Becoming Jeremiah inside the wilderness of the US Empire:

On the Trickster Poetics of Bob Dylan:

Boundary 2 dialogue in Honolulu between Linda Ching and Rob Wilson

(Transcribed by Bernie Richter in Santa Cruz, May 2002)

LC: …it seems that Bob Dylan has become some kind of shape-shifter in his work, that he keeps changing and growing, as if in the Trickster mode.

RW: I think he [Dylan] is the classic Gemini in some ways; in other words, he embodies both belief and the innermost deconstruction of belief (or love) and its very antithesis. Because I take it in the poetic sense that the trickster has to do with being a master “troper,” and the troper…

LC: troper?

RW: Yes, as poetic syntax, troper means the projector of tropes. It’s like Picasso’s idea that art is a lie that tells the truth wryly. If you’re a folk singer or say a Nietzschean blues singer, you will project yourself into various songs. So Dylan could affirm in a song, “she’s gone and I don’t worry, I’m sitting on top of the world” at that moment he has to project himself into a Robert Johnson-like Delta situation to become that song; it’s not him, but he’s been through that. He becomes Blind Lemon Jefferson very early in his career, and mimics Woody Guthrie until he becomes his own mastery.

So what he did was to create a whole myriad caste of people those in “Like a Desolation Row,” from the village liberals of “Like a Rolling Stone” all the way up to “Like a Grain of Sand” which is a more Dante-like belief song. Thus, the trickster figure plays out extremities of the mask and projected imagination as he/she embodies characters, experiences – a whole range of things. Now, the greatness of Dylan for me is that he embodies everything from secular love to sacred love and from really fallen states of lacklove and rage to really redemptive and prophetic states.

I love Burt Bacharach too, he can write beautiful Dionne Warwick lyrics and they’re beautiful lyrics about loss of love and domestic emptiness and all that. But Dylan can also write lyrics that are basically about the quest for the redemption of the soul and he can embody it in a Jeremiah like rage against the American imperialism and capitalism. With Dylan you have an incredible range of vision and imagination, and you also have a gift of the poetic ability to associate line by line, that’s a trope, where you go from one thing to the next leaping domain you know, “beauty walks a razor’s edge, someday I’ll make it mine.” He just has an ability, line by line, to keep generating a kind of gifted insight, so that’s why you can say its almost like free association where it just keeps coming to him. Most people burn out and they shut up but he doesn’t, he just keeps going. He’s sort of poetic extraordinary in that sense.

LC: From an academic point of view, tell me what you relate to in his poetry or where you find the genius abiding in his music and his lyrics?

RW: Well, for one thing, going back to his first three albums released on Columbia (Bob Dylan [1962], The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan [1963] and The Times They Are A-Changin’ [1964]), you would have to talk about him historically as embodying some of the Civil Rights energies - the movement energies - to him being an emergent representative of Civil Rights figures. (Barry Shank has done this superbly in his “That Wild Mercury Sound” discussion of black-mimetic harmonics and the push towards more imaginative hyper-ecstatic autonomy by the time of Highway 61 Revisited [1965])

The leftist tradition of Joe Hill, a US protest music that was his basic prosodic starting point, and Woody Guthrie, seeking to croon a kind of a working class protest song. But he didn’t stop there as a poet and song writer. Indeed, he did that folk form quite well, but then he transformed himself into a kind of rock’n’roll Rimbaud kicking out the stops of form and flow of line to line thinking, whereby he would have surrealistic visionary quest lyrics, “Tambourine Man,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” but he kept going and he went all the way to Blake and Dante. So in other words you’ve got someone who started out as miming Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Dave Von Ronk, but who went through others like Sam Cooke to the Rolling Stones, Ma Rainey, and the Beatles. Still, he kept going further into autonomy of vision and syntax, so then you’ve got to talk about his becoming a US Jeremiah, or writing the neo-Psalms of David, you’ve got to talk about miming Blake and Dante. So when you have a range like that you’re talking about somebody who’s almost like a Shakespeare for our tinpan-alley time, voicing that kind of nation-shaping dramaturgy.

