I set out to find this home that I’d left a while back . . . and I couldn’t remember exactly where it was, but I was on my way there. And encountering what I encountered on the way, was how I envisioned it all. I didn’t really have any ambition at all. I was born very far from where I’m supposed to be . . . and so I’m on my way home, you know.

In fact, if you think about Dylan’s 1960s work, you can easily see his struggle with origins and locations, beginning with the beginning of “Song to Woody,” almost certainly his first fully realized song and the first of his own work that he committed to vinyl, the only commercial medium available at the time:

I’m out here a thousand miles from my home
Walkin’ a road other men have gone down
I’m seein’ your world of people and things
Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings

And also with the song’s ending:

I’m a-leavin’ tomorrow, but I could leave today
Somewhere down the road someday
The very last thing that I’d want to do
Is to say I’ve been hittin’ some hard travelin’ too

Psychobiography of an artist’s work can be a reductive pursuit, but here in perhaps the earliest of his songs, we find Dylan identifying with his imagined Woody Guthrie and presenting himself as a troubadour and a wanderer with a romantic past filled with peasants and princes, anything other than his actual Jewish middle-class background. Sigmund Freud termed these imaginings of mythical aristocratic origins family romances. Dylan not only is a thousand miles from his home when he writes this song; he needs, psychologically, to be a thousand miles from his home.

A Jewish Midwestern Childhood

But what drives this need? There is surprisingly little trauma in Dylan’s relationships with his parents, but there is much misattunement, a serious problem for someone who wants to be a musician. Although his relationship with his stern, introverted father was distant, Dylan’s relationship with his mother was rather warmer, and his strict father even relented when his 19-year-old son said that he wanted to drop out of college and journey to New York to be a musician. But there is something peculiar in his family background. Dylan’s family wound up in Hibbing, and his father Abram or Abe wound up working for the family appliance business, because Dylan’s father, an athlete in youth and a promising executive for Standard Oil in an age when success did not require a college degree, had been laid low by polio and therefore had difficulty walking. It is a strange coincidence that three of the best songwriters in rock have had their lives affected by polio. Joni Mitchell and Neil Young are survivors of the disease itself, but Bob Dylan instead lived with the consequences that the disease had had for his family and his father.

A reasonable surmise is that Dylan became rebellious not just because he fell in love with rock ‘n’ roll, although he says that the music beaming in over the AM radio is what told him that there was a bigger life outside Hibbing, and not just because his father was stern or strict, but because his father was somehow diminished, unable to be the father that Dylan needed him to be, just as in Rebel Without a Cause, a film that a young Dylan saw many times and that dominated 1950s youth culture, Jim Backus, playing Frank Stark, was unable, until the last scene, to be the strong, courageous father that James Dean’s Jim Stark needed. Irony would have it that Woody Guthrie, the man Dylan chose as his hero, was by the time Dylan met him far more immobile with Huntington’s disease than his own father ever had been, but there is a romance to Guthrie’s story that Dylan simply could find in his father’s life. Meanwhile, to my reading, Dylan also carried in his psyche an image of a more dangerous father, far more menacing or abandoning than anything his actual father could ever have been, that was split off from his need for a romantic, vital figure, as “Highway 61 Revisited,” his satiric take on what Jews call the Binding of Isaac, suggests:

Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God says, “Out on Highway 61”

Here it matters critically to Dylan’s retelling of one of the most frightening stories in the Hebrew Bible is that Dylan’s father’s name actually was Abe. Meanwhile, although Dylan’s relationship with his mother, Beatrice or Beatty, was rather better, such that Dylan felt much more supported by her in the pursuit of his dreams, it can be reasonably supposed that she too did not fully understand these dreams, for if it is one thing that Abe and Beatty Zimmerman wanted for their son, it was not that he become a musician, let alone one who came to symbolize rebellion, but rather that he go to college, get a good job, find a nice Jewish girl, etc., as in this directive from “Subterranean Homesick Blues”:

Ah get born, keep warm

Short pants, romance, learn to dance

Get dressed, get blessed

Try to be a success

Please her, please him, buy gifts

Twenty years of schoolin’

And they put you on the day shift

Dylan was having none of it, and my surmise, although I have no direct evidence for it, is that his mother’s support could not or did not outweigh the criticism and disapproval that Dylan felt from his father.

