Sunday, August 2, 2020

James On Dylan

Some of my favorite moments from Bill James Online are when he writes about things other than baseball, or when he writes about baseball in a way that points to large truths about life.  Here he responds to a remark regarding Bob Dylan.  I think him correct in his assessment of Dylan and also in the larger sense.


There's a famous moment when someone asks if he thinks of himself as more a singer or a poet and he says the thinks of himself as more of a song and dance man.

Asked by: marbus1

Answered: 7/31/2020
 I know the interview, although I actually don't recall that line.  Could be a different interview, I guess.  Dylan in that interview seems brilliant, but also arrogant and rude.  He is at the end of that period in his youth when he was able to enjoy his success, and is being pulled under by the undertow of his success.   He is starting to resent what other people have made of him--as he did for five to ten years after that and still does to a certain extent, although he has come to terms with it to a certain extent.  
Dylan is in a certain sense like our beloved President, in that he feeds off of negativity.   Whatever he is told he cannot do or should not do, that is what he is GOING to do.   
There is a passage in Hamlet. . . .I am sure I am going to make of mess of this, because I haven't read Hamlet in 40 years. . . .but there is a passage in which one of his young friends, I think, is trying to manipulate Hamlet to some end, I forget what.   Hamlet hands his friend a violin, I think, and says "play this violin".   The friend says that he cannot, and Hamlet says, in essence, "Well then, don't try to play ME.  If you can't even play a goddamned violin you have no business trying to play me."   
I think that is Dylan.  I think he has a sense--not incorrectly--that if you understand him, then you have contained him, that you have become greater than him because you have subsumed all of his abilities, all of his soul.   He doesn't want you to do that.  He doesn't want you to understand him because he doesn't want you to think that you have control of him.  The same with Trump; he does not WANT you to understand him, because he does not want you to be greater than he is.  
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    Back later to try to tie up the thought.   I relate to Dylan because I think that he is a flawed and damaged person, in ways that are similar to the ways that I am a flawed and damaged person.  I suspect that many people see that in him, see in him the failings that they recognize in themselves.   
    But also, what Dylan is doing is compatible with my philosophy of the world, as I have tried to explain many times.   The world is vastly more complicated than the human mind; therefore, all efforts to understand the world terminate in wrong answers.   The conservatives are full of shit; the liberals are full of shit.   The Christians don't have it, the Jews don't have it, the atheists don't even have a clue.   The world is simply not something that you can understand.   All your understandings of it are just simplifications, just models of thought.   Plato's allegory of the cave; we just have shadows in mind, two-dimensional things without color which represent real things which are vastly more complicated.   That is how I see the world; that, I think, is also how Dylan sees the world.   When you force the world to make sense, you are simply buying into some into some kind of phony baloney plastic banana explanation that would disintegrate in your hands if you were honest enough to accept that.  
     Trump is also SORT OF like that, in that he doesn't really believe in any of these bullshit explanations that the Republicans and the Democrats like to cling to.  But he is different in that he thinks that NOBODY ELSE understands it, but, being smarter than everybody else, he has it figured out. 
***
     Again trying to finish the thought.  
     But this does not mean that we do not struggle to see the truth.  It means that we CONTINUE to struggle to see the truth, rather than claiming that we have it.   There is truth and there is wisdom in the conservative theory of the world, and there is truth and wisdom in the progressive view, and there is truth and wisdom in Christianity or Judaism or in psychology or philosophy.  But there is no truth or wisdom in atheism; that is merely defeatism.   That is merely accepting defeat.   
     It isn't really that Dylan is a slippery interview.  It is that interviewers are always trying to get out of him something that just isn't there.   They want to know what is the stopping point at which he rests, secure in his understanding, but there is no stopping point.   

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