Chronicles - Bob Dylan [65]
I began to see less and less of the daylight. I’d lay back in a chair to rest my eyes and then two or three hours later wake up — go off to get something and forget what I went there to get. I’m glad my wife was around. In times like this, it’s good if you’re with someone who desires the same things as you and is open and not closed to your energy. She could make me feel like I wasn’t in some godforsaken hole. One day when she was wearing metallic sunglasses I could see myself in miniature and thought how small everything had become.
The one thing that I had no strong desire to do was to compose songs. I hadn’t written any in a long while, anyway. I had stopped doing that, just wasn’t crazy for it. My last couple of record albums didn’t contain many of my own compositions, anyway. As far as being a songwriter went, I couldn’t have had a more casual attitude. I’d written plenty and that was fine. I did whatever it took to get there, had reached my goal and had no more high ambitions for it. Had long ceased running towards it. When and if an idea would come, I would no longer try to get in touch with the base of its power. I could easily deny it and stay clear of it. Just couldn’t make myself do it. I never expected to write anything ever again. Didn’t need any more songs anyway.
One night when everyone was asleep and I was sitting at the kitchen table, nothing on the hillside but a shiny bed of lights — all that changed. I wrote about twenty verses for a song called “Political World” and this was about the first of twenty songs I would write in the next month or so. They came from out of the blue. Maybe I wouldn’t have written them if I wasn’t laid up like I was. Maybe, maybe not. They were easy to write, seemed to float downstream with the current. It’s not like they’d been faint or far away — they were right there in my face, but if you’d look too steady at them, they’d be gone.
A song is like a dream, and you try to make it come true. They’re like strange countries that you have to enter. You can write a song anywhere, in a railroad compartment, on a boat, on horseback — it helps to be moving. Sometimes people who have the greatest talent for writing songs never write any because they are not moving. I wasn’t moving in any of these songs, not externally, anyway. Still, I got them all down as if I was. Sometimes things you see and hear outside of yourself can influence a song. The song “Political World” could have been triggered by current events. There was a heated presidential race underway, you couldn’t avoid hearing about it. But I had no interest in politics as an art form, so I don’t think that was all there was to it. The song is too broad. The political world in the song is more of an underworld, not the world where men live, toil and die like men. With the song, I thought I might have broken through to something. It was like you wake up from a deep and drugged slumber and somebody strikes a little silver gong and you come to your senses. There were about twice as many verses