The Waters of the Deep

William Wordsworth:

... once in the stillness of a summer's noon,
While I was seated in a rocky cave
By the sea-side, perusing, so it chanced,
The famous history of the errant knight
Recorded by Cervantes, these same thoughts
Beset me, and to height unusual rose,
While listlessly I sate, and, having closed
The book, had turned my eyes toward the wide sea.
On poetry and geometric truth,
And their high privilege of lasting life,
From all internal injury exempt,
I mused, upon these chiefly: and at length,
My senses yielding to the sultry air,
Sleep seized me, and I passed into a dream.
I saw before me stretched a boundless plain
Of sandy wilderness, all black and void,
And as I looked around, distress and fear
Came creeping over me, when at my side,
Close at my side, an uncouth shape appeared
Upon a dromedary, mounted high.
He seemed an Arab of the Bedouin tribes:
A lance he bore, and underneath one arm
A stone, and in the opposite hand a shell
Of a surpassing brightness. At the sight
Much I rejoiced, not doubting but a guide
Was present, one who with unerring skill
Would through the desert lead me; and while yet
I looked and looked, self-questioned what this freight
Which the new-comer carried through the waste
Could mean, the Arab told me that the stone
(To give it in the language of the dream)
Was "Euclid's Elements;" and "This," said he,
"Is something of more worth;" and at the word
Stretched forth the shell, so beautiful in shape,
In colour so resplendent, with command
That I should hold it to my ear. I did so,
And heard that instant in an unknown tongue,
Which yet I understood, articulate sounds,
A loud prophetic blast of harmony;
An Ode, in passion uttered, which foretold
Destruction to the children of the earth
By deluge, now at hand. No sooner ceased
The song, than the Arab with calm look declared
That all would come to pass of which the voice
Had given forewarning, and that he himself
Was going then to bury those two books:
The one that held acquaintance with the stars,
And wedded soul to soul in purest bond
Of reason, undisturbed by space or time;
The other that was a god, yea many gods,
Had voices more than all the winds, with power
To exhilarate the spirit, and to soothe,
Through every clime, the heart of human kind.
While this was uttering, strange as it may seem,
I wondered not, although I plainly saw
The one to be a stone, the other a shell;
Nor doubted once but that they both were books,
Having a perfect faith in all that passed.
Far stronger, now, grew the desire I felt
To cleave unto this man; but when I prayed
To share his enterprise, he hurried on
Reckless of me: I followed, not unseen,
For oftentimes he cast a backward look,
Grasping his twofold treasure. -- Lance in rest,
He rode, I keeping pace with him; and now
He, to my fancy, had become the knight
Whose tale Cervantes tells; yet not the knight,
But was an Arab of the desert too;
Of these was neither, and was both at once.
His countenance, meanwhile, grew more disturbed;
And, looking backwards when he looked, mine eyes
Saw, over half the wilderness diffused,
A bed of glittering light: I asked the cause:
"It is," said he, "the waters of the deep
Gathering upon us;" quickening then the pace
Of the unwieldy creature he bestrode,
He left me: I called after him aloud;
He heeded not; but, with his twofold charge
Still in his grasp, before me, full in view,
Went hurrying o'er the illimitable waste,
With the fleet waters of a drowning world
In chase of him; whereat I waked in terror,
And saw the sea before me, and the book,
In which I had been reading, at my side.

From The Prelude

I owe my familiarity with the wonderful passage above to Thomas De Quincey's essay on Wordsworth, written in 1839, that is, well before the poem he quotes was made available to the general public. De Quincey had heard or read it decades earlier and recalled it nearly verbatim. His gloss on it is as follows:

Wordsworth was a profound admirer of the sublimer mathematics; at least of the higher geometry. The secret of this admiration for geometry lay in the antagonism between this world of bodiless abstraction and the world of passion. And here I may mention appropriately, and I hope without any breach of confidence, that, in a great philosophic poem of Wordsworth's, which is still in MS., and will remain in MS. until after his death, there is, at the opening of one of the books, a dream, which reaches the very ne plus ultra of sublimity, in my opinion, expressly framed to illustrate the eternity, and the independence of all social modes or fashions of existence, conceded to these two hemispheres, as it were, that compose the total world of human power -- mathematics on the one hand, poetry on the other...

He had been reading "Don Quixote" by the sea-side; and, oppressed by the heat of the sun, he had fallen asleep, whilst gazing on the barren sands before him. Even in these circumstances of the case -- as, first, the adventurous and half-lunatic knight riding about the world, on missions of universal philanthropy, and, secondly, the barren sands of the sea-shore -- one may read the germinal principles of the dream...

