by Jochen Markhorst
XVI Your writings and rotten plagiarisings ill-gotten
Can you tell me what it means to be or not to be You won’t get away with fooling me Can you help me walk that moonlight mile Can you give me the blessings of your smile
This penultimate verse, the verse before the final marathon verse of 20 lines, is the odd one out. It is a demure quatrain that appears to be set up as a bridge. But once in the studio, Dylan, like all of us, becomes entranced by what Blake Mills conjures from his guitar, and decides to solidify that hypnotic descending c#/b/a#/a and let it resonate under the “bridge” as well. Well, that seems a likely scenario anyway, given the distinct colour of this quatrain’s lyrics.
The colour, or perhaps rather, the tone suggests a brief fermata, a short pause for breath before we plunge into that overwhelming, exhausting finale. The accumulation of polite, submissive questions, the opening with a well-known Shakespeare quote, the elegant nod to one of the most elegant Stones songs, and especially the remarkable gentleness and charm of the graceful final line Can you give me the blessings of your smile… tone and colour are decidedly different from the other seven verses of “My Own Version Of You”.
In this context, the blessings of your smile seems to signal something like “the impact of a work of art”, the shivers that run down your spine at the first notes of the Adagio from Rachmaninov’s 2nd Piano Concerto or when Jeff Buckley reaches the chorus of “Lilac Wine” – as this whole quatrain seems to want to articulate “the power of a song”. A song can give us “truth that needs no proof”, as Dylan writes in The Philosophy of Modern Song (Ch. 23 “El Paso”), the truth to which Dylan refers when he shares: “There’s a mystery, magic, truth and the bible in great folk music. I can’t hope to touch that, but I’m goin’ to try” (Michael Iachetta interview in New York Daily News, 1967), the truth he means when he says “Music is truthful” (Jonathan Cott interview for Rolling Stone, 1977), to which he alludes when declaring:
“The songs I play night after night are proven to be true and strong. Otherwise, I couldn’t sing them night after night. They can be performed over and over because there is a truth in them.”
(Edna Gundersen interview for USA Today, 1997)
… the truth that his protagonist seeks in “My Own Version Of You” when he asks his creature: “Can you tell me what it means to be or not to be?”. And after the next question, “Can you help me walk the moonlight mile?”, the chosen structure for this “bridge couplet” emerges. With anyone else, we might be inclined to think of the corniest and most successful inspirational quote of this century, Love Live Laugh, but knowing Dylan, he probably had as a format: the truth, the way and the life, John 14:6, Jesus’ self-portrait and His answer to the question of how we can come to the Father.
In this – presumed – structure, the blessings of your smile would then be “Life”, and the choice of words is striking. This is not the first time in Dylan’s oeuvre that we hear an echo from Hesse’s Steppenwolf (1927);
„Da klang hinter mir ein Gelächter, ein helles und eiskaltes Gelächter, aus einem den Menschen unerhörten Jenseits von Gelittenhaben, von Götterhumor geboren. Ich wandte mich um, durchfroren und beseligt von diesem Lachen, und da kam Mozart gegangen.“
“At that, there rang out behind me a peal of laughter, a clear and ice-cold laughter out of a world beyond unknown to men, a world born of sufferings, purged and divine humour. I turned about, frozen through with the blessing of this laughter, and there came Mozart.”
We are in the final phase of Harry Haller’s hallucinatory notes, as Harry comes to the realisation that he, like everyone else for that matter, contains multitudes, housing hundreds of characters and personas within him. United with his alter egos, he takes drugs, enters the “magical theatre”, and there he meets the “God of my youth, the lifelong object of my love and veneration,” Mozart.
In the background, the finale of Don Giovanni plays. “Well, the music is fine,” says Mozart, not entirely displeased. Fanboy Harry gets all mushy and makes it awkward. “Es ist die letzte große Musik, die geschrieben worden ist – It is the last great music ever written,“ he solemnly declares. Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert… all nice enough, but “a work of such plentitude and power as Don Giovanni has never since arisen among men.”
Mozart laughs heartily at him: “Take it easy,” and pulls Harry down from his high horse with funny faces, silly dance moves and wicked rhymes. Even worse: in the next scene, Mozart torments Harry with what he considers “the last victorious weapon in the war of extermination against art”, a radio, and from the “devilish metal funnel” sounds “its mixture of bronchial slime and chewed rubber” which is nowadays stupidly called “music”.
Once again, Mozart ridicules him wholeheartedly. Put that pathos aside, he smirks, and just listen: Händel’s Concerto Grosso in F major. Hear those basses – they stride like gods. “Behind the veil of this hopelessly idiotic and ridiculous apparatus the form of this divine music passes by. Pay attention.” Even a Händel distorted by the radio is still divine, Mozart teaches. And so it is with your life, Harry. The music that is mutilated by the radio is a metaphor for the eternal conflict between idea and reality – life is just like that, my dear. And then Mozart reveals to poor Harry the secret of life: laugh about it. Harry must learn to laugh, must learn the blessings of a smile.
Nat King Cole – Smile:
A nice correlation, all in all, Mozart’s lessons to Harry and this quatrain from Dylan’s song (including Harry’s Dylanesque sensitivity to sound), but it is unlikely that the associatively writing songwriter Dylan set it up like that. A more obvious scenario is that the course of his stream-of-consciousness meanders via Moonlight Mile past his own song “Moonlight”, the song he has performed over a hundred times in the first decade of this century. The song with the Melville paraphrase I’m preachin’ peace and harmony, the blessings of tranquility, (“Glad to find one blessed oasis of tranquility,” from The Two Temples), the only other instance in Dylan’s vast oeuvre with the word blessings, leading him to the final link in the association chain moonlight mile – Moonlight – blessings of tranquility – blessings of your smile.
Not very high-brow then, such a creation scenario of a quatrain constructed from Shakespeare’s most well-known bumper sticker, a Stones song, a song from his own catalogue, and an indirect paraphrase of Melville – but entirely in the spirit of the punchline of Mozart’s teasing, silly rhyme tsunami, with which he cheerfully and good-naturedly humiliates Harry Haller:
„Gott befohlen, der Teufel wird dich holen, verhauen und versohlen für dein Schreiben und Kohlen, hast ja alles zusammengestohlen.“
“For the devil, I pray, will bear you away and slice you and splice you till that shall suffice you for your writings and rotten plagiarisings ill-gotten.”
———————
To be continued. Next up My Own Version Of You part 17: They seemed to have an ancient presence
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 2nd 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
- It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry b/w Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – Bob Dylan’s melancholy blues