If You Have to Ask…

 

                        “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.”

-       Louis Armstrong

 

I get that the human brain likes to label and sort, to name and identify. It’s a stop on the road to understanding, a way to position yourself in the vast sea of knowledge. But the most important things to understand and experience defy easy explanation. Truth is nuanced, filled with alluring and unexpected curves and turns and hidden places. To ex-plain means to lay it out flat like a Kansas plain and in the process, lose its true meaning. Truth and beauty can be pointed to with words using images, metaphors, stories, can be felt in the body through musical vibration, exuberant or graceful dance, attention to breath. But it can’t be packaged, mass-marketed and sold on the Costco shelf. 

 

The two Bob Dylan films I recently watched are still echoing (the mark of a good film as opposed to a merely entertaining movie) and one thing that struck me in the latter part of the Scorsese film were all the failed attempts to interview Dylan and his resistance to the barrage of misguided questions. Misguided because they were all about him trying to pigeonhole his place in the ecology of artists and explain his “message.” If I was his advisor, I’d suggest he simply answer, “Listen to my songs.” And then ask the interviewer, “What do you think they mean?” In fact, one interviewer confessed he had never heard Dylan sing and when Dylan asked why he thought he had the right to ask him a question, the man replied, “It’s my job.” He was a newspaper reporter trying to capture Dylan in a sound-byte for a mass market not prepared for or capable of understanding what his songs had to offer. 

 

I’m so pleased that Dylan was the first songwriter to receive a Nobel prize for literature. More than well-earned, as re-listening to his songs (of course, especially his earlier ones), I was transfixed by his ability to find the perfect rhyme and image and phrasing in melodies that neither swallowed the meaning nor interfered with the words but drove them all yet deeper and lifted them yet higher. And equally impressed that he could sing these complex lyrics in long songs (a marked complex to the over-repeated little soundbyte-phrases of so much pop music) without ever faltering or needing a prompter. 

 

Without resorting to Google, here is a short list of some of his poignant images and wise words, all of which apply to our lives now as much as they did then and as much as they will tomorrow. All praises to the poet!

 

• You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

 

• You know something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is., do you, Mr. Jones.

 

• The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.

 

• You better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone, for the times they are a-changin’.

 

• He never thinks straight about the shape he is in, but it ain’t him to blame. He’s only a pawn in their game.

 

• He not busy being born is busy dying. 

 

• But I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.

 

• To dance beneath the diamond sky, with one hand waving free.

 

I could go on. What are your favorites?