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Sloth

If some particular sin – sloth, say (no longer sayable, “sloth”, too old-world a word) – isn’t for you, good for you. But this may not be good for you. You may be a prig about it, self-righteous. (Ain’t no man righteous, no, not oneself.) Human beings, all too human, have long found it convenient to

Compound for sins they are inclined to,

By damning those they have no mind to.¹³⁶

And for the artist, the imaginer, this not-being-tempted may turn out to be a mixed blessing, a bit of a curse. For temptation is a profound form that imagination may take. Is it possible to imagine deeply a sin that tempts you not a whit? The greatest artists have always been those who take the full force of temptation, and who know what they – not just we or you guys – are in for and are up against. So it is not surprising that on occasion these will be the very artists who lapse. The profoundest comprehension of snobbery, for instance, has come from writers who are not simply and unwaveringly impervious to it: Henry James, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ivy Compton-Burnett . . . True, they don’t invariably get it right, but this is inseparable from their getting it.

Certain of the seven sins engage Dylan more rewardingly, and more often, than others, because he knows full well where he is susceptible. It can be salutary to be prone to these things, as against being either supine under them or superior to them. From this admission or admittance, there can rise the achievement of an art free from condescension and smugness.

When it comes to the sins of anger and pride, there is many a Dylan song that comes to mind. You might, though, find yourself having to cast about a bit before seizing upon a Dylan song that settles upon – or into – sloth as the sin that challenges. Anger, yes; languor (sloth’s cousin), scarcely.

“Energy is eternal delight”. Hear the voice of the bard, William Blake, in whom Dylan has often delighted. And Dylan is energy incarnate. Energy is Activity. Sloth finds its place in Roget’s Thesaurus under “Inactivity”. But does sloth – could it – find a place in Dylan’s art, given his indefatigable energy? It asks of us a positive effort even to imagine Dylan’s being lazy, slothful, idle, slack, inert, sluggish, languid, or lethargic (to pick up sticks from the thesaurus). The opposite of slothful? “Diligent” is the opposing term that is everywhere in the Book of Proverbs (which Dylan knows like the back of God’s hand). O O O O that Dylanesque rag. It’s so elegant. So intelligent. So Dyligent. Never negligent.

But Dylan, as an heir of Romanticism (Blake’s and Keats’s, for a start), was sure to be drawn to imagine in depth those slothful-looking moods or modes that smilingly put it to us that we might put in a good word for them. Sloth is bad, but “wise passiveness” (Wordsworth) is the condition of many a good thing, including the contemplative arts in both their creation and reception. Sloth is bad, but leisure may be an amiably ambling ambience that should not be mistaken for, or misrepresented as, sloth. British English rhymes “pleasure” with “leisure”, relaxed about it, but perhaps in danger of complacency; American English combines “seizure” and “lesion” for its “leisure”, uneasy about it, but perhaps in danger of morbidity. And then again we differ about sloth. The American pronunciation, with a short o (sloppy, sloshy, this sloth, for slobs who haven’t even the energy for a long o), is differently evocative from the long o of British English, which assimilates the slow to sloth.¹³⁷ “Blue river running slow and lazy”. Sloth drags its eels.

There is an undulating hammock of a word from the good old days: “indolence”. Keats, who had more energy than others would have known what to do with, valued indolence very highly, and devoted an Ode to it, to “The blissful cloud of summer-indolence”, such a relaxation as makes poetry seem hardly worth the effort. But then is poetry perhaps just a relaxation anyway?

For Poesy! – no, she has not a joy –

At least for me – so sweet as drowsy noons,

And evenings steeped in honeyed indolence.

It is characteristic of true art to be willing to acknowledge such feelings about art, feelings that pass for truth, but will pass.

William Empson once invoked The Pilgrim’s Progress in a poem:

Muchafraid went over the river singing

Though none knew what she sang. Usual for a man

Of Bunyan’s courage to respect fear.

