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On Robert Polito’s ‘After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace’

Bob Dylan in London, England, 1965, Photograph, Getty Images

1.

In The Flame, Leonard Cohen’s posthumously published collection of late lyrics and poems, I came across this lone stanza:

and Nico was blonde

and Dylan was found

in a pit he alone had descended

and there he unfurled

for the sake of the world

the bright flag so long undefended.

Drafted into one of Cohen’s notebooks, the passage leaves a strange aftertaste, like a question not quite asked.

Bob Dylan turned 85 in May, and as of this writing he is still on the road. This year and counting he has played 27 shows — that’s six more than Geese in roughly half the time: his spring tour opened in Omaha on March 21 and closed in Abilene on May 1. As he says: “What could be bad about traveling places, seeing different things, moving? It keeps you alive.” Dylan has played over 3,000 live shows since 1993. For him the songs and his singing them seem to be the only thing that really matters, that night after night, around America and the world, in big cities and half-forgotten towns, he be “playing on the stage in front of live people, feeling hearts and minds moving.”

If Dylan remains cool it’s because, as Robert Harrison has said, “cool does not crave, and our age is craven.” All the things we bemoan as direly absent from contemporary culture Dylan embodies, even when he sells his publishing catalog to Universal Music Group and his song catalog to Sony for $300-odd million per piece; even as he decides to contribute a cover of the cowboy classic “Don’t Fence Me In” to the deplorable 2024 biopic Reagan. Every year, he finds new ways to baffle. Most recently this included launching a Patreon account with the Poe-esque title “Lectures from the Grave.” It’s billed as “curated by Bob Dylan.” It purports to be “a living archive of lectures from the grave, letters never sent, and original short stories,” all posted under pseudonyms, or no name at all, sparking accusations concerning the AI voicing (and, perhaps, the AI origin) of much of the material. He is also on X, formerly Twitter: “I ran into one of the Buffalo Sabres in the elevator at the Prague Hotel. They were in town to play the New Jersey Devils. He invited me to the game but I was performing that night.” In a sweeter world than ours he’d be on Substack.

Over 2,000 books have been written about Dylan. Among 20^th-century musicians, he is the most marked by “eras.” You can chop his life and work up in a dozen different ways, but one particularly clean view splits it into two. Dylan’s second half commences around 1992, 30 years on from the release of his self-titled first album.

The key to the second half of Dylan’s legacy is that he stopped worrying, as he clearly had during the 1980s, about how to keep being “Bob Dylan,” a personage whose real existence he has repeatedly denied. Instead, he refocused his target on the muse. Covering old folk songs. Making paintings. Co-writing and starring in a neglected, fascinating movie, Masked and Anonymous (2003). Writing an elliptical memoir, Chronicles (2004), and an impeccably weird theoretical text, The Philosophy of Modern Song (2022). Recording 100 episodes of his Theme Time Radio Hour (2006–2009). Releasing six albums of new songs and dozens of others (covers, live, bootlegs). Touring, touring, touring.

Poet and critic Robert Polito’s After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace is a look at this “second act” of Dylan’s career from 1991 through 2024. Polito stresses that there is no “accounting for” such a revival, “the most sustained, intelligent, and startling second act by an American artist.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald’s adage about there being “no second acts in American lives” was clearly premature.) Dylan somewhere found the will to pull himself from his slough of 1980s despondency, which reached its depths in a “harrowing performance at Live Aid in 1985 with Keith Richards and Ron Wood,” where he appeared as “the glazed zombie version of himself . . . a sweaty pub trouper from a forgotten war in a Pogues lyric.”

And Dylan’s later work still has an air of obscurity about it. If Spotify plays are anything to go by, the combined number for all of the songs on Love and Theft (perhaps the greatest of his later albums, which Johnny Cash called his best of all) is less than a mid-tier mid-’70s song like “One More Cup of Coffee” (39,862,746 and counting). There are obvious reasons for this: the voice is harsher, the songs often longer, and the narratives behind them labyrinthine.

Polito, who has written studies of several poets including James Merrill, uses a form borrowed from Merrill’s Book of Ephraim, the first installment of a trilogy of long poems in communication with the dead and the “other world” over a homemade Ouija board. Constructed as an abecedarium (“alphabet book”), After the Flood’s 26 chapters take in 26 focal points across 30 years of frantic creative activity, from N (Dylan and noir) to X (Dylan and social media) to M (Dylan and death). Generally the choice of form works, and there is fun in its approach to Dylan’s profusion of activity, sometimes using “a telescope, sometimes a microscope.”

Although there are no pretensions to exhaustiveness or definitiveness, this book will probably remain the account of Dylan’s “second act” for a long time yet. It is also full of deep, original scholarship. Polito had unprecedented access to the recently opened Bob Dylan Archive in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He scoured its vast array (over 100,000 items) of lyric drafts, hotel stationery, and alternate takes. It wears its research lightly, containing none of the tiresomely opinionated “accounting” of Dylanologists who have, generally, had none of the grace of Polito’s style, nor his poetic insight. Polito is both a poet himself and a scholar of American modernism — both useful assets. The book is personal, informed by the experience of a “second chance of my own, after an ominous illness, corrosive treatments, and multiple radical surgeries.” The author, like his subject, has endured.

And, like me, Polito seems to feel that we are yet to really understand Dylan, who seems to agree: “I don’t think I’m gonna be really understood until maybe 100 years from now. I don’t think anything I’ve done is mildly hinted at. Nobody’s come close.”

