Simply earlier than Christmas in 1977, the thirty-six-year-old Bob Dylan sat down for a protracted dialog with Jonathan Cott. Included in Cott’s endlessly great e book Listening: Interviews, 1970–1989 (public library), it stays Dylan’s most soulful and deepest-fathoming interview, replete along with his reflections on vulnerability, the meaning of integrity, and the power of music as an instrument of truth.
One explicit fragment of it has stayed with me through the years — the form of pure mountain spring on which the spirit is refreshed repeatedly with every go to.
20 years earlier than string theorists formulated the holographic precept — a property of quantum gravity below which the three-dimensional universe we understand is likely to be a two-dimensional hologram — Dylan tells Cott:
We’re all wind and mud anyway… We don’t even have any proof that the universe exists. We don’t have any proof that we’re even sitting right here. We will’t show that we’re alive.
When Cott asks what sort of life Dylan believes in, within the absence of such proof, he holds up “actual life” — the truth of life he experiences “on a regular basis,” however which lies “past this life.” (I’m reminded right here of Saul Bellow’s very good Nobel Prize acceptance speech from the identical period: “Solely artwork penetrates… the seeming realities of this world. There’s one other actuality, the real one, which we lose sight of. This different actuality is all the time sending us hints, which with out artwork, we are able to’t obtain.”)
This prompts the ever-erudite Cott to learn for Dylan a instructing by the Hasidic rabbi Dov Baer, the Maggid of Mezeritch, through which he sees a mirroring of Dylan’s inventive ethos and means of being on this planet. It so captivates Dylan as “probably the most mind-blazing chronicle of human conduct,” exceeding in knowledge any of the “gurus and yogis and philosophers and politicians and docs and legal professionals,” that he asks for a replica to pin to his wall.
From a baby you possibly can be taught
1) to all the time to be completely happy;
2) by no means to take a seat idle;
3) to cry for every little thing you need.From a thief you possibly can be taught
1) to work at night time;
2) that for those who can’t achieve what you need in a single night time to attempt once more the subsequent night time;
3) to like your co-workers simply as thieves love one another;
4) to be prepared to danger your life even for a bit of factor;
5) to not connect an excessive amount of worth to issues regardless that you’ve gotten risked your life for them — simply as a thief will resell a stolen article for a fraction of its actual worth;
6) to resist all types of beatings and tortures however to stay what you might be;
7) to consider that your work is worth it and never be prepared to vary it.
Complement with Dylan on the unconscious mind and Leonard Cohen’s lessons in the art of stillness, then revisit the four Buddhist mantras for turning fear into love.
