False Prophet (2020) part 14: I discern the fruit from the poison

Previous articles in this series…

by Jochen Markhorst

XIV      I discern the fruit from the poison

You know darlin’ the kind of life that I live
When your smile meets my smile - something’s got to give
I ain’t no false prophet - I’m nobody’s bride
Can’t remember when I was born and I forgot when I died

“Though I cannot remember my birth and shall forget my death, I live in the midst of wonder,” the diary-like, poetic profession from the Egyptian Book of the Dead that paraphrased became the closing line of Dylan’s “False Prophet” – the fourth (paraphrased) quote from Chapter 8, Triumph Over Darkness, to descend into Dylan’s song. The honourable positions of these quotes (opening line, the opening couplet and the closing line), their expressive power and quantity do by now justify the conclusion that Dylan based his protagonist on the narrator in Triumph Over Darkness.

Which doesn’t really resolve the question of his identity, by the way. Eight pages, 2880 words, in which the narrator – teasingly, it seems – insinuates 42 times that he will now reveal his identity: no fewer than 42 times in those eight pages he makes an “I am” statement. “I am a man walking the path, separating the nettles from the flowers,” for example. “I am an animal”, “I am a baboon driven by instinct”, “I am a jackal devouring the meat of life”, “I am a light, a fire, a purpose, a rager against oblivion”, and so on – and with each “revelation”, with each self-characterisation, the picture becomes more unclear – he contains multitudes, might be the sharpest characterisation then.

In any case, he is an entity that seems to be outside time and space. And beyond that, as with the Prophet, we can only tick off who or what he is not. He is not a god, for instance – the narrator places himself outside the realm of the gods, recounts having seen the birth of Ra, witnesses bickering between gods, and even hints that he himself is outside creation, when he reports on an overheard conversation between the god of life and the god of death, revealing that he existed before the god at duty started creating living beings:

“Come,” said the lord of life to the lord of death one day. “Let us make a truce. I shall bring forth creatures and deliver them unto death, if you deliver the dead unto life.”

Death still resists a bit, until Truth, “the great uniter”, suggests that the god of life creates two of each creature; a visible and an invisible one. Death may keep the visible creature, the flesh, after its death, but the invisible one he returns to Life.

This is described in the first half of Triumph Over Darkness, and at that point we might still be tempted to think that the narrator is Anubis, a psychopompos at any rate, a conductor of souls to the Realm of the Dead. He is obsessed with dualities, with light and darkness, good and evil, birth and death, and above all: “I discern the fruit from the poison.” In Egyptian mythology, the deceased is led by Anubis to the Hall of Two Truths, where he weighs the heart. Lighter than the Feather of Truth: eternal life – but if sins have made the heart too heavy, the monster Ammit eats the heart. Fitting to one of the narrator’s many credos in this chapter: “I am a lover of truth. I cut away lies, these rags of mortality.” And fitting with Dylan’s Prophet, with a whole series of his statements. I’m the enemy of treason, for instance, and you got a poisoned brain, and I’m here to bring vengeance – and without too much intellectual acrobatics we can rhyme even more of Dylan’s Prophet’s statements with a Final Judge, with a being who on the threshold of the Hereafter passes the verdict eternal life or damnation.

But alas, further on in the chapter, it turns out that the narrator is not Anubis, but mainly an observer, a passive, omniscient witness reporting on what goes on in earthly life, in the house of death, and on its threshold. And his function seems to be to guard the harmony, “that the world would remain constantly in balance,” as he says. A storyteller with characteristics such as we have seen emerge in Dylan’s oeuvre for decades. The reporter from “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall”, the prophet from “When The Ship Comes In”, the seer from “Gates Of Eden”, the traveller in “Shelter From The Storm”, all the way through to the mysterious, lonely seekers in “Changing Of The Guards”, “Man In The Long Black Coat” and “Red River Shore”: sketchily painted portraits of eccentric characters who give wondrous testimonies, tell of strange, distant lands and have witnessed unimaginable events – and usually seem to possess spiritual, intangible powers. And, like the Prophet, all of them unique entities as well – second to none, as it were.

The Prophet’s elusiveness is not lifted in this last verse either. Indeed, with I’m nobody’s bride, the narrator suddenly insinuates that he is female – or at least genderless, anyway. Nay, it seems as if Dylan fills the last lines to the closing line with more vagueness-enhancing multitudes, scraping a few last references from the bottom of his cultural rucksack. At least: I’m nobody’s bride seems like a not too substantial, sympathetic salute to “Nobody’s Bride” by Ronee Blakley, the never quite broken-through super-talent we have met in Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue – the appealing ‘Nobody’s Bride’ is on the album released during the Revue, Please (1975), the album also featuring the song with which she shone night after night during that tour, “Need A New Rising Sun”.

With even more wishful thinking we could understand something’s got to give as a hint to Marilyn Monroe’s last, unfinished film. Unfinished, as Marilyn died during its filming – so it is the movie portraying her while she is standing on the threshold of the House of Death. However, the preceding verse fragment, the rather corny, Sinatra-like when your smile meets my smile, does not fit with this at all – nor with the image of the Prophet that we have by now, for all its vagueness, been able to discern.

And that picture, for all its vagueness, is framed above all by all those antique-literary references, by all those reverences to the music-historical gods and demigods, the bowing to the cultural signposts through all the centuries – in which, atypically enough, we are gradually beginning to recognise the contours of Dylan himself…

To be continued. Next up False Prophet part 15: No, people never see me as a prophet

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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:

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