For
my own spiritual enrichment, I was reading Hasidism and Modern Man by Martin
Buber when / came across on pages 92-95 a revelation—key words and images and
what / perceive to be the feeling expressed in “All Along The Watchtower.” At
the time I was listening to New Morning which has other indications of Buber’s
influence and which in5pired my two-year study of Buber’s work and Bob Dylan’s
life and work around the time he wrote John Wesley Harding and New Morning. I
hope my writings inspire others to look deeply into and to write about the
connection between Martin Buber and Bob Dylan.
I can’t tell you
the influences ‘cause there are too many to mention… what about the curves an’
corners an’ cut-offs that drop out a sight and fall behind. What about the
records you hear but onetime…coyote’s call… bulldog’s bark…tomcat’s meow… milk
cow’s moo… train whistle’s moan. Open up your ears and you’re influenced.
(Dylan Lyrics 72)
“I am my words,”
he says. (Shelton 194)
In 1963 for his part in a
Newsweek magazine fiasco, manager Albert Grossman presented to his client Bob
Dylan a peace offering: “a few books” by Martin Buber (Shelton 195). Hasidism,
the focus of Buber’s work, flourished in the mid-l8th century in Poland and the
Ukraine. The mystic movement, which arose in the ghettos from the people,
protested against elitist, intellectual Judaism and emphasized the emotional
inner values of faith in God: piety, joy, active love and was characterized by
deep religious feeling, a pure longing for God. Martin Buber himself
transformed by Hasidism ceased all activity to study and translate Hasidic
tales. For Buber, Hasidism meant “a principal model of the redeemed life”
(Hasidism V).
To
recuperate from the famous motorcycle accident of July 29, 1966, Bob Dylan
turned to the work of Martin Buber and the large Holy Bible which lay open in
the study of his home in Woodstock. At age 25, much like Buber himself, Dylan
withdrew from the world and focused on study and writing. “One begins with
oneself, searching one’s heart and finding one’s particular way” (Buber
Hasidism 7). The retreat into study confirmed for Dylan his place in the world
and purpose: “Married man, poet, singer, songwriter, custodian, gatekeeper…
all of it. I’ll be it all” (McGregor 356).
Evidenced
by the songs that came out of that period, the retreat into the texts initiated
for Dylan (in traditional Jewish terms) a “turning” to God: Teshuva: “turning
from… aberrations to “the way of God”(Tales of Hasidism 337). Dylan said at the
time. “What I’ve been doin’ mostly is seem’ only a few close friends… pourin’
over books by people you never heard of, thinkin’ about where I’m goin’ and why
I’m runnin’, and am I mixed up too much, and what I’m knowin’, and what I’m
givin’, and what I’m takin’. And mainly what I’ve been doin’ is workin’ on
getting better and makin’ better music, which is what my life is all about”
(McGregor 195).
The
literature of Hasidism would touch deeply and perhaps inwardly redirect a
young man at a pivotal time in his life. Dylan had recently married, experienced
the birth of his children, and, with the sudden blow of the accident, faced his
mortality and vulnerability. Hasidism as a spiritual way is grounded in the practical,
the simple, the ordinary. The practice as presented by Buber is accessible and
as natural as breathing. The seeker begins without presumptions of superhuman
or divine holiness: “humanly holy you shall be unto me” (Hasidism 23), a great
place to begin a spiritual journey, especially for a “superstar” weighed down
by fanatical devotees with impossible labels such as messiah, Jesus, prince of
folk, prophet, savior, the spokesperson for a generation. Hasidism teaches that
each person has his/her own special gift. Each can live a grounded human holiness,
blessing food, sleep, family, home, community, even tools, even words, lifting
all to God, liberating the “divine sparks” that are embedded in all of creation,
even in the inanimate. While “turning” to God is central to Jewish life, Buber
explains that for the hasid—the pious one— “turning” deeply renews a person and
is greater than merely repenting: “turning” reverses one’s “whole being.” A
person who has been lost finds a way to God, “a way to the fulfillment of the
particular task” which is “destined by God” (156). The hasid, the pious one,
who is further blessed with the gift of song, lifts the prayers of the people
with his song, and in Dylan’s case, for his audience, each word holds infinite
responsibility, each song surges in the world waves of power and is
far-reaching (59). As the voice of the pious one lifts the prayers, one knows
“his speech is destiny...the world needs him… awaits him ever again” (61).
