The Times They Are A-Changin'

Popular song-poet Bob Dylan, hailed in the '60s as prophetic spokesperson for his generation, is remarkably well and alive as he turns 50 years old May 24, 1991. Music critic Ralph Gleason early termed Dylan "a genius, a singing conscience and moral referee as well as a preacher." Although Dylan has radically shifted perspectives many times since he burst upon Greenwich Village 30 years ago, Gleason's assessment still stands. This past February, Dylan was the recipient of the distinguished Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

Dylan is now generating an everflowing stream of serious studies of his song-poems, the latest and one of the best being the first of a two-volume work by Paul Williams titled Performing Artist: The Music of Bob Dylan, published in 1990. Last fall he issued his 36th record album, titled Under the Red Sky, and he continues a heavy schedule of concerts around the world. Marking his 50th birthday, Columbia Records has released The Blue Lake Series Volumes 1-3: Rare and Unreleased 1961-1991, a three-hour retrospective set containing 58 songs.

My interest in Bob Dylan was kindled in 1965 by reading an article titled "Bob Dylan as Theologian." Upon purchasing Dylan's albums, I was less struck by his theological acumen than his flashing imagery; his hauntingly expressive, rough, and raspy voice; and his earnest, but sometimes humorous, search for life's meaning.

Dylan's quest for meaning has consistently centered upon the nature of temporal reality. In song-poetry he has sought to confront what it means, in theologian Mircea Eliade's phrase, to "fall into time." Recognizing his own mortality, he searches to understand how he relates to a time-bound world, which, too, is mortal -- moving toward its end. How does one solve the mystery expressed in "Oh Sister" (1975) that time is an ocean but it ends at the shore? As a seer, a visionary -- but eschewing the role of prophetic leader -- Dylan has carved out his partial answers in fragmentary images of song. Clearly in his philosophical journey through time, Dylan has done, like his folk-singing hero Woody Guthrie, "some hard travelin' too."

OF PARTICULAR concern to this time-trapped artist is the issue of injustice and how it is redressed. Dylan goes beyond individual instances where justice has gone awry to decry a world in which injustice is the rule rather than the exception.

In an early song, "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" (1964), Dylan graphically relates the true story of Hattie Carroll's senseless murder. This maid of the kitchen is "slain by a cane" at a socially elite party in Maryland. But as Dylan unfolds the story, he cautions the listener at the close of each verse to withhold one's tears. Something more tragic is yet to be revealed.

The closing verse ironically announces that the judge "handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance/William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence." Dylan concludes: "Oh, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,/Bury the rag deep in your face/For now's the time for your tears." The greatest tragedy lies in the complete corruption of a society that produces this kind of specific injustice.

In these early years, Dylan expresses a prophetic optimism that promises redemption in time. He believes "The Times They Are A-Changin'" (1963) in which "the order is rapidly fadin'" and "the loser now will be later to win." Dylan, in the Hebrew prophetic tradition, does not minimize the element of God's judgment, which entails a cataclysmic upheaval of society in the process.

Dylan sings darkly that "a hard rain's a-gonna fall" (1963) and to look toward "the meanest flood that anybody's seen." But enemies of justice shall in time be conquered. He looks to the day "When the Ship Comes In," (1964) when the "foes will rise":

And they'll raise their hands,
Sayin' we'll meet all your demands,
But we'll shout from the bow your days are numbered.
And like Pharoah's tribe,
They'll be drownded in the tide,
And like Goliath, they'll be conquered.

Dylan expected the time to be redeemed through the prophetic assurance that life can change and injustices be redressed. Battles for justice must be fought and can be won.

ALTHOUGH DOGGED by pessimism from his earliest days, Dylan did not begin to lose hope about the meaning of history until around the time of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Through that event he recognized something of Lee Harvey Oswald within himself -- that perverseness of evil that pervades all of life. In "My Back Pages" (1964) he renounced the prophet's mantle, declaring that "I'd become my enemy/In the instant that I preach."

Dylan turned radically inward, seeking to transcend time within his own psyche. Through French symbolist derangements he sought to follow "Mr. Tambourine Man" (1964), who took him "disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind,/Down the foggy ruins of time ..." This interior venture produced some of Dylan's most imaginative and poetic songs.

At the same time Dylan's psychedelic view of the world produced a time warp in which all of life was seen as corrupt and beyond redemption. The world's doom is expressed in this imagery from "Desolation Row" (1965): "The Titanic sails at dawn/And everybody's shouting/'Which Side Are You On?'" As if it mattered.

Yet Dylan found it did matter to him. However much he sought to transcend time by escape into an inward landscape of the mind, he still cared about a fallen and unjust world. He continued to decry corrupt senators and commissioners and judges and preachers and businessmen. These temporal concerns were important to him. Dylan expresses this tension in "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again" (1966), where he simultaneously laments a degenerate society and complains, "An' I have no sense of time." Time is of the essence of this world. Dylan finds there is no escape.

Fed up with a surrealistic approach to life, Dylan startled his followers by producing in 1968 an earnest and austere Nashville-flavored album titled John Wesley Harding (1968). This followed a motorcycle accident in which he broke some neck vertebrae and spent months, as he put it, "looking up at the ceiling." With a fresh prophetic earnestness, Dylan engaged once more the issues of justice.

