Portrait of Bob Dylan by Lance Austin Olsen
Robert Zimmerman (1941-83 years) The Shape-Shifter
“Being young means keeping the porthole of hope open, even when the sea is rough and the sky is tired of being blue.” B.D.
Many people thought his thoughtful short story, entitled Forever Young, 1974, one often mistaken for a mere pop song, albeit a brilliant one, somehow summed up a sentiment he was again directly aiming at a generation he used to reluctantly embody. But in reality, that particular ode, issued in a Francois Villon troubadour tone, was really all about the ability to maintain a youthful state of mind and heart, one capable of continuing to hope, long after that feeling seems doomed to volatile seas and an exhausted sky. Like out world today for instance, just as precariously perched as it was back in the distressing politcal/cultural watershead year of 1968. No matter how old you might be in chronological terms, just as he stipulated in the above extra curricular testimony, we have to carry on as if the world, or at least civilization, wasn’t ending right in front of our bleary eyes. Poet-mystic, maniacal-minstrel, troubled-troubadour, surrealist-folk artist, chameleon-rock star, existential-entertainer, creative genius. Each of these terms well applies to the storytelling mystery that is Bob Dylan, the singer-songwriter who has never found a single reason to leave the life of a touring musician behind. I’ve long felt that each of his musical expeditions might also be read as chapters in a long running novel, not unlike Proust’s search for lost time tomes. I’m happy in fact to claim him as an accidental novelist at par with Ernest Hemingway (although his stylistic delivery might lead one to align him more with Thomas Pynchon) as evidenced by even the frquently slightly stuffy Nobel Prize for Literature jury surrendering to this clearly obvious fact. He was and still is a critical voice for multiple generations of the stubbornly hopeful and is still a songwriter who needs to properly be positioned closer to Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, WH Auden and TS Eliot. He has made pleasing himself alone into an art form all by itself, and by doing so he has pleased us all as the genuine unconscious voice of our own discontinuous discomforts, our disjunctive demands, our delusions, and our delights. And what a feral narrative voice it is. His ultra-Dylanesque literary take on the culture industry was first lobbed in an opening salvo with his stream of consciousness ‘novel’ Tarantula, 1966. And Dylan’s personal take on how smooth his own rhapsody will be once he paints his masterpiece, which is something he did long ago, remains as enigmatic as his visionary quartet of storytelling gems Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, both 1965, and Blonde on Blonde, 1966, then turning a radical corner with John Wesley Harding, 1968. With his multi-volume memoir Chronicles, 2004, however, some were astonished to discover that this shadowy fellow really could actually write up a storm, and that he was far more cogent than many would have hastily supposed. Some of us, of course, knew so all along, and we also courteously, if coyly, refrained from crowing “We told you so.” when Mr. Zimmerman’s Literary Nobel was finally awarded. Hear hear, we simply sighed and whispered. Meanwhile, the night was up to its usual tricks.
Text and Image: from the forthcoming collaborative book called Transposed Heads: A Dialogue, by Donald Brackett and Lance Austin Olsen.
An artist and a writer walked into a bar… sounds like a perfect set-up for what promises to be a very interesting book. The intriguing title, Transposed Heads, conjures several interpretations for this exchange.
By the way … I looked up Mr. Olsen’s work on his website. All I can say is that it is like stumbling upon a visual language that vibrates with meaning - like being able to read an ancient text from the future.
As for Dylan, the more said, the less said, it doesn’t matter. He is simply present - like the sun.
Thanks Donald. He became the truth teller of my early years in California beginning 1965. What a time that was. “Wowie pretty scary” and much more. This young Nebraskan became a believer. I also love Lance’s drawing/painting of mr. Dylan.