My Own Version Of You part 6: They saw, yet they did not see

by Jochen Markhorst

VI         They saw, yet they did not see

I get blood from a cactus – make gunpowder from ice 
I don’t gamble with cards and I don’t shoot no dice
Can you look in my face with your sightless eye
Can you cross your heart and hope to die

I’ll bring someone to life - someone for real
Someone who feels the way that I feel

The PR department of Zeus and his colleagues seems more effective. Zeus and all the other gods are honoured, given temples and offerings, are worshipped, respected and feared. Which is a bit peculiar, viewed rationally – Zeus is de facto the first godfather, a powerful mob boss actually. He offers “protection” in exchange for “sacrifices”, punishes innocents cruelly and unreasonably (for example: when Prometheus steals fire for mankind, humans are punished with Pandora’s Box), and assaults, rapes and kidnaps people – men, women and underaged girls – when he has yet another horny fit. Destroying them just as easily, for that matter.

The Titan son Prometheus, on the other hand, is not only the creator of man, but also the ultimate benefactor. Besides fire, he grants his creation medicine, architecture, metalwork, hope, penmanship and what not. In short: Zeus brings misery, Prometheus blessing. However, his creation, i.e. humanity, does not show itself too grateful. Schools, sports clubs, planets, symphonies, delivery services, dating sites, universities and hundreds more cultural products are named after gods – but never after Prometheus. The arrogant scum on Olympus, as mentioned, have their PR in better order.

We can’t blame the historians. Homer, Aeschylus, Sappho, Ovid, Apollodorus, Plato, and the biggest fan being Hesiod… in all centuries and in all corners of the ancient world, they are, without exception, clear and unambiguous: mankind owes intelligence, progress and health, happiness and prosperity, well-being and welfare, everything in fact, to Prometheus. And this may have been recognised and endorsed by artists in all centuries up to the present day, but certainly not by Tom, Dick and Harry, nor by Joe and John Q. Public.

Dylan is a next artist in line, though only implicitly referring to the ancient Titan. No doubt he has seen Mary Shelley’s subtitle (Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus), and that may have put him on the trail, or at the very least triggered associations. After all, that odd sightless eye in this third stanza is quite a giveaway. Some interpreters may see a hint to blind blues legends such as Blind Willie McTell, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Reverend Gary Davis and others, or even to the blind bard Homer, but that would really be a bit too cumbersome a reference – not to say slightly disrespectful in this context. No, the context – a life-creating genius – leads to Aeschylus, to Prometheus Bound (Προμηθεὺς Δεσμώτης, c. 450 BC), leads rather directly to the famous monologue in which Prometheus lists his merits for humanity, stating in line 447:

οι πρώτα μέν βλέποντες έβλεπον μάτην – They saw, yet they did not see

A key sentence, as it marks the moment when Prometheus decides to upgrade those will-less, emotionless, ignorant lumps of flesh who “led their long lives randomly and in total confusion” into what we now call human beings – to give “sight” to the sightless eyes, eyesight to the blind, as Sonny Boy Williamson would say (1951).

Remarkably, Dylan’s stream of thought then flows into a tributary dug out by a more recent predecessor: by Goethe.

Goethe struggled with the Prometheus material for a while in his younger years. Understandably so, because the story is tailor-made for the young Stürmer und Dränger that Goethe was back then. The protagonist a fierce, powerful rebel who rebels against the highest authority, against the Supreme God himself – if Prometheus had not already existed, he would have been invented by the fierce, rebellious poets of Sturm und Drang. In 1773, Goethe first tries to turn it into a play, breaks it off again, then has it published and performed as a “drama fragment” anyway in 1774. This Prometheus will appeal to both Dylan and the narrator of “My Own Version Of You”: a headstrong, creative genius who defies the gods, especially Zeus, with utter disrespect and disdain. He ridicules them, denies them any quality and acknowledges only two superior forces: Time and Fate. Parts of the drama fragment Goethe then reuses for his hymn Prometheus, which soon achieves the status it still has today: it is one of Goethe’s Greatest Hits. And in the apotheosis of that hymn, in the final couplet, we see the soulful relationship with the creator in Dylan’s refrain line after the third verse. I’ll bring someone to life – someone for real / Someone who feels the way that I feel:

Hier sitz’ ich, forme Menschen
Nach meinem Bilde,
Ein Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei,
Zu leiden, zu weinen,
Zu genießen und zu freuen sich,
Und dein nicht zu achten,
Wie ich!

Here sit I, forming mortals
After my image;
A race resembling me,
To suffer, to weep,
To enjoy, to be glad,
And thee to scorn,
As I!
                                       (transl. Sir Walter Scott)

 After Goethe’s Prometheus has spent six irregular, non-rhyming couplets lashing out at the gods, snarling at them about how powerless, poor, unfeeling and arrogant they are, mocking them for deriving their supposed majesty from the sacrifices and prayers of “trusting fools, children and beggars”, he shares the recipe for the perfect creation: emotions. A creature in my image has the feelings I have, can suffer and enjoy, cry and laugh, and has no respect for you – just like me. Or, as Dylan has the creator summarise in his song, “a real being who can feel what I feel.” And again a little later, recapitulating in the song’s closing line, even a stroke more explicit: “Do it with laughter – do it with tears.” A laugh and a tear, or: comedy and tragedy, ultimately the only two flavours of Life itself, the Way of all the World – which, as we all know, is a stage.

To be continued. Next up My Own Version Of You part 7: “Although I did not mean myself when I said ‘I’…”

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