Bob Dylan: What the Songs Mean

Copyright © 2019 Michael Karwowski

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"We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it

for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us,

an effort no one can spare us."

Marcel Proust

Contents

Introduction

"It ain’t the melodies that’re important, man, it’s the words.

I don’t give a damn ’bout melodies."

(Bob Dylan, New York, 1963)

Rock music is, arguably, the most important cultural expression of the last half-century. And it was Bob Dylan who invented the medium in its purest form, thereby transforming popular music into an art form. It was The Beatles who made rock more accessible, but the idea of marrying significant words with popular music was essentially Dylan’s. He’s written many songs in other forms, but it’s his role as matchmaker between poetical lyrics and the driving rhythms of rock ‘n’ roll for which, musically, at least, he’ll probably best be remembered. For that reason alone, he has every right to be considered one of the great cultural innovators of the 20th century.

But this book is less concerned with the music than it is with the lyrics to the songs. In this, it’s in tune with the man himself, since Dylan has made it plain on numerous occasions that the music only matters as a framework to the lyrics. Right at the beginning of his career as a songwriter, he said that his song lyrics were written to be read, that the words had a life apart from the music.

This obviously begs the question about whether Bob Dylan can actually be considered a poet. As for the man himself, he told journalist and biographer Robert Shelton in 1978 that he considered himself a poet first and a musician only second. He lived like a poet, he said, and would die like a poet. Not surprisingly, the issue has been fiercely debated ever since his remarkable way with words first became apparent at the beginning of the creative renaissance of the 1960s. Since then, numerous critical books and articles have been published outlining his credentials as a poet. Finally, in 1996, aged 55, Dylan was formally nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, having, bizarrely perhaps, already received France’s highest cultural crown, Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters. In the event, the Nobel went elsewhere and continued to do so for a further 20 years, right up until 2016, when, to the surprise of many, amazement of others, and consternation of some, the 75-year-old actually won the prize for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.

Sir Christopher Ricks, a Professor of English Literature, Poetry, and the Humanities at Cambridge, Oxford and Boston Universities respectively, had actually suggested many years before: If the question is does anybody use words better than he does, then the answer in my opinion is no. In fact, Dylan’s Nobel Prize had already been presaged by his receipt of a special Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.

But, again, this book is less concerned with the form of Bob Dylan’s lyrics than it is with their content, with what they mean, hence its title. In this respect, while it may be relevant to ask whether Dylan is a poet, it’s not just relevant but essential to ask whether he’s an artist. And this book does ask that question, indeed, outlines a very precise definition of art in support of the argument that Dylan is, as Britain’s former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion has claimed, one of the greatest artists of the century, or of the 20th and 21st centuries, since he belongs to both.

What’s more, where this quest for precision is concerned, Bob Dylan himself has drawn attention to the fact that his lyrics have a very particular meaning, a meaning that comprises a whole, a meaning that adds up to a world view; in short, that his lyrics define a philosophy that sets out to make sense of the world and everything human in it. People can learn everything about me through my songs, he explained in 1990, if they know where to look. They can juxtapose them with certain other songs and draw a clear conclusion.

Many Bob Dylan fans know this instinctively. That’s precisely why they are fans. In fact, the whole point of Dylan’s songs is not whether they can be compared with Keats or how catchy the tunes are, but what they mean, and what they can tell us about the human condition, about ourselves. This is why the songs chosen by many lifelong fans as their favourites tend to be the most self-evidently comprehensive or profound. On BBC Radio 4’s long-running Desert Island Discs programme, for instance, where guests choose the records they would take to a desert island and Dylan comes second only to The Beatles in the popular music choices, American horror writer Stephen King picked the 11-minute-long despair-fest that is Desolation Row as his all-time favourite song. Rock star Bruce Springsteen, meanwhile, the so-called bard of blue-collar America, chose the six-minute-long "Like a Rolling Stone", whose opening snare shot sounded like somebody had kicked open the door to your mind, as his own abiding favourite, while other choices are the lyrically transcendent "Mr. Tambourine Man" and the riddle that is "Tangled Up in Blue. Visions of Johanna" – the best song lyric ever written, according to Andrew Motion – is another such, chosen as their favourite song by a comprehensive survey of Bob Dylan fans.

But while Dylan fans know instinctively that the songs, to paraphrase Springsteen, contain the whole world, they’re not always entirely sure what precisely that world consists of, although they know what it doesn’t, as Dylan discovered to his discomfiture when he briefly embraced Christian fundamentalism and hostile audiences heckled him with "Highway 61 Revisited", his rubbishing of religious belief.