2.

In Polito’s telling, “Dylan’s ‘lost’ 1980s should comprise his official second act.” During “this slow debasement,” he wore droopy pirate earrings, made overpowered, undercooked records that forlornly chased trends, and increasingly resembled a Saturday Night Live version of his former self. “I’d kind of reached the end of the line,” he wrote in his memoir. “Whatever I’d started out to do, it wasn’t that. I was going to pack it in.” His muse had fled: “You get caught up in wondering if anyone really needs to hear it. Maybe a person gets to the point where they have written enough songs. Let someone else write them.” Still not enough artists ask themselves whether “someone really needs to hear it”; the fact that Dylan does says something about his sense of calling. In 1991, when presented with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (a sure sign that you’re safely a part of history), Dylan came the closest he ever has to a public confession — or breakdown:

Well, my daddy, he didn’t leave me too much, you know, he was a very simple man, and he didn’t leave me a lot, but what he did tell me was this — [long pause] — He said so many things, you know — [nervous audience laughter] — He did say, son, “you know it’s possible to become so defiled in this world that your own father and mother will abandon you, and if that happens God will always believe in your own ability to mend your own ways.” Thank you.

Polito writes, “as a lapsed Catholic, I instantly recognized his torment, his despond, his guilt . . . he confessed his artistic decline as a spiritual failing.” It was that speech which “seized my attention, and I immediately started listening closely to him again after a decade.” In 1992, the year after Polito began listening again, Dylan released Good As I Been To You.

This album of folk-country-blues covers finds a solo Dylan with guitar and harmonica once again, re-exploring the territory of songs first covered in the 1920s and ’30s. These are songs he first heard in the weird old world of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music — and, as he describes in Chronicles, at the folk music collector Alan Lomax’s Third Street loft in the early ’60s. Here the astonished, spongelike Dylan soaked up all he heard, performances by the neglected likes of Dock Boggs, Clarence Ashley, Roscoe Holcomb, Mississippi John Hurt, and, particularly, Mike Seeger of the New Lost City Ramblers. He describes these performances as “spiritual experiences.”

Dylan had been here before, at an earlier crossroads following a motorcycle crash in 1966, which took him away from a speed-fueled touring schedule into the idyll of upstate New York. He concentrated on his young family and played around in the basement of a big pink house nearby, where The Band was living. Over about eight months, with “the windows open and a dog lying on the floor,” as Dylan recalled, Bob, Robbie, Garth, Richard, Rick, and later Levon played to their heart’s content — jamming on whatever songs had blown through Dylan’s brain that particular morning, a jumble of ’40s and ’50s ballads, classic country, contemporary folk, blues, and R&B.

The Basement Tapes contains the sound of true musical liberation. At the same time, as the late Robbie Robertson remembered, Dylan “was taking us to school.” To these apparent mess-arounds, he began to bring new songs: “Lo and Behold,” “Tears of Rage,” “Nothing Was Delivered,” “I’m Not There,” and dozens more, which seem to somehow both emerge out of and recompose the musical America that the Band and he had spontaneously discovered in Rip Van Winkle-land, among sleepy hollows and whispering pines. These mysterious, old-new songs sounded, as Elvis Costello said, “like he’d just found them under a stone. They sound like real folk songs — because if you go back into the folk tradition, you will find songs as dark and as deep as these.” Or as Robertson experienced it: “We didn’t know if he wrote them or if he remembered them. When he sang them, you couldn’t tell.”

This is the story Greil Marcus tells in The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. Originally published as Invisible Republic in 1997 (and republished since to capitalize on Marcus’ now ubiquitously perverted coinage), this impressionistic fantasia on themes from that basement remains the most revealing Dylan book there is. It is the only one the man himself has blurbed (with characteristic ambiguity) and in Chronicles, he even seems to acknowledge his debt to its vision of his own work, describing the old folk material as “my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic.” Marcus describes the Tapes as “palavers with a community of ghosts. . . . These ghosts were not abstractions. As native sons and daughters they were a community. And they were once gathered in a single place: on the Anthology of American Folk Music.”

An invisible and liberated republic. Whether Dylan imbibed this crystallization from Marcus or not, his view of folk music as historically transcendent, beyond any one time or place while containing all of them, was borne out by the music he would go on to create, and for which his self-directed early-’90s folk revival prepared the ground. Both in the basement and the early ’90s Dylan was “learning to go forward by turning back the clock,” or (as he scribbled on a piece of paper now in the Tulsa archive) “fire a few random shots at the clock itself.” In the Basement Tapes, Dylan quit being the embodiment of the bleeding edge of hip modernity, instead tunneling for timelessness.

“What is most modern in our time frequently turns out to be the most archaic,” Guy Davenport writes in his landmark essay “The Symbol of the Archaic.” “The archaic is one of the great inventions of the twentieth century . . . the twentieth century has looked back to a deeper past in which it has imagined it sees the very beginnings of civilization. Laocoön was Michelangelo’s touchstone; the redstone Kouros from Sounion was Picasso’s.” As Dylan put it, recalling his schooling in the folk clubs of Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home, “These songs sounded archaic to most people. I don’t know why they didn’t sound archaic to me . . . [they] sounded like they were happening at the moment to me.”

“I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music,” Dylan stated in a 1996 interview. “I don’t find it anywhere else. Songs like ‘Let Me Rest on a Peaceful Mountain’ or ‘I Saw the Light’ — that’s my religion . . . I believe the songs. They are my lexicon and my prayer-book.” This is no pedestaled tradition-worship; Dylan’s vision of American music is of a living tradition with names, addresses, details, and bloody compromised history all rolled into one. It includes Stephen Foster, Blind Willie McTell, Hank Williams, Robert Johnson, himself, and innumerable poor pioneers (“all Shakespeares,” he once called them) as much as some vague combination of “Anon.” and “Trad.” These authors are as much a part of American history as Civil War battlefields and dead presidents. As Justin Smith-Ruiu recently put it in Romanticon, “It is a grave mistake to suppose that the political history of America is its only history. You can hear a different history in its music . . . a more promising one for thinking about American collective identity and its possible futures.”

In sessions for Good As I Been To You and its sequel, World Gone Wrong (released in 1993), Dylan recorded around 50 “traditional” songs. On songs like “Blackjack Davey” and “Arthur McBride,” Dylan’s voice is like a needle dropping into the past; a plain acoustic guitar never sounded more chisel-like. In reverently describing Mike Seeger in Chronicles, Polito intuits, Dylan might be describing his own aspirations at that time: “He played on all the various planes, the full index of the old-time styles, played in all the genres and had all the idioms mastered — Delta blues, ragtime, minstrel songs, buck-and-wing, dance reels, play party, hymns and gospel.”

It was through this self-reschooling that Dylan sought to rebaptize himself as a performer. As Marcus perceives, the “engine, the motor, of Dylan’s best work is empathy.” Nobody inhabits a song in the way Dylan can. He “burrows down deep into the syllables,” Polito enthuses, “and stresses as though no one has ever vocalized the songs before, and he is articulating the lines as occasion and necessity require.” Dylan’s commitment to this material, to disappear into it, led him to a fruitful vanishing point. For Polito, “the marvel is the fluent magnitude of spirit in this music that [Dylan] hears, frames, and enunciates for us — myths, allegories, and magic alongside history, religion, economics, technologies, sensibility, other tunes, and restless phantoms — even as he vanishes into that music.” If Dylan knows the land of song better than anyone, it’s because no one else seems to have quite his need for songs: to play them, to revisualize and relive them, returning and revisiting, over and over. As he wrote, he had something of a revelation around this time: “I’ve got to go out and play these songs. That’s just what I must do.”

3.

“I’m walking through streets that are dead” is the first line of Dylan’s “comeback” album, 1997’s Time Out of Mind. “Love Sick” has a wispy opening of organ chords and Dylan’s half-choked vocal, and immediately we are shown the essential image of the album: a wasteland and a wanderer. Polito, in one of his many pithy encapsulations, notes a misty atmosphere of “erotic grief” and “metaphysical noir,” sung in a voice consumed with a desperate regret. This singer has no time left to waste; he has realized all his mistakes and feels, unbearably, the weight of a wasted past. He’s also no longer alone with his thoughts:

Did I hear someone tell a lie?
Did I hear someone’s distant cry?

Or as “Cold Irons Bound” begins:

I’m beginning to hear voices

There’s no one around.

Polito buried himself in the Tulsa archive to resurrect the process of the album’s creation, a unique, ghostly, wholly fresh sound-world of “intensive spiritual desolation.” It was painstakingly crafted by Dylan “draft by draft, fragment by fragment” in notebooks, on notepads, hotel stationery, napkins, floating phrases hovering between potential songs:

I try to remember how I got here

The night is coming down and I just won’t be able to get far enough away from myself

Here is a man at the very bottom who has just begun looking up:

Maybe they’ll get me and maybe they won’t

But not tonight and it won’t be here

There are things I could say but I don’t

I know the mercy of God must be near

The record’s centerpiece is undoubtedly “Not Dark Yet.” Its sound is vast, groaning, and heaving in guitar reverb, the trembling hiss of cymbal and faint background organ, humming a strange comfort behind everything. Dylan hits long, slow nails through words full of “prickly aphorisms” and “glints of biblical revelation” in the voice of one who, as he sings, has “Been down on the bottom of a world full of lies.” Time Out of Mind, writes Polito, is “the country blues record Beckett might have made had he made country blues records: those magnificent sentences telling you all those dire things.” There’s the need to keep moving, that equally Beckettian refusal of speech, yet there’s nothing of the Irishman’s imprisonment here. Dylan sounds full to bursting with despair, dread and enervation — more human, in other words — than he ever has. It’s an album as wild and bewildered as it is dark and dire. As he would later write in his tender eulogy for Johnny Cash, it is “the voice of the wilderness of your head.” The door had opened onto the real existential territory of late Dylan: “Feel like a stranger in a world of mystery.”

My favorite song, however, is a sublimely unserious blues chug, the slow-burning closer “Highlands.” Dylan once joked that every song of his “signs off with good luck,” but it’s certainly true that he likes to turn albums on their heads at their endings. The song unspools, like Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, as a long ramble of a pseudo-story with a quiet, self-puncturing humor.

Insanity is smashin’

Up against my soul

You could say I was on anything

But a roll

Dylan meets a waitress at a restaurant “in Boston town” — she doesn’t have any hard-boiled eggs for him, she says, then accuses him of not reading women authors (“at least that’s what I think I hear her say”), to which Dylan replies: “I’ve read Erica Jong.” Over 16 hypnotic minutes, the terrible load with which the album has been freighted is gracefully shrugged, before the singer proclaims the source of his strength. His heart will go on — because after all (and after Robert Burns):

My heart’s in the highlands

Gentle and fair.

