Bob Dylan
has made up his mind to give himself to somebody….. But who is it?
The new song called "I've Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You" released on the new Rough and Rowdy Ways album in the midst of the current Pandemic on June 19th, 2020 demonstrates that Bob Dylan still has the Midas Touch and has what it takes to spin out a great new love song at age 79.
But is this just another silly love song, of the kind that Paul McCartney and his mates were good at bringing forth? Not that there is anything “wrong with that” as we can agree that we “would like to know.” But I would suggest there might be something deeper going on within the structure of this love song that may escape our notice unless we carefully drill down on the careful way this song is put together.
The first thing we need to do to really evaluate this song is to give it another good listen to, which can be done on this convenient link:
I remember a day when you had to purchase songs like this if you wanted to hear them whenever you wanted. But this is a new day. Now there are many different ways to listen to this song. One Bob Dylan fan, Family Headley by name wrote in her comments under the “Official Audio” on the YouTube link that upon hearing this song for the first time, she found it to be so beautiful that she immediately had to go and grab her husband --presumably from his home office where he was pretending to be working through the pandemic --and she made him stop “working from home” for a few minutes and get up and dance with her in the kitchen. Now that is a beautiful story. Many others in the comments confess to tears arising while playing this song. Another lady I know, whose husband is going through a very serious health crisis at the moment, wrote me that upon first hearing the song she was brought to a flood of tears as she listened along with her husband.
Another way to listen to the song is to get out all of
the tools, you know the linguistic structuralist stuff, the English Hebrew
dictionaries, the Grammars, the Lexicons, some commentaries, some Midrashim and
Targumim and give this song a real thorough going
over.
I think it is always a nice thing when someone goes to
the trouble of deciphering the new lyrics like these and then posting them in
the comments section of the YouTube video so that you can follow along with the
song and be sure that you are hearing things right, prior to them showing up on
Bob Dylan.com as
they do now.
Because you know, Bob mumbles a bit. But I am convinced that all this is done on
purpose because he wants to make you work a little for it. He doesn’t want you to hear it all perfectly
the first time through. What is the fun
in that? He wants to make you have to go
through it many times, maybe over the course of many days, weeks, months or even
years before you finally hear it fully and then go, “Ah! O, I get it now!”
Back in the early days we used to have to do this
with the record player. We would lift up
the needle and take it back to the beginning of the song, being careful not to
scratch the record and listen to the song which might be smack dab in the
middle of the album over and over until you finally got it all. Then there was the CD where you could
conveniently push a button and take it back one song or two and listen to it
again. And then finally came the internet
when you could go to Bob Dylan.com or Expecting Rain and obtain the Holy
Grail, the official lyrics page with all ambiguities ironed out as you compared
what you were hearing along with the official Bob Dylan Songs page. One issue is that Bob says that he never sings
the same song the same way twice so there are always endless new arrangements
and often interesting and substantive lyric changes, and some are quite
dramatic, as we have discussed elsewhere.
One thing I have found fun to do on the official songs page is to go
there and then click on something like the letter “Y” in the alphabet near the
top of the page, and then watch the page scroll and scroll. I say go to the letter “Y” because there are
no songs that Bob has written that begin with the letter “Z” ….. at least not yet,
and then it is amazing to watch the pages scroll and scroll through the nearly
500 or so songs that he has written that are all now listed on this official song
page site. This is a ridiculous amount
of output for one lifetime, as he says in the new Album on the Song “Mother of Muses”
Mother of Muses wherever you are
I’ve already
outlived my life by far
but these are just the songs. Then there are the paintings, the books written, the poems, the interviews, the speeches given, the movies made and appeared in, the television appearances, the metallurgy, etc.
It just doesn’t end. Let me repost the official lyrics below for our convenience.