This ignorance of the precise meaning of Bob Dylan’s songs, moreover, hasn’t always been helped by the man himself, who, undoubtedly brilliant though he is with song lyrics, tends to comes across as a bashful suitor or someone mumbling down a poor telephone line when he speaks, giving the impression that the meaning of the songs is beyond words.

In 1962, for instance, he explained that the songs existed in their own right and were only waiting for someone to write them down. If he hadn’t done it, someone else would have. This idea was obviously close to his heart because, on a separate occasion, he compared his songwriting to taking dictation.

Finally, as if all this wasn’t confusing enough, Dylan responded to the widespread conviction in the 1960s that he was some kind of prophet or messiah by flatly denying that his songs were about anything at all, telling a press conference in San Francisco in 1965 that he was just a song and dance man. He took this even further in 1970 when he released a double album consisting largely of covers of standards, entitled Self Portrait.

While this may have scared off a few fair-weather fans, it hardly convinced the cognoscenti, as Dylan himself knew only too well. In a 1978 interview in Playboy magazine, for instance, after insisting on the need to step aside from everything false, he then went on to state unequivocally: But, then again, if you believe you have a purpose and a mission, and not much time to carry it out, you don’t bother about those things, before going on to define that vocation by misquoting American writer Henry Miller in terms of: The role of an artist is to inoculate the world with disillusionment, which is obviously how Dylan himself sees the role in question.

This book is an attempt to explain that statement and to do so, what’s more, in a way to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Bob Dylan’s songs can be completely understood through simple ideas and straightforward words.

Finally, readers might find this book more illuminating if they have access to Bob Dylan’s song lyrics, either in book form or via the bobdylan.com website. They would almost certainly enjoy it more as it would enable the lyrics analysed here to be appreciated in their proper context.

Chapter One

Wind and Rain

To say that Bob Dylan is an artist is to say something with a very precise meaning. This is because art, true art, is concerned with the nature of reality as it relates to man, just as science, true science, is concerned with the nature of reality as it relates to matter. Art and science, in other words, deal with different aspects of the same reality. Artist and scientist, therefore, rather than being contraries, actually complement one another.

The starting point for the artist is to ask the question why. Why am I alive? What is the meaning or purpose of life? Is there a meaning or purpose, and, if so, can it be perceived and understood by man? Answering the question why, in turn, involves understanding the nature of reality with regard to human life. To know why we exist, it’s first necessary to know who we are and what kind of world we live in.

The artist, then, like the scientist, is concerned with the nature of reality, in the artist’s case specifically with the human condition. And if the questions they ask about the nature of reality are asked sincerely, which is to say with an open mind, with an absolute willingness to find the answer no matter what the consequences, the artist, like the scientist, will find inspiration through the spirit of truth, which is the only means whereby reality can be perceived. In other words, William Shakespeare and Albert Einstein both had exactly the same source for their inspiration: the spirit of truth.

The spirit of truth is an outside force that works on the mind of the artist or scientist, of any truth seeker, enabling it to perceive the truth of any aspect of reality that it might consider. The artist then confirms this perception through personal experience, which transforms the perception into knowledge. This process, moreover, is similar to that for the scientist, whose original idea or theory – the equivalent of the artist’s perception – is followed by experimentation intended to confirm the theory – the equivalent of the artist’s personal experience – which finally leads to knowledge or understanding, and so on to questioning another aspect of reality, at which point the process is repeated.

The process of truth, then, is a cyclical process, starting with a question about an aspect of reality, followed by the inspiring perception of truth, which is then confirmed by experience or experimentation to transmute the perception into knowledge, which the artist/scientist then knows for a fact. This prompts another question and so on and on. This is what the poet T. S. Eliot means towards the end of Little Gidding, the fourth of his Four Quartets, when he writes that the end of all human questioning is to arrive back at the beginning and know it for the first time.

Bob Dylan has written many songs about the spirit of truth. In fact, the majority of his songs relate either to the spirit of truth or to the process of truth in one way or another. For the true artist, like the true scientist, everything revolves around the spirit of truth. Nothing meaningful can be achieved without it. Dylan has even said so, in his usual roundabout way. Talking to The Los Angeles Times in 2004, for instance, Dylan refers to the circular process of truth when, commenting on his great song, "Just Like a Woman", he says: I don’t think in lateral terms as a writer. That’s a fault of a lot of the old Broadway writers…They are so lateral. There’s no circular thing, nothing to be learned from the song, nothing to inspire you.

