Bob Dylan, poet, singer, metalworker - making us think

_{I remember the furore when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature some time ago. There was some outrage that}

_{1)  he had been given such a prestigious award and}

_{2) that he didn’t bother to appear in Stockholm to accept the prize in person.}

_{I don’t remember the details of the article I read but the gist of it was to suggest that Bob Dylan did not deserve this award and his disdain of the Nobel Prize Committee emphasized his being not an appropriate person to receive it.  So, it was with some amusement I read of how popular Bob Dylan’s acceptance speech for the Nobel prize was.} 

_{It turns out Bob Dylan wrote a rather wonderful acceptance speech which although not given in person was presented in Stockholm. I wasn’t surprised that the fact of this affair different so totally from the fiction by which it was portrayed in the media. We have become used to the dichotomy of the age we live in. Things are rarely how they are portrayed. Strangely, Bob Dylan always managed to be himself a genuine article. So, it’s not surprising that even in the case of this prestigious award his words and act actions ring true to form.}

_{I remember being shocked at one of his early performances where he introduced an electric guitar into his act. His Folk Festival} audience hated it and viewed it as a betrayal of everything he had produced before. He was actually booed by a large crowd of his fans. His response was unique. He just turned his back on the audience and continue to play. An artist that is not swayed by publicity, agents, music industry or even his fans is a unique creature indeed.  I love the fact that he makes weird metal stuff too.  It pleases me no end that when he’s not creating music or singing he likes to weld metal into amazing sculpture. 

Bob Dylans metalwork

_{Humility is rare in an artist. I like the fact that his song “All Along the Watchtower” which Dylan released was later covered by another singer Hendrix.  Dylan announced that it was Hendrix’s version that was the definitive one.  Too few modern artists could or would be so generous with praise.} 

_{In his acceptance speech, Dylan expresses an appreciation for the prize he has been awarded. He comes across as self-depreciating and admits that he had never even asked himself if his songs are literature.  Here is a short quote from that Nobel prize acceptance speech.}

_{“If someone had ever told me that I had the slightest chance of winning the Nobel Prize, I would have to think that I’d have about the same odds as standing on the moon. In fact, during the year I was born and for a few years after, there wasn’t anyone in the world who was considered good enough to win this Nobel Prize.”}

_{In lieu of his presence at the Nobel prize award ceremony, the singer Patti Smith sang his song “It’s a Hard Day’s Night”.  Because it was this song that someone chose to represent his work, I wanted to take a closer look at its lyrics.  I have to confess I listen to songs and rarely hear the words. I know it is sacrilege but I tend to get caught up in the tune and the words are sort of ‘blah blah blah’ in the background. Given this tendency, I wanted to actually print out the lyrics of this song and also give it a bit of thought.}  

A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall  by Bob Dylan

Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?

Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?

I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains

_{For some reason the song track of Misty Mountains from Tolkien’s Book came to my mind.}

I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways

_{I think we have all experienced those highways in our lives, places you find yourself asking how you ever ended up here.  The fact that we sometimes don’t walk these but end up crawling them says a lot about how hard they are to navigate.}

I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests

I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans

_{There are dead zones in the sea suffering from hypoxia (low oxygen) due to excessive pollution from man.  In the 1960s ( Dylan wrote this song in 1962) there were roughly 49 such dead zones by 2008 the number had grown to 405.  A recent publication entitled Climate Change and Dead Zones suggests that the news could be bleaker still as climate change could have a dramatic and worrying interaction with dead zones (Altieri AH1, Gedan KB. 2015).  Talk about your worst enemies ganging up on you?}

I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard

And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard

And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall

Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?

Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?

I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it

_{The world has made valuable progress under the United Nations Millenium goals to reduce deaths in under-fives. It is a real achievement that globally under-five deaths have dropped from 12.5 million in 1990 to less than 9 million in 2008.  But heart-stopping that still 25,000 under-five year old children die every day in our world.  Those wild wolves are getting past us!}

I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it

I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin'

I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin'

_{This gruesome imagery conjures up violence against other races that has blighted nations.  Some musicians have been unusually effective in drawing attention to these atrocities.  Dylan’s song ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ focused attention on the death of a 51-year-old black barmaid, mother of ten, who died after being struck by the cane of a 24-year-old white customer (who was released from prison after only six months).  There have been more emotive songs like Billie Holiday's - Strange fruit addressing these issues but it heartening to hear real musicians letting their craft speak truth to power.}

I saw a white ladder all covered with water

I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken

I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children

_{These lines conjured up for me, social media, all those talkers. There are 3.48 billion social media users in 2019, a big multiplication from 10,000 but his observation of broken tongues nicely predicts the misinformation that floods minds young and old around our world.} 

And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard

And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall

And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?

And what did you hear, my darling young one?

