Desolation Row – the 5th stanza

By Jochen Markhorst

More than five years ago, on March 8, 2020, Tony posted here on Untold “Desolation Row – The Origins of the Title”, being Chapter 1 of my attempt to write an article about “Desolation Row”, which got a bit out of control. It led to a 17-chapter book (available on Amazon). We then promised to post some chapters here, though. A promise that somehow floated away over the Waters of Oblivion after one publication (about the Ophelia stanza, 18 March 2020). And today, more than five years later, it washed ashore again.

Desolation Row’s 5th: Greenwich Village Blues

Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood
With his memories in a trunk
Passed this way an hour ago
With his friend, a jealous monk
He looked so immaculately frightful
As he bummed a cigarette
Then he went off sniffing drainpipes
And reciting the alphabet
Now you would not think to look at him
But he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin
On Desolation Row

I           Einstein plays the MacDougal Street Blues

Kerouac, too, has something with Einstein. In Desolation Angels, the Great Physicist gets a single, somewhat malicious, name check (“Don’t disturb the sleeping Einstein in his bliss”), insinuating that he is blissfully ignorant. In the letters to Allen Ginsberg he comes along a few times (to compare his supposed ignorance with Buddha’s omniscience, for example). And in the Mexico City Blues (1959) so admired by Dylan also twice. One time Einstein is again placed opposite Siddharta (“132nd Chorus”) and one later, in the “133rd Chorus”, that other Jewish greatness, Spinoza, is brought in and, while he is at it, Spinoza’s pantheism from Ethica, 1678:

“Einstein probably put a lot
of people in the bughouse by
saying that
All those pseudo intellectuals
went home & read Spinoza
then they dig in
to the subtleties
of Pantheism –

Kerouac has been under the spell of Buddhism since the mid-1950s, but he also reads other difficult books, that much is clear. He writes poems anytime, anywhere, including in the years before Mexico City Blues, and the observation of biographer Robert Creeley, in the introduction to Book Of Blues (posthumous, 1995) does ring Dylan bells again:

He wrote incessantly, carrying usually a small spiral notebook in his back pocket so as to “sketch” what occurred on the spot. He was in that old way “serious.” He really believed in words.

… so almost a paraphrase of Dylan’s t sketch You a picture manifest.

That Book Of Blues, which partly bundles unpublished poems from the years 1954-61, offers one after another aha-Erlebnis for Dylanologists. Like a few Einsteins again, but this time in a much more Dylanesque setting:

the swish of the snow
and Einstein in his yard
and All's Well with
the Emily Dickinson World

… from “Orizaba 210 Blues”, 50th Chorus.  While browsing, attention is drawn to the title of “Desolation Blues”, but especially to the content of “MacDougal Street Blues.”

Dylan’s first performance in New York takes place at the Café Wha? on MacDougal Street, and in Chronicles, he recalls the warm memories thereof. Literally warm memories, by the way:

Fred Neill couldn’t have been nicer. He asked me what I did and I told him I sang, played guitar and harmonica. He asked me to play something. After about a minute, he said I could play harmonica with him during his sets. I was ecstatic. At least it was a place to stay out of the cold. This was good.

Not much later, Dylan starts hanging out at the Folkore Center of Izzy Young, also on MacDougal, where he dwells for hours, days, weeks in a back room with stacks of old gramophone records and a phonograph. At Izzy he meets Dave Van Ronk, and through Dave Dylan gets access to a podium opportunity and a bedroom in the Gaslight Café. Again, on, as Dylan says, the carnivalesque MacDougal Street, where Kerouac’s spirit still wanders – the owner of The Gaslight, John Mitchell, has an “exotic-looking girlfriend who Jack Kerouac had based a novel on.”

This is 1961. Four years later, when Dylan reaches a next peak in his creative development, writing “Desolation Row”, his receptiveness and admiration for beat poet Kerouac has long been apparent. The poet Dylan has already borrowed style figures, entire quotes and archetypes from Desolation Angels and On The Road, from the poems of Mexico City Blues and collaborative poems such as “Pull My Daisy”. But a work like “MacDougal Street Blues” adds an extra dimension.

The work originally consists of just under a thousand words, spread over three Cantos (the sound recording provided by Joe Strummer in 1997 is an adaptation in which Kerouac reduces the poem to 282 words), and for Dylan it is a trip down Memory Lane. The opening of Canto Uno seems to be thematically inspiring too:

The goofy foolish
human parade
Passing on Sunday
art streets
Of Greenwich Village

.. promising a streetscape of what goes on around here, and in the next lines the camera zooms in further on Greenwich Village:

I mean sincerely
naive sailors buying prints
Women with red banjos
On their handbags
And arts handicrafty
Slow shuffling
art-ers of Washington Sq
Passing in what they think
Is a happy June afternoon
Good God the Sorrow
They dont even listen to me when
I try to tell them they will die

“Sailors” who are on shore leave is apparently such a defining decor piece that Dylan also likes to borrow to paint an impressionistic cityscape, women with red banjos becomes an electric violin, but the man Dylan will mainly jump up at the location choice: Washington Square – that is his corner, he often hangs around there, there is the crummy hotel where Joan Baez was waiting for him. And Kerouac’s camera zooms in even further:

And on the corner at the
Pony Stables
Of Sixth Ave & 4th
Sits Bodhisattva Meditating
In Hobo Rags

The corner of 6th Avenue and the street where Dylan lives! West 4th Street, Positively 4th Street, where Kerouac places a supporting actor who would fit effortlessly in a Dylan song from this period: a meditating Buddhist saint dressed in hobo rags – Dylan turns him into a Napoleon in rags.