In his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, also published in 2004, Dylan is more precise. The second chapter, entitled The Lost Land, considers the roots of his songwriting. Dylan begins by expressing one of his favourite tropes, that destiny was on his side as he adapted to a changing America. He goes on to say that he needed some new kind of long-term philosophical identity if he wanted to write his own songs, before, crucially, adding that this new philosophical identity would have to come from the outside. The fact that he’s referring to the spirit of truth here is given added resonance by the fact that Dylan had talked earlier in the same chapter about invoking the poetic muse, which he first denies knowing, before correcting himself to the effect that he does know it, but doesn’t yet know how to employ it.

The new philosophical identity he invoked, then, was one that was conferred by the spirit of truth, which acts on the mind of the artist from the outside, providing an infallible guide to reality, hence Bob Dylan’s supreme confidence that destiny was with him. This also explains the fact that one minute Dylan was writing songs that left the folk idol of his early career, Woody Guthrie, rather underwhelmed by his apostle’s ability in this respect, the next he was writing masterpieces like "Blowin’ in the Wind" and "A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall".

Dylan’s most pointed song about truth is probably "Mr. Tambourine Man", which captures the process whereby the spirit of truth operates on the artist’s mind with an ecstatic lyricism, yet in precise, almost scientific detail. This precision explains why the song apparently took him a couple of months to write, on and off, and seems to have involved at least one all-night session. This is in contrast, for instance, with Blowin’ in the Wind, another song about the spirit of truth, which Dylan appears to have written in two short sittings: the first and third verses in one go, followed by the middle verse a little later.

Before "Tambourine Man" can be explained, however, it’s necessary to understand rather more about the nature of the human condition. This centres on the fact that, just as the human mind has a fundamental need to know why, to understand the purpose or meaning of life, so is there also a second, overwhelming factor at work. This is the human mind’s assertive pride in itself. MAN IS PROUD!

This pride, moreover, seeks justification, needs proof, looks, that is, for reasons to feel proud. The human mind’s assertive pride in itself has been termed original sin. But, however it might be conceived, it’s a universal human tendency. We all know it well. And just as the mind’s need to know why finds a response in the spirit of truth, so, too, does the mind’s assertive pride find a response from an outside spirit or force. This force is the desire for power, which presents itself to each human mind as the means whereby it can justify its pride in itself.

This force of desire provided Bob Dylan with the title of one of his albums, 1976’s Desire, and is also the she of "She Belongs to Me" on Dylan’s 1965 album, Bringing It All Back Home, a song that features a protagonist who is proud to serve the desire for power by stealing whatever it sees, just like the Artful Dodger thieving for Fagin in Charles Dickens’ novel, Oliver Twist. The relationship between pride and the desire for power is brought home in the final verse of the song, where it’s associated with a trumpet, as in blow your own trumpet, and a drum, as in banging your own drum.

The desire for power, like the spirit of truth, is an outside force acting on the human mind, but, unlike the spirit of truth, its pressure is unrelenting. It never lets up. Just try to stop thinking even for a single instant and see for yourself how pressing it is! Much of what passes for thought is, in fact, nothing more than the operation of the desire for power on the human mind. Techniques of meditation have been developed to block the pressure for a short time, but such techniques only go to prove the relentlessness of the desire for power. By contrast, the spirit of truth only operates on a mind where there’s an urgent appeal from that mind. This isn’t to say that the spirit of truth isn’t always available, forever present. As British singer-songwriter David Gray notes in his inspiring song Silver Lining on the 1998 White Ladder album, the light, by which he means the spirit of truth, never sleeps. But while truth is always available, it never imposes itself, as the desire for power does.

Each human mind, then, finds itself having to deal with two interior impulses: on the one hand, everyone has to deal with an assertive pride that seeks to prove itself in the world; on the other hand, each human mind can also choose to acknowledge a need to know why. And, in each case, the impulse is met by an outside force: on the one hand, the desire for power, on the other, the spirit of truth.

It follows that, at any one time, the human mind can act in one of two different ways. In answer to its assertive pride, it can respond to the desire for power. A human mind in this mode is the meaning of the word self or ego, so a person whose mind is thus directed may be termed an egoist. Alternatively, it can commit itself to the spirit of truth in answer to the need to know why. A human mind in this mode is the meaning of the word soul and a person whose mind is thus directed may be termed a truth seeker or an artist, particularly for the purposes of this book, which is concerned with Bob Dylan’s creative soul. The opportunity to choose at any moment between one of two completely contrary options – self or soul, desire or truth – is the meaning of the term free will.