During
his retreat for recuperation and study, Bob Dylan found a spiritual way and
confirmation of his destiny in the words of Martin Buber and became a new man
worthy to create a new song, which he did. We find evidence in Dylan’s work of
this period the “decisive heart search” and the “turning” which begins a new
“human way” (127) and which produced a new song which Dylan calls “the first
biblical rock album” (Shelton 389). Indeed with careful listening and reflection,
turning frequently to the works of Martin Buber for illumination, we can enrich
our understanding and appreciation of Bob Dylan’s spiritual transformation as
reflected in his work and find a key to mysterious lyrics on John Wesley
Harding.
If I had the
choice, I would rather have lived at the time of King David, when he was the
high king of Israel. (Shelton 497) (tradition attributes the book of
Psalms to King David)
Call it John
Wesley Harding because that was the one song that I had oo idea what If was
about, why it was even on the album. (Dylan Biograph).
Retreat
into the study of the spiritual way wrought dramatic change in Dylan’s work
noted at once by critics. The songs on John Wesley Harding intended by Dylan to
be “everybody’s song” are described as stories that cut to the heart but which
are indecipherable (Shelton 390). John Wesley Harding “not only eludes, but
dares interpretation” (391). However illusive the meaning, critics describe the
work as potent, deep, religious. moral, soul-searching, visionary,
confessional, mystic. The myths and parables make plain the artist’s “heart
search,” his confession, his vulnerability, even his fear. Dylan states, “John
Wesley Harding is a fearful album… AII I wanted to do is get the words right”
(Williams 45).
Martin
Buber’s Good and Evil helps illumine the “indecipherable,” the illusive, even
the structure of Dylan’s work. Buber writes in the introduction to Good and
Evil, here “several Psalms are examined” and when “set in the right sequence,
they complete one another like the stages of a personal way, leading through
moving and transforming experiences…” Buber’s description of his study aptly
describes Dylan’s departure from preceding work, certainly mirrors the content
of the new “fearful” album as a journey through a personal way. And further,
for the content and message of his songs, Dylan draws upon the very Psalms
Buber explicates.
John Wesley
Harding was a friend to the poor…
With
inspiration from Buber’s Good and Evil and the Psalms explicated therein, Dylan
first begins a new study or a return to his earlier advocacy for the poor.
Evident in his earliest work is Dylan’s concern with human rights. However,
with Another Side of Bob Dylan, the songwriter veers from humanitarian
concerns to consciously highlight his “mocking wit” and to accentuate a new
direction (Shelton 219). Before Dylan lies the hectic road trips, the “frenzied
vision” of his next three ground-breaking albums of 1965/66 in which he will
drown his “absurd rock life in absurd inventions of his imagination” (Shelton
225). However, John Wesley Harding reveals the artist again in transformation,
“turning” from the frenzy, the excess of piled up images. The content of John
Wesley Harding mirrors Dylan’s own inquiry into spirituality, a search for
inner calm. And first with the title track, the album returns to compassion, to
the interest at the heart of Dylan in the weak, the outcast, the underdog. John
Wesley Harding presents a new arresting music in its organic sounds and in the
simplicity which surprises, especially in the midst of the explosion of excess
in the wider world of rock. The voice on the album is clear and sober and
infused with the seriousness of the Psalmist asking after and speaking on
behalf of the poor.
Martin Buber explains in Good
and Evil that in Psalm 12 and 82, God arises to give safety to the poor: “the
weak, the afflicted, the wretched and needy” (21). The Psalmist specifies: the
destitute, the orphan, the downtrodden, the poor. On John Wesley Harding
similar concerns are strongly stated and repeated. “John Wesley Harding was a
friend to the poor… he was always known to lend a helping hand” (Dylan 249).
