I and I: God finds out Dylan thinks He maybe isn’t almighty after all.

By Tony Attwood

Dylan described this as “one of them Caribbean songs.  One year a bunch of songs just came to me hanging around down in the islands.”  He also said on another occasion in a comment to Leonard Cohen he wrote it in 15 minutes.

These are, for me at least, two of Dylan’s most helpful comments, for here they suggest that the song’s lyrics really are a series of phrases and words that came to him – perhaps with some flipping through the Old Testament at the same time (or maybe just remembering a phrase, given the amount of Bible study he had done a few years earlier), and which were crafted together without any deep planning or plotting of the meaning.

But even without said plotting and planning this is one of those songs in which the dichotomy between the life of the individual (whose life is inevitably self-centred) and the world itself (which could be on the brink of political, environmental, or conflagrational disaster) is explored.  Although it could also be a song in which God reflects on the futility and sheer utter pointlessness of being omnipotent.  And that is rather fascinating for when the omnipotent one asks, “what is the point of all this?” then the sparks really do either start to fly, or begin to die.

One of the key reference points we have here is that the song itself can travel in so many directions, as revealed by the various versions of the song hear on stage and across so many different times, as the lyrics reveal.

I’ve put three links on here to different live versions of the song, and if you have a mind to I would urge you to try all three (unless you already know them) because they each tell a different story even though each uses the same lyrics.  Then go back to the album (or listen on Spotify) and hear how Dylan wanted it at the start.

But back to the lyrics – for behind all the different musical versions there are two issues that commentators focus on: what does “I and I” actually mean, and how to handle a song in which the chorus (with its obscure meaning) is repeated five times.  Indeed, for me, identifying these issues really help me as I listen to the live versions, not least because the Hammersmith version really seems (to me – it is always just my opinion) to fail to deal with these issues in the way the others do much more successfully.

So let’s start with the dominant issue in many people’s debates on the song, the issue of what “I and I” actually means.

It can mean “me and you” and can also mean “myself and my consciousness”.  Or maybe “Me and Mine”, or it could be the public persona and the private persona.  There really is no way of telling what Dylan had in mind, which again makes me think it was just a phrase that came to him.

In such a case it could even (and this is just me being fanciful, but having had the thought I do rather like it) be about God being omnipotent, but also saying to humanity, I want you to be my friend.  God the all-powerful one vs. God the guy next door who helps you out with a new pair of shoes.

That God is part of the show is indicated with the final line of the chorus which is from Exodus, and refers to the notion that God is so utterly almighty and powerful that no one can see His face and live.  The overarching, all-powerful, omnipotent, absolute ruler and controller of all things who demands devotion or else sends you into the endless fires on judgement day.   Not my idea of fun but yes, in such a scenario, it seems fair enough that to look at Him is to die.

In many regards we’ve got the same sort of mystique and mysteriousness of Caribbean Wind here, as we move from one world to another line by line.  Take for example

Told about Jesus, told about the rain,
She told me about the jungle where her brothers were slain
By a man who danced on the roof of the embassy.

And that means… well anything you like.  The roof of the embassy could be a metaphor for pretty well most things – power, corruption, revolution, the denial of power…   or it could just be one of those great phrases that actually has no meaning but is worth keeping because it is so, so intriguing.   I can say for sure as an occasional song-writer whose works are just heard by a select few, I would love to have written that line.

Against this, the song is without utter brilliance and complexity of the music; it is a good song that benefits from its simplicity in the music, because of what the lyrics do.   So (for me at least) musically it is without the pure certainty of direction that the chorus of Caribbean Wind offers, but the lyrics make up for that to quite a large degree.

Here’s the first of the live versions:

After listening to this and the other live versions (below) it is a shock to come back to the album track, so restrained and (at least in the verses) almost hesitant.  It is an interesting game to play to jump from one to another.  Well, it has been for me over the last couple of days, as I prepare this little commentary.

