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03/21/2005 Archived Entry: "Rolling Stone"

Rolling Stone
Back from the C's. Brief web surfing today reveals a new Greil Marcus book on Dylan about to hit the shelves. The book is all about "Like A Rolling Stone."

In The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald writes: "the fact is that writing is the only way I can cope with the memories which overwhelm me so frequently and unexpectedly." Dylan is a part of my memories. And, it seems, a big part of Marcus' (this is the third book about Dylan he's done?"). The line I always remember from "Like a Rolling Stone" is one I used to scrawl on the back of high school notebooks or school book covers:

"When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose"

A teenage mantra, of course. But one that keeps with me. Continuum has a music series they do on records, 33 1/3 - a writer devotes the whole book to memories/thoughts on one record: Live at the Apollo, Dusty in Memphis. I would love to do one on Highway 61 Revisited, the album "Like a Rolling Stone" is on. In the photo above, lifted from a very brief Village Voice piece on the Marcus book, I recall those early moments of listening to Dylan as a teenager - the opening chords of the organ in "Like a Rolling Stone" ringing out, the call-out to narratives and story telling

"Once upon a time you dressed so fine"

The odes to Dada and surrealism

"You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat"

That wonderful point to do what the f you want

"When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose"

And if my memories are what force me to write, and if I keep coming back to that line, I wonder if I really can act on such a declaration.

"When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose"

In another place (other than the blog space), I could take that line into a series of notes and memories, into a lengthy piece of writing (memo for writing: use one song as a place to reimagine memories and thoughts in search of an identification). In the photo of Dylan leaning back in the studio, I no doubt form my own identification - that mix of conflicting points of reference which lure me into believing I see "me" or some other force. I identify with Dylan not because I want to be Dylan, but because of a series of memories circulating within my own internal rhetoric(s). These are, as Sebald notes, the places where writing occurs: inside one’s own rhetorical mix of identification and memory. That is not to say: it’s all personal. No. Not at all. Just as Barthes’ autobiography is not “personal” (it is code; which is the me; which is the code?). This mix is the place composition dare not enter, for it would negate a century of codified instruction that looks for identification outside of the internal mix – in a prominently placed sentence, in a controversy made cliché, in an analysis of a text.

Maybe more later.

Posted by joanna @ 03/21/2005 03:50 PM EST