Highlands (1997) part 4 (final): She studied the lines on my face  

Highlands (1997) part 4 (final)

by Jochen Markhorst

• Part 1: Wild rose in the heather
• Part 2: You can hear the air around it
• Part 3: That long rambling talking thing

IV         She studied the lines on my face     

I’m in Boston town, in some restaurant
I got no idea what I want
Well, maybe I do but I’m just really not sure
Waitress comes over
Nobody in the place but me and her

 We owe to the esteemed Harvard professor Richard F. Thomas a special, fascinating plot interpretation of that alienating intermezzo halfway through the song, those seven stanzas forming a kind of one-act play for two in an empty restaurant in Boston. In his wonderful Dylan study Why Dylan Matters (2017), Professor Thomas points to the return of the image of the waitress. A return from that other monumental song in Dylan’s catalogue, from “Tangled Up In Blue” (Blood On The Tracks, 1975).

Now we also recognise the male protagonist from “Tangled Up In Blue”. Now, in “Highlands”, he is in the “wrong time”, you picked the wrong time to come, says the waitress, who by her looks and her behaviour has thrown him back in time, back to 1974. Just like her predecessor, she observes the restaurant guest intently (She studied the lines on my face vs. She studies me closely), we are again in an otherwise empty catering facility, and when she insists on drawing her portrait, he has to draw it, strangely, from memory, although she is standing right in front of him. It doesn’t look a thing like me, she says a little later, a bit indignantly. On the contrary, the satisfied artist contradicts her, it most certainly does – after all, he has fabricated a fine portrait of the memory of that waitress in the topless place at the time. The last stanza definitively illustrates that the narrator is in a different time zone when the waitress asks which female authors he has read: “Erica Jong,” he replies triumphantly. Erica Jong’s controversial Fear Of Flying is from 1973.

She goes away for a minute
And I slide up out of my chair
I step outside back to the busy street but nobody’s going anywhere

Bob Dylan – Highlands:

It is the second time in Dylan’s oeuvre that an assertive bar lady is given a supporting role. So the first is that lady in a topless bar taking the protagonist home and making such a smashing impression with the work of a thirteenth-century Italian poet.

Twenty-two years later, her colleague in some Boston restaurant gets the spotlight, with word choice and plot suggesting that the protagonist is thinking of the same lady as in “Tangled Up In Blue”.

And four years after this we seem to encounter her a third time. In the sixth verse of “High Water” on “Love And Theft” the lady in the restaurant scene is then given a name, “Fat Nancy”, and there is again a suspicion of déjà vu. The tone, this time;

I asked Fat Nancy for something to eat, she said, “Take it off the shelf—
As great as you are, man,
You’ll never be greater than yourself.”
I told her I didn’t really care

Each time, the protagonist has a laborious, jolting dialogue with the lady present. In Tangled, the first-person can only mumble unintelligibly at a direct, simple question like “Don’t I know your name?” and remain awkwardly silent at an inviting opening like “I thought you’d never say hello”. In Boston, like a Kafka story, the conversation stumbles from denial to misunderstanding to rebuttals and back again (“got any soft boiled eggs?” “we’re out of them”, “draw a picture of me” “I don’t have my drawing book”, etc.): the same pattern as the brief interlude in “High Water”.

It’s not the only striking thing that seems to hint at Dylan doing some retrospection in “Highlands”. It is a sub-motive at the very least, or so it seems. Time Out Of Mind is a double album released thirty-one years after Dylan’s first double album Blonde On Blonde, and again the last record side, side 4, is reserved for one single song. Back then “Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands”, in which a young, lovesick narrator sings a lady from the Lowlands. Now “Highlands”, in which an old, disillusioned narrator longs for the loneliness of the Highlands. Unattainable they both are, by the way; “Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands, where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes” as the narrator sang thirty years ago, willing to wait, though. Worn out, but nevertheless more optimistic, the narrator is thirty years later:

Well, my heart’s in the Highlands at the break of day
Over the hills and far away
There’s a way to get there and I’ll figure it out somehow
But I’m already there in my mind
And that’s good enough for now 

… a beautiful, peaceful, thoroughly melancholic ending to a wonderful song. And if Dylan keeps up this rhythm, we will hear what happened to this protagonist on side 4 of the next double album, sometime around 2028.

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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:

• 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
• Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door