But I was so much older then...

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet - Bob Dylan

I suppose I’ve been postponing this particular tribute for nearly fifteen years. Having touched upon my love for Dylan in tidy snippets before I didn’t really know how to take it on in full. Over the years, I have most certainly opened and closed many a sentence with one of his lyrics but it’s hard to really express the debt I owe the man. Still, it’s his 70^th birthday today so I figure there was no better time to try.

There has been far too much written about Bob and far too many labels used to describe his genius, so I think I’ll skip all the fan mail. I first discovered Dylan when I was thirteen and that may or may not necessarily have been a good thing. By then I had raised myself on a steady diet of John Denver, Tina Turner, the Beatles and Bruce Springsteen, so one might say I was primed for Dylan. I’ve always known that I was an old soul and admittedly a purist when it comes to art, it didn’t help that discovering Dylan kind of cemented that.

Naturally, it was the words. Words matter to me - they matter a lot. How they sound, how they move and how they affect me is one of the few pleasures I will always be grateful for in this world. The first Dylan song I ever heard was ‘Desolation Row’ and for a thirteen-year-old, only child with a penchant towards escapism and conversing with a troupe of imaginary friends that song was like a guidebook. It was the ‘How to’ manual for the hopeless romantic and I remember being frozen while walking in my driveway listening to FM100 through my headphones.

Now Ophelia, she's 'neath the window

For her I feel so afraid

On her twenty-second birthday

She already is an old maid

Something about those words continues to stop me in my tracks, it’s oddly flattering in a perverse way. Then again, I suppose everyone finds something for themselves in Dylan’s words. A tween-time nuance that is so obtuse and ironic that it allows people to fool themselves into believing it was written for them. For me, it was the fact that he operated beneath the surface of the truth. That made his words subtle enough to be true and trite at the same time…it was breathtaking. When you’re listening to Dylan, you’re mocking the world and you’re doing it in code far superior to anything Hammurabi might have conceived. Above all, you’re not doing it alone.

I remember the first time I cried listening to a song was to ‘Shelter from the Storm’ because I understood the perverse impulse to be free to take care of someone and make them fall in love with you while doing it. The rather jingle-jangle feminist in me cringes at that a little today. But that doesn’t stop the song from still making me cry.

To her, death is quite romantic

She wears an iron vest

Her profession's her religion

Her sin is her lifelessness

Then of course came the obsession, where I was glad to finally find one artist I would never be able to pin down or comprehend which guaranteed it would last forever.  That the romance would continue. That is perhaps the most beautiful thing about loving Bob Dylan, the fact that not understanding him and always wanting to remains a constant in one’s life.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m a bit of a musical purist so my personal Dylan avatar will always be the 60’s troubadour…not to say I still don’t loyally preen on everything he comes up with. But it was the awkward, shy, messy twerp with crooked teeth, strumming an acoustic guitar and yodelling ‘Hattie Carol’ outside a cotton plantation in the Mississippi that I fell in love with. I’ve never been comfortable with how success and money look on a person. In my experience money has a tendency to make people quite ugly, quite fast. Coupled with fame it’s just a play by play of every verse in ‘Disease of Conceit’. And even though Dylan wore it uncomfortably enough for me to still love him, I always liked him best in flannel.

What I am perhaps most grateful for to Dylan and his catalogue is the solace in knowing that being a hobo was a legitimate existence. That the nonconformity and misshapen-ness of ‘Quinn the Eskimo’ had a place and above all that the quiet of the mind in ‘Going to Apaculco’ could move mountains if it was enough for you that the landscape resided in your head. That was a relief like no other. Also, the man introduced me to pretty much everyone else that I live to listen to: Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Woodie, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, The Clancy Brothers, Mercedes Sosa, the beats, Muddy, Kristofferson, Haggard, Tom Waits, Hank Williams and with Theme Time Radio Hour, the journey and the moods continue.

Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood

With his memories in a trunk

Passed this way an hour ago

With his friend, a jealous monk

In 2009, I finally got to see Bobby in concert. I was lucky too: to get the cheery, hoppity-hoopla Bob rather than sandpaper sulky Bob that often changes the guard in concert. For some reason though, I simply couldn’t pay any attention to the music. My three hours were spent stalking his every step and zooming in on every tip of the hat. I needed to constantly pinch myself that the man was real and not a phantom sweeping through the conscience of the O2 arena. By the end, I managed to creep up quite close to the stage, close enough to see his face and his expression. The only time I thought I spotted a wistful quarter smile on his face was during ‘Visions of Johanna’. Which is as it should be.

Dr. Filth, he keeps his world

Inside of a leather cup

But all his sexless patients

They're trying to blow it up

On some level my continuing adoration is a tad frightening at this juncture. I fell in love with the likes of Dylan, Cohen and Baez when I felt the need to escape from myself and my surroundings on a daily basis and the fact that this need continues to persist is proving dangerous. On some level, still being in love with Bob, as he turns 70 and as I approach 30 means that I may have just missed that sacred bus to Adultville. It also means that I will always persist on surreality to surpass reality and never give in to practical precision and penny counting. That is not the best move for a romantic who’s life is anything but rosy and who doesn’t have the skill, the resources or the talent to merit a never ending tour.

Given Dylan’s notorious media fright, people have stopped referring to him as a prophet, a messenger, a revolutionary or a troubadour. They appear to finally be toeing his line and refraining from labels. This development is perhaps a step forward for political correctness but frankly it hankers hollow. After all, the reason why no single word was appropriate to sum up Dylan’s genius was because he will always be better at manipulating words to describe what he sees in contrast to those who try to see him.

