Some reflections on Hinchey's chapter on Bringing It All Back Home

Hinchey's writing on these songs may provide some useful ideas or "hooks" around which you may be able to organize your second paper.   Here are some of the major points that he makes:  

•  Hinchey finds that "Dylan focuses on a single issue" in Bringing it All Back Home, his "assertion of artistic freedom from 'them', of his right to the riches of the imagination." (80)

•  He also finds that Dylan is thrilling himself with his own poetry on this album (84) which he defines as a poetry of "self-disclosure that takes the form of a disappearing act." (86)   In other words, by probing his deeper consciousness, his heart, mind and soul, he does reveal himself--becomes naked in his art--but then he somehow dissolves or disappears like mist before the dawn.  

•  Hinchey is taken by the way the last line of the song, "Love Minus Zero/No Limit"-- "My love she's like some raven/at my window with a broken wing"-- transforms the entire song and makes us rethink and reconceptualize what we have been listening to.   The last line, he suggests, "turns the the final verse into an incandescence that consumes the song that engendered it.' (84)   The "lady" of whom he has been singing--"My love she speaks like silence/without ideals or violence,"--has metamorphosed into a raven whose presence, a temporary and arbitrary gift of the indifferent storm, is but an imagined thing, and not just an imagined thing ("like a raven") but an imagined imagined thing ("like some raven").   This little word, 'some,' an untranslatable idiomatic shrug of the mind, is a characteristically Dylanesque evasion, but here it is deployed against himself, to acknowledge that his deepest intuitions of truth and beauty all but evade his ministering mind." (83, italics, mine) It is as though Dylan's best songs, his wisest lyrics are now about the process of how he comes to envision and express eternal truths lodged deep in human consciousness.

•  "He was beginning to thrill himself with his poetry," Hinchey writes, and "The thrill in question is the illusion of presence, of seeming to be here now.   This is the conquest of time that Dylan would later define as the 'heroic' task of all art.   Meaningfulness is a function of our existence in time, a measure of connection between then and now, or between now and again, or between here and there." (84)

•  Many of the songs on BIABH are ripe with references to the ways in which society impinges on our freedoms and destroys our sense of imagination and wonder.   After identifying all the mechanisms that society uses to oppress us, his writing "gives way immediately to a sense of liberation from oppressive illusions." (89) This is where the sense of exuberance and exhilaration that runs throughout the album comes from.

•  Freedom--personal and artistic, freedom from bourgeois and "straight" codes of conduct--is what Bringing it All Back Home seems most concerned with, especially "Mr. Tambourine Man."   For Hinchey, "Mr. Tambourine Man" is a kind of "prayer in which the ordinary ego, hungering for a freer, stronger consciousness, addresses the transcendent power that gives it life." (94)   It is, then, like a dialogue between Dylan and his consciousness, the artist and his muse.   As Hinchey puts it elsewhere, "the entire song is possessed of this double consciousness...of a creative will beside itself with joy, an ego that is at once nothing in itself and the maddeningly inextinguishable medium through which its genius discloses its presence." (95)   So, we find both erasure and presence in Dylan's songs, especially "Mr. Tambourine Man."  

•  The double-consciousness that Hinchey finds in these lyrics is about a "yearning ego and a celebratory spirit," and he likens them to "matter and anti-matter, sealed off from each other." Except in the third verse where, "with a blend of cognitive sophistication and nonchalant charm that would make even the most erudite deconstructionist weep with envy," the song's point of view is altered and the "shadow you're seeing that he's chasing" becomes the singer who for a moment is identical with Mr. Tambourine Man.   According to Hinchey, "The 'shadow" the Tambourine Man sees is this song, a song whose music 'he,' the singer, is pursuing." "For one giddy moment....the singer addresses the Tambourine Man as an equal, face to face, or addresses himself in the voice of the Tambourine Man." (97-98)   I think my interpretation may be a little different from Hinchey's because when I hear the singer addressing the Tambourine Man by singing "Though you might hear laughing, spinning swinging madly across the sun/It's not aimed at anyone/it's just escaping on the run," I think I hear the singer addressing Mr. Tambourine Man in reference to his own voice, his own singing and rhyming that are contained in this song that Mr. Tambourine Man might be hearing. But the singer wants to reassure him that his words and rhymes are not aimed at anyone, they are just escaping on the run, seeking their own freedom, unbound, as it were because "But for the sky there are no fences facing."   In other words, these are the singer's words thrown out there to join those of other poets and singers, and that is why he pleads to not be noticed:

And if you hear vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme

To your tambourine in time, it's just a ragged clown behind

I wouldn't pay it any mind, it's just a shadow you're

Seeing that he's chasing.

