It's easily done, you just pick anyone

I can't understand

She let go of my hand

An' left me here facing the wall

I'd sure like to know

Why she'd go

But I can't get close to her at all

Though we kissed through the wild blazing nighttime

She said she would never forget

But now morning is clear

It's like ain't here

She just acts like we never have met.

It's all new to me

Like some mystery

It could even be like a myth

But it's hard to think on

That she's the same one

That last night I was with

From darkness, dreams are deserted

Am I still dreamin' yet ?

I wish she'd unlock

Her voice once and talk

'Stead of acting like we never met.

If she ain't feelin' well

Then why don't she tell

'Stead of turnin' her back to my face

Without any doubt

She seems too far out

For me to return to her chase

Though the night ran swirling and whirling

I remember her whispering yet

But evidently she don't

And evidently she won't

She just acts like we never have met.

If I didn't have to guess

I'd gladly confess

To anything I might've tried

If I was with her too long

Or have done something wrong

I wish she'd tell me what it is, I'll run and hide

Her skirt it swayed as a guitar played

Her mouth was watery and wet

But now something has changed

For she ain't the same

She just acts like we never have met.

I'm leavin' today

I'll be on my way

Of this I can't say very much

But if you want me to

I can be just like you

And pretend that we never have touched

And if anybody asks me, "Is it easy to forget ?"

I'll say, "It's easily done

You just pick anyone

And pretend that you never have met".

This came into my head today – it’s one of my favourite songs from one of my favourite albums, Another Side of Bob Dylan – because as with most of his stuff, it hits it right on the head. No obfuscation, no bullshitting, no fxxing around. One of the best things, the most unusual and powerful things about Dylan is his breathtaking honesty, though it is seldom mentioned by anyone, maybe not even consciously noticed.

Thus, if you analyze the words to Positively 4th Street, Dylan’s notorious diatribe of vengeance– well, guess what?  It isn’t. A diatribe. At. All. The song is merely a series of statements, true statements by the sound of them, strung together in the plainest English you ever heard:

You got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend

When I was down, you just stood there grinnin’

You got a lot of nerve to say you have a helping hand to lend

You just want to be on the side that’s winnin’

When Dylan became impossibly famous in his early 20s, everybody really did want a piece of him, and it eventually became obscene. At heart he is introverted and hypersensitive, has few real friends, and mostly cleaves to his highly-protected family (who, by the way, have been seriously threatened by flaming psychotics like "Dylanologist" A. J. Weberman). If you get past its sardonic hipness and really listen to the song, you get the feeling that this all happened:  he really was used and abused this way, and with his usual who-gives-a-shit honesty he’s going to tell the world exactly what they did to him in those terse, compressed lines that are so characteristic of the most powerful poetry.

Like every other form of writing, poetry is reporting. And Dylan might just be the best reporter who ever lived.

People have argued over who is the “target” of Positively 4^th Street since the song came out in 1965. He recorded it right after his legendary gig at the Newport Folk Festival: you know, the one where he “went electric”, singing two of his ten or so songs with an amplified guitar and a rhythm section. They didn’t just boo him then: they booed him through an entire tour, every time he pulled out that electric guitar. And he kept on singing.

So there were plenty of potential targets for the varnish-stripping Dylan honesty, among them numerous folkie has-beens and never-weres, parasites trying to suck away his vital force as he struggled to be reborn. Some even think it’s about Joan Baez, but frankly, given the way he coat-tailed on her fame in the early ‘60s, she had even more reason to sing that song to HIM. No, I think it’s aimed at that nauseating sycophant and self-styled hipster/flamboyant creep, Richard Farina, a Dylan wanna-be who married  Baez’s 17-year-old sister Mimi strictly to get a piece of the action with Joan.

So let’s get into this one. It has one of those twisty Dylan titles: I Don’t Believe You. But what is it really about? It’s about being cut so dead by someone you like or love that they won’t even acknowledge you’ve met.

Hey, who is this guy.

Are you talking to me?

What? . . . Do I know you?

It’s easily done, you just pick anyone.  Let’s pick someone you HAVE known for years, even had a close relationship with, whether professional or personal.

At some point – well, sometimes it’s just totally baffling. No discernible reason at all, or perhaps things just get a little “thick”, a little less than jolly and easy.

A scum or a fog or a – something – something toxic begins to form.

And you try to clear the air - and you try – and –

It isn’t so much being “ignored” or even having the other person pretend you never have met, which is devastating enough. It’s that sense of – uhh, is there another person in the room? Somebody over there, maybe? Ah, no – nobody there –  (whew).

The opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s indifference. The opposite of acknowledgement is obliviousness. It’s easily done: you just do nothing! Try to call them on it, and all sorts of generic excuses pop up that are meant to be blandly accepted: “Oh! NOW I know why you didn’t answer my email/phone message, you know the one, that message that laid my guts open and made me vulnerable enough to risk everything I had. You didn’t answer me because you were Busy That Day. You were away from your desk.”

No. You were not. Away. From. Your Desk. You made this up on the spot to make it easier for YOU, and if I don’t accept it or if I try to call you on it, I will get some version of “how can you be so cruel? How can you even think of such a thing?”

I can be so cruel as to think, because it is TRUE.

But though it may look like you suddenly shunned me for no reason, it will eventually come to light that there was a reason. You didn’t answer me because I embarrassed you. I embarrassed you because I cared so intensely, and you didn’t. I wanted to know what made things go so wrong between us, to try to understand it or at least get some sort of dialogue going. But you can’t have a dialogue if the other person won’t even acknowledge your existence.

As I get older, I see the real dynamics between people, the way the endless games are played, and it sickens me. I open myself, show my belly, roll all over the floor, longing for someone/anyone to hear me, understand me, or at least live on the same planet as me, and it all echoes back at me as if nobody is there. At. All.

The opposite of love. Dylan almost makes light of this, though not quite. It’s not nice not to be acknowledged. Especially it’s not nice if you’ve gutted yourself in order to be understood, and gotten an indifferent silence in reply. Silence isn’t nice when it’s malignant like that. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the human brain has a tendency to fill it in. And not with the sweetest thoughts.

When people don’t return your phone calls/emails, and it’s happened to me a lot since I decided to fall on my sword by being a novelist, it’s like being stood up on a date. It doesn’t feel nice. The person doing the standing-up should be feeling guilty and bad for letting you down. They don’t. They don’t feel anything. Or they’re busy doing something else, probably having much more fun than they would have had with you. YOU feel bad. YOU feel embarrassed, unacknowledged, dumped. You’re sitting there in a bar or a coffee shop alone, being glanced at, and you feel embarrassed, shamed. You went out of your way. You put your pretty dress on. You told the guy you liked him. Loved him? If you say anything to anyone – but no. THAT truly exposes you as a loser. All you’ll get is pity, or “oh, come on, don’t be so sensitive”.

We must hold our Winner mask in front of our faces at all times. If it drops, we’ll be under attack. Or underacknowledged. Or, perhaps, not even acknowledged at all.

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Forever young

At dawn my lover comes to me and tells me of her dreams
With no attempt to shovel the glimpse into the ditch of what each one means.

Bob Dylan, Gates of Eden


Sometimes I actually do this: I take my morning coffee and curl up on the leather sofa next to the Lazy Boy my husband has preferred for something like 30 years. And I tell him. In the manner of nearly all dreams, these will soon sublimate into the air like so much night frost and disappear, though I sometimes try to get them down on this blog (i. e. Whatever Happened to the Wildwood Flower, about a young Sissy Spacek-like woman preparing to get married in a church where no one knows her). I tell my dreams as an attempt to fix them in time and memory, and mostly it doesn't work, leaving Bill with the usual baffled look on his face.

This one, well, it was even stranger than that.

Like Bob Dylan, I think the eternal question "what does the dream mean?" wrecks it more often than not, like analyzing poetry until it's nothing but fragments of phrases and unmoored words. But it's interesting to behold what bin-ends of thought and experience re-emerge in scrambled or rearranged form, unrelated jigsaw pieces suddenly revealing a picture you never thought of before.

I was in some sort of big theatre, a movie theatre I would guess, and it reminded me of the theatres of my childhood in Chatham. We had two, the Capital and the Centre, and I remember we felt considerable civic pride in the fact that we had more than one. In the dream the theatre was huge, cavernous, more like the Orpheum in Vancouver, though I am sure the Capital and the Centre were rather puny and not grand at all.

