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 fantastic guide Listening: Interviews, 1970–1989 (public library), it stays Dylan’s most soulful and deepest-fathoming interview, replete together with his reflections on vulnerability, the that means of integrity, and the ability of music as an instrument of fact.
One explicit fragment of it has stayed with me over time — the sort 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 may 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 are able to’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 fact 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 may be one other actuality, the real one, which we lose sight of. This different actuality is at all times 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, wherein he sees a mirroring of Dylan’s artistic ethos and manner of being on the earth. It so captivates Dylan as “essentially the most mind-blazing chronicle of human habits,” exceeding in knowledge any of the “gurus and yogis and philosophers and politicians and docs and attorneys,” that he asks for a duplicate to pin to his wall.
From a baby you’ll be able to study
1) to at all times to be pleased;
2) by no means to take a seat idle;
3) to cry for every little thing you need.From a thief you’ll be able to study
1) to work at night time;
2) that if you happen to can’t acquire 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 keen to threat your life even for just a little factor;
5) to not connect an excessive amount of worth to issues regardless that you may have risked your life for them — simply as a thief will resell a stolen article for a fraction of its actual worth;
6) to resist every kind of beatings and tortures however to stay what you’re;
7) to imagine that your work is worth it and never be keen to vary it.
Complement with Dylan on the unconscious thoughts and Leonard Cohen’s classes within the artwork of stillness, then revisit the 4 Buddhist mantras for turning worry into love.