Sitting on my terrace lost in the stars
Listenin’ to the sounds of the sad guitars
Been thinking it over and I thought it all
through
I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you
I saw the first fall of snow
I saw the flowers come and go
I don’t think anyone else ever knew
I made up my mind to give myself to you
I’m giving myself to you, I am
From Salt Lake City to Birmingham
From East L.A. to San Antone
I don’t think I could bear to live my life alone
My eye is like a shooting star
It looks at nothing, neither near or far
No one ever told me, it’s just something I knew
I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you
If I had the wings of a snow white dove
I’d preach the gospel, the gospel of love
A love so real - a love so true
I made up my mind to give myself to you
Take me out traveling, you’re a traveling man
Show me something that I’ll understand
I’m not what I was, things aren’t what they were
I’m going to go far away from home with her
I traveled the long road of despair
I met no other traveler there
A lot of people gone, a lot of people I knew
I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you
My heart’s like a river - a river that sings
It just takes me a while to realize things
I’ll see you at sunrise - I’ll see you at dawn
I’ll lay down beside you, when everyone is gone
From the plains and the prairies - from the
mountains to the sea
I hope that the gods go easy with me
I knew you’d say yes - I’m saying it too
I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you
The first thing we notice here when we lay this song out like this is that we see there are nine verses. And as we have been reminded of late there are currently nine Supreme Court justices, at least for a little while longer. When there are nine you can’t have an even number, because you don’t want a final decisions to end up in a tie. So with nine verses there is some kind of structure here. Kind of like that “swing vote” on the Supreme Court there is one extra, one special, because what you don’t want is an even number. So that means that one of the verses might have something extra to say, just in the way that these nine verses are laid out.
As noted by Pascal-Emanuel Gobry “Dylan is a profoundly spiritual poet, and his
spirituality is profoundly shaped by the Christian Bible.” There can be no doubt about this declaration
so let’s see if he is using any biblical poetic techniques.
Now it is time to dig into our Hebrew grammars a
little bit to follow the next part of the argument. There is something in Hebrew and Biblical
poetry called Chiasmus. It is
beautifully explained on this link: I won’t go into it too
much here with a lot of detail except to say that the Biblical writers often
deployed this technique to gives some symmetry to the passage they were writing
which ends up succinctly making the central point and making it more memorable.
Here is an easy one to understand, an example from
Genesis 9:6 ESV:
(A) Whoever sheds
(B) the blood
(C) of man
(C’) by man
(B’) shall his blood
(A’) be shed
The legs of the poetry match up and in the Chiasmus
structure and there is often a focus on a single central clause, as in the example the
author linked above gives under number 4 above from John chapter 4:
A (23a) But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers
shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth:
The effect of this chiasmic structure is to give prominence to the central statement, which then can be considered as the main point of the passage. So in the example above from John chapter 4, the main point is at the exact center of the passage: “God is a Spirit” and therefore if you are going to worship Him rightly, you need to doing it by worshipping Him in Spirit. In the context of Jesus’ discussion with the Samaritan woman, he is highlighting that it is not so much about where you are located, on your mountain in Samaria or on our mountain in Jerusalem, you can worship anytime, anyplace if you are worshiping “in Spirit.” So in the coming Kingdom of God physical location is no longer in the New Testament epoch the paramount thing. It is true that God commanded Moses where he should worship Him in the Old Covenant:
Deuteronomy 12:13-14 Take care that you do not offer your burnt offerings at any
place that you see, but
at the place that the Lord will
choose in one of your tribes, there you
shall offer your burnt offerings, and there
you shall do all that I am commanding you.
Ok so how does all of this relate to this beautiful new song from Mr. Dylan? Well we noticed that there was one verse that was something of the odd man out, and it is placed in the exact center of the song so that it kind of stands out, so maybe it is put in this place in order to be the interpretive key to the whole song and that is verse number 5. There are four verses that come before it and four verses that come after it. Could this verse be the pivot or turning point of the song? Let’s take a closer look at verse 5:
If I had
the wings of a snow white dove
I’d preach the gospel, the gospel of love
A love so real - a love so true
I made up my mind to give myself to you
So if this passage is the chiastic center of the song, the odd man out, then it could indeed be the interpretive key. Let’s look at it in greater detail. If Bob had the wings of a snow white dove he would preach the gospel, the gospel of love. What are the wings of the snow white dove here? One of the contributors to the YouTube post suggests this might be a connection in the words "If I had wings like a snow-white dove" it could be an allusion to "Dink's Song," which was covered by Bob in 1961 and by Bob and Joan on the Rolling Thunder Tour in Gainesville, FL. But the song was made immortal by Oscar Isaac and Marcus Mumford courtesy of the music director T Bone Burnett in the movie Inside Llewyn Davis. Well I think this is getting close especially since the song references “Noah’s Dove.” But the Dove that greeted Noah, the one that foreshadowed the one that descended on Jesus in the Jordan River when he was baptized were one in the same, the Holy Spirit. So Bob is telling us that if he had the Holy Spirit in full measure he would be preaching the gospel, the gospel of Love. The unique thing about this gospel is that it is “So real…. So true” it is unlike anything that originates within the mind of man. It is a message directly from God.