The sketch I have here given of this sublime dream sufficiently attests the interest which Wordsworth took in the mathematic studies of the place [by "the place" De Quincey means Cambridge University], and the exalted privilege which he ascribed to them of co-eternity with "the vision and the faculty divine" of the poet -- the destiny common to both, of an endless triumph over the ruins of nature and of time.

It would be interesting to speculate, as to the figure of the Arab, whether Wordsworth had in mind the transmission of Euclid (and even lyric poetry, via the troubadours) through Arabic intermediaries, but the Don Quixote he was reading itself has a ostensible (but presumably fictional) Arab source, one Cide Hamete Benengeli.

Though De Quincey refers to "the ruins of nature and time," he also seems to interpret the poem as simply expressing a desire to carve out a refuge from "the world of passion" by taking shelter in a "world of bodiless abstraction," as well as in poetry. Today, though, Wordsworth's line about "the fleet waters of a drowning world" may strike a more ominous note. And I want to read more of this poem.

With no greater excuse than the segue of moving from one poet laureate to a Nobel laureate, here is Bob Dylan's "Too Much of Nothing," in a 1970 live performance by Fotheringay, with the sublime Sandy Denny joining in on the refrain.

Say hello to Valerie, say hello to Marion,
Send them all my salary, on the waters of oblivion.

When the Ship Comes In

Arlo Guthrie's version of an early Bob Dylan composition feels like just what I need today.



And the sands will roll
Out a carpet of gold
For your wearied toes to be a-touchin’
And the ship’s wise men
Will remind you once again
That the whole wide world is watchin’

Open the Door, Homer

(I'm dusting off this old post in honor of Bob Dylan's just-released Nobel Lecture, which, among other things, cites the Odyssey. Michael Leddy has a related post.)

Until about a week ago [in 2007], the last time I read the Odyssey was, as far as I remember, more than thirty years ago, during my freshman year in college, when I devoured the whole thing in two marathon sessions over a weekend. (My classmates were presumably off doing other things that were perhaps, in their way, equally memorable.) It wasn't assigned reading; then as now I read it for the pure pleasure of the thing, in Robert Fitzgerald's translation which still strikes me as a miracle of naturalness and narrative ease.

More often than not, when I revisit the reading enthusiasms of my youth after a span of time has passed I find it a little hard to understand what I ever saw in them. Either my standards have been raised over the years or I've become jaded, I couldn't say which. But nothing like that happened when I picked up the Odyssey again. If anything I got more out of it this time, picking up on things that wouldn't have registered back then.

The curious episode of the Ancient of the Sea, for instance. To bring this worthy under their power, Meneláos and his companions must seize hold of him while he sleeps, then hold on tight as he passes through a rapid series of transformations, from lion to serpent to boar and so on. Thirty years ago I wouldn't have known that the capture of the Ancient is strikingly echoed in the British fairy ballad of “Tam Lin,” the earliest known version of which postdates the Odyssey by roughly two thousand years. While it's possible that the incident in the ballad is an independent invention, it seems more likely that the motif had been floating around in the European folk memory for all that time, waiting for an opportunity to emerge, along with much else that didn't find the surface and has been lost forever.

Nor had I really ever thought about how much the meeting with the assembled shades of the dead, a scene in which the poet pulls out all the stops, prefigures both the Inferno and Hamlet. And though I remembered the set piece of carnage in which Odysseus and and his son dispatch the suitors who had besieged Penélopê in his palace, I don't think I ever felt the full horror of the chilling sequel, in which the Telémakhos deals out summary justice to the twelve maids who had been sleeping with the enemy. The atrocities of our own time have a long pedigree:

He tied one end of a hawser to a pillar
and passed the other around the roundhouse top,
taking the slack up, so that no one's toes
could touch the ground. They would be hung like doves
or larks in springès triggered in a thicket,
where the birds think to rest — a cruel nesting.
So now in turn each woman thrust her head
Into a noose and swung, yanked high in air,
to perish there most piteously.
Their feet danced a little, but not long.

The creator of the Odyssey has been variously held to be, among other things, a blind man, a woman, and a committee. Since we have no reliable biographical information about him — or her — we are left to rely on internal evidence, which is beyond my ability to weigh and which is, in any case, apparently not sufficiently conclusive to tell us much that would make a difference. At least for the sake of convenience, then, it seems harmless to suppose that the poem was composed from start to finish by a single Homer, who may well not have been called Homer but who may as well be thought of as Homer as by any other name.

The epic that Homer concocted is a corker of an adventure, a book of marvels as inventive as anything that has been written since, but it's something else as well. Along with the Iliad, which may or may not be by the same hand and which I confess I have no immediate urge to reread [but did], it's the first real window into an interior life of a kind that is recognizable to us today, the oldest surviving record of people thinking, scheming, doubting, worrying, wondering, longing for home, in ways that we immediately and viscerally relate to. Before that there are outlines, flickers, fading traces of a consciousness we know must have been there if only anyone had possessed the language in which to record it, the language that Homer could perhaps be said to have invented, though he must of course have drawn from traditions now long lost.