LC: Talk about Jeremiah as an American context.

RW: Yes, Jeremiah is the one who laments the fall of empire, the lost City of God. I do think Dylan feels that fallen-wilderness sense about the Vietnam War and especially the reign of Reaganomics; all through Infidels (1983) and especially his greatest lyric, “Joker Man.” That album (which I played over and over in the DMZ) pretty much reflected an American build up of violence and the luxurious life in the 1980s that was founded in a lost sense of spirituality.

So I think Dylan relentlessly laments that America has lost itself spiritually somewhere along the road. He speaks about ‘empire burlesque’ and himself (as rock star) being a clown inside this global empire. But I really feel that he thinks that the big record companies, MTV, and a lot of the contemporary music is just fraudulent, fallen entertainment, so he’s really in for articulating a big religious and cultural-political vision. The Jeremiah complex reflects the one that ‘serves somebody,’ meaning here the reign of capital.

And it’s on that shifty album Slow Train Coming (1979) where he first turns into this Jeremiah voice, and it’s very much using a traditional genre where someone laments the greatness of America, the redemptive possibility of America as fallen into a kind of a betrayal. For Dylan, as for Bob Marley at times, the US has become analogous to the latest Roman Empire on earth. The poetry of Dylan channels a lot of anger through himself, and I identify his anger and misogyny with being Jesus in the temple of the money-lenders. Even though Dylan has made a great deal of money - he’s in for the art, he’s in it for the vision, he’s in it for beauty, he is in it for the quest. That’s his enduring Jeremiah-like quality. At times, it’s not a pretty picture.

LC: But considering Dylan as trickster, in the sense that maybe he speaks in metaphors, in a veiled tongue, but whom is he speaking to? Whom is he really communicating with by means of this song poetry?

RW: Speaking to? Well I have a simple answer to that. He’s speaking to a muse figure inside himself, and he calls the muse Angelina, “farewell Angelina the sky is on fire and I must leave fast” and so on. And sometimes he calls her merely Sara, he reincarnated her as his wife of the “warehouse eyes” in Blonde on Blonde (1966). But actually, it’s much higher vision of love than that. Blake calls this figure ‘Jesus the Imagination’ where you’re speaking to a cast of spiritual entities almost walking inside you like a dream world. I really do believe that he’s not speaking to that Albert Hall audience in London 1965, that he’s somewhere else. He goes out there. The audience will give him appreciation, rage, contempt, call him Judas Iscariat and so on, but he’s somewhere else, he’s on another plane and some people are with him or not.

I think in a lyric like ‘Joker Man’ he’s really standing on the water casting his bread and the audience either gets it (the vision, the quest for redemption amid all the egomania) or they don’t. He’s really talking about a redemptive vision and resisting an antichrist of Empire. His work offers a very complicated religious vision even when in his more recent albums he’s almost deconstructed his own religious beliefs, whereby they seem to be falling apart. As he says in Time Out of Mind (1997), ‘his heart is in the highlands’ he is almost virtually dead and walking around with dark eyes on the other side but looking back at his own existence. He is physically just barely there but the vision is there, even as his body is falling apart.

LC: His body is falling apart?

RW: Yes, I think his body has physically shown signs of decay, if you see him on TV it is obvious. But also several times in his life, I am speaking about how he has come close to a kind of crisis of identity-disintegration, there is also the despair over his marriage breaking up, the Dean-like motorcycle accident. But also there is the lurking sense that he had pushed a certain bad set of beliefs to an extremity where he was into a kind of paranoid egotism and macho rage, and then shredded it all up.

