Dreamers Rise
An Open Notebook
And for those who choose the twisty road, prefer it to the straight
Let joy beat out old misery, as love will conquer hate.
 Illustration by Henry L. Stephens from The Goblin Snob (ca. 1855) | |||||
|
A sort of electronic broadside, composed of rants and reviews, conceits and speculations, and whatever else feels the need to be here. Issued as chance will have it. 2:32 The first recording of “All Along the Watchtower” appeared on John Wesley Harding, Bob Dylan's 1967 album, his first to be released in the wake of a motorcycle accident the year before. According to Wikipedia, Dylan has performed the song live at least 1,747 times. I'm not sure whether the size of that number is more disturbing than the fact that someone has taken the trouble of tabulating it. It has also been covered by numerous other musicians, notably by Jimi Hendrix in a version that Dylan has said influenced his own subsequent renditions. As originally recorded the song has but three brief verses and no refrain, and lasts barely two and a half minutes. (Reportedly, when he sings it now, Dylan extends it a bit by repeating the first verse at the end.) That the song is essentially concerned with matters traditionally associated with religion has long been known, but its stark prophetic power transcends any particular theology. Here are the lyrics: “There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief,What follows is not an interpretation of the song, but simply an attempt to pull on some of the threads leading into or out of it. Don't expect coherence. The opening cry, there must be some way out of here, could easily have been lifted verbatim from the dialogue of a low-grade Hollywood adventure film, in which hero and heroine find themselves trapped in a dungeon. But it also echoes the gangster film threat nobody gets out of here alive, which has subsequently become an adage with a more general and ironic significance.* If the identification which some observers have made of the Joker with Jesus is correct, then the line takes on other meanings, evoking both the lament of Jesus on the cross and the Christian belief that his crucifixion delivered mankind “out of” eternal death. Note that Joker is not the usual English name for the court entertainer who is granted license to mock the King and his retinue; that would be jester or fool. The Joker, however, was a familiar villain in the popular Batman television series (1966-1968), and Dylan in the 1960s was fond dropping the names of stock characters into his songs (for this see especially “Desolation Row”). The Joker is also the name used for the figure of the Fool in decks of playing cards. In Tarot decks there is a Fool, as well as a figure (the Seven of Swords) who is sometimes identified as a Thief. Jesus was crucified alongside two thieves, one of whom received Christian salvation, so the dialogue between Joker and Thief would make sense. Yet would it wrong to say that — at least for a 20th-century listener — the pair have more than a touch of kinship with Lewis Carroll's Walrus and Carpenter and with Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon? In the Joker's continuing complaint, there's too much confusion seems like a bit of a letdown (and I can't get no relief is probably there mostly to provide a rhyme) but it evokes a Confucian lament at the disordered state of affairs that results when the world is not governed by a just ruler. In the next line, businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth, “they” is needed to make the line scan, but along with “no relief” in the previous line (instead of “any relief”) it establishes the song's idiolect, which differs from Standard English both in its tolerance for grammatical variation and its “heightened” or liturgical tone. Dig (rather than the expected plow) is a useful and visceral synonym necessary to avoid the redundant “plowmen plow.” If it is indeed Jesus who is making the lament, then my makes perfect sense (“the earth is the lord's, and the fullness thereof”). The parallelism between businessmen drinking wine and plowmen plowing the earth seems strained, unless perhaps we are to imagine the businessmen as the rich consuming the fruits of the earth. But I think the next line reveals the real point of the complaint; it's not that the businessmen or plowmen are deriving unjust benefit, it's that none of them along the line know what any of it is worth. “Along the line” may be filler inserted to achieve a landing on a rhyme, but it nicely anticipates “all along the watchtower” in the final verse and also makes the range of people encompassed by the judgment easier to visualize. None of them along the line know what any of it is worth also anticipates the Thief's acknowledgment in the next verse that there are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke. No reason to get excited, the thief, he kindly spoke: again, he is not grammatically necessary but is consistent with the song's idiolect. Kindly, though, strikes me as entirely the wrong word. It is altogether too soft for the context of the song and seems to have been inserted at all only because an adjective was needed to fill out the line, but Dylan has a fondness for unexpected adjectives, and the slightly askew effect the word produces should not be dismissed. There are many here among us recalls, to my exegetically untutored