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Just Like a Woman–The Concert for Bangladesh

In the mid 1960s, very little of Dylan’s greatest songs had stand out bridges.  Like a Rolling Stone, perhaps his greatest song, does not have a bridge and is all the more powerful because of it.  Tombstone Blues, Chimes of Freedom, A Hard Rains Gonna Fall, Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again, It’s Alright Ma–all classics, no bridge.  Which is why songs like Ballad of a Thin Man and Just Like a Woman stand out.  These bridges are both powerful and simple, something that sticks out and begs for attention.

In this performance of Just Like a Woman, when Dylan gets to the bridge, something happens.  His voice, which has been strong the whole performance reaches further and almost strains.  There are hints of the strain, when he pushes himself on “fog, amphetamine, and pearls”, but the bridge is where he lets loose.  The break in the guitar playing is apparent after he begins “It was raining…” and his voice rises, and rises again, almost cresting on the word “pain”–a pop he could not control–and comes back down to finish the line, mirroring the line before, defeated and dropping the end, which sets up perfectly the high point of the performance and what I believe to be the crux of the whole song, the absolutely belted “AIN’T IT CLEAR!?” held out before the exhaustion of explanation ends with “That I…just. don’t. fit.”

We come to art from our places in our lives and these places inform our understanding of the work.  This song vacillates between singer and woman, back and forth, working through an issue that isn’t quite apparent, nor does it need to be apparent–what’s important is the tension of the issue, the boasting of status, the ask that she not let on when she knew him when.  For two verses, they go back and forth, how even in circumstances that are detrimental, we feel no pain when we have love–we don’t even believe it exists and have no memory of when it did.  The gradual give and take of love does not augure well for the singer and with our fairy tales, it does not for us as people–these are the gorry details, taken away and hidden or glossed over or simply not mentioned, leading each of us to our one or twenty or infinite “AIN’T IT CLEAR” moments, so exhausting and perhaps even life changing, but in the end, life itself.

I am stronger now than perhaps I’ve ever been, but the rust of doubt does not shake off; doubt is powerful and all consuming, essential for very little.  A warning sign; a tap on the shoulder; the shake of the head.  I become tripped up on doubt and it gives power to others.  In my relationships, I have relied on control because without control, I am adrift, or so I believe.  I grasp at the beginning breaths of love–or lust–and while attempting to keep the air clean and pure, I choke it, each of my fingers a fearful vice, denting the neck of what should be alarming, new, and fresh.  Often, my relationships have become suffocating because I control and manipulate the air out of them, leading myself or her to state, “I can’t stay in here.”  And only when it’s too late do I understand the detriment of my own controlling sleight of hand and again I am left alone and silent, crippled by doubt, relying on escapist adventures and petty solipsism.

This performance is essential because of all it conveys, all found in his voice and the emotion clawing up from his heart, tearing into his throat, and coming from his mouth.  Watch him: his eyes never change, nor should they; the brain is behind the eyes and we have forgone the brain at this point.  The song, and this performance especially, is simply story and hurt and the immense frustration and release when we have exhausted our explanatory capacities, when the listening party is no longer understanding the truth in their own skin.  Look into someone’s eyes, look behind them, see the confusion and battle and try to convince him the way he should see it and how inept and unmoving that is; do that and you will have this performance.  Bob is running us against a brick wall, changing course and taking us around the wall, in the end, with such sorrow and grace.  The bridge is that wall–blunt, exasperated, and unmoving.

It seems preposterous, probably bordering on pretension and unoriginality, for me to be writing about reading again, but fuck it–here goes. I often say out loud to anyone who will listen, “There are (insert large number) of reasons that I read and all of them are good.” Certainly, that is bloviating and hyperbolic, but it’s based in a truth that is very present and also elusive, hence why I keep coming back to it. What’s interesting about this topic–not only for me, but also in general–is that reading is basically an act of trying to find something; you begin with the first word of the first sentence and you then chase the words until you reach the last word of the last sentence and along the way you pretty much get the world.