(Courage means Running)

Usual for a man of Keats’s energy to respect indolence. Or for a man of Dylan’s energy, he who goes over the river singing. (“I’ll take you ’cross the river, dear / You’ve no need to linger here”: Moonlight.) No need to linger here? Oh, reason not the need, for it may be the fact that there is no need to do something that makes it so tempting, needless, and heedless, so innocently remiss. Dylan can sit by the river while never forgetting the claims of the activities that will sometime have to be resumed. He is not brushing them off, he is sitting them aside:

Wish I was back in the city

Instead of this old bank of sand

With the sun beating down over the chimney tops

And the one I love so close at hand

If I had wings and I could fly

I know where I would go

But right now I’ll just sit here so contentedly

And watch the river flow

(Watching the River Flow)

What brings this to a very different life in the singing is an unexpected cross-current or counter-current. You would never guess from the words alone that the phrasing and the arrangement would be so choppy, so bent on disrupting any easy flowing. Stroppy stomping is the note from the very start, before Dylan even hits the words – and hit them is what he does, not mollify them or play along with their sentiments or go with their flow. The third and then the last verse both kick off with “People disagreeing” – “People disagreeing on all just about everything, yeah”, “People disagreeing everywhere you look” – but then the song is thrillingly disagreeing with itself. Its rhythmical and vocal raucousness is far from flowing. More like shooting a few rapids. Bracing, really, because braced. In the singing, Watching the River Flow turns out not to be one of your usual floatings downstream. “Sweet Thames run softly, till I end my song”: this was sheer fluency in Spenser, but when T. S. Eliot incorporated the line as part of his own song, he did not leave it at that. Later in this same section of The Waste Land, his river is an old man, back in the city, who works for his living and who sweats at it.

The river sweats

Oil and tar

The barges drift

With the turning tide

Watching the River Flow is tarred with a realism that qualifies and complicates the lure of the lazy, though never to the point of abolishing what the words express a hope for: some relaxing, please, if at all possible. For, whatever the abrupt music may say, the unruffled words have a right to be heard. Independence, yes, but interdependence, too, some balance and sustenance of alternate tones and claims.

right now I’ll just sit here so contentedly

And watch the river flow.

Right now this is the right thing, young man Dylan sitting by old man river. (“But this ol’ river keeps on rollin’, though”.) No hurry. It’s got to be done sometime, why not do it then . . . You can muse as long as you like, for now at least, murmurously imagining (that, at least) that you might repeat yourself as a river contentedly does. To the unbitter end.

Watch the river flow

Watchin’ the river flow

Watchin’ the river flow

But I’ll just sit down on this bank of sand

And watch the river flow

The right kind of sloth, a good-natured indolence that acknowledges a realistic feeling for what life is like, had better be no more than a mood, something that must not harden into habit or addiction. So Baby, I’m in the Mood for You understands the link between being in the mood for you and being, sometimes, in the mood for vacancy:

Sometimes I’m in the mood, I ain’t gonna do nothin’ at all

But then again, but then again, I said oh, I said oh, I said

Oh babe, I’m in the mood for you

As printed in Lyrics 1962–1985, eighteen lines of the song each begin with “Sometimes I’m in the mood”, but this one, “Sometimes I’m in the mood, I ain’t gonna do nothin’ at all”, is the only one repeated. Very apt, too. “I ain’t gonna do nothin’ at all” – except just maybe say this again before long. This doesn’t happen as released on Biograph, where there are only four verses (plus an elaborated refrain at the end), in a different order and with different wording but with one excellent stroke, I must say: “Sometimes I’m in the mood, I’m goin’ to give away all my sins”. The innocent exuberance of the song ought to warn us against taking any of these moods other than lightly. Scarcely any sloth to give away, that’s for sure, despite “Sometimes I’m in the mood, I ain’t gonna do nothin’ at all”.

How light at heart the song is, to be sure, and what a contrast to the context within which A. E. Housman once imagined what a relief it might be to do (and perhaps feel) nothing at all. His characteristic letter is dated Boxing Day, 1930:

Between a Feast last night and a dinner-party this evening, I sit me down to thank you and your wife and family for their Christmas greetings and wish you all a happy New Year. Rutherford’s daughter, married to another Fellow of Trinity, died suddenly a day or two ago; the wife of the Emeritus Professor of Greek, who himself is paralysed, has cut her throat with a razor which she had bought to give her son-in-law; I have a brother and a brother-in-law both seriously ill and liable to drop dead any moment; and in short Providence has given itself up to the festivities of the season. A more cheerful piece of news is that I have just published the last book I shall ever write, and that I now mean to do nothing for ever and ever. It is one of my more serious works, so you will not read it.¹³⁸

Housman’s is a stoically doleful challenge. The playful challenge is to convey a pleasure in leisure without being too too leisurely about it all. The word “lazy” – the only everyday term hereabouts – agrees to make light of the matter, easy-coming and easy-going. (Sin? “I say, ‘Aw come on now’”.)

Flowers on the hillside, blooming crazy

Crickets talkin’ back and forth in rhyme

Blue river running slow and lazy

I could stay with you forever

And never realize the time

(You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go)

“Running slow”: it is good of “slow” to be both an adjective and an adverb (The Oxford English Dictionary is no slouch in these matters), for this means that “slow” can preserve the proprieties and at the same time can keep the adjective “lazy” company. Not itself lazy, this, for all the predictable casualness by which “crazy” ushers in “lazy”. For there is plenty quietly going on: in the invoking of rhyme itself,¹³⁹ and of the crickets working their little legs or wings off (for nature is not slothful, nor is the sloth); in the equable paradox of “running slow” (how slow would it have to be to no longer be running?); and in the assonance that is itself a form of staying, when “lazy” finds itself talking, three words later, with “stay with”. Laziness is prudently acknowledged and very prudently shifted: you’re not to think, my dear, that I’m the one that’s lazy, it’s the river that’s lazy. “And never realize the time”? But always realize the art, with honestly deceptive ease.

Winterlude, waltzing along on its skating rink, likewise takes its ease, but again not selfishly, since the song is in the unbusied business of giving ease, too, not just taking it. “My little daisy” effortlessly rhymes with “Winterlude, it’s makin’ me lazy”, and the ludic trick upon which the whole song turns – the telescoping of “winter” into “interlude” – depends on the mixed feelings that we have about such compactings. Lewis Carroll took out the patent on portmanteau words: “‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy’ . . . You see, it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word.”¹⁴⁰ On the one (iron) hand, you might be sliding one word into another because you’re a busy man, packing for your business trip, in haste and under pressure, no time for both the words in full, economy of effort in the interests of economics (Federal Express takes too long, so FedEx it) . . . Or, on the other (velvet) hand, you might be smoothly idly sliding one word into another in quite the opposite spirit, not seeing why you should be expected to go through the effort of saying both “winter” and “interlude”, given that there is an overlap of the words, one word in the other word’s lap, relax, okay?

Either way, Dylan has a feeling for how laziness – which is how we prefer to think of sloth these days, making it lighter, less sodden – can be unlazily evoked:

And yer train engine fire needs a new spark to catch it

And the wood’s easy findin’ but yer lazy to fetch it

(Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie)

Off-hand, the off-rhyme of catch it / fetch it; you catch it, even if he couldn’t quite bring himself to fetch it. “And the wood’s easy findin’” – no excuse, really – “but yer lazy to fetch it”. Two ways of putting it, collapsed into one: You’re disinclined to fetch it / You’re too lazy to fetch it. Then we can hear the reducing of the effort down to the minimum. But you are too lazy to fetch it. Reduced to But you’re too lazy to fetch it. Further reduced, not just you’re to yer but too lazy to lazy. Can’t be bothered to say too right now, since I’m going to have to say to in just a moment. “But yer lazy to fetch it”.

All the Tired Horses

There is comedy in the thought that someone as up and about as Dylan might settle for what Keats called “summer-indolence”. Such comedy is in the air, even if the air is thick and heavy, in the first song on Self Portrait: All the Tired Horses. The wish to take the day off, surlily glad of the excuse of the heat (which even gets to the animals, you know), comes up against the faintly guilty acknowledgement that some activity or other does have a claim on you. The song consists of two lines of words, followed by a musing hmm sound that might be one line or two:

All the tired horses in the sun

How’m I s’posed to get any ridin’ done

Hmm¹⁴¹

– or rather

hmmmmmmmm hmmmm hmm hmm-hmm

This sequence arrives gradually from silence, and departs gradually into silence, and you hear it fourteen times. It’s that and that only. Oh, the orchestration of it varies and does some mock-pompous clowning around, but nothing changes, it’s just a matter of shifting weight while having to rest rather restlessly.

Dylan, who believes every word of it, doesn’t sing a word of it. With endearing effrontery, he leaves it to the back-up singers – except that it doesn’t make sense to call them back-up singers in the absence of any full frontal voice of his. Dylan has not backed down exactly or backed out, but he has backed away – from the very first song on an album called, of all things, Self Portrait. Where is Dylan’s self now that we need it? But then you don’t need it. The song gets on very beautifully without him, thank you. A good Self Portrait may begin with Self Abnegation. Of a kind. Or, if you think putting it like that is too grand, the man is still on holiday – not back for this opener of a song, one that turns upon mildly cursing that the day isn’t sheer holiday.

Not away for long, though: in the two songs that follow, Alberta and I Forgot More than You’ll Ever Know, Dylan gets some writing done (as he had hinted he would like to), though not all that much, since Alberta is a traditional song slightly adapted by him.¹⁴² Some writing done, and some singing, too, with backing from the serene women. After that, he is on his own, in Days of ’49. The women will never again on the album find themselves left frontless. Our man wouldn’t want to make a habit of such amicable sloth.

Genial relaxation hangs about All the Tired Horses, this plain-spun plaint, in some other respects, too. Attributed to Dylan on the album, the song doesn’t make it into the Lyrics 1962–1985. Someone couldn’t be bothered, was slothered?

And then again, with that receptiveness of leisure that may amount to creative sloth, the song cocks an ear for coincidences, or at any rate might not resent our wondering (mustn’t be heavy) about a possible coincidence or two. That word “tired”, for instance. It just happens that this is the word crucial to the musical drowsiness of The Lotos-Eaters:

Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,

Than tir’d eyelids upon tir’d eyes.

Tennyson on how to pronounce “tir’d” there: “making the word neither monosyllabic nor disyllabic, but a dreamy child of the two”.¹⁴³ This dreaminess in The Lotos-Eaters is from within the “Choric Song”, and there is something about song that often finds itself drawn to such relaxation in the sun. Dylan, dawdling drawlingly into “All the tired horses in the sun”, wouldn’t have to have known this; all he would have needed was to be in sympathy with its sympathies. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first definition of “in the sun” is “free from care or sorrow”. The phrase “in the sun” likes to close the line when figuring in a song. In The Pirates of Penzance, there is an instance within a song that finds pleasure in contemplating the leisure of another: “He loves to lie a-basking in the sun”. A good old tradition, this, for in As You Like It the three-word phrase (likewise in conclusion) had been at play in a song that happily invoked the person “Who doth ambition shun / And loves to live i’ the sun”. In Twelfth Night there is a song of which we hear before we actually hear the song itself, one woven by those who weave, “The spinsters and the knitters in the sun”. Dylan’s “All the tired horses in the sun” is interknitted with such a feeling for it all, placing and timing. A very different feeling from the energetic aggression that can be felt in It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue:

Yonder stands your orphan with his gun

Crying like a fire in the sun

Marlowe staged a parade of the Seven Deadly Sins in his Doctor Faustus. And what is the first thing that Sloth wants to tell you? “I am Sloth. I was begotten on a sunny bank, where I have lain ever since.” And the last thing he wants to say? “I’ll not speak a word more for a king’s ransom.”

A word more: perhaps in the recesses of the song’s few words there is something else that is worth a king’s ransom. Or am I alone in flirting with the thought that if we had a crossword clue, All the –––– horses (5), the word we might wish we could ink in would be King’s?¹⁴⁴ Dylan, who loves to make play with nursery rhymes, might enjoy playing the energetic pointlessness of “All the King’s horses and all the King’s men” (pointless because How were they s’posed to get any repairs done? whereas the Dylan women are all getting the singing done) against the unenergetic pointedness of

All the tired horses in the sun

How’m I s’posed to get any riding done

A good question (with no question-mark), though not exactly a question, really. A quasi-querulousness, rather, the weary aggrievance of someone who can’t muster the energy to mount an argument, let alone a horse. How’m I s’posed . . .: So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold. (To invoke the music of Browning’s A Toccata of Galuppi’s.) “How’m I s’posed . . .”: with, perhaps again, some pleasure derivable from this striking a chord, if we happen to know that “supposed” was for ages a helpful musical term, as The Oxford English Dictionary records:

Mus. Applied to a note added or introduced below the notes of a chord, or to an upper note of a chord when used as the lower note (supposed bars) etc.