Naturally, because the pressure from within – pride – and from without – the desire for power – is unrelenting, most humans tend to choose this option most or all the time. They choose, that is, to attach themselves to the desire for power rather than to the spirit of truth, although, on a certain level, they cannot be entirely unaware of the question why. This explains the widespread lack of understanding of, but also enduring fascination with, Bob Dylan’s songs, not to speak of countless works by other artists that testify to the road less travelled, as American poet Robert Frost called the way of truth in his poem The Road Not Taken.

Now, the desire for power, just like sexual desire, demands satisfaction. The satisfaction of the desire for power is what is meant by the term happiness. But happiness is not the same for everyone. This is because the desire for power appears to each of us in terms of particular desires. The nature of these desires, in turn, depends on the influences we’re exposed to, particularly in childhood, when the human mind is most susceptible to influence.

Most of us are totally unaware of our attachment to the desire for power because we see it in terms of the particular desires whose satisfaction defines our particular interpretation of happiness, and, in turn, because this satisfaction involves the realisation of certain conditions. The reality of the world, that is, has to be organised in a certain way in order for happiness to be achieved. For each of us, therefore, the particular desires we associate with happiness require the realisation of certain conditions for their satisfaction. We usually see these conditions in term of aims, goals or ambitions. Again, the nature of our aims depends on the influences we’re exposed to, particularly in childhood.

Just as the prerequisite for the satisfaction of any desire is the realisation of certain conditions, so is the prerequisite for this realisation a subscription to certain values. For, just as a traveller can’t hope to reach their destination unless the steps they take to reach it actually lead them towards it, neither can we hope to achieve our aims unless our actions actually lead in the right direction. In other words, the practical application of the egoist’s values is in telling right from wrong with regard to the achievement of their aims. This is the meaning of morality. Inevitably, a commitment to the achievement of a certain aim implies a moral attitude to any thought or action which is undertaken in the service of that achievement: they’re right if they lead towards it and wrong if they don’t. Each of us is bound, therefore, to subscribe to certain values that act as signposts towards achieving our aims, signposts that act as our moral compass, enabling us to avoid anything that might prevent progress towards our goals. Again, our influences are crucial when it comes to the nature of the values we espouse.

Here, then, we have a simple definition of human happiness, aims, values and morality. The last piece of the jigsaw is belief. This is because conditions for the achievement of happiness can only be realised if the reality of the world is such that conditions are capable of being realised, i.e. the reality of the world needs to be conditional for happiness to be achievable; otherwise, the realisation of the conditions would be unrealistic.

It follows that each of us is bound to believe, firstly, that the reality of the world is such that conditions for happiness are realisable in principle, and, secondly, that the particular conditions for the achievement of our own idea of happiness are realisable in practice. This comprises our belief system, whose nature, as with everything else, depends on our influences, particularly in childhood. Each of us believes, in other words, that the reality of the world is such that the achievement of human happiness is possible in general and that our own concept of happiness is achievable in particular.

In fact, the reality of the world, whatever it is, and whether or not it’s susceptible to human understanding, must, by its very nature, be unconditional. It must be absolute. It’s what is. It’s either this or it’s that. Any conception of a conditional reality of the world, therefore, is necessarily illusory. This is not to say that the world we live in on a daily basis doesn’t exist, only that it’s not what we think it is. It’s not real. It’s an illusion. Moreover, as each individual’s fundamental conception of the nature of reality is illusory, so does it follow that their conditions for the arrangement of reality are particular illusions arising out of the general illusion of their belief. One way of expressing this is to say that any belief in a conditional reality of the world is tantamount to sleep while our aims are dreams arising from this sleep.

These images of sleep and dreams occur in many Bob Dylan songs, as they do in the work of other artists. In "To Ramona", for instance, a Dylan masterpiece from his 1964 Another Side of Bob Dylan album, he writes that it pains him to see Ramona trying to fit into a world that doesn’t really exist, that’s merely a dream, hence her feelings of despair.

A distinction needs to be made here, however. This is that happiness cannot be achieved, that it is just an illusion, yet the egoist’s aims can be achieved. This is not a paradox. Our aims can be achieved, only they aren’t what we think they are, i.e. conditions for the arrangement of the reality of the world, which is unconditional and can’t be arranged to suit anyone. So, although it’s true that any aims we might identify with such conditions can be achieved, their achievement doesn’t bring happiness. No matter how many aims the egoist might achieve, in fact, they’ll always feel ultimately frustrated and dissatisfied. The American writer Henry David Thoreau expressed this succinctly and dramatically in his 1854 book Walden: The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Another way of expressing the metaphor of sleep and dreams is to say that egoists are not real people; they’re not people who relate to a real world. As egoists, we’re not living but acting, acting in relation to the stage of the world we believe to be real but which is, in fact, an illusion. To be more precise, we’re not acting one part but a series of parts related to the individual desires in terms of which we see the desire for power. This was a favourite metaphor of Shakespeare’s:

"All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts…"

(As You Like It: Act 2, Sc. 7)

Bob Dylan very specifically refers to these lines in his liner notes to 1965’s Highway 61 Revisited album when he writes that I, or the ego, is an eye that perceives an illusory world or stage, whose expression is a collection of mouths or parts. The eye, in turn, relates to She Belongs to Me, where the egoist is portrayed as being proud to steal whatever the controlling desire for power sees, underlining the fact that the egoist is not a real person at all, merely a creation of desire.

This also relates to Bob Dylan writing in Chronicles about the defining influence on him of French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud.

Rimbaud (1854–1891), who wrote all his work, including The Drunken Boat, A Season in Hell and Illuminations, before he was 20 years old, became a major influence on modern writers and painters including Pablo Picasso, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, Dylan Thomas and Henry Miller, and musicians including Jim Morrison, singer and lyricist of late-1960s rock band The Doors, and Northern Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison, as well as Bob Dylan.

To many people, he’s more famous for his letters, particularly one written when he was just 16 years old. In the letter, Rimbaud says: The poet makes himself a visionary by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons within himself, and keeps only their essences.

The quote became an influential text, especially in the 1960s, as an excuse for all kinds of excess, of decadent behaviour, with the justification that anything goes in the name of art. There’s absolutely no doubt, however, that Rimbaud is a seminal figure in modern literature rather than a poseur, which is a criticism that can justifiably be levelled at some of his followers and admirers. Echoing that Rimbaud quote about how the poet makes himself a visionary, for instance, Dylan recalls in Chronicles that he, too, realised that he might need to change the way he thought about things, might need to leave his comfort zone, as we would express it nowadays.

But it’s another letter that Rimbaud also wrote at 16 years old that is at issue here. In this letter, Rimbaud writes that "Je est un autre, which can be translated as I is another or I is someone else. In other words, I, or the ego, is not our essential self, which is the soul, the mind that responds to the spirit of truth, rather than the mind that responds to the desire for power. The quote, Dylan tells us, set bells off in his head and helped him to understand the nature of human identity as, indeed, it did for Van Morrison. In his superb song Tore Down à la Rimbaud", the opening song on the 1985 album A Sense of Wonder, he explains how the poet gave him self-knowledge.

For I is someone else equates to the self being merely a construct made up of each human individual’s innate pride, desire for power, interpretation of happiness and the influences that have shaped their idea of happiness. Dylan also echoes Shakespeare’s characterisation of the play-acting of the self in contrast to the soul’s relation to reality in the song Spanish Harlem Incident on Another Side of Bob Dylan, which concludes with him asking the spirit of truth if he can rely on it to help him find his true reality.

Here, then, is the human condition: an imprisonment in illusion with the gaoler the desire for power, which drives mankind’s pursuit of happiness. And no matter how determinedly we might try to find the key to happiness, it will always elude us precisely because it is an illusion. This explains the lines in She Belongs to Me where the protagonist starts out proudly standing as they respond to the force of desire, only to end up on their knees, pleading to that same force to supply them with the key to an eternally-elusive happiness.

In the first book of his lyrics and album liner notes, Writings and Drawings, published in 1973, Dylan accompanies the lyrics to She Belongs to Me with a drawing of a man desperately trying to balance a mountain of possessions as he heads for a hill topped by an inviting home in the distance. The drawing recalls the iconic painting, Christina’s World (1948), by American artist Andrew Wyeth, which shows a disabled woman lying in a field looking up at a homestead at the top of a sloping hill. Both are artistic expressions of the idea that happiness is an illusion.

Incidentally, it also explains a supposed quote from rock ‘n’ roll superstar Elvis Presley towards the end of his life: I’ve got everything that any man could ever want, except what I want. By rights, in other words, a man in his position of apparent overwhelming power should have been happy, but he wasn’t; in fact, he was thoroughly miserable.

As for Bob Dylan, in an interview with the Chicago Daily News in November 1965, just days after his wedding to model Sara Lownds, he seems to suggest that happiness is an illusion when he says that he tries not to make plans because, every time that he does, nothing seems to work out, whatever his hopes might have been. He has, he says, given up on most of that stuff, adding that he isn’t pessimistic, only doesn’t think that things can turn out. He expresses this as a simple fact of life that he has accepted.