ear, Paul's promise that there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom (KJV). You and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate: this is the one line in this song that always keeps coming back to me, and which, really, is the reason I'm writing this at all. It's a line I often think of whenever I hear of some great folly that I have managed to elude, one which you and I have been through, which, however many follies we may commit, will never be numbered among them. (The folly, for example, of believing that Americans can reshape third-world countries at will to suit their own purposes, which is a folly I would have thought had been laid soundly to rest thirty years ago, but never mind.) But to be honest the line should not be divorced from its context, which is the Thief's preceding observation that there are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke. And here is the crux of the song. Read it religiously or not, as you choose, but the song is a repudiation of those who fail to see what is at stake in their own lives. The biographical background of the song should be kept in mind: Dylan wrote “All Along the Watchtower” during a period of reflection, when his motorcycle accident had forced him to confront his own mortality and to reconsider what was important to him and where he stood in relation to the world around him, where he stood in relation to being. And in the song, to use Milan Kundera's terminology from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he came down firmly on the side of the heaviness of being, or at least, he expressed the longing for life to have weight. But we are not living in biblical times, and even though there-are-many-here-among-us who would like to reclaim the supposed heaviness of that world, Dylan can not escape the modern, secular view of the world. That is why, despite its biblical inspiration and biblical language, the song is at least as much a vision of Samuel Beckett's world as it is of Isaiah's or Paul's. In the first two verses, the Thief's message is this: though neither businessman nor plowman nor anyone in between knows what any of this life we are living is worth, that is no reason for concern, because while there are indeed many here among us who likewise think that life is but a joke, you and I have been through that, and it is not our fate to share their ignorance or their folly. So let us not talk falsely now is unexpected, since Joker and Thief have both only described — not advocated — false beliefs, but perhaps the idea is let us not concern ourselves with the false and idle notions of others. There is no time for that, because the hour is getting late. This sudden eschatological turn sets up the final verse, which is largely drawn from Isaiah 21**, verses 5-9: Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink: arise, ye princes, and anoint the shield. For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.I'm the wrong person to place this passage in its biblical context, so I'll limit myself to a few observations. I don't know whether the princes who are addressed by the Lord are to be understood as unjustly exalted and therefore deserving of humbling, but it is certain that what the watchman sees, from the watchtower, is the approach of messengers bearing the news of the fall of Babylon, a wicked city that had worshipped vain and false idols, just as the businessman, the ploughman, and their fellows are living vain and false lives. The reference to a lion is obscure, at least to me (some translations interpret it as meaning that the watchman cried out like a lion), but whatever its original import it seems to have suggested the atmospheric but gratuitous wildcat. In the first line of the final verse, along the watchtower is a curious choice of phrase, as one normally doesn't think of a tower as having length as opposed to height. But then there are multiple princes keeping the view (keeping watch), so perhaps they need more room. The repeated syllable al(l) gives the beginning of the line an interesting loping rhythm. Dylan provides some extra color to the scene with women coming and going, barefoot servants, too. The wildcat growls, the riders draw near, and the song rhymes to an end with the wind beginning to howl. Begins is actually a pivotal word, for it implies the advent of something new, in addition to the riders; we are just now seeing and hearing the first signs of a great change on the wind, a terrible cleansing that will bring down princes and cities. But for me, what the third verse brings to mind, more than anything else, is Dino Buzzati's novel The Tartar Steppe, in which a detachment of soldiers assigned to maintain watch at an isolated desert outpost live out their lives waiting for barbarians who never seem to arrive. What if we're all poised on the watchtower, waiting for the heralds, and they never come? *There is a biography of the singer Jim Morrison — published long after “All Along the Watchtower” was written — called No One Gets Out of Here Alive, the title of which may be a Morrison reference of some sort that I'm not familiar with. **The same passage, incidentally, provides the name of The Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, the publishing arm of the Jehovah's Witnesses. April 1, 2008 [ Permalink ]
Email me
|
![[Valid RSS]](valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed")