That Old Black and White

The tune "Bob Dylan’s Dream" has long been on my mental play-list (like so many of his gems, at times purposeful, at others a bit of an earworm), admittedly first quite likely because of the PPM cover (Album 1700). Fantastic tune, terrific lyrics, and a classic bittersweet evocation of gaining of experience versus loss of innocence.

Lyrics start off like this, hopefully all the reminder needed for most:

While riding on a train going west
I fell asleep for to take my rest
I dreamed a dream that made me sad
Concerning myself and the first few friends I had

With half-damp eyes I stared to the room
Where my friends and I spent many an afternoon
Where we together weathered many a storm
Laughing and singing till the early hours of the morn.

Almost a Jungian theme perhaps (as if I knew anything about Jung). I awoke this AM, for example, to a tune with lyrics like “wish I knew way back when what I know now.” And there is the classic Bob Seger lyric “wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.”

Not to mention Bob’s own “ah but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”

But the Dream lyrics have always cut awfully close to the bone for a sentimental romantic sot like me, first in heading east to college and even more so on return to the Pacific Northwest. I cherished tight camaraderie with a handful of college classmates; the inevitable post-graduation separation amounted to the scattering of a proto-commune of fantastic soul-mates. Not that “we never thought we could ever get old,” but at least I may have entertained the thought that “we could sit forever in fun.” Some of that fun centered on a mere card game – the principles in theory at least transmitted solely through absolutely addle-pated demonstration rather than any liturgical stating of rules. Not that there weren’t absolutely dogmatic rules, mind you! It was a great faceoff between stoner and fascist. The rules just were not supposed to be recorded or according to some even stated aloud.

But my freewheeling tonight (inadvertent album title evocation, honest) is more along the lines of whether (horrors!) 43 might down the road be sitting around a pile of burning brush, with similar pondering. What would seem pretty innocent musings for most of us suddenly have pretty nasty cataclysmic implications given our experience with dreamer XLIII. These lines in particular come to mind:

as easy it was to tell black from white
it was all that easy to tell wrong from right

and

where we longed for nothing and were satisfied
talkin’ and a-jokin’ about the world outside

That would be him alright, putting everything in over-simplistic white/black, us/them, wrong/right dichotomies, to hell with facts, nuances, uncertainty, and the real world. And as long as we’re at it, making our own reality and giving the finger to anyone with a different opinion, why not also poke fun at those others who are actually trying to make the world a better place and thus having to deal with subtleties and real life. Now that you've made it this far, thanks to ma and pa barbie having repeatedly paid off the authorities, go ahead and twist those lipless gums a bit and sneer out a few condescending nicknames for old time’s sake?

(I'm going into song-rehab after this to try to recapture my enjoyment of Dream.)

But that’s how you will be remembered, sorry little Mr. Strutter-decider. Clueless and absolutely devoid of any class to the end. A new icon for the odd combination of petulant spoiled brat and trailer-trash loser.