“The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next for of the future.”
-Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
1.
Adorno’s well known essay “Late Style in Beethoven” finds common ground with Giles Deleuze’s last essay “Immanence: A Life.” Both attempt to describe a state of being outside the subjective individual expression (both grounded in the artwork: for Adorno Beethoven, for Deleuze Dickens), while retaining something like the singularity of expression. Two passages from each will suffice:
“Death is imposed only on created beings, not on works of art, and thus it has appeared in art only in a refracted mode, as allegory. The psychological interpretation misses this. By declaring mortal subjectivity to be the substance of the late work, it hopes to be able to perceive death in unbroken form in the work of art. This is the deceptive crown of its metaphysics. True it recognizes the explosive force of subjectivity in the late work. But it looks for it in the opposite direction from that in which the work itself is striving; in the expression of subjectivity itself. But this subjectivity, as mortal, and in the name of death, disappears from the work of art into truth.” (Adorno 566)
He continues, with specific reference to Goethe’s Faust II and Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderjahre, “no longer, at this point, an expression of the solitary I, but of the mythical nature of the created being and its fall, whose steps the late works strike symbolically as if in the momentary pauses of their descent.” (566 emphasis mine)
In proximity, if not in agreement, Deleuze’s essay uses Dickens to express what he means by a life as an “index of the transcendental:
“The life of the individual has given way to an impersonal and yet singular life, which foregrounds a pure event that has been liberated from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what comes to pass […] a life of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil, since only the subject that incarnated it in the midst of things made it good or bad.” (Deleuze 387).
As if almost anticipating where they will disagree, namely the “descent” of the “created being and its fall” that leads unto death for Adorno, Deleuze writes as if he wishes the ethos of the “late work’s” emptying of subjectivity in the work of art could be experienced regularly in art and life:
“But a life should not have to be enclosed in the simple moment when individual life confronts universal death. A life is everywhere, in every moment which a living subject traverses and which is measured by the objects that have been experienced, an immanent life carrying along the events or singularities that are merely actualized in subjects and objects” (Deleuze 387)
If we take the two ideas together, beyond good and evil and Adorno and Deleuze’s teacher Nietzsche might say, then the work of art is the space wherein death can be allegorized without having to actually confront universal death, and the incarnation of life through events evaluated as either “good” or “evil.” It can refocus itself on a life while also acknowledging that the descent represented within that artwork by the figure of death is merely one virtually to reflect a life among many. The great reversal is, however, for the thinker Deleuze, it is his own confrontation of life’s “weakness and suffering” that engenders the reflection upon the transcendental field of “a life.” A life contains multitudes.
2.
Bob Dylan’s latest album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, begins with the song “I Contain Multitudes.” He released it a week after “Murder Most Foul” and deep into the pandemic. The title is a reference to Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” There are Blake and Poe references in there as well. Dylan just won the Nobel Prize for literature, so he either needs to prove his literary knowledge, or wants to play with his audience’s expectations for such things. But the song begins with the following couplet:
“Today, tomorrow, and yesterday, too/ The flowers are dyin' like all things do”
As Dylan has gotten older, his lyrics have become much less opaque. One of the ways one could demarcate “late” Dylan from “early” Dylan would be a continued reliance on plain language rather than surreal descriptions for his lyrics. Songs like “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” “Isis,” and “Changing of the Guards” gave way to the simple proselytizing of “Pressing On,” “Serve Somebody” and “Every Grain of Sand.” This has been mitigated by his post-Christian albums with secular versions of such homilies such as “Dignity,” “Most of the Time,” and “To Bring You My Love,” the last of which is so homely that even Adele herself turned it into a hit. This isn’t to say that Dylan hasn’t always been able to bend his voice to universal truths about love, justice and time, its that he always reserved part of his talent for a lyrical modernism that made him the great inheritor of the American poetic tradition from Whitman to Ginsburg (his fellow rolling god of thunder).
Interlude (My baby/ he wrote me a letter):
While writing this essay on Dylan’s new album, a letter was published in Harper’s Magazine titled “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate.” Much has been written about the letter and, dear lord, I really don’t want to spend any time discussing its dumb argument. I’ll let the opening paragraph speak for itself:
"Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides."