It is important that we remember that there is a before-and-after Dylan, and so the other side of baby Dylan is the “Slow Train Coming,” “Infidels,” “Shot of Love” all of that canon I would call redemptive. Of course he has that white-gospel album called Saved (1980). Now some people can’t stand it, I like it because it’s harping towards and re-functioning (in Brecht’s term for this creative work) the whole gospel visionary tradition like some cross between Saint Augustine, Blind Willy Mctell, and Sam Cook when he sang sacred do-wop lead for the Soul Stirrers. As the sublime extremity of this symbolization of self and polity, poetry’s highest quest is to offer not just a vision of profane love, ordinary love, or romantic love, but to actually offer a wrought vision of sacred love or some higher spiritual quest. I think Bob Dylan does that, yes, which is impressive because I think very few people can take you on that whole un/American journey, certainly not our neo-liberal poet laureates in the empire of capital or even the Barrett Watten white language war-machine poesy.

LC: But where does this enduring misery come from? The Dylan angst?

RW: There seems to be an extra ounce of rage that he’s had all along. Part of it has to do perhaps with a prophetic and self-marginalizing ‘Jewishness’ that drives him. But some of the lyric anger has to do with the way he projects auras onto women and then he’ll feel betrayed when they turn out to be merely human and lost like himself. So it’s when the Angelina figure turns back into an ordinary woman or she falls in love with somebody else, then he’s full of rage and contempt—and writes poetry!

But, even given this male-centered tropological disease of the lyric, he seems to have an excess of anger and rage. More than misery I would say he has a lot of agonistic aggression. This is not a person that’s going to beat himself, he’s somebody who turns the aggression outward. “Positively Fourth Street,” “Crawl Out Your Window,” “Mister Jones” those are early rage songs. He has that more tenderly didactic song, “Trust Yourself” - don’t listen to someone else outside the god-self – and that’s been one of his greatest post-Emersonian messages. To follow your own vision or follow your own poetry even if people tell you it’s junk, just keep pursuing it. Here’s that little harmonica, a little crabby kind of guy singing for coffee and then after awhile they projected that he was like a god on earth. But he kept going.

LC: I think that was one of the things that touched me because all along from the very beginning he rejected the idea that people thought he was the second coming of Christ. And he said all along to find your own truth. And that is very much working in the trickster mode.

RW: Yeah, yeah, I think so too. I think the trickster figure has to do with a transformation of states of being, transmuting states of love into states of despair, states of vision into states of emptiness. For Dylan, the trickster is a kind of a Dionysian figure; that is to say, he’s willing to be like an Orpheus figure that descends into hell to find a vision. Later, he then will disintegrate himself in the process, but then has to come out of it and then go on a ruination-quest again. There’s a lot of humor, there’s a lot of self-mockery in this, but I don’t think that finally Dylan is a jokester figure. I think finally he’s pretty serious about the quest to bespeak and forge sacred vision, he’s very didactic. He’s not just a clown, he’s not a mocker, he’s Zarathustra or Prospero, he’s a vision-maker, he’s working like Blake or Whitman or Bob Kauffman in the visionary company of love and celestial battle for secular hegemony.

LC: What was the ‘white face’ masking about?

RW: Oh the white face? That was a strange period - that was the ‘Rolling Thunder’ review period where he was almost singing in drag for a while. I was really attracted to that because I think that sometimes in a poetry reading you feel like you’re going to give people something, and they’re going to think it’s you, but it isn’t going to be you at all because it’s almost always a mask. The degree of love and theft in any Dylan song covers all trails and homages (debts, influences) into something strange, raunchy and new: behold all things are becoming lyric and new.

Some well-meaning people will say “oooh, that love poem is about so and so, or this is about x, y, z,” and I’m thinking they can think that gossip, but I know I’m somewhere else or maybe that was written in 1986 and that was me then, and I’m somewhere else. So it’s almost a mask. There is also the larger problem of blackface, miming the blues of those who suffered for their racial abjection that no white person can claim.

Still, I think bad poets don’t use any white mask for this blues, the bad poets think they’re that thing itself. Somebody who is really clever, they’re like the jokester and the trickster rolled into because they know that it’s a mask and they take that mask as far as it is possible to go. (But they have other masks awaiting.) It’s much like an actor, but it’s not to say it’s fake, it’s actually more real because it is very much like a symbolic projection.