Oedipus and Mobility

The matter of mobility is of particular importance in Dylan’s life for a different, more literary reason as well. Freud’s interpretation of the Oedipus myth focuses on incest and parricide and proposes that every human being, by virtue of connection to Oedipus, wishes to break these two taboos. It is not unreasonable to interpret Dylan’s life through such a lens, especially with regard to parricide, for what does it mean to reject one’s father’s name and, later, one’s parents’ religion? But other readings of the Oedipus myth are available. The name Oedipus means “swollen foot,” and Oedipus acquired his swollen feet after his father Laius, fearing the prophecy of the oracle at Delphi that he would be killed by his own son, who would then marry his mother, Laius’ wife, left this son, Oedipus, exposed on Mount Cithaeron, with his feet bound or perhaps staked to the ground. Later in the story, Oedipus, after killing an unknown older man who had challenged him at a crossroads while he was escaping Corinth, and the people he regarded as his parents, in order to avoid his own fate, a fate also revealed to him by the Delphic oracle, arrives at Thebes, a city in mourning over its lost king. There he saves the city by solving the riddle of the Sphinx: “Which creature has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?” The famous answer provided by Oedipus, in exchange for which he was given rulership of the city and marriage with its queen Jocasta, was, of course, “Man—who crawls on all fours as a baby, then walks on two feet as an adult, and then uses a walking stick in old age.” In other words, the Oedipus myth is as much about locomotion, aging, and lack of self-knowledge as it is about taboo wishes toward one’s parents. In my view, some significant psychological concerns of Dylan’s would be that his father, by virtue of disability in walking, could be neither the hero nor the rival that Dylan needed him to be, but that his mother, certainly not the taboo-breaking figure of the Oedipus story, Jocasta being a woman who (unknowingly) marries her son Oedipus, just as her son (unknowingly) marries her, could not compensate for the subtle psychological injury that Dylan apparently experienced in relation to his father.

The additional problem was that Abe Zimmerman’s illness and its sequelae had placed the family in Hibbing, Minnesota, as white and non-Jewish a part of the United States as one can find and a very poor fit not only for a Jewish teenager but also, more importantly, for a Jewish teenager, who by virtue of the signals of southern radio stations that reached up into northern Minnesota on clear nights, had fallen in love with the country’s indigenous music. For Dylan, this music was, at first, the heartbreak country songs of Hank Williams and then, in short order, the early rockabilly of Elvis Presley’s Sun recordings, the wild rhythm and blues of Little Richard, the greatest rock ‘n’ roll wild man of the day, and, finally, late in his high school years, the folk stylings of Odetta. Dylan has said that both he and his father lived in Hibbing but that they nonetheless lived in different towns. What mattered to Dylan was that he lived in a place from which he needed to escape.

Highway 61 Previsited

Dylan’s paths of escape to the lands he experienced through AM radio signals were the Mississippi River and Highway 61. And so about these thoroughfares, one natural and the other human made, US Route 61 runs from northern Minnesota, where it used to go all the way to the Canadian border, through Duluth, where Dylan was born and spent his first six years, surrounded by family and by the Jewish community there. It then parallels the Mississippi River through Chicago (epicenter of the blues after World War II), St. Louis (the home of Chuck Berry), Memphis (the home of Elvis Presley, the place where W. C. Handy, the father of the blues, wrote his first hits, and a major center of the blues to this day), and the Mississippi Delta (where the deepest blues in the United States were created and where it creates the second most important crossroads in Western culture, the first being the crossroads at which Oedipus slew Laius, by intersecting with US Route 49), all the way down to New Orleans (where jazz was born). Highway 61 is therefore the road that enables Dylan to escape rural Minnesota, that connects him to the blues at the other end of the highway, the blues that are just as central to the formation of Dylan’s musical imagination as his vaunted tie to Woody Guthrie, as the song selection on Dylan’s first album indicates.

About these things, Dylan has written, in Chronicles: Volume One,

Highway 61, the main thoroughfare of the country blues begins where I come from . . . . The Mississippi River, the bloodstream of the blues, also starts up from my neck of the woods. I was never too far from any of it. It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood.

Highway 61 therefore takes Dylan away from home, but like all roads, it goes in both directions. It also brings him back home. He may try to leave rural Minnesota, and he says that he was born when he arrived in New York in January 1961, but his preoccupation with departure masks, I believe, a fear and a wish in connection with returning.

There are other indications in Dylan’s early work of the need to travel, to locomote. Consider “Blowin’ in the Wind,” the song that made him famous when in 1963 Peter, Paul and Mary took it to number two on the Billboard chart. Its opening line, “How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?,” was readily seen as empathy with the struggles, continuing to this day, of African American men to be regarded as men and not boys. Mavis Staples says as much in No Direction Home regarding the struggles of her father, the great Pops Staples, and it is possibly the line in the song that inspired Sam Cooke to write “A Change is Gonna Come.” But perhaps this opening line is psychobiography as well. How many roads must a man who has changed his name and left his home walk down before he too is his own man? And we can go deeper as we consider not the song that made him famous, written in April 1962, but the first song he wrote that may be regarded as brilliant, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.”

Hard Rain

A great deal of mythology, some of it, to no surprise, of Dylan’s own making, surrounds “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” It is Dylan himself who is quoted in Nat Hentoff’s liner notes to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, the album on which it appears, as saying that the song was written in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. But in another interview, with Studs Terkel, Dylan said that he really did mean hard rain, not atomic rain, and in any case, the historical record is clear that Dylan first performed the song as part of an all-star hootenanny at Carnegie Hall on September 22 that year. It is still possible, even plausible, that Dylan had nuclear war on his mind. Earlier that year, before “Blowin’ in the Wind” came to him, he had already written one of his earliest unknown masterpieces, “Let Me Die in My Footsteps,” a statement of refusal to die in a fallout shelter if nuclear war should ever come, and like all of us during the Cold War, he was raised with duck-and-cover drills. Nevertheless, I think that (for once) we can take Dylan at his word when he says about “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” that “every line in it is actually the start of a whole new song,” for it still feels that way, even more than five decades after its initial composition. Another interesting thing about this song is that perhaps its most powerful image is one that Dylan included in the earliest recordings of it, found on Live at the Gaslight 1962 and The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964, but that he chose to omit, for whatever obscure purposes he usually has, from the canonical lyrics. It was originally supposed to be the concluding line of the third (“What did you hear?”) verse: “I heard the sound of one person who cried he was human.” This one seems particularly appropriate as we consider how we are to survive the next four years with our own humanity intact.

As we consider this song, it is easy to get lost in Dylan’s series of stupendous (from Latin, stupendus, “to be wondered at”) images, and also to think about nuclear destruction, even if we now know that this song was composed in the months prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis, but from a psychoanalytic perspective, other things are far more important. First is that the opening verse continues Dylan’s concern with locomotion and travel, although there is nothing romantic about this particular journey:

I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways
I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard

Second are the framing lines of each verse: “Oh, where have you been my blue-eyed son?/And where have you been my darling young one?” These lines are a mother’s questions to her son, and they therefore speak to a world in which a mother cannot protect her child from seeing and knowing the world as it is, in all its terrifying detail, a consideration of continuing relevance as we contemplate the return to power of a political administration that saw fit to separate families as a core policy but also a consideration of relevance as we reflect on the mind and the life story of the person who wrote these words. Dylan borrowed these lines from “Lord Randall” (Child Ballad 12), a tale in which, verse by verse, question by question, a mother learns from her son and “handsome young man” that he has been poisoned by his lover for reasons unknown. Here we see not only a mother’s inability, perhaps failure, to protect her son, but also suggestions of an oedipal or incestuous tie between the two speaking characters in the ballad, perhaps the reason for a murder by a lover who has come to believe that her beloved will never leave home. Nevertheless, a simpler explanation, that the mother-son dialogue that is presented here is merely an indication of an attachment relationship, of closeness between mother and son, still leaves us with the terrifying prospect of a mother’s inability to protect.

These psychoanalytic aspects of the source material do not seem to appear in Dylan’s updating of the original ballad, certainly because Dylan is no longer giving us the slow reveal of a son’s murder that is the point of the original song but probably also because here Dylan is describing a world in which, as a doomsday approaches, no long-term relationships, such as that between a mother and son, are possible (e.g., “I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it”), so something like an oedipal or an attachment tie cannot develop. It is a world in which the best we can hope for is to hear the sound of one person who cried he was human or to have the song’s narrator stand on the ocean until he starts sinking. True, there is one important hopeful image that is crucial in a song about rain—“I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow”—but it too is swept away in the flood of terrifying images that, in the fourth (“Who did you meet?”) verse, ends with another assertion of the failure of human connection: “I met one man who was wounded in love/I met another man who was wounded in hatred.”

Similar considerations about the mother-child relationship in Dylan’s work also apply to “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” which has equally dazzling imagery and an extraordinarily complex rhyme scheme but which ends every verse with a simple framing device similar to that found in “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” this time a complex entreaty to and simultaneous spurning of a mother who is not there or who simply does not understand, as in “It’s alright, ma/It’s life and life only.” In the 1960s, and probably not today either, there are few, if any, other songwriters who are grappling with these ideas, both the political and the personal, with this degree of imagination and subtlety.

