She's an artist, she don't look back *

They say God when he wants the angels to be happy plays them Mozart and when the angels want God to be happy they play him Bach. Anyway, sometimes when the artist is working I play her Bob Dylan. Why I should be so presumptuous, I don't know. Perhaps it's something so obvious as both artists' artfulness. As for me, I was thirteen when I first listened to Dylan. I was away from home in a school in the chilly north and I think it was his poetic sensibility rather than his D,G, or A chords I sought.

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child's balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying

When I listen to the lyrics now, I still think back to the times when I would scour music shops and stare at the covers as if entranced by the poetry of the idea as much as any artwork. It got to the stage that when he mentioned other poets I was their biggest fans too.

Praise be to Nero's Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody's shouting
"Which Side Are You On?"
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers

or

Situations have ended sad
Relationships have all been bad
Mine've been like Verlaine's and Rimbaud
But there's no way I can compare
All those scenes to this affair
Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go.

He paints with his words. I am always telling the artist this. There is a new film about him, suitably obscure I hear. It has to be a good thing when the world pays attention to Dylan, one of the few people whose lyric absorbs successfully and accommodates helpfully the complexities of the modern world.

Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches
I'll recruit my army from the orphanages
I been to St. Herman's church, said my religious vows
I've sucked the milk out of a thousand cows

Sometimes, if we're lucky, he may even relate to art itself.

Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble,
Ancient footprints are everywhere.
You can almost think that you're seein' double
On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs.
Got to hurry on back to my hotel room,
Where I've got me a date with Botticelli's niece.
She promised that she'd be right there with me
When I paint my masterpiece.

And there is something lyrical in some of the artist's new work too, though never pedantic or literal or too trenchant. In fact just when you think you have it in your grasp it jumps out of your hand and you are left chasing it down a completely different road. Dylan is the same.

She lit a burner on the stove and offered me a pipe
"I thought you'd never say hello," she said
"You look like the silent type."

This is immediately followed by

Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century.
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burnin' coal
Pourin' off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you,
Tangled up in blue.

He is, of course, a consistent romantic. This is from 'Modern Times', his most recent album.

Well, I picked up a rose and it poked through my clothes
I followed the winding stream
I heard the deafening noise, I felt transient joys
I know they're not what they seem
In this earthly domain, full of disappointment and pain
You'll never see me frown
I owe my heart to you, and that's sayin' it true
And I'll be with you when the deal goes down

I'm listening to it now.

* Bob Dylan : 'She Belongs To Me' from 'Bringing It All Back Home', 1965