There is so much that I could say about that paragraph but I will offer two reflections. One, the “But this need…” sentence and what comes after is one example of the violence of this letter. What comes before it, a laundry list of social institutions that are in need of reform, justice and equality, would be a task, were it actually implemented, so great that it would occupy us as humans for a long, long while. Yet this collection of “intellectuals” is so dismissive of these protests and calls for change, that they present these lists of demands as if they are so many tasks to be fulfilled by sub-contracted workers before the research reports owed deans are unconscionably late.
Second, and perhaps the more serious one for pesky things like history, the “illiberalism” which these intellectuals see as somehow equivalent to the “resistance” hardening into “dogma and coercion” are in no way equivalent, and to make them so is the second example of this letter’s violence. As I write this, unmarked vehicles manned by hybrid soldier/police are “Pinochetting” people off the streets where I live in Portland, Oregon. Rather than letting the signatories define what illiberalism is, I’ll let Christopher Browning, historian of Holocaust, define illiberalism:
"We are at a point now in the United States with Donald Trump where democracy is beleaguered. But it is in the form of a new kind of authoritarianism, what I call ‘illiberal democracy,’ where the whole system does not need to be changed entirely. You don't need a vast army of secret police. You don't need concentration camps. You don't need to lock up all your opponents. Now, in America or other liberal democracies, if an enemy of democracy or a would-be authoritarian manages to tweak the electoral system, infiltrate and stock the judiciary, control information and pollute the public discourse against truth -- using language such as "fake news" -- people basically lose faith. The fig leaf of democratic appearance is preserved. Elections are held but the opponents have no chance of winning. If the standard threshold for an assault on democracy and authoritarianism is set at Adolf Hitler then we are all failing to see how much damage can be done to democracy without getting anywhere near that level. Our guard is lowered because in so many ways Trump isn't anything like Hitler. Yet that does not mean there is not a clear and present danger of another sort to American democracy."
The morons parroting their own idiolect of grievance in this open letter somehow minimize both the uprisings around the country at the murder of George Floyd, Breanna Taylor and so many other victims of institutional racist violence, as well as the true resistance to Trump’s illiberalism among those of us who understand how history repeats itself.
Prior to this week I would have numbered Greil Marcus, one of the signatories of the above letter, as an ally in understanding the seriousness of this moment with regard to both the uprisings as well as the historical echoes of fascism because he’s been writing about race and those historical echoes all my life. As I write this, I’m staring at my copy of In the Fascist’s Bathroom, a collections of essays with the overarching theme that in the 1980s the Regan and Thatcher regimes were the modern day incarnation of fascism. If the person who admired that book way back when had been shown the events of 2020 and asked whether Marcus or Bob Dylan, arguably the figure Marcus has written about the most, would have understood what is at stake, my response would have been: “well, what can you expect from Dylan? He will be 79 years old in 2020 after all.” Yet, Dylan seems to be having his most relevant year in decades.
My friend Kate, who is in her mid-30s, had, prior to 2020, never intentionally heard a Bob Dylan song. I’m sure, like everyone in my general age group who has listened to a radio before, she has passively heard part of or all of a Bob Dylan song before. However, in terms of a Bob Dylan song she sat down and listened to all the way through, “Murder Most Foul” was the first one and I think that’s wild, of course. She really liked it. Her first response was “fuck our government.” It’s heartening to know that the dude who wrote “Masters of War” so many years ago can solicit that kind of response first time out. From the little evidence that has been released by the streaming services, my friend isn’t the only person for whom “Murder Most Foul” might be their first exposure to Dylan: it was the most streamed song the week it was released.
But that wasn’t the only thing: Dylan gave a significant and rare interview to the New York Times ahead of his album’s release and, before the interview itself, the first comment from Dylan the reader encounters concerns George Floyd: “It sickened me no end to see George tortured to death like that,” he said. “It was beyond ugly. Let’s hope that justice comes swift for the Floyd family and for the nation.” For some reason that I can’t fully articulate, that simple statement from Dylan regarding Floyd’s torture and murder most foul, is worth all of the aggrieved letters that have been, are being and could ever be written.