At the close of John Wesley Harding, Dylan took a fresh tack toward time and its potential for meaning in history. Striking his rock followers dumbfounded, he assumed the manner of a country gentleman who enjoyed the simple pleasures of nature. On New Morning, he explored time as an ever-flowing river or as cyclical -- reveling in the changing seasons.

But despite the joys of nature, Dylan concluded in "Time Passes Slowly" (1970):

Time passes slowly up here in the daylight,
We stare straight ahead and try so hard to stay right,
Like the red rose of summer that blooms in the day,
Time passes slow and fades away.

By 1971 the cyclical time of nature had circled quickly back to justice. In a lament titled "George Jackson" Dylan professed his love for this black man who had been shot through the head by prison guards. Where was the justice in all this? The cyclical time of nature had no answer.

A variation on time as cyclical is the effort to find meaning in the recurrent myths which seek to replenish old symbols with fresh meaning. Dylan explored these possibilities on an album called Desire (1975). Particularly in a song titled "Isis" (done in collaboration with Jacques Levy), Dylan explored how this ancient Egyptian myth could renew the wounds of married life. Recounting a long adventurous tale of a year's journey, the persona returns "not quite" different, confessing to his mystical lover that "what drives me to you is what drives me insane." Dylan, father of five children, was divorced from his wife Sara in 1977.

DYLAN'S MOST astounding shift in world perspective came in 1979 with the announcement that this Jewish native of Minnesota (born Robert Zimmerman but self-dubbed Bob Dylan before leaving for New York) had become a born-again Christian. Three evangelical albums quickly followed -- Slow Train Coming (1979), Saved (1980), and Shot of Love (1981) -- all with a clearly New Testament apocalyptic cast. In personal terms Dylan related a mystical experience: "Jesus put his hand on me. It was a physical thing. I felt it. I felt it all over me. I felt my whole body tremble. The glory of the Lord knocked me down and picked me up."

In a broader perspective, Dylan was still seeking to come to terms with humanity's "fall into time." He saw a pre-millenarian apocalyptic reading of the book of Revelation as a means to bring together his need for justice to be vindicated within history.

Dylan's new-found apocalypticism was congenial to his long-held pessimism toward improving society. The problem, Dylan now concluded, was cosmic. In an uncharacteristic outburst of testimony during a Santa Monica performance, he declared: "Satan is called the God of this world ... That's right -- he's called the God of this world, and prince of the power of the air."

But for Dylan the good news was that Jesus Christ through cross and resurrection had demonstrated his victorious power over Satan. And soon Christ would return to set up his righteous kingdom. In the final end, righteousness would be vindicated.

In "I and I" (1983) he marveled that it "took a stranger to teach me, to look into justice's beautiful face/And to see an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." At the same Santa Monica concert Dylan explained: "All these sad stories that are floating around. We're not worried about any of that - we don't care about the atom bomb, any of that, 'cause we know this world is going to be destroyed and Christ will set up his kingdom in Jerusalem for a thousand years, where the lion will lie down with the lamb."

DYLAN'S SEARCH for meaning in time throughout his 30 active years as a songwriter, which has resulted in an apocalypticism to which he still firmly holds, seems actually to have brought him little comfort. He still resides on Desolation Row -- more despairing and cynical than ever. With growing disillusionment he terms himself the old "Jokerman" (1983) who sees "freedom just around the corner for you/But with the truth so far off, what good will it do?" On his album Oh Mercy (1989), Dylan declares that we live in a political world in which everything is broken.

Ultimately divine retribution affords little encouragement for the triumph of justice in present-day living. In "Dark Eyes" (1985), a hauntingly doleful song, Dylan looks out upon a world of suffering and sings:

They tell me to be discreet
For all intended purposes
They tell me revenge is sweet
And from where they stand, I'm sure it is.
But I feel nothing for their game
Where beauty goes unrecognized.
All I feel is heat and flame and
All I see are dark eyes.

Dylan's ultimate hope for justice lies, as he sings in "Ring Them Bells" (1989), in being among "the chosen few/Who will judge the many when the game is through." But meaningful redemption in this life seems to have escaped him.

Dylan has not been able to shake his concern for justice taking place here and now in this world. This is expressed in his participation in relief efforts such as Live Aid and Farm Aid (which he helped initiate) and L'Chaim to Life. In regard to participating in a charity benefit, Dylan has said, "Obviously, on some level it does help, but as for any sweeping movement to destroy hunger and poverty, I don't see that happening." In a world seen as degenerating into its original chaos, present injustices seem to empty time of any vital meaning.

As Dylan joins the "fifty-somethings," he continues to search for life's meanings in terms of time and justice. He does so no longer as a blue-eyed visionary leader of an optimistic generation but as a sad-eyed prophet who is less sure of the answers than when he began composing his protest anthems 30 years ago.

At 50, Dylan is a sadder, and in his uncertainties, possibly a wiser man than when he began his visionary quest for meaning. But clearly he still struggles and puzzles over humanity's riddle of having fallen into time.

Colbert S. Cartwright was a retired pastor and lived in Fort Worth, Texas when this article appeared. He is the author of The Bible in the Lyrics of Bob Dylan.