Dylan’s lingo is a language vital to learn

“I wrote the songs to perform the songs. And I needed to sing-in that language. Which is a… “I wrote the songs to perform the songs. And I needed to sing-in that language. Which is a language that I hadn’t heard before.” Dylan hadn’t heard it until he began to write in it. In the years since he began to perform, we’ve forgotten how to hear it. We’ve lost what we most need to speak, to sing, to write, to shout, to dream in.

Bob Dylan found this language in the footsteps of Woody Guthrie and Jack Kerouac. He found it in the twitches and tears of fellow singers, fellow poets and in the need of so many others who had no voice. He found that language because he allowed it to speak for him, to speak through him.

Terror and progress have left us clinging to connectivity, certain that we’ve lost that kind of community which is most essential. Community with all of its hope and synergy and momentum æ that’s what seemed most noticeable as I watched the first part of “No Direction Home.”

Dylan moved from one community to another while learning, hiding, changing, growing and moving again. The Scorsese documentary shows a nation full of young men and women unsure of what to say, but needing their lives to be about more than fear of bombs or communists.

Scorsese creates a vision of Greenwich Village, New York, at the beginning of the ’60s that allowed me to connect all that I’d read with the few things I’ve long questioned. It always seemed odd to me that the hippies would have sprung full grown, armored with flowers and rock ‘n’ roll, from the head of the dull generation that, I’d been assured, had preceded them. I couldn’t believe that the energy for that kind of cultural change could simply appear all at once.

Scorsese captures modern culture while it’s still in the womb and lets us hear its heart beating through Bob Dylan’s voice. The documentary shows Greenwich Village swirling in the wake of the Beats’ rebellion. Their spark was waiting to follow a new generation out into the world. When Bob Dylan showed up on the scene, that spark flung itself inside him and waited until the time was right to flood the world, hopping from genius to genius and changing everything.

It was a transition that the Beats themselves recognized. In an interview included in the documentary, Allen Ginsberg said that he wept upon first hearing a Bob Dylan song because “it seemed that the torch had been passed to another generation from earlier bohemian or Beat illumination.”

That torch ignited the world, but eventually even the greatest of fires must burn itself out. As Dylan began to find his voice, the record industry started packaging it. That industry chased after each new musical visionary, gaining wealth and bulk, while individual, illuminated expression waned. It waned because, over time, those initial communities were left further and further behind.

Now we’re left locked behind walls believing our only connection to humanity is what trickles through wires. My whole life I thought those walls were indestructible. Having watched just the first part of “No Direction Home,” having been shown that even when tightly compressed by institutional fear, apathy and avarice, change can uncoil and strike – I realized that those walls aren’t even real.

I used to believe that if Allen Ginsberg, Jim Morrison, Charles Bukowski or even Kurt Cobain had been drowned out by a sea of corrosive commercialism, then there was no real hope for our generation to contribute anything important.

Perhaps that kind of drowning is the fate of all art. Perhaps without the stagnation brought by exhausted institutions, those forces necessary to redefine a nation’s cultural identity can never meet. It’s a balancing act that takes decades, a seesaw for the muses. We’ve been resting on the soulless side for a few years now. It’s time for somebody to push off.

E-mail Zak Sharif at rzs8@pitt.edu once you’ve watched “No Direction Home.”