3.
Rough and Rowdy Ways follows a formal pattern in Dylan albums regarded as “statements” insofar as it is a double record (like Blonde on Blonde, Time Out of Mind and, yes, Self-Portrait), containing a side-long track (like the first two double records mentioned). Rough and Rowdy Ways is a good to great Dylan record, not as good as his other double albums (yes, including Self-Portrait). If Blonde On Blonde presented Dylan as the newest of the new in 1966 and Time Out of Mind presented him as a swamp ghost from a 1950s C&W AM station picked up late at night, then Rough and Rowdy Ways sounds like a ghost having made peace with incorporeality, settling in to whatever the (after) life has planned. The popularity of Dylan at the moment on Spotify among people who were not even born when Dylan first became old suggests that this stance, inscrutable but certainly not unapproachable, demonstrates Dylan’s continuing canny ability to understand how to shape his image at every moment.
He also has a canny ability—or at least the younger people who are employed to run his release schedules and social media presence on platforms like Spotify—to release a new album in 2020: trickle out three tracks before releasing the whole thing at a later date. “Murder Most Foul” and “I Contain Multitudes” were the important early releases but it’s the third, “False Prophet” that’s the best of the three. What better opening couplet for life in 2020:
Another day that don't end
Another ship goin' out
Another day of anger, bitterness, and doubt
But it’s the music that I love: the kind of throw away sloppy blues rock stomp that he’s always seemingly populated his albums, and has always been the highlight of his live performances. They’ve always been the songs that slip between the cracks of his statement songs, but you can’t help but feel that they’re the songs he loves writing and performing, often hiding his most profound truths. “False Prophet” is about that very beyond death state that snakes through late work and the singularity of life that art like Dylan’s is always trying to express, the very heimish unheimlich that only the wandering ghost somewhat at home finally can sing to you with raspy voice:
You don't know me, darlin'
You never would guess
I'm nothing like my ghostly appearance would suggest
And then later on:
Can't remember, when I was born
And I forgot when I died
Neither born nor dead, Dylan inhabits the space of Delueze’s a life in his art: empathetic, but singular, living beyond the ascent and descent of life as it is lived in the world of murders (JFK and George Floyd) most foul.
As great as “False Prophet” is, it’s not the best song on the record. For me, that’s “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You.” His late in life love songs have been remarkable. If as a young man Dylan the artist sings “I Want You” then Dylan the old man understands that such desire cannot be fulfilled and just becomes unproductively stupid the older the artist gets (just ask “those bad boys from England the Rolling Stones”). The young artist might understand this as well, which is why Blonde On Blonde’s answer song to “I Want You” is “Just Like a Woman”—if she doesn’t want you, fuck her, break her like a little girl, if she doesn’t break first.
“I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You,” depending on Dylan’s continued productivity, might be the final chapter in the great theme of Dylan’s work: desire. It, more than political injustice or, relatedly, the law of this world and justice in the next, seems to be the career-long lyrical concern of his: he entitled a goddamn album after it. Desire for the younger Dylan suggests a sacrifice to an other: whether the submission of one lover to another (the early love songs), submission to desire itself (divorce and after), and submission to the dark God of faith (Dylan: 1979-1981). It would seem that giving oneself up to another would be both the larger theme and ultimate final statement for Dylan on desire. Yet, he’s made up his mind to do it. No longer imposing his desire and longing on the world, and taking his revenge when it does not follow, Dylan, ghostly apparition that he is, is content to finally, at the end, give himself to you.
This doesn’t mean he isn’t a false prophet, or so multitudinous that he couldn’t be anybody giving himself to you. It means that love—the gospel the narrator of the song would preach were he a “snow white dove”—means giving up the desire to possess another but also giving up one’s ego to something or someone else. This emptying out of the subjective agency to shape the world after one’s desire is the final form Dylan’s music and lyrics are taking. It is the mark of late work but not because the subject has been finally done in by the descent of mortal sin and death, but because he understands that his work has been moving to a place wherein the subject becomes universal in its rejection of individualism, only reflected in the multitude voices of death and desire in the songs themselves.
