False Prophet IX: Just a closer walk with Thee

False Prophet (2020) part 9

by Jochen Markhorst

Just a closer walk with Thee

What are you lookin’ at - there’s nothing to see
Just a cool breeze encircling me
Let’s walk in the garden - so far and so wide
We can sit in the shade by the fountain side

The car chase in which bone-dry Detective Sergeant Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) chases the villainous doctor in the Naked Gun series (1988-94) gets completely out of hand. The doctor crashes into a tanker truck, rolls on scorched and blackened after the explosion on the remains of his car, collides with an army vehicle transporting a cruise missile, survives that crash too and, clinging to the cruise missile, rams a fireworks shop – the ensuing explosion is infernal. People stagger out from the burning hell, fireworks spray out whistling in all directions and a bewildered crowd gathers on the streets. Debrin’s police instinct switches to crowd control: “Alright, move on. Nothing to see here! Please disperse!”

Same charge as Dylan’s Twitter announcement. When Dylan releases “False Prophet” on 8 May 2020 as a teaser for the forthcoming album Rough And Rowdy Ways, he limits the accompanying text on Twitter to “What are you lookin’ at – there’s nothing to see”, the opening line of the fifth verse. So he – or his promotional team – seems to attach a special value to it, but why is not entirely clear. Prompted by a sympathetic penchant for self-mockery, presumably. On its own, as with Detective Sergeant Frank Drebin, it is of course a line that signals that there is, in fact, something to see.

Bob Dylan – False Prophet live in Lyon 2023

The tweet is the scoop of the image that will also adorn all Rough & Rowdy Ways Tour posters – the grinning, well-dressed Dr Death with syringe and the shadow of a hanged man behind him. “Nothing to see” is thus decidedly ironic. Irony that in this song works as a kind of comic relief after the preceding verse; after all, we have just become better acquainted with the Prophet who boasts that he is second to none and the last of the best, who implicitly proclaims “Look at me – I am quite something to see”, and sinisterly adds that we should put everyone else underground – and then, with feigned assertiveness, parries the attention thus drawn with “what are you looking at?”.

The assertiveness of the opening line contrasts with the rest of the verse. The three lines that follow are conciliatory, breathe a pastoral atmosphere and outline an idyll;

Just a cool breeze encircling me
Let’s walk in the garden - so far and so wide
We can sit in the shade by the fountain side

A walk in the garden, cool, a fountain… the Dylan fan is inevitably reminded of the setting described in the opening lines of “Ain’t Talkin’”, the finale of Modern Times (2006);

As I walked out tonight in the mystic garden
The wounded flowers were dangling from the vines
I was passing by yon cool and crystal fountain
Someone hit me from behind

Bob Dylan – Ain’t Talkin’ (Alternate Version):

Not too far-fetched; like “False Prophet”, “Ain’t Talkin’” is a song of cut-and-paste from Dylan’s jukebox (The Stanley Brothers’ “Highway Of Regret” and “The Wayfaring Stranger”, for instance) and from Dylan’s library (Ovid’s Tristia, notably). And the tone of both is set by gospel overtones, larded with a faint but unmistakable Walt Whitman scent.

However, the most remarkable similarity between the two lyrics concerns the dualistic nature of the protagonist. Like the narrator in “Ain’t Talkin’”, the not-false prophet chafes at paranoid schizophrenia, judging by the mixed signals he gives off. Bloodthirsty vindictiveness on the one hand:

I’ll avenge my father’s death    vs.      I’m here to bring vengeance on somebody’s head

or

I’ll just slaughter them              vs.           Open your mouth – I’ll stuff it with gold

… carried by blunt, aggressive talk, and, on the other hand, the gentle side of the narrator, evidenced by such gentle, amicable words as

I’m trying to love my neighbor    vs.           I sing songs of love

or

I beg your pardon                      vs.           your smile meets my smile

… or like the whole pastoral terzet in this fifth verse, of course.

Gospel overtones predominate. “Walking in the garden” + “cool” has been a trigger for religious interpretation since Genesis 3; “And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.” Christian interpreters of “False Prophet” welcome the suggestions and implications of the context, the circumstance that the strolling scene takes place right after “the eyes of them both were opened”, right after Adam and Eve have eaten of the forbidden fruit. “What are you lookin‘ at – there’s nothing to see” are then the words a poet may put into the mouth of Adam, who is now aware of his nakedness and hides to avoid being seen.

And, even more conclusively, Adam now has knowledge of Good and Evil, can indeed use his just acquired discernment to judge whether or not he is a false prophet. Statistically, by the way, the Christian interpreters have a point as well: in the canon and in Dylan’s record collection, a “walk in the garden” is nine times out of ten the Garden of Eden. In fact, only Dylan’s hero George Jones uses it once without divine suggestion:

When the leaves begin to fall in the autumn
And the raindrops drip from the trees
There's an old old man who walks in the garden
And his head is bowed in memory

… in the 1963 blockbuster “The Old, Old House”, the song eagerly picked up by Bill Monroe, by Dr Ralph Stanley and by the rest of the bluegrass world.

The other garden, the Garden of Gethsemane that Dylan sings about in “In The Garden” (Saved, 1980), equally delivers the religious connotations we all have when we in 2020 hear Dylan singing about a prophet walking in a garden. Stronger connotations even, as in this garden, after all, walks the most famous prophet of all time.

Otherwise not entirely conclusive, unfortunately. The garden of Gethsemane is primarily the place where Jesus spends His last night, agonising over what awaits Him, begging His Father that this hour pass Him by and this cup be taken away from Him. But ultimately He bows to the will of God, and with burdened hearts He welcomes the treason and strife, welcomes the Judas kiss and the subsequent skirmish that costs the high priest’s servant an ear.

Preceding words like I go where only the lonely can go, I’m first among equals, I just know what I know and I ain’t no false prophet all fit Jesus’ last night and His words during the subsequent trial in the Sanhedrin where He is condemned to death by Caiaphas and his henchmen. Still, God’s and thus Jesus’ will can only be done through the betrayal by Judas; Jesus is no enemy of treason, but rather wishes for that betrayal – implicitly in the New Testament gospels, explicitly in the fascinating, apocryphal Gospel of Judas.

On the other hand: if we already want to assign an identity to the first-person in “False Prophet”, Jesus is still a much stronger candidate than Detective Sergeant Frank Drebin. Who, incidentally, we do see walking in a garden as well, one single time. In the garden of the hospital Our Lady of the Worthless Miracle.

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To be continued. Next up False Prophet part 10: I found the sound that was my holy grail

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