Passivity rules? But Dylan’s words have their unobtrusive activity, as does his syntax, his articulate energy. There is no verb in the first line, as if unable to bring itself to do more than just point to, point out: “All the tired horses in the sun”. Blankly, as though a verb (for the verb is the activating part of speech) would be too much of a bustle or hassle. And then no syntactical relation between the first line, which just adduces those horses, and the second line, which is nothing but a fatigued remonstration. “How’m I s’posed to get any riding done”. I ask you. Not that you need take the trouble to answer. It is in vain for any of us to kick against the pricks – and anyway kicking would be more of an effort than I’m prepared to make, I don’t mind telling you. Forget it. But don’t forget the song, even though Lyrics 1962–1985 does.

Self Portrait doesn’t leave it at that. For there are other occasions when the album puts us in mind of the lure of sloth, easy though queasy. Wigwam is happy to undertake its instrumental operations, its ineffable wordlessness, for three minutes, just singing over and over again “la” and “da”. If you were to complain about this, you would only come across as la-di-da. And there is Copper Kettle (attributed on the album to A. F. Beddoe), which Dylan sings with an exquisite slowness that languorously lingers in the knowledge that “sloth” is a noun from the adjective “slow”. So easy and so slow.

Get you a copper kettle

Get you a copper coil

Fill it with new-made corn mash

And never more you’ll toil

You’ll just lay there by the juniper

While the moon is bright

Watch them jugs a-filling

In the pale moonlight

“And never more you’ll toil”. Dylan, working against the grain of his own character and disposition, has found a way of imagining this with affection – thanks to another. (Maybe Beddoe didn’t have to toil at it, but he must have had to work at it, which is how it manages to sound so effortless.) “They toil not, neither do they spin”: those are the gospel words that Keats chose as epigraph for his Ode on Indolence. Dylan isn’t the type to envy the lilies of the field, but he knows why you and I might.

Time Passes Slowly

Whereas the cadences of All the Tired Horses are entirely at one (vocally, musically, verbally), Time Passes Slowly sets itself to set your teeth on edge. On the page, it looks at first entirely equable in its setting, at its setting out:

Time passes slowly up here in the mountains

We sit beside bridges and walk beside fountains

Catch the wild fishes that float through the stream

Time passes slowly when you’re lost in a dream

It never becomes a nightmare exactly, but it assuredly isn’t voiced as happily idle, a happy idyll. From the start, the song evinces the kind of contrariety that characterizes Watching the River Flow; Time Passes Slowly, too, is rhythmically and vocally bumpy, jagged, pot-holed, unsettled and unsettling, straining its musical strains, not soporific at all, at all. And more and more the song commits itself to the implications of the words that follow that first verse. “Once I had a sweetheart, she was fine and good-lookin’”. Time passes slowly; this love has passed but not the wrenched and wrenching memory of it. The rhymes refuse to stay right, and the voicing then does nothing to ameliorate this (the way of Dylan’s comedy, but then this is tragedy), rather it skewers the rhymes askew:

Time passes slowly up here in the daylight

We stare straight ahead and try so hard to stay right

On the page, you are likely to glimpse the having to try so hard; in performance, you are sure to hear it, compounded vocally and musically so that it really won’t stay right. “Up here in the mountains”, from the opening, has become, here at the closing, “up here in the daylight”, which is perfectly calm, but the rhyme of “daylight” with “stay right” is tense: you have to stay cautiously with “stay” for a moment, and you have to make sure that you get “right” right when it comes to the run of the words or rather to their halting.

Time passes slowly up here in the daylight

We stare straight ahead and try so hard to stay right

Like the red rose of summer that blooms in the day

Time passes slowly and fades away

This final verse plaits its rhymes as no previous verse had done: “daylight” “stay right” “the day” “away”. But this conclusiveness is not that of a love-knot.

This is no love song, a no-love song. It would all feel less hopeless if things were over and done with. But. “Time passes slowly when you’re searching for love”. This entailing some sour soul-searching.