It’s like somebody playing Hamlet; actors can take that drive to self-destruct the world of the corrupt polity as far as it will go. Those actors who get into those parts, they’re more real [on stage] than they are in their own life, for the mask allows them to project something that is a possibility in their own life that maybe if they did in their life they would shred it all up and thus would ruin their life…the kind of parts Robert DeNiro has played. Dustin Hoffman may be short in real life (I passed him on the streets of NYC), but he becomes a giant on the stage of art-altered existence.

LC: I think this is interesting because it [the mask] takes people into a different reality. When I read about it [the use of the mask] I thought it was very dramatic, very dynamic as a form…

RW: Yes, I think it’s identified with a certain period of Dylan’s life where he was very tormented and that was when his marriage was breaking up. When you were talking about the Jungian period of “Desire” (1976) and “Street Legal” (1978), there is really a whole carnival of Jungian masks, and they are all projections – animus/anima struggles and a lot of crazed masking. I think that was a very unhappy period for him. But then I think he breaks through with “Infidels” in 1983, which I think is probably the most spectacular album of all both musically and creatively as every song on there [exhibits] a level of vision and rage and tenderness that’s pretty awesome.

I think the most important speech Dylan ever made, this was in the Grammy speech of 1991: he came out and I don’t think he had a mask on, but he looked crabbed, blasted, not in the sense that he was on drugs, but just broken apart. Finally he was being honored with a Grammy Award and he said more or less: ‘My father was a poor man, he didn’t have much to give me or say to me, but he did tell me this: [reads] “It is possible to be so defiled in this world that your own mother and father will abandon you, and if this happens god will always believe in your own ability to mend your own ways.” So what he is talking about finally here is trust yourself. But the trust in yourself is the trust in the power of god to heal you. He’s saying ‘I defiled myself,’ ‘I became a crazy person,’ ‘I lost my own mother and father,’ ‘I became this rage-filled, contemptible, contemptuous human being’ which I think he did.

LC: When he said that he lost his mother and father, is he not speaking about his own parents? Or something more?

RW: Well, the first trickster act is when he changed his name form Zimmerman to Dylan. So that is his way of rejecting his small-town USA Minnesota family…I am becoming Dylan Thomas, I am Bob Dylan. When people would ask him about his family he would tell people that he was in a carnival for ten years and never went to college. He never wanted to tell people that he was from a Jewish family who ran a hardware store and that he went to the University of Minnesota for half a year and played in stupid music clubs and that he hitchhiked his way across to New York City totally broke. So he did follow that vision to New York City and he named himself Bob Dylan and he became that trickster persona – ‘I am Bob Dylan’ so he was rejecting his biological father.

There is a lot of poetry where he is turning against older people and traditional wisdom, so I also think this has to do with his turning against Judaism – the father was like a Jewish father and he turned against the Jewish father. What happened spiritually to him in the late 1970s was really interesting because he went towards a Christian belief system and then he went back to the Judaism of his youth. So that the photo of “Infidels” shows him kissing the very soil of tormented and torn Jerusalem. And he is said to be going to synagogues with his son, even if the refusal of his real father means the father of Jewish tradition as well. But I think that extremity of ‘I was really defiled and I found forgiveness, I found some kind of redemption’ for a little two minute speech he had packed in a real important message. And he is always preaching.

I think the Dylan project is pretty amazing because most people would say something like ‘Oh, I would like to thank my mother and my father, my brother, my girlfriend, and the Columbia producers, you know, some obvious thing like I am just thrilled to be here,’ but he’s just a poet. Every time he opens his mouth something interesting comes out; you’ve seen his interviews, he’s never saying ‘how’s the weather?’ - he almost has to shut his mouth because he has so much packed in his lyric-ridden specific head.

LC: Do you get from his lyrics the implication that when he is speaking of god that he is speaking of some inner authority, [or in that sense] who is his god?