Illusion, then, is the human condition. Moreover, this condition applies equally to anyone who asks the question why and to someone who never seeks to find the purpose or meaning of life. The artist, in other words, is just as lost in illusion as the egoist. Similarly, Buddha, Jesus, and Socrates were just as lost in illusion as were Hitler, Stalin and Genghis Khan, at least to start with. It follows that the artist must free himself from the illusions arising from the human condition before he can perceive the reality of the world. This is what English poet William Blake meant when he wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. The doors of perception here are the eyes, which provides another possible explanation of why Dylan uses eye for I.

The first task of the artist, then, is disillusionment, which explains Bob Dylan’s definition of the artist’s role as to inoculate the world with disillusionment, for, in crafting the story of their own process of disillusionment for public consumption, they’re inevitably working to immunise the world against its illusions.

Now, the reason that the artist, at least initially, is as lost in illusion as the egoist is that pride is as much a part of their make-up as it is for the confirmed egoist. Pride is, after all, a universal human tendency. The artist’s longing for happiness, moreover, which arises from this pride, is just as strong as is the egoist’s, as we shall see with Bob Dylan.

In order to commit himself to truth in answer to his need to know why, therefore, the artist must first detach himself from the desire for power. This is the precondition of a commitment to truth. An attachment to desire and a commitment to truth are mutually exclusive at any one moment. This is because one leads the mind into illusion, while the other leads towards reality.

Any commitment to truth, therefore, must involve a concurrent detachment from desire, even though the illusions arising from that desire will remain in place until the artist is finally disillusioned from them. And the human mind does have the potential to detach itself in this way through free will. For its attachment to desire is purely voluntary. The human mind, in other words, freely chooses to attach itself to the desire for power, actively holds on to its particular desires – to its idea of happiness – and can, therefore, detach itself in order to commit itself to truth. In Mr. Tambourine Man, Bob Dylan refers to this ability to be free of desire while still in the grip of illusion in a delightfully original way when he writes how the artist has one hand waving free, with the other, therefore, still being attached.

Now, just as the mind’s attachment to desire arises from its assertive pride in itself, so must any detachment from desire involve the adoption of an antidote to this pride. This antidote can only be the opposite of pride, which is humility: the adoption of a humble or childlike passivity, which quietens or stills the assertive pride of the self. Through such humility, the mind opens up a distance or space from desire whereby it can respond to the inspiration of truth and move towards the ultimate fulfilment of the human need to answer the question why.

David Gray summarises this process brilliantly in Silver Lining when he writes that the only things of value in life are innocence, by which he means humility or childlike passivity, and magic, which is to say inspiration from the spirit of truth. Dylan does the same in his song "My Back Pages" on Another Side of Bob Dylan when he refers to being older when he campaigned for a change in the power structure during his early years as a so-called protest singer in New York City’s Greenwich Village and being younger when he abandoned protest for an unconditional commitment to truth.

There are many examples in the New Testament of Jesus speaking in similar terms. In the St. Matthew Gospel (18:2-4), for instance, we have:

And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

The relationship between humility and freedom of the soul to respond to truth is also expressed in:

Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls, Matthew (11:29).

The frustration and dissatisfaction arising from pride and the knowledge and fulfilment arising from humility, meanwhile, are beautifully summarised in: And whoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted, Matthew (23:12). Dylan echoes the first part of this quote in She Belongs to Me by having the protagonist in the song end up on their knees, while 20th century abstract painter Piet Mondrian echoes the second part in his: The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel. Mondrian is also echoing William Blake: I myself do nothing. The Holy Spirit accomplishes all through me. The Holy Spirit in question is, of course, the spirit of truth.

The cyclical process of truth, then, begins with humility. However, at first, the questioning mind of the artist – or truth seeker, or scientist – isn’t necessarily aware that there is such a thing as a spirit of truth. It’s certainly not aware that the phenomenal world in which it exists is illusory. The artist merely begins the interior journey of the soul by responding to the need to know why, questioning the world around him and looking to find meaning or purpose. The process is barely conscious; it’s intuitive or instinctive. Bob Dylan made this very point in an interview in Rolling Stone magazine published in November 1978 by confidently stating, clearly on the basis of his own experience, that it’s instinct that makes a genius what they are.

At some point, the realisation dawns that to understand why, it’s first necessary to understand who we are, what the world is; in other words, to understand the human condition. Again, this may or may not be conscious. To question some aspect of the world, to perceive its truth, then to convert that perception into understanding or knowledge through experience simply establishes itself as the modus operandi.