And after a couple of days of pondering, to me the whole song seems like a deliberate mix, jumping from one reality to another, and so it deserves lots of outings in different forms.

Been so long since a strange woman has slept in my bed
Look how sweet she sleeps, how free must be her dreams
In another lifetime she must have owned the world, or been faithfully wed
To some righteous king who wrote psalms beside moonlit streams

Dylan here is exploring the vacuum, the alternative realities, the fact that where we are is pure chance, and as we move on (and not for the first time in writing these reviews of songs from the post-Christian era) I am reminded of Talking Heads song “Heaven” .

Dylan sings

Think I’ll go out and go for a walk
Not much happenin’ here, nothin’ ever does
Besides, if she wakes up now, she’ll just want me to talk
I got nothin’ to say, ’specially about whatever was

Talking Heads proclaimed,

There is a party, everyone is there
Everyone will leave at exactly the same time 
It’s hard to imagine that nothing at all
Could be so exciting could be this much fun 

This is the world of nothingness, vacancy, hopelessness, so far removed from the world of dominance proclaimed by Exodus despite the Old Testament certainty….

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

And we have the great imponderable.  There is no connectivity, except that everything is connected, but at the same time all is uncertain

Outside of two men on a train platform there’s nobody in sight
They’re waiting for spring to come, smoking down the track
The world could come to an end tonight, but that’s all right
She should still be there sleepin’ when I get back

There is also the most extraordinarily set of images in the final verse.  It is almost as if the character relating the tale is either the god who suddenly finds he is not omnipotent at all or the mortal who realises that he is not under God’s power.

Noontime, and I’m still pushin’ myself along the road, the darkest part
Into the narrow lanes, I can’t stumble or stay put
Someone else is speakin’ with my mouth, but I’m listening only to my heart
I’ve made shoes for everyone, even you, while I still go barefoot

That final line is not, for me, a line that has an explicit meaning – it is an image, like shaded colours in an abstract painting.  It is there for us to take as a feeling, not to say that it means x or y.  A bit like dancing on the roof of the embassy.

Time for the second live version…

Of course as others have said it could be about two Bob Dylan’s – the public and private man, the evangelical man or the agnostic, the optimist the pessimist.   Two characters at different times, two people living in the same body.  Hence the multiple versions of the song.

Here’s the third version…

Musically the song is a simple minor key blues rift build around Am, C, G; D Am.  The chorus has the same musical basis, just leaving out the C chord.  It is one of the many amazing things about Dylan’s music how it can get so much out of a chord sequence he has used so often before.

Dylan certainly felt a complete empathy with the song, between 1984 and 1999 he played it 204 times live on stage.  Thus he clearly got a lot out of the composition – which again reinforces my view that it is an abstract not a set of meanings.  Each time he recreated it, the music set the lyrics into a new mode with a new meaning.

It really is great fun.

The Discussion Group

We now have a discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook.  Just type the phrase in, on your Facebook page Untold Dylan or go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/254617038225146/

The Chronology Files

There are reviews of Dylan’s compositions from all parts of his life, up to the most recent writings, but of late I have been trying to put these into chronological order, and fill in the gaps as I work.

All the songs reviewed on this site are also listed on the home page in alphabetical order – just scroll down a bit once you get there.

14 Comments

  1. wow. no one else has dared take a stab at this one huh? I think the two I’s are the one he is and the one he wishes he were. He knows he should be different, better. Who makes love to a woman and then just gets up and leaves? Not the person he wishes he was. But unfortunately the person he is. He wishes he didn’t ask an eye for an eye (an old Testament concept for sure) but he’s just not able to get there (despite taking the untrodden path once where the swift don’t win the race)

    He has made shoes — his songs — as gifts of insight for us all. But he still goes barefoot because despite that fact he still wishes he knew more, he still does not understand; the ‘I’ inside himself is as lost and confused and incompetent as all of us are.