The title track celebrates the traditional legendary motif of the outsider, the
traveling man, unchained, free, yet a man who in image and feeling is the true helper
of the poor. Harding, with his beautiful lady by his side, is tracked by
authorities and rumors fly, but nothing can be proven—and he continues, a
helper to the honest and needy. Dylan’s Harding is one of the “unsettled and
fugitive,” a human reflection of Shekina, “the exiled glory of God [who]
wanders endlessly, separated from her ‘lord.”' The man, like Harding, who is
detached, writes Martin Buber, is “the friend of God” (Hasidism 73). A contrast
to Harding, is on the second track, the woman in chains who binds the speaker,
who intends to do him harm. The concerns of the Psalmist are again echoed on
“The Ballad of Frankie Lee…” which admonishes us to help our neighbor with his
load. And the “poor immigrant’s” fatal error is falling in love with wealth and
turning from his neighbor. Like the Psalms explicated by Martin Buber, Dylan’s
“biblical” album is peopled with men on the margins—the destitute, the outlaw,
the outcast, the thief, the drifter, overburdened ones who suffer, the lonesome
hobo, the poor immigrant. The songs like the Psalms present morals.
The truth is just
a plain picture (McGregor 205).
Dylan
also draws upon Martin Buber’s exploration of truth and lies. Buber entitles a
chapter “Against the Generation of the Lie: Psalm 12.” The Psalmist here
declares: “One man lies to another: they talk with smooth lips and double
heart… boastfully.” The liars say if “words are our ally, who can master us?”
Buber illuminates, “The lie is the specific evil” which humans have introduced
into the world. The speaker in Psalm 12 “no longer suffers merely from liars,
but from a generation of the lie, and the lie in this generation has reached
the highest of perfection as ingeniously controlled means of supremacy” (Good
and Evil 8).
According
to the Psalms, the break up of human speech results from smooth talk, flattery,
the lying tongue. In Jewish terms, letters, even rhythms of speech, possess a
living spirit as a human means of “calling out” to one another and to God.
“Know that each letter is a complete living being… if one reads a prayer and
sees lights within the letters… God approves” (Seigal 185). Yet each letter
with its ambivalence has the power to trick, to conceal, to obscure the truth.
The letter for a name of God, for instance, can also mean peace and falsehood.
Speech is slippery. Buber explains that Psalm 82 is preoccupied with such delusion:
“they spin illusions… a way of thinking… which they do not follow” (10). So
the lie appears truthful. “The lie wells up to the ‘smooth lips’ like
spontaneous utterances of experience and insight.” The powerful speak merely to
bind people to themselves like slaves.
Dylan finds a new way into these precepts: devotion to the
truth, abhorrence of the lie. In “All Along The Watchtower,” with a controlled
urgency, the thief admonishes the joker to tell the truth, “for the hour is
getting late.” The lonesome hobo has neither family nor friends because of his
blackmail, his bribery, and his deceit. The poor immigrant “lies with every
breath.” The title “Wicked Messenger” echoes Buber’s text: “liars walk the
earth in wickedness.” For the Psalmist, God’s truth is the antidote for the lie
of the wicked. The Psalmist too uses the word: “The wicked flaunt themselves
on every side.” Dylan’s “wicked messenger cannot speak but “only flatter.”
Reflecting the Psalmist who calls out to God, the people in Dylan’s song confront
this wicked one. The confrontation opens the messenger’s heart. The people
warn, “If you cannot bring good news, then don’t bring any.” The confrontation
provokes the messenger (whose mind “multiplies the smallest matter”) to search
his heart, to change his tune, to weigh his words, to cultivate the truth.
Buber again illumines: The lie has taken the place of well-wishing, good will,
loyalty, reliability, among human beings (8). Psalm 37 declares, “The mouth of
the righteous speaketh wisdom”.
The
hasid, the pious one, tells reality rather than obscuring it with tricky play
with words. The hasid seeks to be “healed of teaching without soul,” that his
each word may brim with holiness. In the light of these precepts, we see the
right word, the honest word is now clearly Dylan’s goal. In a 1967 interview in
Woodstock by Michael Iachetta, Dylan states his concern about his words in his
as yet unpublished Tarantula. “Editors keep makin… revisions, and makin it
wrong and it just can’t be printed until it’s right,
Hubert Saul quotes Dylan regarding John Wesley
Harding, “But here I took more care in writing” (245). Jon Landau characterizes
the songs on John Wesley Harding as “attempting to be real” and Bob Dylan as
“playing fewer games than ever before… The Dylan of John Wesley Harding is
profoundly moral” (260). Landau reflects even on Dylan’s vocal “honesty”—that
“you won’t hear any where else these days” (261). Dylan in 1968 comments on
albums before John Wesley Harding: “Some kind of wild line… might not mean
anything to you at all, and you just go on, and that will be what happens. Now
I don’t do that anymore” (273).
Martin Buber states in Hasidism and Modern Man that one word
spoken in truth can lift the whole world, can “purge the world from sin” (75).
Bob Dylan revises this precept regarding the power of the individual: “I always
thought that one man, the lone balladeer with the guitar could blow an entire
army off the stage if he knew what he was doing… To draw a crowd with my
guitar, that’s about the most heroic thing I can do” (Shelton 496). He says of
the “Wicked Messenger” that the third verse opens it up…the time schedule
becomes wider… anything we imagine is really there” (McGregor 277).
Mister Judge and
Jury
Can’t you see the
shape I’m in?
When we look at the corresponding Psalm 82, the “judgement
on the judges,” the obscure meaning in “Drifter’s Escape” comes clear. The Psalm
opens: God takes a stand in the court of heaven to deliver judgement among the
gods themselves.” God condemns the powerful for favoring the wicked and
trampling on the weak. God sentences the gods to “die as men die.” Buber
explains the concern of the Psalmist, that the weak “receive justice in the
face of the wicked.” God castigates the judges: “They do not let the weak of
the earth receive justice” (Buber Good and Evil 21). The Psalmist and Buber
both emphasize that the power of the mighty is “lent.. .by God” (22). Dylan
restates the events and message in his song. The judge in “Drifter’s Escape”
also buckles under to injustice and steps down. The crowd stirs. The jury
clamors. Voices complain and cry out. God stops the madness with a lightening bolt.
While everybody kneels and prays, the drifter runs away. The subtext of the
song echoes the Psalmist’s call: “Arise 0 God, and judge the earth,” the call
that the people want to hear again. The message embedded in human spirituality
and experience, the songwriter sings and restates.
I don’t constantly
‘reinvent’ myself – I was there from the beginning… “m a mystery only to those
who haven’t felt he samee things I have” (Dylan Biograph).
“When you’re listening to songs night after
night, some of them kind of rub off on you” (Dylan Biograph).
“‘All Along The
Watchtower,’ It probably came to me during a thunder and lightening storm. I’m
sure it did” (Dylan Biograph).
Dylan biographer, Anthony Scaduto, writes
that “All Along The Watchtower,” the “finest song” on the album, draws “heavily
from the book of Isaiah with portents of a wrathful destruction of a corrupt
world” (286). However, “key words” and images from another of Martin Buber’s
seminal works, Hasidism and Modern Man, make their way into the song. Dylan’s
descriptive and confessional story of power retells the precepts of kavana.
Buber explains that kauana is a mystic component of Hasidic belief which
retells “the way.” Buber explains kavana as the one goal of redemption
when the messiah will come and make “all beings free.” The pious man waits for
the coming as when a father waits for his only son to come home from a distant
land, standing on the “watchtower” with “longing in his eyes.” Others wait too
for the approaching one and are aware of the “uncompleted state of the
world...” (92). They all look outward. Buber tells this “parable” of the
“prince” which Dylan restates in his song, which Dylan describes as opening “up
in a slightly different way, in a stranger way,” with “the cycle of events
working in a rather reverse order” (McGregor 277). “All along the watchtower,
princes kept their view, all the women came and went, barefoot servants too.”
The second part of the song continues to make use of Buber’s ideas and images:
the possibility of the redemption of the world coming with “storm and force.”
with “threatening dangers” (94-95). Buber’s key words and images, the “blast”
of the “bitter wind” while “all lies in battle” come through in Dylan’s music
and words. We hear in the music “the voice of becoming roaring in the gorges”
and experience in the sounds of the song “the seed of eternity in the ground of
time”(91). Dylan represents the dangers with similar natural forces of his own—
“outside… a wild cat… confusion, the strangers approaching, the howling wind.
