False Prophet part 4: Sing to me, O Muse, of that man of many troubles

False Prophet (2020) part 4

by Jochen Markhorst

IV Sing to me, O Muse, of that man of many troubles

Hello Mary Lou - Hello Miss Pearl
My fleet-footed guides from the underworld
No stars in the sky shine brighter than you
You girls mean business and I do too

Tangible, identifiable influences of Homer on Dylan’s songs we have heard since the late 20th century, ever since Robert Fagles’ brilliant 1996 translation of The Odyssey. Initially in not too remarkable, undylanesque idioms where you can still think of coincidence (such as torn and tattered in “Can’t Wait” or true to life in “Red River Shore”), but at the latest since 2012, since Tempest, it’s irrefutable: Dylan copies entire sentences to his songs. They hauled your ship up on the shore and You been cooped up on an island far too long in “Roll On John”, for example, and I’ll lead you there myself at the break of day in “Duquesne Whistle”, up to even two consecutive lines as in “Early Roman Kings” (I’ll strip you of life, strip you of breath / Ship you down to the house of death).

And on Rough And Rowdy Ways in 2020 Homer, both the classic translations and Fagles’ retranslation, after nearly a quarter of a century of providing idiom and verse, seems to be slowly permeating Dylan’s style as well. Idioms we still see as well, of course. The painted wagon in “Crossing The Rubicon”, for instance, and the words with which Odysseus in Book XIX warns his old nurse Eurycleia not to betray him, “Or else, I warn you-and I mean business too”, we hear again in this second verse of “False Prophet”. But in a distich, as My fleet-footed guides from the underworld / No stars in the sky shine brighter than you now also sound Homeric stylistic features such as long comparisons and the peculiarity of naming characters with a compound adjective. Pallas Athena is almost always called “bright-eyed Athena”, or else “the bright-eyed goddess”, Hector is always “brazen-armed”, Menelaus “fair-haired” and Achilles, to return to Dylan, is nine times out of 10 referred to as “fleet-footed Achilles” (25 times in Lang’s translation, to be precise. And almost every time as “fleet-footed noble Achilles”).

It also seems to influence the choice of words in the setting description. We were already in the underworld thanks to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which apparently leads the flow of thought to the Greek underworld, to the fleet-footed god Hermes, the guide who leads the dead to, and Odysseus from the underworld;

“Why, he sent me down here once, to retrieve the hound that guards the dead—no harder task for me, he thought — but I dragged the great beast up from the underworld to earth and Hermes and gleaming-eyed Athena blazed the way!”

Even more remarkable than these stylistic quirks is the content. The narrator is led out of the underworld by two archetypal rock ‘n’ roll heroines – the suggestion being that he lived in a dark hell before 1956, and is then brought to the light by the fleet-footed, unearthly bright shining Mary Lou and Miss Pearl. Opening the gate to draw biographical lines from this narrator to Dylan:

“It was like I had been in the dark and someone had turned on the main switch of a lightning conductor.”
(Chronicles, Ch. 5, “River Of Ice”)

… an image Dylan uses more than once to describe the crushing impact music in general, and specific songs and/or artists have had on him:

“And that record changed my life right then and there. Transported me into a world I’d never known. It was like an explosion went off. Like I’d been walking in darkness and all of the sudden the darkness was illuminated.”
(Nobel Lecture, 2017)

In the first case, in Chronicles, about Woody Guthrie; in the Nobel Prize lecture about Leadbelly’s “Cottonfields”. And in 2022, in The Philosophy Of Modern Song, the image still has as much eloquence for Dylan when he wants to characterise the songs of Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong in Chapter 17, on The Temptations’ “Ball Of Confusion”:

“They look into the darkness and shine the light. And then they move on and shine the light into a different darkness. But it’s always darkness because you can’t shine a light into the light. They’re not preachers.”

Incidentally, with that last addition, They’re not preachers, we suddenly have a bridge to “False Prophet”. Not a tight, straight bridge, but still. Preachers, Dylan argues indirectly, bring light into the light. Great songwriters, on the other hand, bring light into darkness, drive out darkness in other words. In this second stanza of “False Prophet”, the listener may not yet know that we are listening to a first-person narrator who will hereafter declare three times that he is not a false prophet, but we already get a semi-religious hint; this narrator is someone who is led from the underworld to the light by luminous rock ‘n’ roll icons. And the closing line also insinuates that music is gospel: while the phrase “to mean business” seems to have come to Dylan the song poet via Fagles’ Odyssey, Dylan also uses it elsewhere to express something like “producing exceptional music”:

“With Roy, you didn’t know if you were listening to mariachi or opera. He kept you on your toes. With him, it was all about fat and blood. He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop and he meant business.”

… when the autobiographer Dylan tries to articulate Roy Orbison’s exceptionalism (Chronicles Chapter 1, “The Lost Land”), whom we, by chance or by design, shall encounter in the next verse. And in which that peculiar It was all about fat and blood seems like another Homer echo as well; we really only know the word combination “fat and blood” from The Odyssey, after all. With Fagles, the combination comes along three times, including in yet another of those long, Homeric comparisons:

“But he himself kept tossing, turning,
intent as a cook before some white-hot blazing fire
who rolls his sizzling sausage back and forth,
packed with fat and blood—keen to broil it quickly.”
                           (Book XX, "Portents Gather")

In short, the Muse who sang to Homer around 800 BC about the troubled man driven time and again off course after destroying the hallowed heights of Troy has found a new disciple 29 centuries later. Whose songs we are bound to keep singing too, for the next 29 centuries.

To be continued. Next up False Prophet part 5: Cut off the head of the owl, it’ll look like a chicken

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:

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