Those three words, “Time passes slowly”, open the song, open it up. They open the first and last lines of the first and last verses, and of the second (the remaining) verse they open the last line. They are perspicuously absent from the song’s bridge. Five lines of the verses’ twelve begin with “Time passes slowly”, five times the bridge rings no changes on a different tedium of words, five of them:

Ain’t no reason to go in a wagon to town

Ain’t no reason to go to the fair

Ain’t no reason to go up, ain’t no reason to go down

Ain’t no reason to go anywhere

This is obdurate, blockish, an evocation of a dangerous state of mind. Indifference can harden, before long, into something damnable: “accidie”, sloth, torpor. The Oxford English Dictionary says that this is “the proper term for the 4th cardinal sin, sloth, sluggishness”, and that when its Greek origin (= non-caring-state, heedlessness) was forgotten, the Latin acidum, sour, lent its harsh flavour to the word. Not-caring: or, Ain’t no reason to go in a wagon to town, or to go to the fair, or to go up, or to go down, or to go anywhere. No go. You name it, I’ll disclaim it. Can you reason with someone who just keeps saying Ain’t no reason to? It might even vie with the vista of the child’s Why?

“Apathy’ is a word that drifts to mind, but apathy doesn’t carry the bone-deep surrender that is the accent of accidie. “Her sin is her lifelessness”.¹⁴⁵ Beckett could joke about “a new lease of apathy”; you can’t pull that off with accidie, the extremity of not-caring that has been characterized as “an acquiescence in discouragement which reaches the utmost of sadness when it ceases to be regretful”.¹⁴⁶

The lines of the song’s bridge do have their equanimity all right, but it is an emptied equanimity that has persuaded itself (as Satan did) that it will be able to say farewell to despair if it says farewell to hope. It acquiesces, yes, but so grimly as to bring home that it constitutes no bridge from this not-caring to any other state of mind. Thank Somebody that there is, elsewhere in Dylan, a world elsewhere:

Happiness is but a state of mind

Anytime you want to you can cross the state line

So sings Waitin’ for You,¹⁴⁷ and very happily, too. But unhappinessis convicted, convinced that there is nothing, nobody, to wait for. And it has long ceased to see any point in making an effort. “Ain’t no reason to go anywhere” – and that includes going across the state line into the state of mind that is happiness.

“Time passes slowly and fades away” – this, too, is an estranging thing to say. There is a glimpse of the lethal state of mind that asks only to kill time. But old Father Time never dies, he only fades away, or rather fades from our fading sight.

Clothes Line Saga

The not-caring, the nothingness, the depths beyond apathy even, at the heartland of Time Passes Slowly is as nothing compared to the vacuity of Clothes Line Saga, which raises small talkative mindlessness and affectlessness from down there in the Basement. Family values, of a sort, flat, faithful, not careless, just not caring. The two things that make it possible for us not to scream (“Why aren’t they screaming?”, in the words of Philip Larkin, The Old Fools) are that the song is stringently straight-faced and that it does give an adolescent’s-eye-view. The adolescent, after all (it may be a long time after – the song begins with the words “After a while”), usually turns out to be a worm that turns. (“Well, I just do what I’m told” – Do you now . . .) Time passes slowly, and so does adolescence but it does pass. Teenagers age. Meanwhile here is a vinegary vignette, the vinaigrette dressing that is Clothes Line Saga. It is sung levelly at a steady sturdy rhythm of monumental unconcern.

CLOTHES LINE SAGA

After a while we took in the clothes

Nobody said very much

Just some old wild shirts and a couple pairs of pants

Which nobody really wanted to touch

Mama come in and picked up a book

An’ Papa asked her what it was

Someone else asked, “What do you care?”

Papa said, “Well, just because”

Then they started to take back their clothes

Hang ’em on the line

It was January the thirtieth

And everybody was feelin’ fine

The next day everybody got up

Seein’ if the clothes were dry

The dogs were barking, a neighbor passed

Mama, of course, she said, “Hi!”

“Have you heard the news?” he said, with a grin

“The Vice-President’s gone mad!”

“Where?” “Downtown.” “When?” “Last night”

“Hmm, say, that’s too bad!”

“Well, there’s nothin’ we can do about it,” said the neighbor

“Just somethin’ we’re gonna have to forget”

“Yes, I guess so,” said Ma

Then she asked me if the clothes was still wet

I reached up, touched my shirt

And the neighbor said, “Are those clothes yours?”

I said, “Some of ’em, not all of ’em”

He said, “Ya always help out around here with the chores?”

I said, “Sometime, not all the time”

Then my neighbor, he blew his nose

Just as papa yelled outside

“Mama wants you t’ come back in the house and bring them clothes”

Well, I just do what I’m told

So, I did it, of course

I went back in the house and Mama met me

And then I shut all the doors

The song makes its point about pointlessness, and the title as given in Lyrics 1962–1985, Clothes Line, was the better for not letting sarcasm have the last word, as against Clothes Line Saga.

It feels like a parody of a way of lifelessness. And so it is, while taking a shot at a previous shot at this: Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe, which had been a hit with its doggèd tedium, its Papa said, and Mama said, and Brother said. Hard to get flatter-footed than the Ode.¹⁴⁸ Hard, but not impossible. For along came Dylan and levelled it some more, the flatly faithful flat-liner. Full of mindless questions, the song is an answer of a sort, and something of a parody.

As so often in Dylan, there may be a touch of the nursery rhyme (and nursery rhymes like to accommodate parodies).

The maid was in the garden hanging out the clothes,

When down came a blackbird and pecked off her nose.

The song avails itself of this in its nose / clothes lines, but its social setting doesn’t have any maids to help out around here with the chores. And there will be nothing as penetrating as a peck, although there is a pecking order: “Papa yelled outside ‘Mama wants you t’ come back in the house and bring them clothes.’”

It starts bored, and it stays that way.

After a while we took in the clothes

Nobody said very much

To put it mildly. This is classic boredom, the more so because not really admitted to, with not just the vacancy but the vacuum of smalltown small talk. Why are you telling me all this? “Well, just because”.

Just some old wild shirts and a couple pairs of pants

Which nobody really wanted to touch

Really? And they are bleached of any real wildness, those “old wild shirts”. The Oxford English Dictionary has, under “wild”:

U.S. slang. Remarkable, unusual, exciting. Used as a general term of approbation . . . “amazing range of colours (including some wild marble-like effects)”.

Exciting? Amazing? Forget it. “It was January the thirtieth / And everybody was feelin’ fine”. (“Feelin’ fine” has never been so evacuated in the delivery. Not tonic, catatonic.) January the thirtieth, eh. Why that day? (King Charles I’s deathday? The birthday of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had run for Vice-President but had not “gone mad”?) Who knows? Who cares? Just being retentive as to the annals, that’s all. “Hmm, say, that’s too bad”. Sloth, which shoulders nothing, shrugs its shoulders, shrugs everything off. “Well, there’s nothin’ we can do about it”. Or can do about anything, come to that. Or can do, period.

The conversation from the start has proceeded apace. A sluggish pace.

Mama come in and picked up a book

An’ Papa asked her what it was

Someone else asked, “What do you care?”

Papa said, “Well, just because”

The boredom is always edgy, on the brink of bad temper (you might think of the opening scenes of the film Badlands, with its smalltown voice-over of incipient family violence). Everything is a matter of course: “Mama, of course, she said, ‘Hi!’” – the voice flattening the exclamation mark, since not-caring is never marked by exclamations. “Well, I just do what I’m told / So, I did it, of course”. Everything just takes its course. And nothing courses, least of all through anybody’s veins.

“The next day everybody got up” – No!!?*!?!* You gotta be kidding.

If people ask you pointless questions, you do well to stick to your rights, and to answer with matching pointlessness:

I reached up, touched my shirt

And the neighbor said, “Are those clothes yours?”

I said, “Some of ’em, not all of ’em”

He said, “Ya always help out around here with the chores?”

I said, “Sometime, not all the time”

The empty questions, the cagey answers, let nothing out, give nothing away. (Here’s some nothing for you, says the song all the way through.) Nothing to give, nothing gives. Or rather, not quite nothing, for there is that one surprising yelp or yodel from Dylan, exultation even, of “Yoo ooh” in the last verse just before the end, as though signalling a way out, an end, an escape from a world in which when “my neighbor, he blew his nose”, that just might be the most interesting thing that you’ll ever hear from him. Hold on to that little yelp, for it is just about all that might give you a glimpse of hope. For the end of the song doesn’t sound as though it can imagine much of a way out:

Well, I just do what I’m told

So, I did it, of course

I went back in the house and Mama met me

And then I shut all the doors