False Prophet (2020) part 10: I found the sound that was my holy grail

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Previously in this series

 

False Prophet (2020) part 10

by Jochen Markhorst

X          I found the sound that was my holy grail

I’ve searched the world over for the Holy Grail
I sing songs of love - I sing songs of betrayal
Don’t care what I drink - don’t care what I eat
I climbed a mountain of swords on my bare feet

At the gate, the servant stops his master. In the distance, a trumpet sounds. “Whither is the journey?” the servant demands to know, boldly. Strangely, the master accepts being stopped and questioned. “I don’t know,” he replies, “away from here, if only away from here.” “You have no food supplies with you,” says the servant, still unwilling to let his master and his horse go. “I don’t need any,” the master says, “the journey is so long that I’d starve anyway if I don’t find anything on the way. No amount of food can save me. Fortunately, it is a truly monstrous journey.”

A hundred years before we hear Dylan’s prophet return empty-handed from his long, strange journey, we meet a kindred spirit in Kafka’s Der Aufbruch (The Departure, 1920) – or perhaps even the young, enterprising and determined version of our prophet himself at the beginning of his journey. At the time, the departing master left unsaid what his destination was, other than that it was away-from-here; the prophet coming home reveals what his goal was, though still not too explicitly: I’ve searched the world over for the Holy Grail. A metaphorical Holy Grail, we may assume. After all, the real Holy Grail was, as we all know, found by Indiana Jones in Petra in 1989, in The Treasury.

In itself not too original; in poetry and in songwriting, nine times out of 10 Holy Grail is used metaphorically. Occasionally the “real” Holy Grail still comes along, as with Van Morrison (in “Avalon Of The Heart”, 1990) or Roger McGuinn (“Round Table”, 1976), but these are exceptions. Usually, searching for the Holy Grail symbolises a romantic longing, is a metaphor for our pursuit of happiness. As in Springsteen’s “Dry Lightning”, for instance, Roxy Music’s “Mother Of Pearl” or Sting’s “Sacred Love” – songs, incidentally, where the romantic connotation “unattainable” is largely ignored, as finding the Holy Grail is something like “gaining her love”. Also highly desirable, of course, but still a bit more prosaic.

More mystical, and thus a little closer to the charge Dylan seems to assign to it in “False Prophet”, are the artists who see something like “creating a crushing work of art” as the Holy Grail. Mark Knopfler, for instance, in his dreamy contribution to the soundtrack of the unjustly somewhat forgotten 1997 film Metroland. At least, “the line unwinding to the Holy Grail” leads past very musical, and very Dylanesque intermediate stations:

I've danced in rain, and I've been Django
And I've got laid
I've been a rolling stone
I've been Verlaine
And I've been Rimbaud
Not afraid to walk alone

… in which, from Highway 61 Revisited through Blood On The Tracks to Slow Train Coming, Knopfler uses subtle Dylan references to describe his journey to “another world” beyond the “blue horizon”, the land where the Holy Grail is said to be. Or, equally Dylanesque, the journey of the protagonist from Thompson Twins’ “The Saint”, a modest 1992 hit with the furious opening

I had an icon that glowed in the dark
With psychotropic eyes and a plastic heart
I had a guru, one vision, one dream
I saw the ides of March and they were looking back at me

… after which the narrator finally, after much prayer to “the Saint of the sonic groove” finds happiness in the last verse:

I have flown through the cosmic pale
I found the sound that was my holy grail
I rode the beat; I rode the drone
'Cause I am your pilgrim and I'm coming home

“I found the sound that was my holy grail”… and with that, we then seem to meet a soulmate of Dylan’s Prophet.

Dylan’s prophet, like his colleagues at the Thompson Twins and Mark Knopfler, has travelled a lot and endured hardship – our prophet has even climbed a “mountain of swords” barefooted. This particular image Dylan may have picked up in the Far East (“climb a mountain of swords” appears to be an ancient Chinese proverb to express the heaviness of a task), and other googling fans find that in the Buddhist underworld such a mountain is used as a torture set. But its keynote we have long known with Dylan. As yet bloodless in Hard Rain, where he “crawls over crooked highways”, in “Shelter From The Storm” it gets more gruesome as beauty walks over a razor’s edge, and in “Sweetheart Like You”, so nearly forty years before “False Prophet”, it’s as gory as Bruce Willis in Die Hard (1988; Willis walking barefoot over shards of glass during the Nakatomi Tower hostage situation) and as our prophet here:

You can be known as the most beautiful woman
Who ever crawled across cut glass to make a deal

And for what does this prophet climb the uninviting mountainside? He suggests that he hopes to find something like Solomon’s Song of Songs; I sing songs of love – I sing songs of betrayal – apparently, the Holy Grail the prophet hopes to find is something like the Mother of All Songs, the song that encompasses everything, the artistic equivalent of what physicists call the Theory Of Everything (and which, for now, seems just as unattainable).

Well, for that the Prophet might just have had to walk over to Dylan’s record cabinet. Under the C, he’ll surely finds Leonard Cohen’s Songs Of Love And Hate, and in the bookcase there might even be the 2011 Omnibus edition The Lyrics of Leonard Cohen; presumably the most complete collection of songs of love and songs of betrayal. And if he is very lucky, there might also be the old 1961 collection of poetry by the very young Leonard Cohen, The Spice-Box of Earth, which includes “The Adulterous Wives of Solomon”:

The adulterous wives of Solomon
Lie with young archers behind the filigree doors.
The music from his throne room, music of Negroes
And trained boys, comes over the night,
Past silver doors, into chambers
Where lovers never meant to betray their king.
How they sing, his musicians,
And our friends are lying unclothed,
Marvelling at the beauty of his court,
And though they betray him, these soldiers, these queens,
Why, they are the King's Men, they love and honour him.

A song in which everything comes together: love and betrayal, Solomon and the Song of Songs, holiness and sin. It just hasn’t been set to music yet – but if the Prophet asks nicely, we can be pretty sure his faithful disciple Dylan might be willing to do that for him.

To be continued. Next up False Prophet part 11: Say my name

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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:

 

 

2 Comments

  1. The movie “Metroland” and play “Madhouse On Castle Street” both feature Philip Saville’s like of intertextuality, the former produced in the time of continuing-Dylan fame; the latter in the time of relatively pre-Dylan fame. The movie centres on the existential decision to escape from the care-free life of youth to the supposed comfort of modern middle class life; the play centres on the decision to shut oneself away from the stress of modern life altogether.

  2. In CBC’s Quest 1964, Dylan finds himself located in an isolated log cabin in the northern woods
    of Canada, singing his songs to a number of others guys who are getting away from city life for a
    while ; to cast members of The Forest Rangers TV series like Michael Zenon (the “Indian” guide Joe Two Rivers) and Eric Cryderman(the always clean-shaven tower- lookout ranger Matt Craig). Clinton Heylin finds Dylan’s rather typical Americana setting to be “most incongrous” as might other European city-dwelling analysts.

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