RW: I think largely it’s an inner authority and a voice that he is following his own surreal or inner vision, but at some point when he talks about “you’ve got to serve somebody, everybody’s got to serve somebody” I think there was a humiliation of the ego. So that then he really was following Christ as some ultimate poetic-spiritual master. Dylan would say ‘you tell me about Buddha, you tell me about Mohamed, but you never told me about the man who came and died a criminal’s death,” so [indeed] there are some overt [statements] about following the Christian messiah. So for him that was a very important act of submission, because he wasn’t following Muktananda as such or Buddha, he wasn’t following some vague sense of inner-authority, [but rather] he was submitting to the man named Jesus.

And I think that rawness of belief alienated a lot of people, he used to get booed. Ok, so Elvis Presley had his gospel album where he did sing songs to Jesus on Sun Records for his mother, but Dylan was like going out and publicly committing to something and people (especially liberals) found that contemptible. Again, they booed him in San Francisco. I remember a review in the SF Chronicle, this must have been in the late 70’s, and they where basically saying that ‘Dylan is dead, he is singing these born-again Christian songs and this is bullshit, he should just quit.’

LC: Do you think he really doesn’t care [about such reviews]?

RW: That was pretty hard. I mean, yes and no. I heard The Band say that everywhere they went in the late 1960s the audience booed the shit out of him and they found it really painful, they wanted to go back to Canada, they were so tired. Now it looks like it was all worth it, it looks like it was pleasant, but I think that stuff gets to your head and then you go out there and sing this what you think are beautiful religious lyrics, and then people say, ‘oh fuck you, shut up!’ ‘you’re a bum, you’re a looser, you’re a property to Jesus, you’re a dead man.’ As I know from Haight-Ashbury days, San Francisco can be a pretty nasty place, so they really gave him a hard time out there.

I remember as a kid, this was at an earlier stage of Dylan’s career, when I had just gotten out of high school in mill-town Connecticut. I went down to Forest Hills. Man, those folk people, they just booed him and just screamed, they walked out and then he just came out with the band and sang, which was like speaking to the audience, “I Ain’t Gonna Work On Maggie’s Farm No More” meaning that he wasn’t going to partake in your leftist, liberal, “authentic” protest songs – ‘I’m going to do what I want.’ Who is this “folk” anyway, most of the ones I knew were Republicans.

But once I had seen someone do that, I thought that you really have to follow your own gift and mercurial vision. Now I don’t know whether Dylan was Prometheus, Baby Blue, the trickster god Maui, or just some homegrown Jesus Christ, but he was pretty brave and courageous and I think that was his gift to me and many.

Because, yes, I followed my own road to Hawaii and points west, nobody follows the exact pattern, that is no one can nor need be Dylan. But they can follow their own inner vision and pursue it and make certain choices that lead you in a certain direction, a road not taken so to speak. Is that the trickster, Linda, is that what you associate the trickster complex of energies to be, the road not taken?

LC: Absolutely. It’s an a-moral path, it’s you following your own inner authority.

RW: Yes, I think that’s really crucial to Dylan, I think that the Jesus lyrics and the spiritual master kind of stuff is important. But I also think that all along he was following the Tambourine Man which was this inner ecstatic-poetic vision. That’s him with a crabby voice, a little guitar and a harmonica creating something of real beauty, and if it sold, it sold and if didn’t he would just keep doing it. But I think for Dylan, he’s got to keep going, so he doesn’t rest, you will find an album every two or three years from 1962 to 2001 and it’s pretty amazing and mercurial and funny stuff.

So again Dylan is somebody who is driven to produce production as it were, but not for Columbia because they say we need a new album; this guy creates to live and he’s got to create some beauty, some poetry. Sometimes he’s gone back and he’s done traditional lyrics from the American folk grain, but I think by now his mind is an absolute tapestry of forms and so he knows almost every lyric form, protest lyrics, ballads, love lyrics, the whole shmeer. He can write like a song bird but all of the embodiment of the traditions are in there, it’s like Shakespeare who knew the dramatic form – he knew it as an actor, as a director – when he wrote a play it all was there. Dylan is like that with the lyric tradition, I don’t mean a book poet, but he is like as song poet. His language gift is extraordinary, and I would put Dylan at the top of any list of great singer/song writing talent.

LC: Do you think that with some time and distance, we will look back at Dylan’s later music and find more appreciation for it and it will start to make even more sense to us?

RW: The thing about a really great writer, whether you are talking about a song lyricist or a book poet, is that they create their own canon. The work of poetry becomes a whole project and the later lyrics help you understand the earlier lyrics and the earlier lyrics help you to understand the later lyrics. With Dylan you have a whole range of stuff from fairly simple Woody Guthrie-like lyrics as ‘it ain’t me babe’ but as you work your way up to the more complex lyrics like ‘bringing it all back home’ and ‘highway 61’- a kind of whole iconography of America, and then you get into the more prophetic lyrics.

A lot of the albums are uneven some songs are better than others, but he just keeps turning it out. I don’t think he judges it really, he lets it all fly, and I should say that some of the best lyrics that he ever wrote are not found on the main albums, they’re found on the bootleg tapes.

I think some of them he left them hidden away. Jesus has this saying to St. Mark – Jesus spoke in parables so that those who would understand with their ears would understand with their spiritual ears and those who couldn’t they wouldn’t get it. There are certain things (messages, allegories) that are hidden away and I think that’s true with Dylan. I think there is an Angelina lyric that’s a great lyric, there is the ‘Blind Wiley McTell’ poem which is probably his best blues lyric. ‘The Foot of Pride’ is an amazing lyric about some capitalist artist, it may be Andy Warhol it’s an amazing portrait of greed, sexual decadence, and the downfall of pride. I think it’s the best thing he ever wrote, it’s called ‘Foot of Pride,’ that’s only on the bootleg tapes. (You see Columbia didn’t allow him to put certain lyrics on, so certain lyrics fell by the wayside. If you hear them, I mean you can make your own judgments, but often you will find that these are the most amazing lyrics of all.)

LC: Let’s fast-forward to his latest albums: what about the Time Out of Mind material from 1997?

RW: Again, he’s almost had a near-death experience that was some heart condition thing, and I think that it is in this album where he says something like ‘everything looks faraway to me, I’m almost not here, my eyes have changed.’ Even in the Pittsburgh-based movie “Wonder Boys” he talks about how things have changed and everything looks different to me. He seems to almost have one foot in the grave and one foot out of the world, he calls it ‘my heart is in the highland everything looks faraway to me” and “I’m trying to get to Heaven’s Gate before they close the door.’ He’s like really going there, moving beyond the comfort of prior beliefs, de-creating and fighting against his own lyric project as on some alien terrain, out of the body, above the dump of time.

LC: Fallen back?

RW: I think he’s fallen back, as it were, and I think he even admits to the inability to sustain some sort of reborn state. He creates a great kind of anti-poetry in there. He does say at times that ‘he can’t even hear the murmur of a prayer’ meaning that religion is somewhere over there in the distance, people are praying and I am over here like a fallen ordinary human being. I associate that with the trickster in the sense that the beliefs dissolve and he has to be truthful about it, just a man in a coffee bar asking for eggs from a sullen waitress in Boston town. He went from Jewish to Christian to back again, a singular mythology nobody else would want to follow or mime. His path is not yours: Emerson’s contrarian message to American poets too, turst your god-relying Gnostic selfhood to find a way forward or out along a line of creative flight/fight.

LC: There was one thing about the trickster complex concerning male energy, and I really had a hard time to understand this side of Bob Dylan.

RW: I think many women feel that way about it too, that it’s a macho quest he’s on, very ambitious, very vain, very nasty, and very selfish in a way.