But every soul is different in its journey. And, with Bob Dylan, the recognition of the spirit of truth, the realisation that the inspiration that leads to the perception of the truth of any aspect of the world comes from an outside force acting on the intuitive mind, arrived amazingly early. How do we know this? Well, it wasn’t too long after he began writing songs that, in April 1962, Dylan wrote Blowin’ in the Wind, a song that provides the earliest recorded proof of a confident knowledge of the spirit of truth. For Bob Dylan’s songs are full of biblical imagery, from both the Old and New Testaments, including that of a wind as a metaphor for the spirit of truth.

The image of a wind occurs many times in the Bible, where God is seen to operate on the world through his breath or a wind. Genesis (2:7), for instance, has: And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. Similarly, when God ends Noah’s flood we have: …and God made a wind to pass over the earth, Genesis (8:1).

This metaphor of a breath or wind is repeated in the New Testament, where it is far more specifically related to the spirit of truth, characterised as the Holy Ghost, the Spirit, the Comforter or, unequivocally, the Spirit of truth. These are all quotes from The Gospel According to St. John, which makes it abundantly clear that Jesus Christ came to announce the spirit of truth as the means whereby mankind might free itself of attachment to the desire for power. The metaphor of the wind comes in the very first mention of this spirit:

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit, John (3:8).

Then Jesus is clearly referring to the human need to know why when he says:

If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink… (But this spake he of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive…), John (7: 37–39).

The upshot of this is:

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free, John (8:32).

As to what humanity will be freed from, Jesus refers to the prince of this world, which can only be the desire for power:

…now shall the prince of this world be cast out, John (12:31).

Jesus subsequently says that the Spirit of truth will abide with you for ever, John (14:16), and teach you all things, John (14:26); again, when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth… John (16:13).

Finally, Jesus specifies his role as a prophet of the spirit of truth during his interrogation by Pontius Pilate, prefect of the Roman province of Judaea, prior to his crucifixion:

To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice, John (18:37).

This quotation will prompt a great deal of discussion in this book. For the moment, however, it’s only necessary to note that Jesus doesn’t say that those who hear his voice are of the truth, but that those who are inspired by the spirit of truth, those who experience truth for themselves, will hear his voice. The distinction is crucial because it means that only those who experience truth will understand him.

Considering that the meaning of Bob Dylan’s songs has a great deal to do with this distinction, Pilate’s reply to Jesus is rather appropriate: What is truth? John (18:38).

Returning to the wind metaphor, which introduced this brief selection of quotes, it occurs again, more insistently this time, in The Acts of the Apostles, which run on from the St. John Gospel:

And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting… And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance, Acts (2–4).

The wind metaphor for the spirit of truth is not unique to Bob Dylan. Indeed, in employing it, Dylan, was following in a tradition of which he may well have been aware. He’d certainly read the poetry of his namesake, Dylan Thomas, for instance. Thomas had also been brought up on the Bible, and he, too, used wind as a metaphor for the spirit of truth. In the Author’s Prologue to his Collected Poems 1934-1952, for instance, Thomas introduces the wind of truth almost at the outset in a theme that would be echoed many times by Bob Dylan: that of truth’s giving the lie to man’s skyscraping megalomania, characterised as towers caught like straw in the religious wind. Similarly, in "Gates of Eden" on Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan refers to mankind’s kingdoms rotting away in what he characterises as a precious rather than a religious wind.

Dylan Thomas, exactly like Bob Dylan after him, first introduced the wind metaphor into his writing at just 20 years old, six years before the infant Bobby’s birth, in his sonnet sequence Altarwise by owl-light, which contains all the elements also present in the songs of Bob Dylan’s early philosophical-spiritual period in the 1960s. The wind metaphor itself occurs in sonnet VII, where Thomas writes that deniers – or those who deny truth – are doomed in consequence of the wind-turned statement. This is to say that reality can only be found through the wind of truth. This is echoed in the final line of Dylan’s "Gates of Eden", where he states categorically that no truth can be found outside the confines of the soul-truth relationship, which is the meaning behind the song’s title and, ultimately, of his entire oeuvre.

Another British poet who used the wind metaphor is Edward Thomas, who, unlike Dylan Thomas and Bob Dylan, had a most un-biblical background. Nevertheless, the wind metaphor is absolutely central to his work. One of his most important poems, Wind and Mist, is clearly about his commitment to the spirit of truth and resulting detachment from human illusions, the mist metaphor for illusion being the equivalent of Bob Dylan’s smoke and fog in Mr. Tambourine Man. Thus, Thomas writes:

"You would not understand about the wind.

It is my subject…

There were whole days and nights when the wind and I

Between us shared the world, and the wind ruled

And I obeyed it and forgot the mist."