  2. I seem to remember an interview, or commentary/review, contemporaneous with the release of “Infidels” where “I and I” was described as a Rastafarian term to signify the oneness of all people under Jah.

  3. If one could completely know God, see his face, then he would cease to be a human and be beyond good and evil:”No man sees my face and lives”: Exodus 33:20); he would have neither spiritual nor physical drives, wants, desires, no conscience; he’d be a nihilist. He would be dead in so far as being human is concerned.
    Nietzsche turns over the tables and says it is God who is dead, and has to be re-formed.

  4. I have an idea of what he means with “I and I”
    The one “I” is God , the other “I” is himself.
    In the Old Testamente Exodus chapter 3 Moses ask God, what he shall call him – and God answers “I am”.
    I have once read that some jewish people are not allowed to say the name for God – and then they call him “I”. I cannot find it on the internet – but here is the story about: Moses and the burning bush
    http://www.biblestudytools.com/exodus/3.html

    The song opens with this scene:
    “Been so long since a strange woman has slept in my bed
    Look how sweet she sleeps, how free must be her dreams
    In another lifetime she must have owned the world, or been faithfully wed
    To some righteous king who wrote psalms beside moonlit streams”

    He is referring to the story about “David and Bathsheba”
    https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Samuel+11

    I think Bob Dylan relates himself to King David who indeed commited a lot of sins –

    Here you can read the story about God and King David:
    https://www.gotquestions.org/man-after-God-heart.html

    And hopefully you will now also find these lines amusing:
    “The world could come to an end tonight, but that’s all right
    She should still be there sleepin’ when I get back”

  5. Leonard Cohen has written a song about the same old story: Halleluja

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVP52dC3jks

    And now the great discussion can begin: Who has stolen from whom????
    We all built our stories on a commen wisdom /knowledge.
    That is what culture and religion is all about.

    Isaac Newton once said:
    “If I have seen futher it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”

    But of cause we could also go back to a period, where there were no names for anything.
    Sometimes you almost feel, we are there just now, especialy when you hear a pop song with only 4 word:
    I love you – I miss you.
    Is that a copy? sorry for asking.

  6. the phrase ‘I & I’ is a Rastafarian way of referring to your identity being both your ordinary separate embodied self and your self in God or Jahweh or Jah – the Rastafarians and the Hebrews words for God are similar – and this also includes your identity as one with every one else who is also alive in God. The drum and bass are from the late Bob Marley’s team too so the idea would have been in the air. I like the song a lot and am intrigued by it though I don’t really understand it much, just a few lines, like about making shoes, make sense. Brilliant what he does with those chords. Since the words are light years from simple its good at least the chords are simple.

  7. how about him leaving out the third verse in all those versions…”Took untrodden path..” Its a great verse, one of the best. What’s this? Surely not too confronting, challenging or confusing even for its maker? Maker of mankind might feel the same way? Dark paths.

  8. Babette is very close with her comment. I and I is one of the possible translations of “ehyeh asher ehyeh” (exodus 3:14). God speaks to Mozes from the burning bush and Mozes asks God how he should call him. Who should he say talked to him, his people will want to know. When I introduce myself I say: I am Joost. God doesn’t really answer. He says: I am I, or: I am who I am, or: I am who I will be. The meaning of the word “asher” depends on the context, but God does not give a context. And neither does Dylan. Great song though.

  9. While Bob makes many biblical references in this song, he also gives away a lot about himself.
    “Think I’ll go out and go for a walk
    Not much happenin’ here, nothin’ ever does
    Besides, if she wakes up now, she’ll just want me to talk
    I got nothin’ to say, ’specially about whatever was”
    Surely Bob is telling us how people with Aspergers feel about conversation and verbal communication. Bob’s Aspergers view of the world is prevalent throughout this and many of his songs, in fact, his so called Aspergers is what makes him able to observe the human condition so accurately.
    I and I could be a reference to I – himself calm relaxed and able to think clearly (known to himself, family a few close friends and to his audience through his songs) and the other I – himself affected by anxiety when dealing with people who expect him to be what they want him to be – “Someone else is speaking with my mouth, but I’m listening with my heart.