Honeysuckle bloomin’

In the wildwood air.

All the late Dylan signatures emerged here, and with Daniel Lanois’ production, in its twangling, shadowy depths, it sounded like a new rock language. Recounting his first reading of Dylan’s drafted lyrics, Lanois declared as much: “Bob had written from a perspective that few had seen. Decades of life experience and testimony lay on the pages in front of me. The myth that rock ’n’ roll belonged only to youth was about to be shattered by the steel blue eyes of the man himself.”

It should be remembered that when it came to expressing the regret, failure, and despair of an older guy in (albeit “soft”) rock music, someone got there before Dylan. Polito mentions “a computer printout of Leonard Cohen’s ‘A Thousand Kisses Deep’ dated to January 13, 1999” in the archive. Cohen and Dylan spoke many times of their delight in each other’s work; Cohen, a decade older, had explored late-middle-aged personal-political despair (caught amid an all-encompassing swirl of “erotic grief”) years before, in I’m Your Man and The Future, respectively released in 1988 and 1992. Just take the chorus to the latter’s title track:

Things are going to slide in all directions

Won’t be nothing, nothing you can measure anymore

The blizzard, the blizzard of the world

Has crossed the threshold

And it has overturned

The order of the soul

When they said repent, repent, repent

I wonder what they meant

In 1983 on “Blind Willie McTell,” Dylan was already singing of a world where “power and greed and corruptible seed seem to be all that there is.” Later he would speak of the world he and Cohen had aged into as “a Machiavellian world, whether we like it or we don’t. Any act that’s immoral, as long as it succeeds, it’s all right.” Whatever handwringing may be carried on today about the collapse of civil international order, listening to late Cohen or late Dylan can often feel like digging up some prophetic Old Testament tablet time-capsuled shortly before Bill Clinton’s sunny inauguration in 1992, the same year Cohen would avow, “I’ve seen the future, brother, it is murder.”

4.

Dylan released Love and Theft on 9/11 — just as, runs a line in “Mississippi,” the “Sky’s full of fire / And the pain is pourin’ down.” If on Time he has never sounded as raw, on Theft he has never sounded quite so threatening; where Time Dylan rasps and groans, Theft Dylan barks and growls. Until the next vocal retooling he was to undergo during his mid-2010s Sinatra micro-era, that voice would sink deeper and deeper into the rocks and the gravel. Dylan doesn’t make much music you can really dance to at the best of times; the songs on Love and Theft aren’t songs you can really sing along to either. Enjoying most of them fully demands hard listening.

Producing himself for the first time (under the moniker “Jack Frost”), Dylan crafts a bright sound, sometimes radiant (“Mississippi”), sometimes glaring (“Honest With Me”). To me, the sound resembles nothing so much as Blonde on Blonde: which is simply to say, it sounds like nothing other than itself. Dylan is channeling the energy of his 24-year-old self on “Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee” and “Summer Nights”; through the lyrical and musical grandeurs of “Mississippi,” “High Water,” and “Sugar Baby”; via “Bye and Bye,” “Floater,” “Moonlight,” and “Po’ Boy,” often in lilting Southern parlor mode. In the press, Dylan evoked “Southern Air”:

It’s filled with rambling ghosts and disturbed spirits. They’re all screaming and forlorning. It’s like they are all caught up in some weird web — some purgatory between heaven and hell and they can’t rest. They can’t live and they can’t die. It’s like they were cut off in their prime, wanting to tell somebody something. It’s all over the place. There are war fields everywhere . . . a lot of times even in people’s backyards.

These dead — ghosts, spirits, morals, images — they’re “wanting to tell somebody something,” and to be present to us still as teeming intelligences, minds, or impulses or ideas or intentions, shaping our actions and thoughts, while showing us how little we know of ourselves and what we have truly come from. They are the real singers of Love and Theft. Rough and rowdy types, all of them American, tried and true, grifters, scoundrels, innocents, fools, boors, victims, and villains float between the songs, exchanging strong words: competing, lying, declaring their ambitions, letting slip subconscious fears. They come costumed in music from country swing to Tin Pan Alley ballad, jump and slow blues, echoes of the minstrel and parlor song, sometimes fully embodied and revived, sometimes merely gestured to, hovering melodically somewhere beyond. Nostalgia as timelessness. “Have you ever seen a ghost?” the singer will ask us on Dylan’s next album, Modern Times. “No, but you have heard of them.”

There is an analogous effect, alienation and part nostalgia mixed into one, in those films of David Lynch that render American dreams apocalyptic. Another parallel might be the Overlook Hotel from Kubrick’s The Shining: swarming spirits with unknown intentions, transplanting the past into the present, the present into the past.

Honeybees are buzzin’

Leaves begin to stir

I’m in love with my second cousin

I tell myself I could be happy forever with her

There is a spooking humor in the opening verses to “Floater (Too Much To Ask).” Dylan’s singer lazes around, complains, threatens, reminisces and regrets:

If you ever try to interfere with me or cross my path again

You do so at the peril of your life

I’m not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound

I’ve seen enough heartaches and strife

My grandfather was a duck trapper

He could do it with just dragnets and ropes

My grandmother could sew new dresses out of old cloth

I don’t know if they had any dreams or hopes

I had ’em once though, I suppose, to go along

With all them ring dancin’ Christmas carols on all of them Christmas Eves

I left all my dreams and hopes

Buried under tobacco leaves

“Summer Days” gives us snatches of Fitzgerald and Hemingway (“What looks good in the day at night is another thing”) rubbing shoulders with Abraham Lincoln (“Sucking the blood out of the genius of generosity”). For “Lonesome Day Blues,” we get an early hint of a Roman ghost in a line from Aeneas’ father, Anchises, put into the mouth of Dylan’s bluesy boaster: “I’m going to teach peace to the conquered, I’m going to tame the proud.” “Po’ Boy” mixes Baudelaire and Blind Willie McTell in the same couplet: “Time and love has branded me with its claws / Had to go to Florida, dodgin’ them Georgia laws.” And, of course through all this, an invisible spine, those oft-untraceable, effectively eternal, “deflected vestiges of folk, country and blues.”

Accused of plagiarism on many fronts in the aftermath of Love and Theft (presumably by people who had never heard of T. S. Eliot or Picasso), Dylan had a waspish retort to those literal or unliterary enough to find the use of other writers, especially “the laureate of the South” Henry Timrod, objectionable: “If you think it’s so easy to quote him and it can help you with your work, do it yourself and see how far you get.” Polito notes the “amplification of folk process” in Dylan’s collage strategies. He calls them “strategies of embodiment” that “lodge the legacies of empire, slavery, criminality, sin, the body, desire, and his own autobiography in volatile verbal echo chambers of harmonizing and clashing reverberations.”

In Chronicles, Dylan describes his first intensive immersion into American history in the early 1960s:

I began searching in the New York Public Library . . . reading articles in newspapers on microfilm from 1855 to about 1865 to see what daily life was like. I wasn’t so much interested in the issues as intrigued by the language and rhetoric of the times. . . . I couldn’t exactly put in words what I was looking for. . . . You wonder how people so united by geography and religious ideals could become such bitter enemies. After a while you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of the human being getting thrown off course. . . . The age that I was living in didn’t resemble this age, but yet it did in some mysterious and traditional way. Not just a little bit, but a lot. Back there, America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything I would write.

If the South and the Civil War pervade the atmosphere of Love and Theft, its subtext is stated plainly in its very title: itself a quote in scare quotes in an album stuffed with them. Love and Theft is the title of a book by the historian Eric Lott, published in 1993. Lott’s Love and Theft is a now standard study of the history and legacy of the minstrel show, the first distinctively and uniquely American form of popular theater, with a musical legacy just as far-reaching. The minstrel show and the music that emerged from it grew in popularity through the pre-Civil War years, such that, as Polito writes, “in the late 1840s minstrelsy came to seem the most representational national art.”

“Underwritten by envy as well as repulsion, sympathetic identification as well as fear,” Lott writes, “the minstrel show continually transgressed the color line even as it made possible the formation of a self-consciously white working class” — who were its core audience. The “terrible pleasures” of minstrelsy not only “became a site of conflictual intensity for the politics of race, class, and nation,” they went into decline in the decades following the Civil War. But their afterlives include the “race” and “hillbilly” records of the early ’20s and ’30s — many of which found their way onto the Anthology of American Folk Music and so inspired both the younger and elder Bob Dylan.

Without slavery, no minstrelsy — without minstrelsy, no Bob Dylan. Of course, Dylan has been aware of this probably for a very long time — at least ever since he performed wearing whiteface throughout his Rolling Thunder tour in 1975 and ’76. But on this album, and in future ones, he engages fully — acknowledging not merely the historical legacy of this compromised form, but its dramatic one. In the classic minstrel show format you had the “Interlocutor” in whiteface, seated between his “endmen,” both in blackface: “Mr. Tambo” on the tambourine and “Mr. Bones” on a pair of clappers. The show evolved into a fixed three-act structure mixing comedic drama, dance, and music. More than once, Dylan has recalled his childhood fascination with the visiting carnivals in Minnesota, watching “weird Shakespearean things” likely descended from minstrelsy’s faux-Shakespeare parodies, broad archetypes and stock figures, bizarre shadings of miracle and mystery that seemed out of the Middle Ages. Not merely the music, but the drama of Love and Theft are inescapably linked to a very old — and very American — tradition.

5.

“I can see what everybody in the world is up against,” declares the singer in album-closer “Sugar Baby,” finally homing a stray thought Dylan had first drafted for Time Out of Mind. He had taken the new, largely interiorized territory of feeling unearthed on that album and turned (or, as a radio antenna, tuned) it outward, in conversation with the dead, both great and forgotten.

There is a glorious irony in the trajectory of Dylan and his own legacy. He invented the singer-songwriter archetype, the romantic who plays and sings songs they have written — lived experience in lyrical form. He has also left the overriding contemporary impulse toward the “autobiographical” or the “lived experience” far in the dust. In Dylan there is the modernist’s preference for the “mask” (to use a favorite term of Yeats) as “escape from personality” (Eliot’s view of the poetic impulse). In an interview from 2007, he said: “I never opened up my own thinking. My stuff was never about me, per se, so everybody who . . . thought it was about me . . . they took the wrong road.” And yet, here he was in 2009: “I’m not a playwright. All the people in my songs are all me.”

If Love and Theft was, as Polito writes, a “consummate vanishing into tradition and history,” what was the real purpose of Dylan’s efforts? “It’s me using everything I know to be true,” he has said. Perhaps then under this new logic, the album form itself could, in such hands, become its own space (Polito’s formulation) of a “timeless classroom, perhaps a model for the vaulted human brain — might such moments, then, mirror how we learn, remember?”