I have always maintained that Art is the only religion I am comfortable with keeping and artists tend to be my only prophets. If there is a conception of the sacred, the holy, the numinous, the soul or redemption I have always sought it in literature, in music, on canvas or behind the veil of the concrete and bitter folly of absolutes. That idea was born for me at the age of 15 when I first heard 

‘A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall’.

So I suppose the reason I still insist on believing Dylan to be a prophet is the fact that he never claimed to be one. I know I would lose my faith if he ever did. 

A Second Stab at Daughterhood

Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken - Jack Kerouac

Recently, I find myself contemplating the misbegotten exercise better known as ‘Eudemonia’. It has been nearly ten years since I took my first selfish stab at self- realization and the course has rendered mixed results.

Still, the question persists…Is happiness possible amid emptiness? Further more, is it possible to be flooded with guilt and guile simultaneously? It appears that I have been mistaking numbness and delusion for happiness for a while now. It has been over two years since heartbreak and it has also been two years since I had one of those days where one wakes up with a song in their head and hops around the bathroom while brushing their teeth. One of those days when it’s just good to be alive and for a fleeting 24 hours, there is no need to justify that.

But yesterday, I woke up with "Darling from the 7 Khoon Maaf" soundtrack in my head (It goes without saying that taste does not factor in particularly well with my subconscious). This recent foray into ‘Walking on Sunshineville’ ironically owes to my renewed relationship with my father. Forgiveness or forget-ness, and I’m not sure which comes first, is an odd thing. It has taken me years to fully admit to myself that I love my father. The sentiment has always been present but the admission has always eluded me. After all, how does one express love for someone who stands opposed to everything you represent simply because the person happens to have sired you? It has always been that way between him and I, an ever-present incomprehensibility regarding the other. He has always stood like a Titan over my literal and metaphorical shoulder …judging and I have always cowered under the gaze, all the while erecting harsher barricades in my mind.

Things appear to be shifting now, the ice of his disapproval seems to have thawed considerably. In retrospect, I suppose it is a waste that it has taken us half a lifetime to get here but it would be tragic to dwell on that. At times like this I am ever grateful for being granted the soul of  The Fool, who cannot digest tragedy for too long. I am programmed to delve into distractions and while my emotional and artistic setting may never be practical in the established sense, it serves its purpose. Our present conversations, Baba’s and mine, seem to me like the first level playing field we have ever pitched our hopes on. There is conversation and for once, there is disagreement (on my part) which is allowed (on his part). That is perhaps what I am most grateful for at this juncture, the fact that I can finally show my father who I am without the paralyzing fear of being shunned.

Our shy shuffling back and forth between phone calls and dinner dates is something I am coming to treasure and my nerves are no longer getting the better of me in the process. I am also developing a new found respect for the gentle, unassuming coding of Xeno’s second paradox. Because re-establishing one’s daughterhood after a near decade of silence means much shifting between time and mood zones. And Xeno’s “To get from A to get to B one would have to make half the distance between both points and then half of that half and half of that and so on” is proving to be a source of constant comfort. I suppose the romantic in me would like to think I am finally waltzing with Baba.

Our recent conversations have run over some turbulent waters: money and matrimony. The former is something I feel guilty about discussing and the latter seems to be something he feels guilty about broaching. All the while my own mind wrestles with those disastrous Freudian anagrams of girls who search for their father in all the men they meet and he seems to feel the need to reassure me constantly about how he will always provide for me. It is an awkward premise but at this point I am grateful for any foundation I can get.

There are times when I wish I could think about money, the future and security like other adults but it appears I am not built for such things. My moments are made simply by his silent approval of something I have said or done that in-turn allows me to turn a blind eye towards our silent disagreements.

Recently, he casually offered me one of my dreams over a platter of mushroom steak at Gymkhana.

“You want to go to Europe? Fine, you plan it. I’ll pay for it,” he said.

And what I felt wasn’t something as perforated as glee over the chance to finally travel and explore on my own-some, as I have always wanted to or the fact that I didn’t have to worry about how I would foot the bill. The feeling was nauseatingly primitive and rather obtusely Darwinian. It has been a long time since I haven’t considered myself as my own caretaker. Granted, it is quite liberating to know one is capable of taking care of oneself but it is even better one to know that one has Dad if and when one can’t. I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that I missed that.

“You can’t keep planning things and not living them. You need to stop letting all this ‘what if something bad happened’ nonsense stop you from doing what you want in life. Life is short and you don’t want to look back and think you didn’t do anything because you were too scared to even try and because you were too busy being perfect,” he says to me, oh-so casually.

The following minutes encompassed nearly three decades, where Schopenhauer’s time fractions split apart and an entire foundation I had constructed for my sanity shook me silly. Schopenhauer tells us that the shape of our intelligence is time, a thin line that only presents things to us one by one. And once upon a time, Time told me that I needed to be perfect for my father to love me. I knew I wasn’t. I knew that I was the soft, slobbering, quiet, romantic, troubadoring hobo to his unmovable, workaholic, stoic, brash and brilliant watchman. He knew it too.

But in those minutes I looked across the table and found that ten years had taken their toll on both of us. He –for better and worse, and admittedly much to my discredit – has stooped a little at the shoulders, his hair is grey and he occasionally laughs at my fumbling attempts at self-deprecation disguised as humour. I have learned to speak up for myself with some conviction and keep quiet only when required. I tell him things now, far from everything but some things. And he lets me.

Funnily enough, my mind can’t help but dipping into Jesus’ last words on the cross at such a juncture of metaphors and rebirths and all that rambling new-age lunacy. ‘Consummatum est – It is completed.’

 I believe I can finally close a book that I have lived in for a long time. I can finally move beyond a story, where I was the daughter who had to turn her back on everything she knew to feel alive.

I’m hoping starting a new chapter means we both can.