I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin'

Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world

_{Floods were, in my mind, somehow almost mythical events far from present life or relevance.  Then in 2004 on Boxing Day, the 26th of December an Indian Ocean tsunami killed almost a quarter of a million people and floods became horrifically real.  Japan’s tsunami in 2011 reinforced this reality.}

Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin'

_{Hunger is a blight and we know where it is most found and how much of the populations are impacted by it.} 

• Sub-Saharan Africa: 22.7 percent
• Caribbean: 17.7 percent
• Southern Asia: 14.4 percent
• Southeastern Asia: 11.5 percent
• Western Asia: 10.6 percent

_{We may not be laughing but until we address this problem effectively we might as well be for those in this world of ours who go hungry to bed tonight.}

Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter

_{Here are some who died before they were discovered and some examples of their words.  We should celebrate their ‘songs’ and their suffering.}

 _{“As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”}

_{― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or, the Whale}

_{“Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible within himself, though both that indestructible something and his own trust in it may remain permanently concealed from him. “}

_{― Franz Kafka}

_{“Success is counted sweetest}

_{By those who ne'er succeed.}

_{To comprehend a nectar}

_{Requires sorest need.”}

_{― Emily Dickinson}

_{“I don't want to throw these characters away. In other words, I'm going to work on the book again. I haven't been able to look at the manuscript since I got it back, but since something of my soul is in the thing, I can't let it rot without trying.”}

_{― John Kennedy Toole, on receiving a rejection for his book which would, after his death, lead to him getting a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction}

Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley

And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard

And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall

Oh, who did you meet, my blue-eyed son?

Who did you meet, my darling young one?

I met a young child beside a dead pony

I met a white man who walked a black dog

I met a young woman whose body was burning

_{This last line on a young woman with a burning body strikes a chord. Who would have thought that throwing acid on young women would become so common?  Thousands of women in countries such as Bangladesh, Pakistan and India etc have had acid thrown on them in revenge attacks.  These women have usually refused either sexual advances or wedding proposals from men who feel that an acid attack on their victims sends the  message,}

_{“If I can’t have you no one shall!”}

I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow

I met one man who was wounded in love

I met another man who was wounded with hatred

And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard

It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall

Oh, what'll you do now, my blue-eyed son?

Oh, what'll you do now, my darling young one?

I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin'

I'll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest

Where the people are many and their hands are all empty

Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters

_{This has echoes of the Flint water crisis in the US which began in 2014, when the drinking water source for the city of Flint, Michigan was diverted from Lake Huron and the Detroit River to a cheaper source the Flint River. Because of insufficient water treatment, lead leached from water pipes into the drinking water, exposing over 100,000 residents to elevated lead levels.  The water was coloured orange or brown, smelt strange and caused skin rashes and hair loss.  A sip of it was said to taste as if you had a metal coin on your tongue.  It took 18 months of delay and cover-up by city, state and federal government officials before the issue was corrected.  For the previous fifty years prior to 2014, the water had been fine.  In trying to save money big mistakes were made.  Lessons need to be learned here surely?  But recent studies have shown that Flint is no aberration. In fact, it doesn't even rank among the most dangerous lead hotspots in America. A recent study found nearly 3,000 areas in the US with recently recorded lead poisoning rates at least double those in Flint during the peak of that city's contamination crisis. Mistakes can be good when we learn from them but tortuous when we refuse to.}

Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison

Where the executioner's face is always well-hidden

Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten

Where black is the color, where none is the number

And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it

And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it

Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin'

But I'll know my song well before I start singin'

And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard

It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall

_{This is the first time I have really read one of Bob Dylan’s lyrics line by line and I reckon he deserves the Nobel Prize in Literature.  I like this poet, I like his metal work and most of all I love the fact that he does his art to please himself and not us.}

"....singing and music are the spiritual food of the hearts and souls"      Bahá'í Writings

Tolkien - life, myths, books, legends

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892 to 1973) was a professor and English writer best known for his fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion. He taught at Oxford university.  

He was actually born in South Africa and when a very small child was bitten by a very large Baboon spider in his garden. (Perhaps giving him the idea of that seen with Frodo and the spider!)

Baboon spider

At the age of three, he was on a visit to the UK with his mother when his father died in South Africa of rheumatic fever. This loss left the family without an income and so they moved to Birmingham in the UK where they would be close to his mother's parents. He had an aunt Jane who owned a farm called Bag End. (Could this be the inspiration for Bilbo's home?)

Bag End

The more one reads of his childhood and life the more it becomes clear how much he used all his experiences, including the spider, in his literary works.

His mother, Maple Tolkien, home tutored her 2 children and found that the young Tolkien showed a propensity for languages, such as Latin, at a very early age.  Unfortunately, Mabel died of diabetes when Tolkien was only 12. It would be another two decades before insulin, a treatment for diabetes, would be discovered. In Edgbaston, Tolkien lived close to Perrot’s Folly and Edgbaston Waterworks.  

