Chronicles - Bob Dylan [30]
The power of the scene somehow jarred my mind, though — maybe because I’d just heard talk about it the previous night, but it reminded me of some old still images I’d seen of the Civil War. How much did I know about that cataclysmic event? Probably close to nothing. There weren’t any great battles fought out where I grew up. No Chancellorsvilles, Bull Runs, Fredericksburgs or Peachtree Creeks. What I knew about it, was that it was a war fought about states’ rights and it ended slavery. It seemed odd, but I became curious to know more and so I asked Van Ronk, who was as politically minded as anybody, what he knew about states’ rights. Van Ronk could talk all day about socialist heavens and political utopias — bourgeois democracies and Trotskyites and Marxists, and international workers’ orders — he could grasp all that stuff firmly, but about states’ rights he almost looked be-mused. “The Civil War was fought to free the slaves,” he said, “there’s no mystery to it.” But then again, Van Ronk would never let you forget that he had his own way of seeing things. “Look, my man, even if those elite Southern barons would have freed their captives, it wouldn’t have done them any good. We still would have gone down there and annihilated them, invaded them for their land. It’s called imperialism.” Van Ronk took the Marxist point of view. “It was one big battle between two rival economic systems is what it was.”
One thing about Van Ronk, what he said was never dull or muddy. We sang the same type of songs and all of these songs were originally sung by singers who seemed to be groping for words, almost in an alien tongue. I was beginning to feel that maybe the language had something to do with causes and ideals that were tied to the circumstances and blood of what happened over a hundred years ago over secession from the Union — at least to those generations who were caught in it. All of a sudden, it didn’t seem that far back.
Once I was talking to the folks back home and my father got on the line, asked me where I was. I told him that I was in New York City, the capital of the world. He said, “That’s a good joke.” But it wasn’t a joke. New York City was the magnet — the force that draws objects to it, but take away the magnet and everything will fall apart.
Ray had flowing, wavy, blond hair like Jerry Lee Lewis or Billy Graham, the evangelist — the kind of hair that preachers had. The kind that the early rock-and-roll singers used to imitate and want to look like. The kind that could create a cult. Ray wasn’t a preacher, though, but he knew how to be one and he could be funny. He said if he preached to farmers, he’d tell them about plowing the furrows with seeds of love and then reaping the harvest of salvation. He could preach to businessmen, too. He would say stuff like, “Sisters and brothers, there’s no profit in trading in sin! Everlasting life is not bought and sold.” He had a sermon for just about anybody. Ray was a Southerner and made no bones about it, but he would have been antislavery as much as he would have been antiunion. “Slavery should have been outlawed from the start,” he said. “It was diabolical. Slave power makes it impossible for free workers to make a decent living — it had to be destroyed.” Ray was pragmatic. Sometimes it was as if he had no heart or soul.
There were about five or six rooms in the apartment. In one of them was this magnificent rolltop desk, sturdy looking, almost indestructible — oak wood with secret drawers and a double sided clock on the mantel, carved nymphs and a medallion of Minerva — mechanical devices to release hidden drawers, upper side panels and gilt bronze mounts emblematic of mathematics and astronomy. It was incredible. I sat down at it, firm footed, and pulled out a sheet of paper and dashed off a