She says, “You can’t repeat the past.” I say, “You can’t?” What do you mean,

you can’t? Of course you can.

Re-spoken by Fitzgerald’s Gatsby in “Summer Days,” Dylan’s ironic drift is echoed by Guy Davenport: “It is man’s worst ineptitude that he has not remembered his own past.” Davenport admires a particularly modern archaic, Heraclitus, for his saying Ethos anthropoi daimon, “which may mean that our moral nature is a daimon, or guiding spirit from among the purified souls of the dead.”

In one of his World Gone Wrong liner notes, Dylan refers to “these modern times (the New Dark Ages).” The modern is that which consummately forgets, and hence, must always believe itself, will itself, to be “modern.” (Thus, per Rimbaud, the necessity to “absolutement moderne.”) Modern Times, released in August 2006, was the first number one album Dylan had scored in the United States since Desire exactly 30 years before. At 65, he became the oldest artist to achieve such a feat. It’s no stretch today to locate the specter this album summoned up at the start of this young and already very long century: it’s all around us, and we are increasingly anxious that it is anti-human at its core. As Dylan sang in “Love Sick”: “My sense of humanity has gone down the drain.”

As Elizabeth Nelson writes in an essay on “Bob Dylan and the Border,” the younger Dylan also “recognized the tortuous distortions of modernization and the medicine-show false promises in the emerging dominance of free-market capitalism. He felt it in his bones; didn’t and couldn’t possibly have understood the full sweep of it, but pointed it out like a man gesturing at a UFO.” The notion that Dylan ever stopped making protest music is wrongheaded (“that’s all I ever do, is protest,” he drawled to an interviewer in 1966) but by the time of Infidels in 1983 he could write songs like “Union Sundown” (“Well, it’s sundown on the union / And what’s made in the USA / Sure was a good idea / ’Til greed got in the way”) and “License to Kill” (“Man thinks ’cause he rules the earth / He can do with it as he please / And if things don’t change soon, he will”) so that by “Workingman’s Blues #2” in 2006, he can even do a Marxist put-on:

There’s an evening haze settling over town

Starlight by the edge of the creek

The buying power of the proletariat’s gone down

Money’s getting shallow and weak

By the album’s end, Dylan is looking (as one of the song’s titles has it) beyond the horizon, which seems to be historical, American, human. In his description of the place our modern moralities have gotten us to, there’s no ambiguity:

People’s lives today are filled on so many levels with vice and the trappings of it. Ambition, greed and selfishness all have to do with vice. Sooner or later, you have to see through it or you don’t survive. We don’t see the people that vice destroys. We just see the glamour of it on a daily basis — everywhere we look, from billboard signs to movies, to newspapers, to magazines. We see the destruction of human life and the mockery of it, everywhere we look.

“Vice,” let’s note, is one of the stock characters out of medieval mystery plays, “the kind that Shakespeare saw when he was growing up.” Dylan referenced these in his MusiCares award acceptance speech in 2015: “I think you could trace what I do back that far. They were on the fringes then, and I think they’re on the fringes now.” In listening to Modern Times, it helps to remember Dylan’s overlooked references to mystery and morality drama, a form that (quaint though this might seem to any modern playgoer) traded on the commonly held, real presences of good and evil.

If Love and Theft took some of the spiritual absurdity and broken-clock chronology already present in Time Out of Mind, Modern Times opens them wider. Less specific characters, grander and more elemental voices, a staging of America — past, present, future — as spiritual drama. A verse from “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” simultaneously declares the impulse haunting the entire album and Dylan’s response:

The night’s filled with shadows, the years are filled with early doom

The night is filled with shadows, the years are filled with early doom

I’ve been conjuring up all these long dead souls from their crumblin’ tombs

That refrain is Henry Timrod again, and throughout Modern Times, this stealing impulse winds all the way back to the ancients. One of the gems of Polito’s digs among the “stray, inchoate notes and sketches” of Dylan’s archive is the discovery of “a sort of scribbled note to self” on a stray piece of hotel stationery: “Read Ovid.”

I’ve been sitting down studying the art of love

I think it’ll fit me like a glove

So Dylan sings on “Thunder on the Mountain.” Not merely the Amores and Ars amatoria but snatches — Polito dubs them “reverberations” — from the Roman poet’s Tristia, Black Sea Letters, and Cures for Love through almost every song on Modern Times. Born in 43 B.C., Ovid, the poet of imperial Rome’s birth throes, was also one of its first free-speech casualties — exiled to the Black Sea city of Tomis for Carmen et Error (“a poem and a mistake”) on the orders of Augustus. Thus, writes Polito, Ovid “grew up during the violent death throes of the Roman republic” and subsequent civil wars while running afoul of the new, censorious authoritarianism. He knew empire and exile.

Dylan’s use of Ovid is redolent of Ezra Pound covering himself with the mask of another Latin poet, Sextus Propertius, through poems composed in London during the crumbling of another world order around 1917. And while we’re on Pound — here’s the beginning of “Canto I,” the best known, probably, of all 700 pages of The Cantos, if only because that’s where most readers stop:

And then went down to the ship,

Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and

We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,

Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also

Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward

Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,

Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.

Pound is translating The Odyssey, Book XI. Except that Pound is in fact not translating directly from Homer at all, but from a merely serviceable translation of The Odyssey into Latin, published in 1538 by an obscure scholar named Andreas Divus, a dusty copy of which he happened to pick up one day from a bookstall by the Seine.

