False Prophet (2020) part 12: A manic depression is a frustrating mess

 

by Jochen Markhorst

XII        A manic depression is a frustrating mess

Put out your hand - there’s nothin’ to hold
Open your mouth - I’ll stuff it with gold
Oh you poor Devil - look up if you will
The City of God is there on the hill

I fought with my twin, that enemy within,” Dylan sings in 1978 (in the underrated masterpiece “Where Are You Tonight?” on Street-Legal), and that is neither the first nor the last time Dylan shows his fascination with duality, with ambivalence, with yin and yang. By the mid-70s, that fascination slips into the somewhat painful, silly, quasi-mystical claptrap that threatens to make inroads as a kind of compensation for our loss of religion and meaning. To which even an intelligent man like Dylan seems momentarily receptive;

“My being a Gemini explains a lot, I think,” Bob Dylan is saying. “It forces me to extremes. I’m never really balanced in the middle. I go from one side to the other without staying in either place very long. I’m happy, sad, up, down, in, out, up in the sky and down in the depths of the earth. I can’t tell you how Bob Dylan has lived his life. And it’s far from over.”
(TV Guide Magazine, September 1976)

A sign of the times; the nonsensical dabbling with constellations and horoscopes conquered more and more space in magazines, newspapers, television programmes and radio shows in the 1970s, only to be slowly pushed back to the margins. It takes until 2007 before Sheldon Cooper finally and definitively catapults belief in horoscopes and the like into the Realm of Dumb Blondes:

Penny: Okay – I’m a Sagittarius, which probably tells you way more than you need to know.
Sheldon: Yes – it tells us that you participate in the mass cultural delusion that the sun’s apparent position relative to arbitrarily defined constellations at the time of your birth somehow affects your personality.
Penny: Participate-in-the-what?
(Big Bang Theory, ep. 1)

By this time, Dylan has also distanced himself somewhat from the hippie-like swagger, classifying something like bipolarity not as a “symptom of being a Gemini” but rather as an inspiring mental condition. Which actually takes us back to the 1960s, by the way – after all, “manic depression is searching my soul” as Jimi confesses.

It is not academically based or undeniably provable, but it seems to be taking an awfully long time for the word bipolar to penetrate the art of song. The word has been around since 1953, thanks to German psychiatrist Karl Kleist’s laudable and ultimately successful intervention to avoid the stigmatising denomination manic depression. But in songwriting, we remain – due no doubt to Jimi – long wedded to that designation.

It eventually takes almost until the 21st century before the less fraught term bipolar appears in songs; The Handsome Family is one of the trailblazers, in the 1998 semi-autobiographical “My Ghost” (Here in the bipolar ward / If you shower you get a gold star), and after that, in the 21st century, the spell is well and truly broken. Indeed: especially our rapping friends on the frayed edges of society and the music industry adopt bipolar as a kind of badge of honour, as a synonym for “I’m dangerous”, but established names like Imagine Dragons, Eminem (Come up with aliases, bipolar opposites, “Groundhog Day”, 2013), Kanye West (who seems to have some right to speak), Flo Rida and the indestructible Ice Cube (The Incredible Hulk is bipolar, “Good Cop Bad Cop”, 2017) are drawn to the word’s euphony and its leaden connotations.

2020’s Dylan does not venture a clinical diagnosis, avoids medical terms, but the mental condition apparently continues to fascinate him. At least, the Prophet’s symptom and behavioural descriptions are gradually allowing for an educated layman’s diagnosis: all too stable our protagonist is not. In the previous seven stanzas we have already heard the Prophet slip from not unsympathetic lone wolf who opens his heart and allows himself to be guided by Miss Pearl and Mary Lou, to a domineering poacher who still doesn’t feel too big for a peaceful stroll in the garden, to an assertive force who announces that he will bring down vengeance. But now, in this eighth verse, the “going from one side to the other without staying in either place very long,” as Dylan self-analyses, accelerates.

The opening Put out your hand suggests a kind, helping friend. A suggestion immediately negated by the frustrating sequel There’s nothin’ to hold – apparently, the Prophet leaves the outstretched hand hanging in the air. To immediately thereafter intimidate the thus-frustrated antagonist with the bizarre threat Open your mouth – I’ll stuff it with gold. A threat that transports the classicists, the googling Dylanologists and the literate fans to ancient times, to the – presumably apocryphal – execution method the Parthians had devised for the hated, extremely rich Roman proconsul Crassus: they allegedly poured molten gold down his throat out of mockery. A gruesome torture death, which incidentally is also attributed to Emperor Valerianus (who would thus have been executed by a Persian king around 260) and to Manius Aquillius, who lost a battle against Mithridates VI of Pontus in 88 BC, was caught while fleeing and then tortured severely in the Dionysus theatre in Pergamon: Manius was tied behind a horse and dragged around while meanwhile gold coins were melted down. As a torture finale the molten gold then was poured down his throat.

That last detail, the detail that the gold came from melted-down coins, is then the closest thing to the threat that Dylan’s Prophet makes here. No more than that, anyway; a “stuffing the mouth with gold” is a quite different, less gruesome image than “pouring molten gold down the throat”. Which in itself is of little importance, of course – whether and how accurately the Prophet copies from ancient historiography is not too relevant. What is relevant are the remarkable tone and moodiness evoked by the weirder, archaic death threat. However, the Prophet’s antagonist is not given time to process this.

It is only a few seconds, and in those few seconds the Prophet switches from quasi-helpful (Put out your hand) through cynicism to aggression and back again to empathy: “Oh you poor Devil” is a rather affectionate insult. The ensuing imperative look up, the eighth imperative in the Prophet’s dramatic monologue, is softened – for the first time – with a harmony-seeking politeness phrase (if you will), and the finale is even an optimistic, happiness-promising exhortation: the Prophet does not send the man whose mouth he was just about to stuff to Hell, but he shows him the way to the City Of God, to Augustine’s Civitas Dei.

The victim of the Prophet’s fickleness, though, is likely to gradually attach less and less importance to the Prophet’s words after all the insults and kindnesses and threats and encouragement. And most likely shrugs his shoulders: a manic depression is a frustrating mess indeed.

To be continued. Next up False Prophet part 13: You’ve been rickrolled

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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:

One comment

  1. The good doctor above easily diagnoses the cause of Bob Dylan’s creativity – that is, Dylan’s bipolar, and the singer/songwriter knows it.
    However, as I’ve pointed out long ago, Dylan’s source of creativity has a lot more to do with his dyslexia. For example, in his short book Tarantula, “lampchops” later gets (mis?)corrected to “lambchops”. Giving too many diseases to Bob could be fatal.

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