Perrot's Folly

Towers must have had a big impression as they two seemed to crop up in his tales in slightly different forms.

Tolkien was also very interested in the romantic medievalist paintings of Edward Burne-Jones. 

In his early teens, Tolkien invented, with his cousin, a complex language called Nevbash. The second constructed language he created was completely his own, Naffarin.  As well as making up new languages he took time to learn Esperanto. After university, he went with a party of 12 friends to Switzerland and hiked from Interlaken to Murren. 

He spoke of this grand adventure with much joy and the scenery would have been startlingly similar to that which would be experienced by Bilbo passing through the Misty mountains.  

Tolkien was in the British Army during World War I and served as a second lieutenant responsible for commanding enlisted men from the industrial heartland of Lancaster. As he later lamented,

"The most improper job of any man is bossing other men. Not one in 1 million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity”.

He was at the battle of the Somme in July 1916 and came down with trench fever from the ever-present lice in the trenches. Token’s battalion was almost completely wiped out in the brutal battles while he recovered in a hospital in England.  (Lice caused 15% of all sicknesses in the British army at that time). Many of his closest school friends died on those bloody muddy fields. In fact, he said by 1918 all but one of his closest friends were dead.

Token translated Beowulf in the 1920s and gave an acclaimed lecture entitled ‘Beowulf: The monsters and the critics’.  Tolkien insisted that this poem was not just

‘a mine of historical data into which some fantastical monsters have inconveniently strayed but a work of art in which the monsters are foils for an entire cultural attitude to life, death and courage’.

The ancient story begins and ends with a funeral and is an epic old English poem of 3182 lines. It is probably the oldest surviving poem in old English and one of its most important. A manuscript found of Beowulf has been dated between 975 to 1025 A.D. and is found in the Nowell Codex in the British library.  The oral tradition that this manuscript recorded dated from much earlier, and it is believed to have been composed between 700 and 750 A.D.  The poem mixes fiction with 5th- and 6th-century history.  The tale of monsters and battles has an epic timeless quality and would have been recited in huge halls for centuries.  Beowulf mentions characters like Ohthere (530 Ad) and his son (575 AD) and their graves have subsequently been discovered in Upplands, Sweden.

The mount at Lejre on the left has been excavated showing epic finds but the other mound on the right has not yet been examined. Who knows what more finds lie beneath?

In Denmark excavations at Lejre have revealed that a hall was built there in the mid-six century, exactly the time period of Beowulf (Beowulf mentions kings of the Skjöldung dynasty) and where Scandinavian tradition said it was. It is now thought that much of Beowulf is from real historical characters from six century Scandinavia. John Niles, a former university professor and an expert on the Lejre site, said that researchers in the area have found now evidence of a series of great halls dating between 550 and 1000 A.D.

Beowulf is written in a language that sounds very much like Tolkien’s Elvish tongue.  Tolkien would enter his lecture room, at Pembroke College in Oxford reciting Beowulf loudly in its original tongue with dramatic power and effectiveness. W H Auden once wrote to tell him “what an unforgettable experience it was for me as an undergraduate, hearing you recite Beowulf. The voice was the voice of Gandalf.”

Pembroke Hall, Oxford

Tolkien spoke many languages including Latin, French, German, Middle English, old English, Finish, Gothic, Greek, Italian, Old Norse, Spanish, Welsh and mediaeval Welsh.  No wonder when it came to making up new cultures and languages and traditions he found himself peculiarly equipped for this fictional landscape.  

Years later during the Third Reich, a German publisher wrote demanding to know if Tolkien was of Aryan extraction, in other words, non-Jewish in order to permit publication of his book in Germany.   Tolkien wrote a cold response correcting their misunderstanding of what Aryan actually meant.  Who better to clarify their erroneous perspectives than this gifted and creative professor.

“Thank you for your letter. I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.” 

For a long period, after writing some of his earlier books, he got tired of writing about Hobbits.  He felt had covered everything in The Silmarillion in enough detail, which had not met with public acclaim.  His publisher pushed for something more like the Hobbit again but Tolkien had lost interest in the topic.  Then decades later his son was sent to the front lines in the second world war and Tolkien began sending instalments to him, set in Middle Earth.  Tales of courage, heroism and danger, fear and suffering with long hard journeys that ended up in his famous book, The Lord of The Rings.  I like that Tolkien became more not less forgiving of others in his old age as this quote of his indicates.

“For myself, I find I become less cynical rather than more--remembering my own sins and follies; and realise that men's hearts are not often as bad as their acts, and very seldom as bad as their words.” 

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

In creating new races, legends, languages and history he never forgot to embed messages in his stories that are epic, timeless and touch the spirit.

All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king.

"Song of Aragorn" from The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien