Thump on the Bible, and proclaim a creed!

I live on a street named after a Saint
Women in the churches wear powder and paint
Where the Jews and the Catholics and the Muslims all pray
I can tell a Proddie from a mile away
Goodbye Jimmy Reed - Jimmy Reed indeed
Give me that old time religion, it’s just what I need

For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory
Go tell it on the mountain, go tell the real story
Tell it in that straightforward puritanical tone
In the mystic hours when a person’s alone
Goodbye Jimmy Reed - Godspeed
Thump on the Bible and proclaim a creed

You won’t amount to much, the people all said
‘Cause I didn’t play guitar behind my head
Never pandered, never acted proud
Never took off my shoes and threw them into the crowd
Goodbye Jimmy Reed - goodbye and goodnight
Put a jewel in your crown and I’ll put out the light

They threw everything at me, everything in the book
Had nothing to fight with but a butcher’s hook
They have no pity - they don’t lend a hand
I can’t sing a song that I don’t understand
Goodbye Jimmy Reed - goodbye and good luck
I can’t play the record ‘cause my needle got stuck

Transparent woman in a transparent dress
Suits you well - I must confess
I’ll break open your grapes, I’ll suck out the juice
I need you like my head needs a noose
Goodbye Jimmy Reed, goodbye and so long
I thought I could resist her but I was so wrong

God be with you, brother dear
If you don’t mind me asking, what brings you here?
Oh, nothing much, I’m just looking for the man
I came to see where he’s lying in this lost land
Goodbye Jimmy Reed and everything within ya
Can’t you hear me calling from down in Virginia

I keep seeing bits and pieces of Dylan's Never-Ending Tour 2024, which just wound up LAST MONTH. This is why no  one can keep up with Dylan - no music critic, no biographer,  no song-ographer or whatever it's called. The "complete Dylan lyrics" book ended in 2012,  which is simply  laughable since all his best work was still ahead of him.

I have this germ of an idea which I may not have the energy to pursue - something that allows  me to put my feelings about  Dylan on paper where I can see them, but I don't want some hackneyed form. I've even thought of an imaginary conversation or a Q & A (though NOT an interview), and God knows I've  been talking to Dylan since I hit puberty at least. Though I was aware of him long before that. Hard Rain did it, and I was never the same after that. 

So, breaking it wide open, what form might it take? If I do pursue it, if I have the energy, it will have to take shape or form on its own and not  be burdensome or something I HAVE to work on. And imaginary conversations  have gotten me into deep waters before, particularly if someone else sees them. Anyway, in those YouTube snippets. Dylan is sitting down behind the piano for the whole thing, unable to stand no doubt, and it's even hard to see him. But he has always been that way. You have to come to him, and the weird thing is, people do. They still do. He looks incredibly old and grizzled, and one wonders what it would be like to actually talk to him, whether he'd magically "get" me as so  few people have (and most of those people  are dead by now). Probably not, would not even want to talk to someone outside his tight little circle. He's not friendly particularly, but why should he be? 

One does wonder why he can't seem to retire or even to slow down, but so long as the songs keep coming, he likely won't. "The songs know me, and they know that I can sing them" is the most enigmatic statement I have ever seen on songwriting, or anything else. They do just come to him, like Mozart taking dictation, like Gershwin spewing out bright balloons while playing piano at a party, and only capturing one or two of them and writing them down. But those geniuses didn't live past their 30s, so they had to write fast. It was always assumed Dylan would flame out early, and had he not had that bogus "motorcycle accident", he likely WOULD have died at 27, like most of them did. 

So for the curious, here is how he looks and sounds more-or-less now (2022). 

Invisible, like the wind: the divine feminine in Bob Dylan's Mother of Muses

 

Mother of Muses

Mother of Muses, sing for me

Sing of the mountains and the deep dark sea

Sing of the lakes and the nymphs of the forest

Sing your hearts out, all you women of the chorus

Sing of honor and faith and glory be

Mother of Muses, sing for me.

Mother of Muses, sing for my heart

Sing of a love too soon to depart

Sing of the heroes who stood alone

Whose names are engraved on tablets of stone

Who struggled with pain so the world could go free

Mother of Muses, sing for me.

 

Sing of Sherman, Montgomery and Scott

And of Zhukov, and Patton, and the battles they fought

Who cleared the path for Presley to sing

Who carved the path for Martin Luther King

Who did what they did and they went on their way

Man I could tell their stories all day

 

I’m falling in love with Calliope

She don’t belong to anyone, why not give her to me

She’s speakin’ to me, speakin’ with her eyes

I’ve grown so tired of chasing lies

Mother of Muses, wherever you are

I’ve already outlived my life by far.

Mother of Muses, unleash your wrath

Things I can’t see, they’re blocking my path

Show my your wisdom, tell me my fate

Put me upright, make me walk straight

Forge my identity from the inside out

You know what I’m talking’ about.