That's one excuse for the title of this piece, which was lifted from a song that can be found on The Basement Tapes. Another is the following passage, in which Penélope, addressing a man whom she takes for a stranger though he is in fact her long-absent husband, speaks to him of the nature of dreams:

                                                             Friend,
many and many a dream is mere confusion,
a cobweb of no consequence at all.
Two gates for ghostly dreams there are: one gateway
of honest horn, and one of ivory.
Issuing by the ivory gate are dreams
of glimmering illusion, fantasies,
but those that come through solid polished horn
may be borne out, if mortals only know them.

But we don't ever know them, do we? What's behind the door, the lady or the tiger? We're all addicts of illusion, of hopes and dreams that will never be borne out. The truth slips by, undetected. But that's part of what being conscious entails; the ability to see things as they are supposes a like ability to imagine things as they are not. We inhabit a fixed world of chemical bonds and gravitational forces, but we also live in the unsteady, ever changing country of the mind. Shut the door to illusion and the world goes dark.

Go on, Homer, open the door.

Billy (Dylan, Rawlings, Welch)

Well, they say Pat Garrett has got your number
So sleep with one eye open when you slumber
'Cause every little sound might be thunder
Thunder from the barrel of his gun.

This Bob Dylan song first surfaced on the soundtrack of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, a 1973 Western I've never seen (and in which Dylan has an acting role). The song has a number of verses, but this much later live cover by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings pares it down to four, in keeping with the starkness and simplicity of the performance (and the black-and-white cinematography). Rawlings's guitar work, in fact, is anything but simple, but he plays, as always, with such unassuming, seemingly effortless command of his instrument (a vintage Epiphone archtop) that it never jars or interferes.

Four verses, four plain-spoken lines each, scraps of a tattered tale about a long-dead gunslinger, it's almost enough to reconcile one with a world that is, more evidently than ever, far too much with us. Hopefully there's a quiet corner of the future where things like this still matter.

This version of "Billy" is available on a DVD entitled The Revelator Collection, which can be purchased from Gillian Welch's webstore.

Update (November 2017): The New York Times reports on a newly-discovered tintype that may show Pat Garrett and Billy together.

Bad Faith Blues

Well that’s that. We've succumbed to the attractions of someone who was not only a transparent con artist and buffoon but who chose to position himself as little short of an actual fascist, a man who was willing to throw open the doors and invite it all in, the bigotry, the misogyny, the hatred, the violence, all the swirling dark matter of our “civilization,” all for a taste of power. It would be nice to believe that the American people have simply lost touch with reality, but I'm afraid that's too charitable. We knew what we were doing. Any illusion that we the people are now somehow different from — more enlightened than — our predecessors who seized a continent and put millions to suffer and die as slaves for their own material gain is dispelled, for once and for all. We are the bullwhip, the noose, waterboard. I could say that I’m ashamed to be a white man, but that’s letting those responsible off way too easy. Race and gender are not destiny — specific individuals chose to do this, and I was not one of them.

I have zero patience for what-ifs and should-have-dones. In the end, we had a sufficiently clear choice — even if for many it was an unappetizing one — and we made it. And I frankly don’t give half a fuck about what political scientists, historians, and biographers may have to say about how what got us to this pass and what it all means, which I’m sure will all make fascinating reading for future generations when we’re safely dead. My only interest is a moral one. What does this election, in both senses of the word, say about us, about how we square our consciences with what we do?

Of course if free choice is just an illusion or democracy is just a charade then none of this matters. Turn the page, shoot up, and move on. But that’s a cop-out and I don’t buy it. If the human spirit means anything at all — and hey, maybe it just doesn’t — then it includes the ability to formulate and act upon moral obligations, however they are arrived at (and of course they will be arrived at differently by people depending on their circumstances and backgrounds), and to do so even — perhaps especially — in the face of great difficulty. I’m convinced that at the heart of our failure to do what is right, in this instance as in others, is a fundamental question of bad faith. We hide our own vested interests and guilty consciences, we mold evidence to our preconceptions, we ignore plain facts, because it suits us to do so. It suits us, always, to believe that other people are the problem. No one is willing to admit that the problem is us, that we act as we do because we benefit, unjustly, from our actions or our failure to act. And our lack of curiosity, our impatience with complex issues that require serious and nuanced consideration, our inability to see beyond our own limited frames of experience, these failures of imagination are, I’m convinced, also profound moral failures, because imagination is not simply a native faculty but also an act of will. We can’t imagine other possibilities because we aren’t telling the truth, either to others or to ourselves, about our real motives.

