Hypnotist Collectors

Perhaps we can all stop looking for answers now. Not because Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home offers any, but because if they’re not to be found in a four-hour documentary they simply don’t exist.

Dylan is. He’s Dylan. Beyond that there are no explanations.

In the past year, I’ve read volume one of his autobiography, viewed the four-hour documentary and listened more than ever, to old albums I took off the shelf and heard with new ears and new perspective, and to newly released recordings from more than 40 years ago. In the past year I’ve heard stories about the man, from a guy who knows, listened intently to actions and descriptions.

I know a ton more about Dylan than before; but I have no answers.

Dylan remains the inscrutable one, the mystique, the chameleon. To hear him give even a bit of his story in his own words is a fascinating treasure. But it doesn’t tell me how he did it. It doesn’t answer how he wrote those songs, or why. It doesn’t answer how he gathered up his rock ‘n’ roll ambition and Woody Guthrie’s story-telling persona, threw in a heavy measure of deep folk tradition and a strange, kinly love of Beat poetry and spit out Hard Rain.

Bob Dylan might be one of the best arguments for a god. How else do you explain talent and vision and prophesy and wisdom, all rolled together like that in a storm cloud?

Dylan couldn’t have existed as he did apart from the time, he couldn’t have soaked up all he did outside of New York in the early 1960s, he couldn’t have written the best of his early songs without observing the world around him. But at the same time he’s ancient and timeless, a singer-poet-prophet hero out of Homer or Shakespeare.

His folk tradition wasn’t just Woody and the Greenwitch Village scene. Dylan’s folk tradition was the old Irish hills and the hot Mississippi Delta. It was the Round Table and the lonesome bride, staring to the sea for a love more in her head than her heart.

He could imagine; that’s for sure.

No Direction Home credits someone as a “Hypnotist Collector.” I missed if the name and perhaps other hidden gems in the scrolling of names.

If we’re all hypnotist collectors, is Dylan the walking antique?

Do any of his individual lyrics, even the most autobiographical ones, really tell us anything about him?

His book didn’t shed any great light, neither did the movie or all these newly unearthed recordings. But they’re all rich, wonderful, captivating.

What light are we looking for? What answers do we demand about Dylan?

I wasn’t around (sadly) for much of Dylan’s career. I didn’t get to hear him when he was new, didn’t get to learn and listen along with the times. Much of his story had been written already before I’d ever heard the name. It’s unfortunate in a sense to have missed out on the first-hand experience of so much of that, but you can’t help when you’re born. (Hell, if you could, I’d guess Dylan would’ve chosen a different time all together, and where would any of us be then?)

I was in college before my lifetime even saw the release of a really good Dylan album.

But I’ve seen him play live seven times, collected a handful of friends for no other reason than we were mutual fans, devoured albums and grounded all manner of meaningful moments in his songs.

I think I’m ready finally to take the story, take the songs, take the experience and take the performer himself and stop looking for the greater answers.