 

Take me to the river, release your charms

Let me lay down a while in your sweet lovin’ arms

Wake me shake me, free me from sin

Make me invisible, like the wind

Got a mind to ramble, got a mind to roam

I’m travellin’ light, and I’m slow comin’ home

In Greek mythology, Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory, and the mother of the nine Muses. The term Mnemosyne is derived from the same source as the word mnemonic, that being the Greek word mnēmē, which means "remembrance, memory".
A titaness, Mnemosyne was the daughter of Uranus and Gaia. Mnemosyne was the mother of the nine Muses, fathered by her nephew, Zeus:

 
Calliope (epic poetry)
Clio (history)
Euterpe (music and lyric poetry)
Erato (love poetry)
Melpomene (tragedy)
Polyhymnia (hymns)
Terpsichore (dance)
Thalia (comedy)
Urania (astronomy)

BLOGGER'S COMMENTARY. I have fallen in love, not with Calliope, but with Bob Dylan, all over again. Only now he's an 80-year-old phenomenon once more in the thick of a year-long world tour, a task which would be daunting to a man half that age. Yes, and that tour likely features mostly new material, including songs we have not even heard yet. Through the wonders of YouTube, we are now able to hear and even SEE him perform only a day or so after the show. Entire performances are popping up that only took place last week.

Mother of Muses is one of my favorite songs on Rough and Rowdy Ways (released last year, and considered by many to be the finest album he has ever produced). It's both tender and haunting, with an undertone of flinty defiance as he rhymes off the names of the heroes he so admires. (Only Dylan could mention Elvis Presley and Martin Luther King in almost the same breath, and still make it work.) Initially, this post was going to be "the divine feminine in Rough and Rowdy Ways", but there were so many references to women, divine in one way or another (like the "transparent woman in a transparent dress"), that I had to cut it down and focus on one song which seemed like the concentrated essence of all the others.

Yes, Mother of Muses is a lovely and poetic title for a sighingly beautiful song -  but until I did a little bit of digging, I had no idea what it really meant. My Greek mythology is rusty, but Dylan's isn't. His knowledge of mythology, literature, and (most especially) the Bible is legendary. Not only that - his knowledge has both tremendous breadth and spooky, mysterious depth.  In fact, I believe Bob Dylan is one of the greatest minds of our time. Who else has won the Nobel Prize for writing what is so erroneously labelled as "popular music"?

So what I found, and maybe it should not have astonished me as much as it did, is that there WAS an actual "mother of Muses" named Mnemosyne. I had heard the name before, of course, and the term "mnemonic" as a device for remembering things. But Mnemosyne is not only the mother of memory, but the mother of NINE muses, the first one being Calliope (the one Bob Dylan is falling in love with), who is responsible for EPIC POETRY.

Which is why this song completely knocks me over.

It's perhaps no mistake that in calling on his "muse", Dylan chooses the "mother of all Muses", one who has the power to transform and redeem. She is not unlike the female face of Jesus. This verse especially spells out the extent of her power:

Mother of Muses, unleash your wrath

Things I can’t see, they’re blocking my path

Show my your wisdom, tell me my fate

Put me upright, make me walk straight

Forge my identity from the inside out

You know what I’m talking’ about.

The line "put me upright, make me walk straight" has made me weep more than once. Dylan is 80 years old, looks as old as time, and seems small, slight and frail.  I know very well from my own deteriorating body about the ravages of age and the slipping away of mobility. This line describes a power which can literally lift him up bodily and set him down on a purposeful path, guiding each step along the way.

But the spookiest line of all in this richly-laden poem is, "Forge my identity from the inside out/You know what I'm talkin' about." No, we don't, Bob - we are gasping in awe at the way in which an ancient Greek goddess can become your own mother, with the relationship close enough that she seems to have literally given birth to you. I've worked my way through many a Dylan biography, and the one I am reading now (a 1,000-page tome by a Scottish writer named Ian Bell) focuses mainly on the fact that Dylan's identity as an artist is in a constant state of flux, as if he doesn't really have one. I hope he is listening to this song right now.

Just think of it: those "women of the chorus", the nine Muses who call Mnemosyne their mother, are almost literally Dylan's backup singers. But this primal mother-figure also has a son, and as we trudge through the travesty of a season originally meant to honor the Son of Man, I am immensely grateful that our greatest living poet has found yet another way to be born again.

POST-POST-OBSERVATIONS. You knew there had to be more! I noticed that in the Wikipedia entry, Mnemosyne was called a "titaness", which is a half-assed way of saying she was a bloody TITAN (why not just come out and say it?). This means, among other things, that she really kicks ass, with considerable mythological clout behind her motherly legend. I knew nothing of titans, and found way too much when I looked it up, but here is the gist of it for those who are interested:

In Greek mythology, the Titans were the pre-Olympian gods. They were the twelve children of the primordial parents Uranus (Sky) and Gaia (Earth), with six male Titans: Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, and Cronus, and six female Titans, called the Titanides or Titanesses: Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, and Tethys. Cronus mated with his older sister Rhea and together they became the parents of the first generation of Olympians – the six siblings Zeus, Hades, Poseidon, Hestia, Demeter, and Hera. Some descendants of the Titans, such as Prometheus, Helios, and Leto, are sometimes also called Titans.

So if we got the whole clan together for Christmas, we'd need more than one turkey.