By Tony Attwood
Previously in this series.
- Restless Farewell
- Long and Wasted Years
- Mississippi
- Foot of Pride
- Things have changed
- Angelina
- Visions of Johanna
- Drifters’ Escape
- Tangled up in blue
My theory here is that we can appreciate Dylan songs as pieces of music we enjoy – and for most Dylan fans, I suspect that what happens in relation to most Dylan songs. But we can also appreciate a small number of songs because of the enormous impact that each made on us individually.
Now, this second list, in my case, I choose to call the songs that gave me a life-changing experience – usually because the songs have stayed with me over a long period of time, and have entered, I am tempted to write, into the very fabric of my being. They have become part of me, in fact.
These songs don’t tell me what to say or how to behave, but there is something within each one that has given me something extra, which I carry with me as an important element in my life.
Of course, these are not the only elements I carry with me. I have three daughters and ten grandchildren, and the reality of their lives, which I sincerely hope will continue long after my lifetime has ended, is of profound importance to me. In another area of life, I continue to support the football team my father took me to see when I was a child and which he and my grandfather (now of course both long deceased but fondly remembered) avidly supported, as do I.
I could also maybe cite a number of books I have read that have influenced me as well, but in this list of influential items, there are the Dylan songs. Not necessarily my favourites, but songs that in writing these articles, I have become aware of much more intently, seeing just how much of an influence they have had. And this is not “influence” in relation to how I have written music, or what music I write, but something beyond that. These songs have become, through my life (as I am now starting the journey, which means my next birthday will be my 80th) as fundamental to my existence as anything I have done, or as anyone I have known.
And in that regard, as per the phrase “as anyone I have known” emphasises, I am thinking of the length of time that they have been influencing me. This is not like hearing a new release by a performer one admires…. this is beyond that. It is not something I have experienced in terms of any other composer, writer, artist… and it is not something I have seen others write about. So maybe it is just me, or maybe I am the only one who is foolish enough to bare his soul in this way, but I most certainly feel I am influenced by the cumulative effect opf the music of Bob Dylan on my life from the age of about 16.
In this case, I reach a bare and open Bob Dylan song – a song only performed in public eight times. It keeps its beat so solidly, one is tempted to say there is no rhythm – it is almost a simple recitation of what the world looks like beyond oneself. Yet despite that simplicity, it is a wonderful song in its own right; a song which integrates with my long life to give a unified experience of life and song. I can’t share my life with you (you would find it quite boring in parts and besides, neither of us has the time to spare), but I find I can offer this song as a song of summary.
Oh, the gentlemen are talking and the midnight moon is on the riverside
They're drinking up and walking and it is time for me to slide
I live in another world where life and death are memorized
Where the earth is strung with lover's pearls and all I see are dark eyes.
A cock is crowing far away and another soldier's deep in prayer
Some mother's child has gone astray, she can't find him anywhere
But I can hear another drum beating for the dead that rise
Whom nature's beast fears as they come and all I see are dark eyes.
They tell me to be discreet for all intended purposes
They tell me revenge is sweet and from where they stand, I'm sure it is
But I feel nothing for their game, where beauty goes unrecognized
All I feel is heat and flame, and all I see are dark eyes.
Oh, the French girl, she's in paradise and a drunken man is at the wheel
Hunger pays a heavy prize to the falling gods of speed and steel
Oh, time is short and the days are sweet and passion rules the arrow that flies
A million faces at my feet but all I see are dark eyes.
Of course, I don’t have a million faces at my feet – but I do have a feeling of living in a world in which everyone is playing their part, but almost no one has any idea what that part is. Which raises the question, do I have any clear idea what I am doing in this world?
There are so many uncertainties in my heart these days, I really have no idea what is going on, and although I do have many kind friends who in my old age, reassure me that all is ok, beyond them I do see dark eyes. Not everywhere, some people are knowing, aware, kind, giving, loving…, but others do seem to have turned themselves inside out and have stopped looking beyond their own tiny inner universe.
Is that what Dylan was talking about in this song? Actually, I don’t know, and I don’t mind, because the most important point for me is that this song awoke in me the realisation that many people are just reciting an awareness of the world that others have passed on to them.
It is perfectly possible to open one’s eyes and one’s ears and see and hear the world afresh, to understand what it means to be a person with feelings and thoughts, to care about the world and care about others …. even when out there all one sees are the dark eyes of people who have not made that leap.
And maybe that gives something of an insight into what this song meant for Bob – but that is not the point of this little series of reviews. It is about what these songs meant to me, and what they did for me in transforming the way in which I see the world.
Indeed, I think I could say this about all the songs in my selection of Dylan songs as a life-changing experience. If you hear a Dylan song and it changes your life, it will almost certainly have done that in a way utterly different from the way the same song has changed my life.
Which leads me to another thought: when I started this series of articles, I had no idea where it might take me, and indeed if anything I wrote might influence anyone else, in the sense of encouraging a reader to listen to and appreciate a Dylan song in a way that might change that person’s life.
But this song challenged me in a way that the others I have included in this little series did not, because Dylan repeatedly says (for times in fact) “all I see are dark eyes”.
Of course, we could play games and imagine he is literally talking about how he sees his audience, and an audience that worships his music and his performances, but (this would imply) is simply there waiting to be led onto the next Dylan experience.
But no, I can’t see that as right. Rather, it seems to me to mean that no one has a true understanding of what this life is all about; a question which for me at the age of 79 seems rather relevant just now.
I have often hinted in my writings on this site and elsewhere that, aside from taking Dylan’s lyrics and suggesting that what he means is this, that or anything else, what we actually have is a set of insights into reality that cannot be expressed in other ways – exactly as abstract works of art do. They express the world, but in a way that we have not seen before.
And here I think this is Bob’s approach. We should not be trying to take any of the lyrical lines and give them meanings that can be said in any other way, because none of us get it. All we have and thus all we see are dark eyes.
In short, we cannot improve or change the world because we cannot see the world, and we cannot see the world because all we have are dark eyes.
All Dylan can do, all he has done through his songs, is give us hints of alternative visions, each of which can allow us to understand a little more, if we wish to consider it carefully enough.
When I first heard this song I was struck by the dichotomy that it offered me… was it saying that I could already see the world as Bob did, or that if I tried hard enough, I could, or that maybe I was like everyone else and really couldn’t see what the world was like.
Or maybe there was nothing new to see… that struck me as the final conundrum. Why worry about what happens after death when we can’t even be sure what this world that we can apparently see is actually telling us. If anything.
So utterly unanswerable are these questions that they seem to suggest there can only be questions thereafter. Just questions, no answers
Dark Eyes was written in 1985, and was for me one more of this little collection of songs that truly changed my perception of the world, not just until the next Dylan song came along, but for all time. And for that, I can only be eternally grateful.