My Own Version Of You 17: They seemed to have an ancient presence

by Jochen Markhorst

XVII     They seemed to have an ancient presence

I can see the history of the whole human race
It’s all right there – it’s carved into your face
Should I break it all down - should I fall on my knees
Is there light at the end of the tunnel - can you tell me please
Stand over there by the Cypress tree
Where the Trojan women and children were sold into slavery
Long ago before the First Crusade 
Way back before England or America were made

“Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληιάδεω Ἀχιλῆος – Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles, son of Peleus,” are the opening words of the Iliad. Written by Homer around 800 BC, so yes, long before the First Crusade, long before the names “England” and “America” were coined. An opening which suggests, just as the first words of the Odyssey do (“Sing to me of the man, O Muse”), that the Iliad is a song – a song that writes a chapter in the history of the whole human race. In which we also hear of the tragic fate of the Trojan women and children: slavery, indeed.

The “Cypress tree” under which they are sold, according to our narrator, seems to be a poetic liberty; neither Homer nor Euripides’ Trojan Women (415 BC) divulges dendrological details about the slave market. Perhaps an echo of Virgil’s Aeneid – as Troy burns, Aeneas tells his family to wait for him in an ancient temple outside the city, “with an ancient cypress growing close beside it” (in Robert Fagles’ 2006 translation), and shortly thereafter he sees “Children and trembling mothers rounded up in a long, endless line.” On the other hand, in Dylan’s own “Moonlight”, the song from which we already heard echoes in the previous verse, Dylan, whether by coincidence or not, also sings about cypress trees (“The boulevards of Cypress trees”). In the official Lyrics, for unclear reasons, it is again written with a capital letter, by the way.

We are at the end of Side A of Rough And Rowdy Ways, the album side that seems to embrace the concept of “song”, and after the “who” of the first song and the “why” of the second, “False Prophet”, this third and final song tells the “what”. Culminating in this closing verse, a marathon verse that at 20 lines is five times longer than the previous verse, and offers a sort of conclusion.

It is no small thing, what “you” bring us. “The history of the whole human race,” the whole of life as we know it, no less. Something of which the songwriter Dylan is aware as well. “I just let the lyrics go, and … they seemed to have an ancient presence,” says Dylan in 2006 in the Rolling Stone interview, when he talks about the creation of the most beautiful song on Modern Times, “Nettie Moore”. That is an exceptional song that indeed meets all the quality requirements set by the narrator for my own version of you, for a song. Dylan writes the song at the beginning of the 21st century, and makes his own version of a song from the 19th century, of James Pierpoint’s song “Gentle Nettie Moore” (1857), the poignant lament of a slave who has lost his beloved:

One sunny morn in autumn ere the dew had left the lawn,
Came a trader up from Louisiana Bay.
Who gave to Master money and then shackled her with chains.
Then he took her off to work her life away.

…a slave who has lost his beloved Nettie to a slave trader, then. Dylan copies the chorus, Oh, I miss you Nettie Moore / And my happiness is o’er, and writes a 565-word song around it, twelve verses featuring Lost John and Frankie & Albert, verses that meander along the railway junction where the Southern crosses the Yellow Dog and the trail where Robert Johnson was hunted by a hellhound, lines that echo the slavery and the Civil War and the Prohibition… in short, a song into which a chapter from the history of the human race has been carved.

It is quite ambitious, “the history of all humanity”, but it is still traceable. More concerning is the subsequent word choice, “it’s carved into your face” (let’s just ignore the rather clumsy typo on the official site, its carved). After the relatively pastoral tranquillity of the two preceding verses, we are back to the raw, cruel, apocalyptic narrative tone that the creator employs in the first half of the song. A face marked by grooves is usually described as a “lined face”, perhaps “rugged” or “furrowed”, sometimes “grooved” or “creased”… all participial adjectives that indicate that Time, or Suffering, or Exhaustion have left marks on the face.

But we use “carved” only to suggest an active, violent origin – most of us will think of The Joker upon considering “carved into face”. The Joker, whose Glasgow smile, as that gruesome disfigurement is euphemistically called, has a violent origin involving the cutting of the corners of the mouth. What origin exactly we do not know. The best Joker, the unforgettable Heath Ledger in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008), alternates between saying that his father did it with a knife (“Why so serious?”) and the explanation that he himself “carved into his face” with a razor blade. He even has a third variation, but Batman beats him up before he can share that one with us.

In any case, “carved” is generally bloody and cruel. At most, visitors to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens have a somewhat drier association, provided they pause for a moment to consider the breathtaking marble head of Alexander the Great, circa 300 BC, found in the Kerameikos in Athens. Alexander wears a lion’s skin, indicating that he is a descendant of Heracles. But even more striking are Alexander’s cheekbones: someone has carved letters into his face. Granted, not “the history of the whole human race”, but still… letters carved into the more than two thousand year old face of Alexander the Great wearing the lion’s skin of Heracles: close enough.

———-

To be continued. Next up My Own Version Of You part 18: “It is strange what people discover in my work”

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
• 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