There were only three people in the theatre: myself, Hassan (a colleague of Bill's from 30 years ago, a fellow engineer relocated from Saudi Arabia) and Paul, a spiritualist medium I have known for many years. He was sitting facing away from the vast silver screen at some sort of monitor, and without saying it Hassan and I knew he was going to tell us what would happen to us, what our future would be. He seemed, in retrospect, a little like the "man behind the curtain" in the Wizard of Oz,  except that there was no curtain.

He worked away. Apparently he was "doing" Hassan first, and I was rather jealous. All the while, ghostly images appeared, more on the ceiling of the theatre than on the screen, giant people, like blowups of characters from silent movies, though I didn't recognize who they were.  I wish I remembered the middle of the dream, but most of it has already faded and gone all patchy and jumbled like a poorly-restored movie from 1915. He finally did tell Hassan his "fortune" in a fairly straightforward way, and he listened intently, obviously taking it very seriously.  But it seemed to me that time was running out, that there would be no time for my own fortune and I would be left hanging.

It was true. As Paul began to pack up his things (what things? His henbane, his Merlin hat?), he told me I would have to "wait until next time" to hear my fortune. I was frustrated by this, and even wondered if something would happen to me if I had "no future", if it had not been laid out for me.  Then I realized he had been using something that looked like an old overhead projector to "see" and project that seeing into the future, and I wondered how that worked.

Then I had this bold idea. Since I couldn't wait for my fortune, I would write it myself. So I started writing it down on something unusual, maybe on an old piece of parchment, but it flowed easily. And I have almost no remembrance of it, though it struck me as quite specific and in detail. I do remember one line, something like, "Sometimes friends will be the greatest comfort and help to you, and sometimes they will vanish and you will be left completely alone." I had a sense of a lacuna or a round hollow space in some sort of rock formation.

Sometimes this, sometimes that: it was a bit like Ecclesiastes and "to every thing there is a season". But when I came to writing the last line, it reminded me strongly of Bob Dylan's most heartfelt song, "Forever Young".


May God bless and keep you
May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others
And let others do for you
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young.

May you grow up to be righteous
May you grow up to be true
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you
May you always be courageous
Stand upright and be strong
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young.

May your hands always be busy
May your feet always be swift
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift
May your heart always be joyful
And may your song always be sung
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young.

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Bob Dylan: ace of hearts

So what can I say about Bob Dylan? Flat-out nothing, because there is no one and nothing like him. As if he's the Taj Mahal, or Abraham-fuckin'-Lincoln or something.

No hip has ever been hipster. Who knew what went on in his head. A flying spin of songs, a spin-dry of flying relationships. Sometimes we knew all about him, somehow we knew nothing. Not much of a core except a glowing fire-winged sycamore tree that burned but was not consumed.

You could touch him but you couldn't. He could smile but he wouldn't. Nobody had such cool hair, such hands. He was an e. e. cummings poem except supremer. He was the joujou doll of the universe.

Some say Bob Dylan still arises, still sails. I see a picture now and again as he gets older, and more and more things are hung around his neck. Might as well take them, as his effort has been Olympian, while - all the while - he made it look easy. Some say all them medals is going to get too heavy one o these days and he will tip over, hopefully on stage where I think he will breathe his last breath. I mean this in the most respectest and possiblist way.

'Skinda-a weird, the attitude-ta fame, cuzzadafact that he sought it and bought it, still tours and tours and tours, but never seemed to care two pygmyburgers about it, as if he could take it or leave it alone, as if he'd still write his songs if nobody listened to them, but I don't know whether to believe him. Would Charles Dickens be Charles Dickens if nobody flippin' heard of him? Didn't think so.

I won't get into his lifelong relationship with La Baez, folktresse supersupreme. She's like a peace pizza with everything. Whenever I see an interview with him he talks about her, and whenever I see an interview with her she talks about him. They are beginning to look like each other now with those never-say-die eyes and the peachfuzz skin of youth stretched and seamed like very fine kidskin leather. They were kids together, and wasn't it awfully hard on Suze? Did he really have any morals at all? Did she? They just took. They did. The entitlement of being extraordinary? Or a drug to make it all bearable?

I can say no benediction more than a man, amen, amayhn, amayhhhn, ahmehhhhhhnnnnnn.