So why say any of this? (Who, in any case, listens to me?) And who am I to preach? What do I do that gives me the right to lecture others on their moral obligations, other than trot down to the polls every few years like a good boy and shoot my mouth off on extremely rare occasions? Is it somehow more morally admirable to recognize what is right and fail to act on it in any serious way than it is not to recognize what is right at all? The truth is that I consider myself morally utterly ordinary — perhaps not the worst, but definitely no saint — except in this one regard: that I refuse to “praise what is no good.” (The phrase is Paul Goodman’s, who also talked — and this was fifty years ago, before much else would happen — about how the United States was “like a conquered province,” except that we ourselves were responsible for the actions of the conquerors.) What has happened here is not right.

End of screed. Take it as you will.

Bob Dylan's Dream

How many a year has passed and gone,
And many a gamble has been lost and won,
And many a road taken by many a friend,
And each one I've never seen again.

I wish, I wish, I wish in vain,
That we could sit simply in that room again.
Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat,
I'd give it all gladly if our lives could be like that.

In May 1962 Columbia Record releases The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, the second LP by a folksinger in his early twenties, and the first to be made up largely of his own compositions. Despite high expectations for the record — Columbia executive John Hammond is said to be convinced that Dylan could be the “next big thing” in the pop music business — the album's sales are initially modest, then quickly plummet. There are one or two polite but puzzled reviews in folk magazines (“original folk songs?”), but most listeners fail to connect with the record and dismiss it as, at best, a mere curiosity. The trade press take it as evidence that the “folk revival” has peaked and will not be a significant factor in the the record business in the coming years.

A few months later a single by an obscure Norwegian polka combo becomes a fluke hit, igniting a decade-long infatuation with the genre. Kids put down guitars and strap on accordions; rival gangs in poor neighborhoods in Los Angeles and Newark form polka bands, competing with each other to see who can play the fastest and dress the flashiest. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan never earns back its advance, and Columbia scraps plans for a follow-up. The folksinger still plays coffee houses for a while, but to smaller and smaller audiences; people are moving on, and he begins to see the writing on the wall. He waits tables, sometimes in the same clubs he used to play, and does some office work as a temp.

Around the time of JFK's second inaugural he moves up to the Catskills, where he becomes part owner, and later sole owner, of a bicycle shop. His records are out of print, though for a few music collectors and eccentrics they eventually achieve a kind of cult status. Now and then somebody tracks him down at the bike shop, where he acknowledges his identity, autographs an album cover or two, and cheerfully gives directions to a nearby trailhead. He keeps a guitar in the back room and will bring it out if requested, but nobody in town seems to have heard of him — he's just Bob from “Bob's Bikes” — or to care that he once cut a couple of records. Once in a while he heads down to the city and joins one old friend or another on a club stage again, just for a couple of songs. He divorces once, marries again, has a couple of daughters. Sometimes he sits on the front steps of his house playing and singing for the kids in the neighborhood.

In 1978 the owner of a small specialty label calls him up to talk about re-releasing his old records, if the label will sell the rights. Dylan agrees to write a paragraph or two to add to the liner notes. Asked if he has any new material he hesitates a bit and then says yes, he's got a few songs, not too many. He goes into a studio — just a little place in somebody's basement — and makes another record. It doesn't sell many copies, but the owner of the label is satisfied, the New York Times gives it a nice capsule review a few months after release, and an old friend who owns a part interest in a club persuades him to do a couple of shows.

He gets a little paunchy and his hair thins out. For his fiftieth birthday a bunch of friends and neighbors throw him a birthday party in the backyard of his home. He's a grandfather now; he takes out the guitar and sings a song he's just written about his new granddaughter, and his neighbors are surprised to hear how well he plays the instrument. He tells a few stories about the old days in the Village, about what it was like to make a record in a big studio in New York.

He sells the bike shop to a younger employee and becomes the arts reporter for a local weekly. As his sixtieth birthday approaches a couple of his songs are picked up and covered by some young kids in Oregon who are making their first record. The record does well and the royalty check is a nice surprise. After a writer for Rolling Stone does a profile of him one of his old records is re-released again and gets a little airplay on some college stations. There's talk of making a new one, if he can find the time and if he can get the new songs into shape.

He likes to sit on the porch in the evenings, while his wife is cleaning up after dinner, and stare off through the pines at the lake in the distance. Every now and then a black bear ambles into the back yard, just at twilight, sniffing around for garbage. Some nights he takes the guitar out and plays just for the bear.

Postscript: Some time after writing the above, I found this passage in Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One: “I don't know what everybody was fantasizing about but what I was fantasizing about was a nine-to-five existence, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard. That would have been nice. That was my deepest dream.”