Dylan, then, was following in a distinguished, if rare, tradition when he took the road less travelled by committing himself to the spirit of truth and identifying in his work with the wind, initially in Blowin’ in the Wind, his first masterpiece, the lyric that made his name and which elevated him to the Prince of Protest in the 1960s youth counterculture. If only its ardent followers could have known it, however, it also rubbished the very idea of protest.

"Blowin’ in the Wind", in fact, while initially seeming to qualify as a so-called protest song through its apparent concern with world peace and civil rights, has infinitely more significance as Bob Dylan’s first artistic or philosophical statement, one that echoes Dylan Thomas in saying that all human knowledge depends on inspiration from the spirit of truth. We can’t know anything of the reality of the world unless the original perception comes from the spirit of truth. As such, Blowin’ in the Wind is the foundation stone of all Bob Dylan’s subsequent masterpieces, not merely in the quality of the songwriting, but also in its basic theme.

The song may have been adopted by the civil rights movement in America in the early 1960s, but it’s just as relevant to any number of causes, in any particular place at any particular time or, more pertinently perhaps, just as relevant to none. This is because the nine questions it asks can be applied to any number of issues or they can apply to just one, the human condition, which isn’t an issue or a cause at all.

The first question the song asks, for instance, about the number of roads a man needs to walk before he qualifies as a man suggests nothing more than Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which asks a similar question in What is a man…? (Act 4, Sc.4). Blowin’ in the Wind, in short, can just as easily be interpreted as a series of philosophical reflections on the universal human condition as about the political or social issues of its day. Indeed, it can also be interpreted as a religious text full of biblical allusions.

Take the third question in the second verse, which asks how many times a man can turn his head and pretend that he doesn’t see. While this may appear to refer to those who ignore the victims of injustice or the casualties of war, it also relates to a 16th century proverb from the English Catholic writer of poems, plays and proverbs John Heywood (c1497–1580), who was also a musician and composer. Heywood is famous for any number of proverbs, such as Look before you leap or Rome was not built in a day. The relevant Heywood proverb is: There are none so blind as those who will not see. This, in turn, resembles the Old Testament verse: Hear now this, O foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes, and see not; which have ears, and hear not, Jeremiah (5:21).

The final part of this quote from Jeremiah, in turn, could also be a source for "Blowin’ in the Wind", specifically for the second question in the third verse, which asks how many ears a man needs before he can hear people cry.

Alternatively, the two crucial lines in Blowin’ in the Wind about failing to see and hear could just as easily have their source in the Old Testament verse: Son of man, thou dwellest in the midst of a rebellious house, which have eyes to see and see not; they have ears to hear, and hear not Ezekiel (12:2).

In fact, nothing about the song appears to be straightforward, which was a problem for many of its first listeners. The most frequent criticism was that it asked a lot of questions that seemed to relate to civil rights, prejudice, war and peace, truth and reality, but proposed no specific answers. For, according to the song, the answer is blowin’ in the wind, whose meaning no one understood and Dylan was, apparently, unwilling or unable to explain.

Dylan did speak about Wind in an interview with folk magazine Sing Out! There ain’t too much I can say about this song except that the answer is blowing in the wind. It ain’t in no book or movie or TV show or discussion group. Man, hip people are telling me where the answer is but, oh, I won’t believe that. I still say it’s in the wind and just like a restless piece of paper it’s got to come down some time... But the only trouble is that no one picks up the answer when it comes down so not too many people get to see and know it… and then it flies away again.

The most that can be said about this explanation is that it doesn’t explain very much, if anything, unless one knows the meaning of the wind. Significantly, Dylan did try to answer those who criticised the song for asking a lot of questions without providing any answers by saying: The first way to answer these questions… is by asking them. But lots of people have to first find the wind.

What’s clear is that the undoubted power of Blowin’ in the Wind is in the fact that its lyric sets up a conflict between two levels of meaning, the one social and political, the other philosophical and spiritual. In this respect, it’s very like Hamlet, which sets a revenge tragedy over injustice against a search for significance. Similarly, Wind asks a number of questions that may be related to human injustice and others that may be related to a search for significance. In doing so, it balances a socio-political concern against a philosophical-spiritual imperative as if to say that human conflict cannot finally be resolved until we know who we are and why we’re here. That these questions involve us all, moreover, Dylan implies in a chorus that pointedly addresses his fellow man as my friend. We are, that is, all subject to the same human condition.

To put this another way, the two levels that operate in Wind are like two poles, one of social or political commitment, the other of philosophical or spiritual