Chronicles - Bob Dylan [28]
I knew I was doing things right, was on the right road, was getting all the knowledge immediately and firsthand — memorizing words and melodies and changes, but now I saw that it could take me the rest of my life to make practical use of that knowledge and Mike didn’t have to do that. He was just right there. He was too good and you can’t be “too good,” not in this world, anyway. In order to be as good as that, you’d just about have to be him, and nobody else. Folk songs are evasive — the truth about life, and life is more or less a lie, but then again that’s exactly the way we want it to be. We wouldn’t be comfortable with it any other way. A folk song has over a thousand faces and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff. A folk song might vary in meaning and it might not appear the same from one moment to the next. It depends on who’s playing and who’s listening.
The thought occurred to me that maybe I’d have to write my own folk songs, ones that Mike didn’t know. That was a startling thought. Up ’til then, I’d gone some places and thought I knew my way around. And then it struck me that I’d never been there before. You open a door to a dark room and you think you know what’s there, where everything is arranged, but you really don’t know until you step inside. I can’t say I’d seen any performances that were like spiritual experiences until I went to Lomax’s loft. I pondered it. I wasn’t ready to act on any of it but knew somehow, though, that if I wanted to stay playing music, that I would have to claim a larger part of myself. I would have to overlook a lot of things — a lot of things that might even need attention — but that was all right. They were things that I probably felt totally powerless over, anyway. I had the map, could even draw it freehand if I had to. Now I knew I’d have to throw it away. Not today, not tonight, sometime soon, though.
At Camilla’s apartment, Moe Asch was chatting with Mike. They were just standing there like people who knew what they were talking about. Moe’s Folkways Records put out all The Ramblers stuff and that’s the label that captured my attention the most. It would have been a dream come true if Moe would have signed me to the label. It was time for me and Delores to leave, so I said good-bye to Cisco, talked with him for a moment — told him that I’d been visiting Woody Guthrie in the hospital. Cisco smiled, said that Woody never tried to camouflage anything, did he, and told me to say hello to him next time I went. I nodded, said good-bye, walked out into the hallway and down the stairs…went out through the lobby.
Outside Delores and I stopped and looked up at the Romanesque pillars surmounted by carved mythological beasts. It was freezing cold. I put my hands in my pockets and we headed off towards 6th Avenue. There was a lot of action and people on the street and I watched them go by. T. S. Eliot wrote a poem once where there were people walking to and fro, and everybody taking the opposite direction was appearing to be running away. That’s what it looked like that night and often would for some time to come. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche talks about feeling old at the beginning of his life…I felt like that, too. Somebody told me a few weeks later that Cisco had died.
America was changing. I had a feeling of destiny and I was riding the changes. New York was as good a place to be as any. My consciousness was beginning to change, too, change and stretch. One thing for sure, if I wanted to compose folk songs I would need some