Chronicles - Bob Dylan [21]
It was freezing winter with a snap and sparkle in the air, nights full of blue haze. It seemed like ages ago since I’d lay in the green grass and it smelled of true summer — glints of light dancing off the lakes and yellow butterflies on the black tarred roads. Walking down 7th Avenue in Manhattan in the early hours, you’d sometimes see people sleeping in the backseats of cars. I was lucky I had places to stay — even people who lived in New York sometimes didn’t have one. There’s a lot of things that I didn’t have, didn’t have too much of a concrete identity either. “I’m a rambler — I’m a gambler. I’m a long way from home.” That pretty much summed it up.
In the world news, Picasso at seventy-nine years old had just married his thirty-five-year-old model. Wow. Picasso wasn’t just loafing about on crowded sidewalks. Life hadn’t flowed past him yet. Picasso had fractured the art world and cracked it wide open. He was revolutionary. I wanted to be like that.
There was an art movie house in the Village on 12th Street that showed foreign movies — French, Italian, German. This made sense, because even Alan Lomax himself, the great folk archivist, had said somewhere that if you want to get out of America, go to Greenwich Village. I’d seen a couple of Italian Fellini movies there — one called La Strada, which means “The Street,” and another one called La Dolce Vita. It was about a guy who sells his soul and becomes a gossip hound. It looked like life in a carnival mirror except it didn’t show any monster freaks — just regular people in a freaky way. I watched it intently, thinking that I might not see it again. One of the actors in it, Evan Jones, was also a dramatist and I would meet him in a few years when I went to London to perform in a play he had written. I knew he looked familiar when I saw him. I never forget a face.
A lot was changing in America. The sociologists were saying that TV had deadly intentions and was destroying the minds and imaginations of the young — that their attention spans were being dragged down. Maybe that’s true but the three minute song also did the same thing. Symphonies and operas are incredibly long, but the audience never seems to lose its place or fail to follow along. With the three minute song, the listener doesn’t have to remember anything as far back as twenty or even ten minutes ago. There’s nothing you have to be able to connect. Nothing to remember. A lot of the songs I was singing were indeed long, maybe not as long as an opera or a symphony, but still long…at least lyrically. “Tom Joad” had at least sixteen verses, “Barbara Allen” about twenty. “Fair Ellender,” “Lord Lovell,” “Little Mattie Groves” and others had numerous verses and I didn’t find it troubling at all to remember or sing the story lines.
I had broken myself of the habit of thinking in short song cycles and began reading longer and longer poems to see if I could remember anything I read about in the beginning. I trained my mind to do this, had cast off gloomy habits and learned to settle myself down. I read all of Lord Byron’s Don Juan, and concentrated fully from start to finish. Also, Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. I began cramming my brain with all kinds of deep poems. It seemed like I’d been pulling an empty wagon for a long time and now I was beginning to fill it up and would have to pull harder. I felt like I was coming out of the back pasture. I was changing in other ways, too. Things that used to affect me, didn’t affect me anymore. I wasn’t too concerned about people, their motives. I didn’t feel the need to examine every stranger that approached.
Ray had told me to read Faulkner. “It’s hard, what Faulkner does,” he said. “It’s hard putting deep feeling into words. It’s easier to write Das Kapital.” Ray was an opium smoker, smoked opium in a bamboo pipe with a mushroom bowl. They had cooked it up once in the kitchen, boiling little kilos of bricks until they became like gum. Boiling and reboiling