To lift up
the fallen, to free the imprisoned, the theme from Buber’s discussion of kavana
Dylan reworks in the opening of “Watchtower.” Buber writes that souls
everywhere are imprisoned, and this is the mission, freedom, “There must be
some way out of here,” the song begins. The characters in the song, the joker
and the thief, “the voiceless,” are “among the banished In exile” from human
society (95). Buber writes, “He whom life drives into exile has.. .not a soul
he can talk to. But if a second stranger appears, the two can confide in each
other” (Buber Tales of Hasidism 89). In the midst of the plunder of greed, the
confusion, the “threatening dangers,” the imprisoned are waiting to be lead to
freedom, waiting that the sparks of holiness in them should be raised (Buber
Hasidism 180). The waiting precedes the dawn of the transformation of the
world. The joker expresses his grief regarding the prosperity
of the wicked (a theme that runs throughout
the Psalms). He despairs over the arrogance and exploitation that amass great
wealth. The song contrasts two kinds of men and the conflict between the wicked
and powerful and the lowly who are pure in heart. In the midst of the
“threatening” dangers, the exiled wait expectantly for freedom (95).
The desire to act and work, the passion to
create and to restore yourself, the yearning for silence and the inner shout of
joy — these all band together in your spirit and you become holy (Essential
Kabbalah 124)
a hallowing of
everyday… (Buber Hasidism 19).
Jewish mysticism
and the work of Martin Buber had lasting influence on Bob Dylan and continued
to color his work. After the transforming personal journey, the “heart
search,” the “turning” to God, and the confession comes the celebration of
redemption which we hear on the last two tracks of John Wesley Harding. “‘I’ll
Be Your Baby Tonight,”' Dylan says is “just a simple song, a simple
sentiment...written from a place where there is no struggle” (Dylan Biograph).
The sentiment continues on what can be considered a companion work: New
Morning. After the “fearful” and first “biblical rock album, Dylan produces in
New Morning a moment of hope, a happy heart of perception about the unity of
all existence—songs that sing with all of life. New Morning is an emollient:
healing sounds, the nature cure for the troubled waters that swirl all around,
which (in the title and continuing song by song) draws heavily on the
literature of Hasidism and the Kabbalah. “New each morning, great is thy faithfulness
— that the world becomes new for us each morning” (Buber Hasidism 83). The
album celebrates the oneness of existence, singing, serving, uplifting,
aspiring “to be arranged in oneness” (Matt 153). In New Morning, the songwriter
expresses “in all things… the Creator who lives in the things” (Buber Hasidlsm 74) and blesses the union of
man and woman which “draws down the upper light” (Matt
156).
The turning point
was bock at Woodstock. A little after the accident. Sitting around one night under
a full moon. I looked out into the bleak woods and I said, “Something’s gotta
change.” (Williams 24)
At a pivotal moment, at a transformational time in his
life, during his inquiry into spirituality, with the direction of Martin Buber
and the large Bible that lay open in the study of his home in Woodstock, Bob
Dylan recognized the potential power of his words to redeem the fallen “within
the wide sphere of his activity,” the circle which he has been called “to set
free.” This is the “humanly holy” vocation which, according to the literature
of Hasidism, is offered by God to human beings. Buber explains the mystic power
of speech: “The word is an abyss through which the speaker strides” (Hasidism
98). Buber warns, “One should speak words as if the heavens were opened in
them” (98). “He who knows the secret melody that bears the inner into the
outer, who knows the holy song… he is full of the power of God” (99). This is
all restated in Dylan’s own mystic words. “That was an inspired song that came
to me... It wasn’t really too difficult. I felt like I was just putting words
down that were coming from somewhere else, and I just stuck it out… The song
wrote itself” (Dylan Biograph).
Mlchaela
Cook teaches English Composition courses at Chaffey College and San Bernardino
Valley College In California and she continues to share Bob Dylan with her
students at every opportunity.
Works Cited
Buber,
Martin, Good and Evil. New York: Charles Schribner’s Sons, 1962.
—.
Hasidism and Modern Man. New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1958.
—. Tales of
Hasidism. New York: Schocken Books, 1947.
Dylan, Bob. Jacket notes. BIOGRAPH, CBS no,
1985.
—. Lyrics
1962-1985. New York: Knopf, 1995.
McGregor,
Craig. Bob Dylan: the Early Years—a Retrospective. New York: DaCapo, 1972.
Matt, Daniel C. The Essential
Kabbalah. San Francisco: Harper
Collins, 1995.
Scaduto,
Anthony. Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography. New York: Signet, 1971.
Shelton,
Robert. No Direction Home. New York: Beech Tine Books, 1986.
Siegal,
Richard, Michael Strassfeld, Sharon Strsssfeld. The Jewish Catalog.
Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1973.
Williams,
Christian. In His Own Words: Bob Dylan. New York: Omnibus Press, 1993.