False Prophet (2020) part 2: The Dead are from a different world

 I don’t know what it means either: an index to the current series appearing on this website.

Part 1 of “False Prophet” is at“The beam that is in thine own eye”

by Jochen Markhorst

II          The Dead are from a different world

Another day without end - another ship going out
Another day of anger - bitterness and doubt
I know how it happened - I saw it begin
I opened my heart to the world and the world came in

“HOLY SHIT, the Dung Beetle said. I will check it out. Thanks for the heads up.” Normandi Ellis responds enthusiastically and wittily to an email from a Dylan fan telling her that Dylan used her poetic translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead (Awakening Osiris, 1988) for his new song “False Prophet”. Half an hour later, she has checked, and Normandi sends a longer e-mail after, in which she cites, among other things, that Jerry Garcia had the entire “Becoming the Phoenix” passage read at his funeral service as he was lying in his coffin; wonders if Coleman Barks feels the same way every time someone uses his adaptations of Rumi’s poetry; and jokingly points out that she would happily accept $100 from Dylan as payment, being the amount that a concert ticket had cost her at the time.

At that point, the Dylan researchers on the fan forum expectingrain only celebrated the discovery I opened my heart to the world and the world came in, which comes straight from Chapter 8 of Ellis’ book, “Triumph over Darkness”:

“I’ve known the pleasures of the earth. I bathed myself in light on an afternoon of rejoicing—not a festival, but an ordinary afternoon where I opened my heart to the world and the world came in, where I brought water from the well with my daughter, where I chewed the grass, ate the figs and sat by the riverbank watching sunlight dazzle like the white pearls of my daughter’s smile.”

… but the intrigued fan who under the name “HatFullOfGasoline” bothers to read the whole chapter falls from one surprise into another aha-erlebnis. The day of anger, bitterness and doubt Dylan has picked up from the same chapter: “I know the names of the scorpions and they are these: anger, bitterness and doubt”, two pages after that we read “This is the day without end”, which Dylan will use for the opening line, for Another day without end, and with that we have already been able to reconstruct almost the entire first verse from Chapter 8 of Awakening Osiris.

Incidentally, the remaining phrases also seem at least inspired by this ancient collection of prayers, magic spells and incantations on assorted papyrus scrolls. Another ship going out breathes the same metaphorical charge as the dozens of boats that sail through the spells; “This white boat of spirit ferries the body through dark waters,” Ra sails in “the boat of the sun,” the soul of Osiris “sets sail in the boat of morning sun,” and to Ra is addressed the supplication “bless the boat of morning that carries us into light” – to quote just a few of the many examples. Only I know how it happened – I saw it begin has a somewhat Biblical tone, although even in Awakening Osiris the chief gods are referred to as “the masters who witnessed the creation.”

Apart from the words themselves, Dylan seems to have been touched by the style of writing as well. Repetitio is the favourite stylistic figure in the Egyptian Book of the Dead anyway, especially the “I + verb” opening variant, like this – rather randomly chosen – example from Chapter 40, “Becoming The Swallow”, in which almost every sentence and phrase begins with it;

“I have held my destiny in my two hands and I am the shape I made. I have suffered and loved. I have walked through fire and did not burn. I’ve been blown by wind and did not fall. I’ve walked the long road and kept to my journey though I met no other traveler. I have lost and found myself in every rock, field and tree. I know what I am and what I imagine. I know shadow and light, and I have never been satisfied with shelter and bread when the great was left unattained.”

… just as in Dylan’s “False Prophet” we also get an ‘I + verb’ opening 24 times in the ten stanzas. In addition, it is again striking how much Awakening Osiris has also permeated the other lyrics on Rough And Rowdy Ways. Side B opens with “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You”, and in it we hear an echo from the above quote:

I travelled the long road of despair
I’ve met no other traveller there

… as the oft-repeated “building people” in the Book of the Dead (Someday I’ll imagine myself a different man, build bone and make flesh around him in Chapter 45, “Becoming the Child”, for example) seems to descend in the next song, in “My Own Version Of You”, and as we hear one borrowing after another again in “Black Rider” on Side B:

Awakening Osiris:
“Is it even the same road I travelled a moment ago?”
“Black Rider” 1st verse:
The road that you’re on, the same road that you know
Just not the same as it was a minute ago

Awakening Osiris:
“I have seen the great world and the small one.”
“Black Rider” 2^nd verse:
                You’ve seen the great world, and you’ve seen the small

Awakening Osiris:
“Let me pass […] Then the doors open.”
“Black Rider” 4^th verse:
Let me go through, open the door

All borrowed from Chapter 9, “Seven Houses in the Other World”, a chapter where Dylan will no doubt have nodded approvingly and muttered in agreement more than once. “I am I – an old man become strong, a tongue spitting light into darkness” he reads there for instance, and “Love and anger gave me words of truth, but I refined them.”

Anyway, after all those otherwise weightless references to Egyptian mythology we’ve heard in Dylan’s songs since the 1960s (the magical Egyptian ring in “She Belongs To Me”, “Isis”, the god with the obsidian eyes in “Romance In Durango”, and more), Jerry Garcia’s funeral in 1995 with “Becoming the Phoenix” as the eulogy seems to have triggered Dylan to dive deeper into it. We see the Eye of Horus appear on a large canvas as background scenery at concerts, in the Rolling Stone interview in 2012 Dylan places the Book of the Dead in a list of titles that contain “truth” and “provide images for the songs”; “There’s truth in all books. In some kind of way. Confucius, Sun Tzu, Marcus Aurelius, the Koran, the Torah, the New Testament, the Buddhist sutras, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and many thousands more,” and a culmination of that fascination we then seem to reach here on Rough And Rowdy Ways: passages from the Book of the Dead that not only “provide images” but inspire whole songs.

“The Dead,” as Dylan says of Jerry Garcia’s Grateful Dead in The Philosophy Of Modern Song, “are from a different world.”

Grateful Dead – Estimated Prophet:

To be continued. Next up False Prophet part 3: Right up there in the stratosphere

 

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang
• Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
• Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
• Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
• Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
• I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
• Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
• Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
• Bob Dylan’s 1971