Parenthood, Loss, and Mortality

In the next few years, Dylan would begin having children, and he would begin, he tells us, to understand his father a great deal better. Of course, his motorcycle accident in 1966, an event that for a time would have restricted his mobility, might also have brought him closer to his father. In 1967, Dylan’s hero Woody Guthrie died, and Dylan appeared at the memorial concert after having been off the metaphorical road of touring and performing for a year. Then, in 1968, his father died suddenly and prematurely of a heart attack. And suddenly, Dylan was writing very different songs. He could still write protestish things like “I Shall Be Released” or apocalyptic things like “This Wheel’s on Fire,” but now he was writing “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” a song that, advising the listener to “strap yourself to the tree with roots,” expresses a very different sentiment from “How many roads must a man walk down?” Dylan, in short, is no longer traveling somewhere, no longer seeking a direction home. He also wrote “Tears of Rage,” a song of parental, no paternal, disappointment in a daughter that is much at variance with the son’s disappointment in earlier songs, a song just as brilliant as any of the others I have mentioned:

We carried you in our arms
On Independence Day
And now you’d throw us all aside
And put us on our way
Oh what dear daughter ’neath the sun
Would treat a father so
To wait upon him hand and foot
And always tell him, “No?”

Here and in 1968’s “All Along the Watchtower” (“There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke”), Dylan is expressing a very different philosophy than that in the declaration found in “Absolutely Sweet Marie” that to live outside the law you must be honest. Life transitions—the birth of children, the deaths of a father-figure and an actual father, and a premature confrontation with his own death—had reorganized a personality that still, as the years have shown, continues to rely on masks. Underneath the mask was now someone who seemed finally to have the home he was seeking, only to have that illusion shattered, as revealed in Blood on the Tracks, a record that Dylan says is not confessional or autobiographical, even though his son Jakob begs to differ, as his marriage collapsed. There are many things in John Wesley Harding, Dylan’s last great record before his triumphant comeback with Blood on the Tracks, that still feel political in the broader sense, and the same might even be said about, for example, “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” the story of a moll who murders her wealthy, philandering husband and is sentenced to death by a corrupt judge, on Blood on the Tracks, as well as about other contributions from later in his career (e.g., “Hurricane,” which actually is a topical song, “Dignity,” “Workingman’s Blues #2”).  But increasingly, we see an artist wrestling with the politics of intimacy and domestic life, with faith (obviously enough, given his conversion to Christianity), and with mortality (his own), although it must be noted that the recording of 1997’s Time Out of Mind, the album that launched Dylan’s career renaissance, came just before a brush with death from histoplasmosis. One more plausible factor in his reemergence from creative stagnation may have been that Dylan, apparently having written no original songs in the first half of the 1990s, revitalized his craft through a return to his folk music roots on Good as I’ve Been to You and World Gone Wrong, especially, if we are thinking politically, with Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times (Come Again No More).”

The Pursuit of Justice

Thus, especially in Dylan’s early work, even with his concerted efforts at not being known, at having a mask, we can easily see some underlying psychological concerns that might have motivated his rebellion in adolescence and early adulthood and that may still operate in a need to find a home. These needs seem to involve leaving home, inventing a past more romantic than the more prosaic life he left, finding a more powerful, more vital father-figure with whom to identify before he (Dylan), as a young parent, found a way to identify with the father with whom he had previously struggled, and finding a mother who could be a protector as well as a nurturer. My thoughts here are speculations, of course, because Dylan is not talking, except through his songs, but to my read, this is what the source material, the songs, are saying. That these concerns can be found in the work does not, however, obviate the quality or power of his songs, insofar as any artist derives his or her work from the raw materials of his or her life, and Dylan remains a master songwriter, whether explicitly political, as in the early work, or implicitly so, as is often the case later on. It also follows that these concerns do not dilute the concerns with righteous justice, with mitzpat tzedek, that animates the explicitly political songs that dominated Dylan’s early career or the more narrowly focused, more intimate songs of his later years, for a concern with righteous justice also comes from the raw materials of life, as anyone who has ever tried to pursue justice knows. Phil Ochs was right, therefore, regarding Dylan’s early political work; he cannot bury these songs because they are too good. For all his own masks, Dylan still calls us to hear the sound of one person who cried he was human. This call is as essential if we are to survive the next four years as is any explicitly political activity in which we might engage, complementary to any activist engagement, because it is through hearing that sound that we preserve our own humanity. And aside from people like Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell or John Prine (and maybe a few others), Bob Dylan calls us to hear the sound of humanity better than any songwriter I know.

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