Pound will later mention Divus directly, but not before he has rendered extended passages from the Latin (one linguistic remove from Homer) into an English colored by the rhythms and tones of Anglo-Saxon poems such as “The Seafarer” — another degree removed. The passage’s subject is ostensibly Odysseus’, or Pound’s, shamanic journey into the realm of the dead as described in the Nekuia episode of the Odyssey, but Pound has also brought in his own poetic autobiography (Vorticism, Imagism) to reorient to the task ahead of him. Hugh Kenner dubs this sinuous twisting and bending of tradition “a chord” struck “to comprise four of history’s beginnings: the earliest English (‘Seafarer’ rhythms and diction), the earliest Greek (the Nekuia), the beginnings of the 20^th century Vortex, and the origins of the Vortex we call the Renaissance, when once before it had seemed pertinent to reaffirm Homer’s perpetual freshness.” Pound said that “all times are contemporaneous in the mind.” Dylan’s music, as he says, “is always speaking to times that are recent.”

As he wrote more Cantos — “each more obscure than the last” as he triumphantly wrote to his father, Homer, back in America — Pound was also developing them according to his evolving conception of the “ideogram.” To cut right to the chase, Pound’s “ideogram method” means that his cantos are less lone-authored poems than layerings of disjunct time periods, actors, events, myths, and voices, with the intention that any “why” will eventually become clear simply by letting image, sound, and sense interplay — “keys in the wind / t’unlock my mind” as a young Dylan once suggested in a poem. From a seemingly jumbled diversity of concrete images, elements, ideas, and allusions, the mind might abstract out a vision wherein history and mythology appear as images in the mind, images of knowledge on an equal plane, as we read or listen, composing, perhaps, new ways of knowing altogether. “The reader, reading, dreams the dream of the deserving page,” wrote William Gass.

“Folk songs were the way I explored the universe,” Dylan observes of his coffee house days. “They were pictures and the pictures were worth more than anything I could say.” Dylan’s ability for merging with the songs he writes or sings is best shown in his prose poem-song criticism (if that’s what it is), first in the liner notes to World Gone Wrong, and later in his Philosophy of Modern Song, published in 2022. In the 60 short essays on individual songs that make up the book (the majority from the 1950s, the era of Dylan’s childhood), the song as an experience of ideogramic empathic vision always shines through. Take Dylan’s account of Marty Robbins’ 1959 song “El Paso”:

Gunfire, blood, and sudden death, seems like a typical western ballad, is anything but. This is Moloch, the cat’s eye pyramid, the underbelly of beauty, where you take away the bottom number and the others fall. The cowboy chosen one, bloody mass sacrifice, Jews of the Holocaust, Christ in the temple, the blood of Aztecs up on the altar. This song kicks you down, and before you can get up, it hits you again. This is the stuff to live for, and what you make of it all. This is mankind created in the image of a jealous godhead. . . .

El Paso — the passageway, the escape hatch, the secret staircase — ritual crime and symbolic lingo — circular imagery, names and numbers, transmigration, deportation, and all in the cryptic first person, the primitive self. The stench of perfume, alcohol, a puff of smoke, the duel, the worthless life, pain in the heart, staying in the saddle, love in vain, the grim reaper, and a love that’s stronger than death, and other things. The black knight and the white knight, the good luck charm, and the evil eye. Five mounted cowboys, twelve more on the hill, and there’s more — queen of sin street, diseased prostitute, an apparition that’s solidly real. . . .

In a way this is a song of genocide, where you’re led by your nose into a nuclear war, ground zero, New Mexico where the first atom bomb was tested. Land of witchcraft, Crazy Cat Mountain, and the El Paso gate of death. Tierra del Encanto, near the white sand missile range, the devils’ highway, down Jornada del Muerto.

The apotheosis of the fruitful contradictions in Dylan’s “relentless collage” may be Modern Times’ “Nettie Moore,” a gorgeous ballad that nonetheless keeps us hanging, suspended.

Lost John’s sitting on a railroad track

Something’s out of whack

Blues this morning fallin’ down like hail

Gonna leave a greasy trail

The first and third lines of this opening are from Papa Charlie Jackson’s “Long Gone Lost John” and Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound on My Trail,” respectively, and interspersed with Dylan’s commentary. “Something’s out of whack,” and as the singer — is he young or old, Black or white? — attempts to sing the blues, there appears the specter of “a greasy trail.” Greasepaint and blackface, slippages of exploitation. As the song goes on Dylan will summon “Yellow Dog Blues,” “Frankie and Albert,” “Moonshiner,” “Two Soldiers,” and other standards, “. . . blues signals,” writes Polito, “disrupted and blocked, and the rueful commentary overlays defensiveness, aggression, apology, and self-reproach.” As the voices, images and tones layer, we get to the chorus, and everything is complicated further:

Oh, I miss you Nettie Moore,

And my happiness is o’er

Winter’s gone, the river’s on the rise

I loved you then and ever shall

But there’s no one here that’s left to tell

The world has gone black before my eyes

The opening couplet of the chorus (and the song’s title) are from “The Little White Cottage, or Gentle Nettie Moore,” Marshall S. Pike and James Pierpont’s popular 1857 minstrel ballad sung by an enslaved man whose “charming Nettie Moore” was sold to a Louisiana master who “shackled her with chains / Then he took her off to work her life away.” This twisted minstrel’s song is Dylan’s “prompt and frame” as Pound’s is Homer and Divus. Ovid slips in there too, in the last line of the chorus, and elsewhere: “I wish to God that it were night.”

