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.
**********
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.
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