LC: There’s a darker side to the trickster too, and I didn’t know what to do with it. But I kind of came to understand that… and even Jung says things about integrating the dark and the light forces in the self, but as a whole person we are only lost humans.

RW: Well how do you associate the dark and the masculine? Can you explain that to me a bit more?

LC: Well ultimate logical characters in this binary are all male, and I haven’t been able to find any female tricksters actually. I had a hard time finding a contemporary female trickster to fit into the mold. So they are basically, it’s representing male energy and we all have male and female energy in us, some to a larger degree.

RW: What is dark about it? Is it refracting the experience of death, ego loss, and transformation?

LC: Well, first of all most of the tricksters start out as juvenile delinquents, and it’s almost until that get to a certain type of maturity that they are able to make the positive contribution, but they do have that comical thing too.

RW: Kind of like a punkish type of thing.

LC: yeah… And with the ‘Coyote Stories’ of course trickster is always getting into trouble and sometimes they’re really the silly fool and sometimes they make mistakes and they get into big social trouble and that’s part of that personality too. When you have trickster gone amuck that’s gone way over to the dark side then you have people like a Nazi…Hitler, who fooled a lot of people and brought them over to the dark side, that’s trickster going way over to the dark side.

RW: That’s like an anti-Christ, pretending to be Christ, pretending to be the leader of good but leading them down a wrong path?

LC: …I want to concentrate on the light-bearing tricksters, they don’t tend to fall over to the other side of the scale, but certainly as a whole they are not perfect beings, they are semi-divine and the human side of them tends to confront the tragic side.

RW: Yes, I think that’s true about Bob Dylan, that song “Like a Rolling Stone” - Napoleon in rags…it’s sort of a song about a juvenile delinquent, almost like a drug addicts anthem, and “Tambourine Man” is a little bit like that but it’s not as bad, ‘Rolling Stone’ is defiantly a nasty downfall song. I think at some point it changes, yeah, between the John Wesley Harding album (1967) and Slow Train Coming (1979), that’s where Dylan realizes that he has a responsibility to some people and he’s got to draw back from a kind of making juvenile delinquent sense. That was when he really changed and scaled back the vanity of it and he became a more humble kind of person. In Nashville Skyline (1969), even inside those little love lyrics, he became kind of like a Country Western singer, he just kind of scaled the project back. So I think that the point you make about the dark path that he was on and then transformed himself away from. It’s because he felt responsibility both to himself and to others, and by that time he had become hugely magnified so that he was almost the leader of a generation and people pulled away, but he just scaled the vision back to a smaller genre.

LC: Does Dylan’s work seem to you to actually follow his life, or do you think that he is the master trickster and so he is just making up this story that’s not really about him telling these stories?

RW: Ok, that’s tricky. Basically it’s a kind of autobiographical project in vision-making he’s on, so he’s going through the narrative transformations and personae of vision; but on the other hand as with blues lyrics or love lyrics he projects himself into states of mind, excess, loss, and being. I think he started miming with Jack Kerouac and Robert Johnson –you know standing at the crossroads and hounded by the devil. But Zimmerman-becoming-Dylan projects himself into those states of mind which is something that he might not be living inside at any given time, but the general project of self-development, expanding vision, redemptive vision, that’s like one plot, a whole project.

That’s why he can be considered a great American poet, it’s like an evolving canon he’s created, a whole work, a vast text-thick and anti-hegemonic corpus. Most writers I know consider Dylan to be a great writer; this guy Norman Hindley who is a fine poet who teaches at a private high school in Honolulu, I asked him if he liked the lyrics on Slow Train Coming which was a Christian era work. Norman looked at me dumbfounded and says “Like it, man that’s like open heart surgery!” Meaning you can listen to that and it’s going to transform your whole existence, you are going to open your innermost heart chakra. So the people that hear such meanings in Dylan really hear them. If some people think that he has a gravely little voice that he’s some type of conman tossing up all these little silly rock lyrics, so be it, but most people think he’s a gifted human being and master teacher as did our own broken-up and gone-away Deleuze.