  10. She told me about the jungle where her brothers were slain
    By a man who danced on the roof of the embassy.

    It doesn’t mean just anything. It’s about people dying in the Vietnam war. The roof of the embassy isn’t a metaphor. It’s the roof on the American embassy in Saigon where a crowd gathered hoping to be taken away by departing helicopters. A photograph of people on the roof crowding the last helicopter became the iconic image of the fall of Saigon in 1975.

  11. “ Someone else is speaking with my mouth, but I’m listening only to my heart
    I’ve made shoes for everyone, even you, while I still go barefoot.”
    These two lines are very interesting of Dylan criticizing critics who believe they know the meaning of his songs better than himself. Dylan has often said he does not know how or why lyrics come to him. For him much of his writing comes from feelings which he himself cannot explain.

  12. I have three other angles that may relate, that I don’t think have been mentioned.

    The first is that there is a biblical story of a woman falling asleep only wake up to find her lover missing. It is of course The Song of Solomon 3:1-5. It is told from the woman’s view: she rushes into the street, asks some watchmen, before finding him. She tells girls not to fall one-sidedly in love.

    I & I’s first 2 verses riff on that situation, thinking what might be going through that man’s mind. The man gets up and goes, he is fond but not so captivated yet that he cares for her imagined yacking or her living in the past.

    (It may be that the two men in the tracks he sees correspond in sone way to the watchmen in her story.)

    The second is that there is a French phrase attributed to Jérôme Lejeune: “Seul Dieu pardonne vraiment, l’homme pardonne parfois, la nature ne pardonne jamais”
    Pope Francis said a version of it in Spanish recently, which comes out in English as “God always forgives, we men forgive sometimes, but nature never forgives.”

    If that phrase was in Dylan’s mind, then the phrase that “one’s nature neither honours nor forgives” is not saying there is no honouring or forgiving.

    Third, I think the song is in part another one of his songs about artistic creation, like Mother of Muses, When I create my Masterpiece, and others. In creation (e.g. songwriting) his nature (his mind) neither honours (thinks his own work is so great) nor forgives (lets him be very happy with bad songs).

    That this song is about his creative self-criticality is foreshadowed in the first verse: there is a king who writes psalms. And the most interesting line then, is that while he acknowledges that “someone else is speaking with my voice” that voice is not what he himself is caught up in: his vocation is to listen only to his heart. So this is the I and I: I the fastidious songwriter results in I the prophet.

    So how do these tie together: what does the runaway lover have to do with a songwriter avoiding being over calculating in his songs? I think it is this: surely we would think the perambulating lover was being a bit of a bastard? An ideal lover would be attentively gazing at her sleeping form and not dream of hurting her by not even leaving a note or SMS, surely? But no, the lover is not calculating the impact but is “listening to his heart” and skidaddling to go off and work through his own thoughts. (Thoughts such as the unfairness of the shoe situation, I guess.)

    I think this fits in with Dylan’s various interviews where he doesn’t like to think if himself as the voice of a generation or whatever, where he does not like people thinking his songs have a single calculated master agenda or univocal meaning, and where he does not like to overwork/overthink songs. If you overthink, you becone a manipulator of people: one of “the swift” who are on their too welltroden paths. His method/vocation is to listen to his heart and create critically, not to worry about what his audiences hear in those words.

    (The issue of how much a Christian should try for bland propaganda rather than ideosyncratic art was one that several mid-century catholic writers contended with, if anyone is interested. Flannery O’Conner wrote about the importance of attending to the art, for example; if you Google “The Atlantic Graham Greene’s Vatican Dossier” there is a great account of his fans and foes.)

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