The “second song”, Canto Dos, offers even stronger similarities:

W Somerset Maugham
is on my bed

An ignorant storyteller
millionaire queer
But Ezra Pound
he crazy—
As the perfect sky
beginninglessly pure
Thinglessly perfect
waits already
They pass in multiplicity

… Dylan passes William Somerset Maugham and replaces him with another half Brit, T.S. Eliot, but Ezra Pound may come along to Desolation Row. At least as striking, apart from the thematic similarity, is not that substantive parallel, but a stylistic one: the catachresis.

II          Derrida’s catachresis

In these years Dylan’s art of writing moves at the intersection of Kafka and Rimbaud: clear and supple, but impenetrable poetry. This self-contradictory quality the poet reaches with a stylistic flaw that Jacques Derrida, the grandmaster of deconstruction, upgrades to a stylistic figure: the catachresis. The catachesis (literally: “wrong-use”, also abusio) connects words that are not actually connected, but are emotionally close to one another – by sound similarity, for example, or by near-by association.

“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” is an earlier high point. Crying like a fire in the sun seems like a weekday metaphor, but is in fact an unknown combination of words, and just as deceptively familiar sounds a word combination like seasick sailors. Expressions such as the saints are coming through or gathered from coincidence only seem to be familiar expressions, and Dylan is undoubtedly the first writer in literary history to put the words empty-handed and painter side by side – and yet the compound does sound familiar.

Kerouac also recognizes its charm. This one “MacDougal Street Blues” alone is teeming with catachreses. Often to give a melodic, rhythmic added value to a verse (Kerouac’s ambition is “jazz music in words”), such as

Pestiferating at moon squid
Salt flat tip fly toe
tat sand traps
With cigar smoking interesteds
puffing at the
stroll

… but just as often to achieve an alienating, disruptive effect. The ignorant storyteller, for example, and the seemingly clear, but irrational, beginninglessly pure, and when the camera catches a flash of chess players in Washington Square, it inspires the abusios that have sprung out of Free Association, “wrong-used” word combinations:

The Chessplayers Wont End
Still they sit
Millions of hats
  In underwater foliage
Over marble games
The Greeks of Chess
Plot the Pop
of Mate
King Queen

… partly traceable. From chess to marble games to Greeks has an associative logic. An abusio like “underwater foliage” is recognizable (the chess players are indeed, submerged in their game, seated under a canopy).

But Kerouac does not shy away from a derailing abusio either. In Dadaesque sound sequences such as “salt – flat – tip – fly – toe – tat – sand – traps”, the word meaning breaks itself completely away from the content and the conjured images of the relevant verse. .

Nothing wrong with that, but the poet Dylan will not go that far.

 

III         Washington Square Blues

“These aren’t contrived images. These are images which are just in there and have got to come out. You know, if it’s in there it’s got to come out.”
                                                           (Dylan in the SongTalk-interview with Paul Zollo, 1991)

“They are not false, artificial images,” says the poet, and he illustrates what he means by the catachresis yellow railroad from “Absolutely Sweet Marie”. I have undoubtedly seen that somewhere, he explains, on a blinding day the sunlight reflecting dazzlingly on a railroad someplace. “These are images which are just in there and have got to come out. You know, if it’s in there it’s got to come out.”

Even such an absurd-looking combination like Einstein dressed as Robin Hood would not be contrived, but did force itself somewhere on the poet, who explains in the same interview:

“You must make yourself observe whatever. But most of the time it hits you. You don’t have to observe. It hits you.”

On a bench on Washington Square is an old bum with a fierce head of hair and a green cap, perhaps. All his belongings in a skewed cardboard box. Einstein dressed as Robin Hood, “his memories in a trunk”. Guesswork of course, but still: an educated guess.

Similar deconstruction can be performed on the other notable catachreses in this verse. The resentful friar, impeccably fearful and, most notably, sniffing drainpipes. Fifty meters away, still on 6th Avenue, at the Washington Place intersection, is St. Joseph’s Church, and ten minutes further into Greenwich Village, on West 14th Street, is the Carmelite Monastery of the nuns of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe … an observing poet being touched by the appearance of a man of God and the imposition of a loaded word as immaculate is conceivable. Again: guesswork, and from where qualifications like “jealous” and “frightful” do come, would be a totally unfounded wild guess altogether – but even these images are undoubtedly not contrived.

It is tempting to retrace the alienating word combination “drain pipes” and “sniffing” to drug use. It is 1965, after all. And later, Dylan does tell us that thanks to drugs he manages to keep himself going in these furious, insane days. “Sniffing” is hardly a metaphor, and drainpipes would then be the sound-related “word error” that an associating poet comes up with when he connects the cover name for marijuana, rain, with the means of transport, the hash pipe.

Far-fetched, and not too likely, in an impressionistic tableau describing a reality. After all, it is that fuzzy haired wanderer with his green cap, who here mumbling to himself (reciting the alphabet) walks through the poet’s view.

He has a chronic cold and probably snorts the mucus back rather noisily, the dirty pig – he sniffs his drainpipe.

——————

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. The above is, obviously, a chapter from Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965.

 

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