In the historical-musical reverberations the late Dylan songs collect around themselves, we return to this refrain — who is singing, to whom, and why? As Polito asks of “Nettie Moore”: “Who’s staging the suffering?” And who is the loquaciously silent hero-villain of “Ain’t Talkin’,” the song which shatteringly closes Modern Times? Polito correctly identifies something in the music, “a sonic intensity” almost unique in Dylan’s work. It is at once pre- and post-apocalyptic. Here, we have minstrelsy’s echoes (lines from “Ole Dan Tucker” and “Hand Me Down My Walkin’ Cane”) alongside Ovid (“I practice a faith that’s been long abandoned”), alongside (as on “Nettie Moore”) a chorus half-composed of lines from another song called “Highway of Regret” by the Stanley Brothers with half its lines (emphasized here in my italics) replaced by Dylan:

Ain’t talkin’, just walkin’

Through this weary world of woe

Heart burnin’, still yearnin’

No one on earth would ever know

Except one of those lines (“world of woe”) is from the gospel standard “The Wayfaring Stranger,” that American archetype already embodied in countless Bob Dylan songs.

As Greil Marcus remarks: “walk, talk — it’s not a phrase, it’s a gesture, a posture, a way of carrying yourself, that speaks of foreboding and escape . . . embedded in the rhythms of American experience.” It’s that rhythm, that trajectory, a circular swinging between moral vision and vengeful resentment that the song enacts. It is, as Polito writes, both “Old Testament” and “classic American . . . the stuff of Winthrop, Mather, Edwards, Brown, Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville.” Dylan’s fugitive exile is keeping the frail flame of an unbearable, unspeakable historical memory. He is also hobbling “with a toothache in my heel” as far away from it and as fast as he can. As you listen to a song like this, it composes, as Marcus writes, “a complete world”:

. . . a world made of morals and emotion, the emotions that fester, then rise up when the morals are broken; as you sense the world the theme makes, you sense in the music that the world is also being judged, and that the judgment isn’t final. All of that is happening.

6.

Dylan once pondered that Love and Theft might be “the beginning of a trilogy,” a claim which seems borne out by Modern Times and Tempest, which was released in 2012. The album’s bold scarlet cover is adorned by a photograph of a bust of Pallas Athene. The Greek goddess of “wisdom, war, craft, and skill” was also present as a traveling bust onstage with Dylan and his band as he toured through 2012 and beyond. He also references Poe’s “The Raven” on the album’s opener, “Duquesne Whistle”: the Raven which perches, in the poem, on a bust of that very same goddess.

It was the beginning of a self-reflection by the artist on himself as bard. Between Tempest and the next original album, Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020), of course, Dylan also happened to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Salman Rushdie tweeted: “From Orpheus to Faiz, song & poetry have been closely linked. Dylan is a brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition. Great choice.” Through all the songs on Tempest, Homer shimmers as a “sentinel” in Polito’s words, while the album’s “crux” is, instead, a “poignant identification with Odysseus.” Pallas Athene is Odysseus’ patron.

At the very opening of No Direction Home, Dylan declares:

I had ambitions to set out and find, like an odyssey, goin’ home somewhere, I’m set out to find this home that I’d left a while back and couldn’t remember exactly where it was, but I was on my way there. And encountering what I encountered on the way was how I envisioned it all. I didn’t really have any ambition at all. . . . I was born very far from where I was supposed to be, so I’m on my way home, you know.

One of the few things Dylan is unambiguous about is his sense of despair, not least at an America “drugged into a barely functioning torpor” as he writes in his Philosophy. Fortunately, the “home” of his America exists between times, not bound by our present moment. In these songs is an otherworld America that Dylan knows, and (as he himself said of Johnny Cash) it “will always bring you to your senses.”

It’s an experience perhaps related in an unreleased Big Thief song by Adrianne Lenker, who has a healthy dose of Dylan lyrically, even more so vocally. In “Beautiful World” she sings something of a Dylanesque shaggy dog story, with a drifter and a dog starting out lost on the highway.

Eastbound going 65

The desert wind is blowing

My dog is sitting by my side

He don’t care where we’re going

Taking the south route this time

Back from California

Stopping in the old mine town

Bisbee, Arizona

They drift to where there’s “no power out here,” only “the wild grass and my desert ass,” and then a sinister border patrol informs her: “That’s a camera and it’s tethered to an invisible string.”

Then a chorus,

It’s a fucked-up world

Why must everything be conquered, gutted?

It’s so beautiful

I’m going to the center of it.

Then, an encounter, and maybe a revelation:

Standing there feeling tripped out

And just wanting to cry

And that disconnected sharpness where everything is dry

I hear the ratchet of the call

Two wheels turning in the dirt

An old man on his bicycle, out of nowhere

Soaking through his shirt

He gets down and he comes over and says

“I’m on a long journey. I’m riding my bike clear across the country. I’m 85. My name is Bob. I’m gonna make the Guinness book.”

I said, “It’s nice to meet you, Bob.”

And then I took his hand and shook.

Gus Mitchell is a writer based in London. His work is featured or forthcoming in the Stinging Fly, Jacobin, Plough, Commonweal, the Cleveland Review of Books, and other places.