He, the singer, then, claims to be just "a ragged clown behind" and merely a "shadow you're seeing that he's chasing."   So, the singer is chasing the shadow of his own skipping reels of rhyme which means that his efforts to capture what both he and Mr. Tambourine Man can see and feel-their poetic, artisitic or musical vision--may come up short, but they can share the knowledge that at least he is trying to reach out and make contact with something that, though illusive and shadowy, is at least nearby and can be apprehended by the senses--that is, it can be heard and seen, or witnessed--and perhaps this is something in which they can both take comfort.   Perhaps they can savor and celebrate their proximity to something that is substantial and real. Can something that is shadowy and illusive also be substantial and real at the same time? It can be if you believe, as both Buddhists and Platonists do, when they hold that the reality that we can perceive through our normal senses is just a pale imitation of a much more powerful and vivid reality that is outide the range of our normal vision. In the case of Plato's cave. prisoners sit chained able to see only the shadows cast on the wall, shadows of puppets that are paraded in front of a fire in the rear of the cave; the prisoners are deluded in their belief that what they are seeing is real. They think that these are the genuine objects when in fact they are merely shadows or crude approximations of something that is real. As the Buddha would have it, what we are able to perceive through our fiver senses is just maya or illusion. To apprehend what is really real one has to go beyond the five senses and see directly into reality, which you can only do with a focussed mind that as a result of meditation is able to perceive reality directluy without the mediation and distortion of the human senses.

I don't know if this is the same as saying, as Hinchey does, that the "I" of this third verse if implicitly different from the "I" who is singing the song in the other verses. He may well be on to something but it works for me to read the narrator's voice as consistent throughout the song--it is the singer, or Dylan the poet--talking to Mr. Tambourine Man about what happens, and what it means to me, when he reels off verses and rhymes and sends them out there. Doesn't it sound like he is saying that he becomes this "ragged clown behind," following Mr. Tambourine Man in the practice of poetry and song, thowing out his own offerings and hoping that they can circulate freely in the air and the sky, unobstructed, undetected--just free and joyful, not tied down or anchored down to definitions and forms which confine and limit them. Because, more than anything, as he tells in the next verse, he wants "to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, silhouetted by the sea," and this would be a limitless sky, a sky where there "are no fences facing." Freedom. I guess we all agree that somehow or other this song is a celebration of some kind of freedom, a freedom accompanied by joy--by dancing, singing, rhyming--where one is free from the constraints of "memory and fate" and there is no need to worry "about today until tomorrow."

•  By the end of the song--the final verse--one can no longer be certain "which is the singer and which is the song, or (to borrow a Yeatsian figure that's wholly appropriate here) which is the dancer and which is the dance." (98) The artist longs for the freedom to find that place where s/he can be free to create but when the artist arrives there and encounters his or her own creativity, a place where individual subjectivity and ego are submerged, the moment never seems to last long and either disappears or floats just out of reach.

•  Earlier (95), Hinchey called "Mr. Tambourine Man"'s plea for nakedness both a neo-Whitmanesque rhapsody and a neo-Keatsian ode.   After quoting the entire last verse, culminating in the triumphantly rhythmic incantation about "Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free/silhouetted by the sea/circled by the circus sands/With all memory and fate/Driven deep beneath the waves...etc." Hinchey observes: "This I am not moved to call neo-anybody.   This is just plain new.   This is Dylan: the voice of a self-possessed yearning that both provides its own answer yet remains full of unquenched expectancy." (99)   The answer is there, in the song, he suggests, but it is provisional and does not leave the poet completely satisfied; there remains a yearning for further discoveries and realizations. And well there should be because if everything were grasped and known, there would be no need to keep moving, to keep pursuing; and it is well-known that "he not busy being born is busy dying."

•  Hinchey is accurate, I think, when he suggests that "our language-bound consciousness both does and does not suffice the claims the spirit makes on it." (97)   In the "scene" in "Mr. Tambourine Man" noted above, where the singer suggests that if Mr. Tambourine Man should   "hear vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme," that this may only be "a ragged clown behind...just a shadow you're seeing that he's chasing," it is as though Dylan understands that he is little more than a ragged clown trying to track down these shadowy entities or visions that are his truth, his art.   If this is accurate, is he acknowledging how difficult it can be to discover these artistic truths, to find one's muse and sustain a creative relationship with it?  

•  Clearly, we are left with something here--the songs, the poems, the music, the vocals all remain, they are "vague traces" of this encounter and at the deeper or higher levels of consciousness.   In fact, Hinchey would argue that these songs are all about the process in which they are conceived and engaged, the process of how they came into being--the process of creation, birth and rebirth, life, change, movement...but never stasis.   Therefore, he can find "Love Minus Zero/No Limit" to be not really about anything other than the trope of the raven at the end of the song which turns the song back on itself and makes it into a poem about...the "turning of a mind that finds and loses itself only in its own perpetual turning." (84)   Dylan tries to capture the experience of having a vision, of seeing it; he holds onto the moment as best he can by writing and singing about it (and singing to it?); it is there with him for a precious moment but then it begins to fade and become shadowy before we can fully grasp it or bask in its presence.   Or is its presence mere illusion?

•  Another way of stating this is that it makes the songs on this album about the process of writing itself; it is very much about the process of creation, of probing the imagination and discovering how it works; about one's muse and where it comes from and where it goes and what happens when you look at it--both the muse and the creative process--and what that can teach you about life, about the mind, about the soul, about humanity, about creativity--about all of us--yes, about "every hung-up person in the whole wide universe" as he says in "Chimes of Freedom."

•    Finally, Hinchey concludes this chapter with this line: "And though he says 'I accept chaos,' he hadn't.   This LP is a grand refusal of chaos, and in its best moments, a sublime triumph over it.   After all, isn't that what it means to bring it all--ALL--back home?" (106)   Although there are definitely some dark moments and some cynical, hard-hitting commentary on BIABH, there are also moments of triumph and of exuberance.  

So, then, exactly what kinds of songs are these?   Songs that celebrate the triumph of art and creativity over the forces in life that would impede our spiritual and artistic growth, that would threaten our access to that "speechless seeking trail" ("Chimes") which leads to the unlocking of the mysteries of life. In the liner notes to BIABH, Dylan writes, "I am convinced that all souls have some superior t deal with/like the school system, an invisible circle of which no one can think without consulting someone/in the face of this, responsibility/security, success mean absolutely nothing..."   Dylan is distinctly anti-authoritarian and anti-establishment, maybe even a little nihilistic in his orientation; but what he is most against is narrow minds and "pettiness which plays so rough." He wants no truck with hate and fear mongers, and all those who would "philosophize disgrace"; instead, he would seek to strip off the blinders that limit our vision and allow us see reality for all that it is--and isn't.   As Larry "Ratso" Sloman wrote just this year in the liner notes for the most recent official "bootleg" release, Tell Tale Signs, Dylan has been on a long odyssey "And it's dawn now, the sun beginning to shine down on him and his heart is still in the Highlands, over those hills, far away. But there's a way to get there and if anyone can, he'll figure it out. And in the meantime, he's already there in his mind. That mind decidedly out of time. And we're all that much richer for his journey." (June 2008, Tell Tale Signs liner notes)

Hinchey on LRS:

Here are some of his insights into this song taken from just a few pages between pp. 24-29. I am sure you can find much more in the whole chapter but here are some statements that stood out to me.

1. LRS "explodes into a realm beyond words, beyond music, beyond all sense, enveloping itself in the intoxicating accents of pure imagination." It constitutes "an invitation to enter a harrowing inner world uncomprmised by the 'alibis' of social and even psychological identity, to re-connect with the freedom of a 'vacuum', or nothingness, deep within you and become a 'complete unknown', even (or especially) to yourself."(26)

2. Hinchey argues that "What Dylan discovered in writing 'Like a Rolling Stone' was what might be called the essential dialogic nature of his own creative identity." (31) His new kind of song "liberated him from his audience's transfixing expectations." (24)

3. He put his audience into his songs, "he kindapped his listeners from their seats and put them--as listeners--in his songs." (24)

4. "Dylan's freedom entails not a loss of identity but an immunity from his own identities: a capacity to own things without being owned by them that takes the form of a readiness to 'pawn' anything and everything, to divest and re-invest an established identity at will." (27)

5. At the conclusion of the song, says Hichey, "Finally, the mystery tramp's divine voice shifts to a tone of visionary exhortation:

Go to him now he calls you, you can't refuse

when you ain't got nothing

you got nothing to lose

You're invisible now

you got no secrets

to conceeeeeeaal

[HOW DOES IT FEEEEEEEL?]

The song reaches its climax here, in the transcendental ecstasy of a visionary 'now' tht breaks the spell of the rage-filled 'once upon a time' out of which the song arose. This 'now' is identical to the emergence of your 'invisible' self from the social covering that has made its nakedness a 'secret'. To be 'invisible', in the sense intended here, is a radically dialectical notion, an appearence that is also a disappearence, and though it invites endless meditation, I'll just say that it seems to be Dylan's ultimate image for an authentic being-in-the-world." (28)

6. LRS is a song about freedom (but so are many Dylan songs) in which he has "dramatically expanded the scope" of the freedom he is talking about, and, he has "expanded the scope of his freedom as a performing artist." LRS "showed him a way to retrieve his freedom from his audience without simply abandoning his audience." (29) Author Andy Gill's comments when he was discussing "Desolation Row" to the effect that songs from this album make "a mockery of accusations that he had betrayed or abandoned protest music; rather, what he has done is to broaden the scope of his protest to reflect more accurately the disconcerting hyper-reality of modern western culture." (See Gill, Don't Think Twice, It's Alright, p. 89)