I love to read sentences in two ways, simultanously. First, for the information contained: Lyndon Johnson stole a Senate election with 87 votes; Nick Carraway was raised with more money than you; Hal Incandenza liked hiding getting high almost as much as he liked getting high itself. Second, the shape of the sentence, or the “prose”. Prose is a tricky word and my definition of it is the way the words massage the brain. What I mean by that: I will read a sentence and as I settle into a book, I feel it move about from my frontal lobe to the rest of my brain, like a drug with an agenda of calm, trickling out and herding my thoughts together like the sheep that they are. A sigh of the brain, flowing or straight forward, it pushes and leans on different sections of the mind. I love to try to figure out the pattern, even as I’m being informed; where will the break come, the breath and the edge of the cliff, just to be pulled back again, something like a good blow job or the best strip tease. Words have this ability–they have mouths and bodies, fully formed urges and thrusts, you just have to look for it.

I love to read because it distracts me from my own solipsism. It’s very simple to say, “reading takes you away”, but fuck it, it does. There’s a quote on the cover of the book I’m currently reading–The Passage by Justin Cronin: “Read this book and the ordinary world disappears.” It’s true; I’ll be reading away and then suddenly six train stops later and something has disappeared, but I’m not sure if it’s the world, or my terrifying sense of loss. What I have lost and what I could lose; that’s the killer, the monster, the created world borne of bitterness and fear–what I could lose. Think those thoughts and the ordinary world disappears; or more appropriately, the ordinary world becomes unbearable.

Having just reread the author’s note of HST’s The Great Shark Hunt, the idea of taking a gainor out of a 28 story window into a fountain as a final act does have its merits…and its drawbacks. The drawbacks being obvious, but the merits being courage and finality, a strange punctuation, a piece of prose in and of itself, ending in an exclamation point of cracking bones, no less. Such energy in his prose, something like a halting madman tugging on your sleeve, pausing to cough and pull on his cigarette, quietly laughing at the sound of the rocks in his drink and then more knowledge before you have the chance to process the first.

There’s a reason he sat at his typewriter as a young artist and typed the novels of Faulkner, Hemingway and Fitzgerald–because the marrow and rhythm of the words are the world. Do you see? Brain massaging.

My Saturdays are best spent falling in love with women in bookstores.
Sure, I wake up and I read and wonder at the amount I have slept from the night before; I work a little and I run; I come home waiting for that burst of energy. I worry that I’m dying. And then I suit up and head to the bookstore.
Once there, I wander the stacks, drink in the spines and the legs, and saunter up–books I will not purchase under my arm–and I smile. There she is: glasses frame and solid colored shirt, hair a hurricane in stasis, a slight smirk on her face. I try to make small talk, but generally I stutter and just mumble my need for coffee and no, thank you, I do not need room for cream. And then I sit down, opening the books, sipping at the rim of the cup.
Today, reading Bolano. I read a sentence and immediately made a small noise and pulled up my phone; I had to text this to someone. “It’s probably clear by now that literature has nothing to do with national prizes and everything to do with a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen, and tears.” What a wonderful sentence. The use of the oxford comma is certainly energizing, but it’s the word semen that makes that sentence–and so many others. Of course, it brings up images, but also the majestic Neutral Milk Hotel lyric, “Semen stains the mountaintop.”
I peak over the book; she is brewing another pot of coffee and her face seems so perfectly framed by her glasses; I watch as she goes to pull two books off of the shelves and look at her ass. Large, but not huge; cupped in grey jeans, jeans made as if from the lost and ashen pages from another bible I will not believe.
I get up and receive a refill, leaving a tip in the jar as if this will show that not only am I well read, but also wealthy and caring!
Finally, I just sigh and make a book purchase. For what is more exciting than a new book, another addition to the shelf, words upon words that I will read and ingest and become before coming back to it in small moments later and later.
I smile at her one more time and walk into the waiting late autumn sunlight, wondering how the rest of my Saturday can possibly compare.