So then now we are moving forward toward an answer
to the question with which we began this post with: “Who exactly has Bob Dylan made up his mind
to give himself to?”
We had noted before in this blog that Dylan often
presents a relationship with a lover in a similar way to a relationship with
the Lord. Is this his attempt at some
kind of plausible deniability? In other
words if anyone ever came up to him and said, “Hey, You said you loved the Lord”
He could say, “No, no I wrote that about a woman.” No, I don’t think so, that is not going to
work. Dylan may be many things but he is
no coward. He doesn’t mind the “booing,”
or “walking out on his own, a thousand miles from home.” He doesn’t mind the driving rain, because he
knows he will sustain…Because He believe in You (i.e the Lord Jesus). Instead poets are supposed to write in such a
way that lyrics can at times be somewhat open.
People can find various perspectives in good poetry. So this is how a poet might put it.
So this raises a question about our central verse in
this great love song. When Dylan uses
the phrase “The Gospel of Love” is his talking about “The Good News about Love”
in other words “Ain’t love grand?” Or is
he referring the Good News which is so wonderful, so spectacular that it can be
described as the Gospel of Love, the Love that God has even for His enemies
such that:
But God demonstrates his own love
for us, in that while we were still sinners,
Christ died for us.
Clearly it is the
later. We can say this because we have
all the Dylan Gospel albums informing us about what he means when he refers to “the
Gospel,” the good news. He has shouted
it out, that he was “going down for the last time, but by His mercies he was
spared,” he says that he has “been saved, by the blood of the Lamb.” And we have had to push back continually in
this blog concerning the continual effort to limit Dylan’s use of his Christian
faith to a few albums way back when -- in the early 1980s as this just doesn’t
work for honest interpreters and that such an effort misconstrues all of his
work that has come since, all of which builds upon that solid rock foundation.
Now at the beginning
of the song he says:
Been
thinking it over and I thought it all through
I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you
We could ask, "Yeah, but hasn’t He already done
that?" If this is addressed to the Lord,
as we are suggesting that it might be, then isn’t a little redundant to give
yourself to the Lord again? No, not
really because the Christian life is about giving yourself to the service of
the Lord anew each and every day. As
sinners, we stray from our beloved often, but when we go out on the terrace at
night and we look up contemplatively at the heavens above and we get “lost in
the stars” as is referenced in the beginning of this song, we end up saying or
thinking something like what David wrote in Psalm 8 about three thousand years
ago:
3 When I
look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the
moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
4 what is man that you are mindful
of him,
and the
son of man that you care for him?
5 Yet
you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings[a]
and
crowned him with glory and honor.
But is this idea carried through the rest of the verses? Yes, I think it is, consider verse two:
I saw
the first fall of snow
I saw the flowers come and go
I don’t think anyone else ever knew
I made up my mind to give myself to you
The beauty of the created order, the first snow, the
annual return of the flowers as they come and go surely all of this works with
our thesis. But what about this next
line “I don’t think anyone else ever knew?”
Wasn’t Dylan’s conversion to Christianity one of the biggest bombshell
stories of 1979? Of course people
knew! They read the reviews of people
like Joel Selvin from Saturday, Nov 3rd, 1979 entitled: “Bob
Dylan’s God-Awful Gospel” where he concluded the Dylan had “turned to the
most prosaic source of truth on Earth, so aptly dubbed ‘opium of the masses’ by
Karl Marx.”
