Mother Of Muses part 6
by Jochen Markhorst
VI And then Jonah the Baptist started splashing people with water!
Mother of Muses, unleash your wrath Things I can't see, they're blocking my path Show me your wisdom, tell me my fate Put me upright, make me walk straight Forge my identity from the inside out You know what I'm talking about
One of the highlights of Hans Teeuwen’s smash-hit first theatre show Hard & Zielig (“Tough & Pathetic”, 1995) is the Bible story. Hans plays a pitiful character, some young chap who stumbles over his words and doesn’t seem quite right in the head. He’s lonely, because according to his former friends he’d “reached the irritation limit”, but Hans doesn’t mind that much – now he has more time for other things. He’s been to the cinema, for example. Schindler’s List. “A really beautiful, important film”. And it was an eye-opener: “People are always going on about the Jews and all that, but those Germans – they weren’t exactly angels either, you know.” But what Hans enjoys most of all is reading the Bible, “a lovely, thick book.” For those who don’t know what it’s about, Hans is happy to roughly explain it:
“At the beginning of the world, there was absolutely nothing. Just a sort of petting zoo, with two people: Moses and Ali Baba. But they’d eaten the poisonous apple and then they’d fallen asleep. And then it started raining really hard and the petting zoo animals nearly drowned. But then Jesus turned that water into red wine, and it became the Red Sea. It parted, and one half was swallowed up by the whale, and the other half by Jonah the Baptist. Jonah the Baptist had drunk so much that he’d got completely drunk, and then he started splashing people with water! Yes he did! And then those people were like: ‘Come on, give it a rest with all that splashing about.’ And they were right. They were right, but he still wouldn’t stop, so they said: ‘That’s enough now.’”
… and then they nail Jonah’s head to his crotch. Hans piles up unrelated, half-correct Bible stories and peppers them with elements from other, unrelated stories. Mary is impregnated by the Good American who is always singing “Maria, Maria, I’ll never stop singing Maria” from the musical Jesus Christ Superman; she is visited by the Three Wives from the East who leave breadcrumbs behind to find their way back, but Jesus turns the breadcrumbs into fish and says to them: “Arise and walk,” and so it goes on until the tragic end:
“Someone else had to go to prison. Then Emperor Pilate was washing his hands, but Jesus walked across the water with his dirty feet! Then they said, ‘That’s the last straw,’ and they crucified him.”
Confabulation it is called, or “honest lying”, and it is usually the diagnosis for a memory disorder that can be particularly disruptive for those around the patient – even objectively clear contradictory evidence does not affect the confabulator’s mistaken belief or false memory.
In literature, we do occasionally come across them: as unreliable narrators. Sometimes pathologically so, such as the first-person narrators in Edgar Allan Poe’s harrowing short stories (“The Cask of Amontillado”, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Black Cat”); and sometimes as deliberate liars, Baron Münchhausen-style narrators such as in the astonishing epic The Life of Pi (Yann Martel 2001, film adaptation by Ang Lee, 2012); and in perhaps the finest of them all: Verbal Kent in The Usual Suspects, with its bewildering plot twist at the end that only then makes us realise that Verbal had been an unreliable narrator throughout the film.
This fifth verse of Dylan’s “Mother of Muses” lies somewhere in between the rambling confabulator Hans Teeuwen and the unreliable narrator Verbal Kint. It starts right from the opening line: “Mother of Muses, unleash your wrath.” We know that Zeus can be quite irascible, and his brother Neptune is no slouch either; in Virgil’s Aeneid, wrath is unleashed by the Harpies, by Zeus’s temperamental and frequently cuckolded wife Hera, and by Hephaestus, the god of fire; and we also come across this phrase in the Old Testament (Job 40:11, “Unleash the fury of your wrath”).
But unleashing wrath is not a quality we associate with Mnemosyne, the mother of the Muses. Hesiod reports little more than that she has beautiful hair; Homer has little to add either, whilst Pindar seems to know that she wears a “radiant diadem” upon that beautiful hair; nor are any character traits attributed to her beyond the biographical fun fact that she allowed her nephew Zeus into her bedroom for nine consecutive nights; Jules Verne confines himself in Les Enfants du capitaine Grant (In Search of the Castaways, 1867) to noting the quality of being “chaste” (“Mnemosyne! Goddess of Memory, chaste mother of the Muses!’ he exclaimed); and in illustrations she always has a slightly detached, but above all calm and affable demeanour… all things considered, it seems highly unlikely that Mnemosyne would be capable of unleashing wrath.
The same applies to the other qualities the narrator attributes to her here. “Show me your wisdom, tell me my fate” is just as out of character. One might perhaps obtain “wisdom” from Mnemosyne’s sister, the Titaness Themis – who, incidentally, had also been impregnated by her nephew Zeus – but more obvious candidates are the Oceanid Metis and/or her daughter Athena. Metis was Zeus’s first wife, goddess of wisdom and, above all, mother of Zeus’s favourite daughter Athena, who inherited the wisdom of her late mother – and has ever since been the number one choice for mortals seeking “wisdom”.
As for “tell me my fate”, we needn’t turn to the Mother of the Muses either; that is, first and foremost, part of the job description of the Moirai, the Fates. We know of other prophets, seers and oracles with that specific ability (Cassandra, to name but one unfortunate example), but given the proximity to Mnemosyne, the confabulator Dylan undoubtedly means the three Moirai, daughters of Zeus and Themis – and in that version of the myth, therefore, the nieces of the Mother of the Muses, and half-sisters of the Muses themselves.
And finally, the narrator asks for a stable, honourable and open personality; “Put me upright, make me walk straight / Forge my identity from the inside out.” This, too, is a request addressed to Moira, or more precisely: to the middle of the three Fates, to Lachesis, the Fate who takes the thread of life in her hands and draws lots to determine the course of life and one’s temperament.
Mnemosyne, the Harpies, Hera, Athena, the Moira… in this fifth verse, the narrator, like a consummate confabulator, concocts a mishmash of Greek mythology, yet the metaphor seems clear enough: the creative artist seeking inspiration for, seeking the key to creating a work of art. A work of art which, like a stand-up routine by Hans Teeuwen or a confession by Verbal Kint, is a patchwork of impressions, fun facts and snippets of art – much like a Dylan song on Rough & Rowdy Ways.
To be continued. Next up Mother Of Muses part 7: Spend’st thou thy fury on some worthless song
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 looking 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
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side A
- Bob Dylan takes Highway 61 – Seven mercurial songs
