Bob Dylan: Inspiration and identity

Bob Dylan's Rough and Rowdy Ways is a late masterpiece with the opening track I Contain Multitudes providing one key - no doubt broken off - to its preoccupations.

I Contain Multitudes concerns human complexity; our changeability, our contradictions, the long and winding roads of our life experiences, and the cultural references into which we were born and which we absorbed as we developed. In these respects, each of us contain multitudes as we are the sum of our parts.

Several of the tracks on Rough and Rowdy Ways, including Mother of Muses and Murder Most Foul, are list songs or part-list songs where the lists are primarily those of cultural references. In Murder Most Foul the latter half of the song is a lengthy list of artists that the protagonist wants to see featuring in Wolfman Jack's radio show. Among the multitudes we each contain, listening to the music that Wolfman Jack plays in the wake of the assassination of John F. Kennedy may be a means of escaping from the foul nature of reality or the way in which those who have grown up with popular culture process emotion or both together in tension. In Mother of Muses we are told that the source of artistic inspiration and identity is to be found in the songs and stories of those who have gone before. The artist is one with a mind that roams our cultural heritage until death brings rest from such cultural rambling. As Dylan said in 2012 'I’m working within my art form. It’s that simple ... It’s called songwriting. It has to do with melody and rhythm, and then after that, anything goes. You make everything yours. We all do it.'

Dylan emerged into public consciousness as one appropriating the folk tradition within which the 'borrowing of ideas has always been an integral part.' That occurs through the sense of a tradition from which musicians take and adapt, 'giving their work added depth and imbuing it with a sense of timelessness.'

The phrase that has come to sum up this approach is 'Good artists copy; great artists steal.' This is an aphorism that seems to have reversed what may have been its original use in an article by W. H. Davenport Adams published in 1892. The reversal being made by T. S. Eliot in an essay published in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism.

In The Waste Land Eliot used fragments of literature drawn from across tradition to map out the place of "stony rubbish" and of:

'A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water'

which is the waste land.

The Waste Land, as a poem, does not accept the waste land that it describes. The narrative movement of the poem is towards escape, the finding of the water that will renew life. Eliot's intention was to 'shore up' fragments against the ruins; in other words, to the extent to which he was able, to reconstruct. His seemingly disparate fragments include the Bible, the Grail legend, the Golden Bough, Tarot cards, Shakespeare, Dante, Buddha's Fire Sermon and many more. All are linked, all are reconciled, in the structure and content of a poem whose narrative thread articulates a rejection of and movement away from the sterility of twentieth century life.

The same impulse can be found in the poetry and paintings of David Jones. Jones said that he regarded his poem, The Anathemata: 'as a series of fragments, fragmented bits, chance scraps really, of records of things, vestiges of sorts and kinds of disciplinae, that have come my way by this channel or that influence. Pieces of stuffs that happen to mean something to me and which I see as perhaps making a kind of coat of many colours, such as belonged to 'that dreamer' in the Hebrew myth'.

Jones believed that objects, images and words accrue meanings over the years that are more than the object as object or image as image. Therefore all things are signs re-presenting something else in another form. Recessive signs which re-present multiple signification are what Jones aims to create in works such as The Anathemata and Aphrodite in Aulis. Jacques Maritain suggested that such multiple signification is what creates joy or delight in a work of art as 'the more the work of art is laden with significance … the vaster and the richer and the higher will be the possibility of joy and beauty'.

This is the source of the added depth and sense of timelessness found in the folk tradition but it is, as Eliot, argues what all great artists do. Dylan clearly agrees but notes too that this is the means by which we all construct our identity; in a way that makes us the sum of our parts because we all contain multitudes. In this sense we are all artists. Most of us, though, are simply good artists as we primarily and relatively unconsciously copy the ideas of others rather than doing what the great artists do, which is to appropriate ideas that are in the cultural commons for their own ends.

In Greek myth the mother of the Muses is Mnemosyne (Memory), who is said to know everything, past, present, and future. Memory is the basis of all life and creativity, as Eliot and Dylan also argue. They want us to recover what used to be in our collective memory so the muses can forge our identity 'from the inside out'.Similarly, forgetting the true order and origin of things is often tantamount to death. That dilemma - what it means to be or not to be - is addressed by Dylan in My Own Version Of You where the protagonist attempts to shape the life of another rather than his own; a wrong remembering and a distraction from our true task.

Ross Horton notes that 'Bob Dylan appears, with each passing year, to have digested more of the very fabric of human history than any prophet or sage before him.' Dylan is returning the culture he absorbed as a child and young adult to our collective memory lest we lose it. He is using epic poetry in order to do so, which is why he's falling for Calliope. He wants us to drink deeply from the river of memory.  

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Bob Dylan - Mother Of Muses.