Selvin’s review today looks very short-sighted and very petty while contrarily those gospel-centered albums have stood the test of time and somehow now have been miraculous transformed in the public’s mind into one of the "most enthusiastically praised Bootleg Series releases." If you doubt this assertion, check out the 8 Disk
Trouble No More: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 13 / 1979-1981 (Deluxe Edition)
where the 102 songs have a running time of 8 hrs. 11 minutes. This is something widely acknowledged to be akin to a master work that chronicles a major transformative period in the artist’s life worthy of a special new retrospective Album in 2017 called Trouble No More.So in what sense can Dylan say,
I don’t
think anyone else ever knew
I made up my mind to give myself to you
Dylan has been critical of “religion” as that concept
has sometimes been described. He
contrasts that with “relationship” and in that sense the relationship was an
intensely private thing for a typically very private person. But he allowed his life changing experiences
with the Lord to be chronicled in those albums, just like he had done with a human relationship
break-up in Blood on the Tracks in
1975 and we were all the better for it.
What about verse three?
I’m giving myself to you, I am
From Salt Lake City to Birmingham
From East L.A. to San Antone
I don’t think I could bear to live my life alone
These verses just describe the universal
geographical nature of this relationship.
A relationship with the Lord travels well, as Jesus suggested to the
Samaritan woman. This works well for a
man “still on the road, trying to stay out of the joint.” And it describes the meaning that Dylan has
found in this relationship, “I don’t think I could bear to live my life alone.” Dylan has a new lifelong friend who promises
to stay closer than a brother, we have noted in this blog the very significant
lyric change from “Going to put my best foot forward” to “Going to put
my best friend forward, stop being influenced by fools” in his revised
version of "Gonna Change My Way of Thinking”
which he and Mavis Staples contributed to the Anthology album called: Gotta Serve Somebody – The Gospel Songs of
Bob Dylan from 2003.
What about verse 6, let’s move on having already
dealt with the chiastic center of the song in verse 5:
Take me out traveling, you’re a traveling man
Show me something that I’ll understand
I’m not what I was, things aren’t what they were
I’m going to go far away from home with her
Yeah this can work, who is a traveling man? Jesus says in Luke 9:58:
And Jesus said to him, “Foxes
have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”
So yeah, Jesus was “a
traveling man.” A companion for a man like
Dylan who lives his life out on the road, but also for every believer who is described
in the Bible as a pilgrim, seeking to walk continually with the Lord as they
head down the long narrow pathway toward their celestial home where Jesus has
prepared a place for us.
Ok on to verse 7:
I traveled the long road of despair
I met no other traveler there
A lot of people gone, a lot of people I knew
I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you
Yeah, I think this
can work too. Bob wrote in the Song
called Slow Train that he had some
concern for his companions:
Sometimes I feel so low-down and disgusted
Can’t help but
wonder what’s happenin’ to my companions
Are they lost or
are they found
Have they counted
the cost it’ll take to bring down
All their earthly
principles they’re gonna have to abandon?
There’s a slow,
slow train comin’ up around the bend
And Bob has met some interesting
companions in his most amazing lifetime. As he says in this song:
“A lot of people gone, a lot of people I knew.”
Let’s see if we can come up with a partial list of some well-known people that Bob spent has at least spent a little time with that are now dead and gone: There was: Buddy Holly, Woody Guthrie, Big Joe Williams, Lenny Bruce, Dave Van Ronk, David Blue, Carl Sandberg, Archibald MacLeish, Martin Luther King, Michael Bloomfield, John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Gregory Peck, Victoria Spivey, Allen Ginsberg, Jacques Levy, Frank Sinatra, Albert Grossman, Sam Peckinpah, Johnny Cash, Jerry Garcia, George Harrison, Sam Shepard, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Mickey Jones, Tony Glover, D.A. Pennebaker and Little Richard. Of course many more could be added here but enough have been listed to show that Bob can definitely say,
“A lot of people gone, a lot of people I knew.”
Well I think I have
gone on long enough, there are some more verses, and some more connections that
could possibly be made, but I think I have provided enough here for your consideration of who it might be that Bob has made up his mind to give himself
to.
Doug
