Timothy Hampton

Perhaps the most memorable performance on Bob Dylan's 1966 masterpiece Blonde on Blonde is the one that people try to mimic when they want to make fun of Dylan's singing. This is the song called "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again."  It recounts the madcap adventures of a narrator who finds himself in Mobile, Alabama, a city noted for its racism, while longing to get to Memphis, Tennessee, a city known, back then, at least, primarily as the home of the blues.  As the song unfolds we see our hero subjected to a number of torments.  He meets a corrupt politician, a beautiful woman, a preacher—an entire menagerie of types of Southern culture.  And after every encounter, he sings his lament, "Oh, mama, can this really be the end/to be stuck inside of Mobile/with the Memphis blues again." 

 

One of the remarkable features of "Stuck Inside of Mobile" is its chorus.  Dylan is not normally a writer of songs with choruses.  He prefers the one or two-line refrain.  The chorus, as we know, is one of the features of song most directly associated with the Pete Seeger school of folk music, in which everyone is supposed to sing along in unison to create community.  Dylan, however, never sings the chorus to this song in the same way twice, so that you couldn't sing along even if you wanted to.  As the song unfolds he hesitates, he hurries the beat, he sings behind the beat, he stretches the words almost beyond recognition.

 

Midway through the song, at four and a half minutes in, we get a parable of disorientation:

 

     Now the rainman gave me two cures,

     Then he said, "Jump right in."

     The one was Texas medicine,

     The other was just railroad gin.

     And like a fool I mixed them

     And it strangled up my mind

     And now people just get uglier,

     And I have no sense of time.

 

     Oh, Mama. . .

 

     And so on. 

 

What is remarkable about the verse is the emphasis on time.  The narrator's drug taking—if that's what this is about—has deprived him, he says, of any sense of time.  Yet this dislocation of time is not merely sensorial distortion, some pop music version of a story by Borges, a painting by Dalí, or a poem by Rimbaud.  For the phrase, "I have no sense of time" is also self-referential.  It is a common phrase used by musicians to describe someone whose playing or singing is out of the groove of the song.  "You have no sense of time," is a phrase that no musician wants to hear addressed to him or her. 

 

Yet here Dylan pushes the idea into the performance itself.  For he hesitates before pronouncing the word "time."  Then as soon as he has made this declaration, he hurries the rhythm of the chorus, jumping into the phrase "Ah mama," an instant before the beat where it should fall--that is, out of time.  Then, for good measure, he changes the pronunciation of MObile, to MoBEEEL, and hurries the final line.  That is, he is showing us, in his own performance, through the manipulation of his own voice,  that he has no sense of time.

 

This self-referential joke, if that is what it is, resolves the tension between the formal completion of the rhyme, the rhythm of diction, and the exigencies of grammar.  It displaces them into the voice, into Dylan's capacity to stretch rhythm in the dynamic moment of performance.  This is his great discovery in the middle years of the 1960s, perhaps more important than his embrace of Allen Ginsberg or Rimbaud or Andy Warhol.  When he inducted Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Bruce Springsteen suggested that, whereas Elvis Presley had freed the body for song, Dylan had freed the mind.  I would argue that the bard of Asbury Park might be overly Cartesian in this formulation, and that what Dylan freed was the breath and the voice, those elements that lie between body and mind.  And it was the freeing of the voice, we could even suggest, that made possible Dylan's great achievement, the injection of high literary language into the world of popular song. 

For I would have you know, Sancho, that all or nearly all of the knights errant of past times were great troubadours and great musicians, because these two skills, or to be more accurate, gifts, are essential to knights errant in love.  (Don Quixote, I, 18)

 

 

In one of the most often imitated lyrics of the European Renaissance, the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca depicts himself walking alone in the wilderness.  "Solo e pensoso," he says," "I più deserti campi,/Vo mesurando/ a passi tardi e lenti."  Or, as Robert Durling's translation has it, "Alone and filled with care, I go measuring the most deserted fields with steps delaying and slow."  The key words in this passage are "mesurando" "measuring," and "passi," or steps.  This last term, as commentators have often pointed out, suggests both the steps of the lover and the passi, or metric units of the poem itself.  The measured gait of the suffering lover is co-extensive with the unfolding of the poem, step by step, syllable by syllable.  And as the poem ends we learn that no matter where his steps lead him, Petrarch is accompanied by Love, which discourses with him, tormenting him and driving him on. 

 

This image of the perfect unfolding of poetic line and poetic sense, of steps and syllables, will become a commonplace in Renaissance poetry, from Ronsard to Góngora.  Petrarch's mobility is one of the features of his modernity.  It marks him out, here as in his letters, as a reflective, self-regarding individual both driven by desire and able to comment, often ironically, on the forces that drive him.  It is no accident that the most famous of these self-descriptions comes in a sonnet, as the sonnet is the form that, by its very structure, imposes on the self a movement of revision, of introspection, of turning and turning again.

 

Yet Petrarch's verse is rooted in literary history.  In this case, he has read the Troubadour poets who wrote in Occitan in the 12th and 13th centuries.  We see his proximity to the poetry of the troubadours most dramatically in the twenty-second poem of his Canzoniere.  This is the first long poem in the collection, and it is a sestina.   The sestina, we recall, is a strangely artificial poetic form consisting of six stanzas of six lines each, with each line ending in one of six words.  The six words each appear at a different place in the stanza as the form unfolds—ending the first line in the first verse, then the fifth line in the second verse, then the third, and so on, until each word has closed a different line and the poem has turned around itself.  Petrarch's sestina tells of how the rhythms of the seasons come and go, day follows night, and night follows day. The natural world knows this.  Only the poet, who is pining for his lady, cannot follow the normal rhythms of the day.  He is an outlier, an unnatural self whose desire sets him at odds with the natural order of things.  It is of course beautifully ironic that Petrarch's evocation of his erotic neural patterns should come in a sestina, the most rigid and cyclical of all poetic forms.   His emotional torment stands against the regularity of the rigid poetic form that gives it voice.

 

Petrarch's poem is indebted to an earlier poem, the first sestina anyone knows about, by Arnaut Daniel, widely acknowledged to be the greatest of the Troubadours.  Arnaut's sestina evokes his desire to enter into the room where his lady awaits him.  Each time he tries to approach her, he cannot.  The poem offers a set of situations in which his attempt to join the lady is derailed, as the form of the sestina suggests the constrained space of the room he cannot enter.  Arnaut is tormented by what the first line of the poem calls "lo ferm voler q'el cor m'intra," "the strong desire that enters my heart."  Petrarch recalls this language in his own sestina, where he speaks of his own "firm desire," "lo mio fermo desir," which, he says, comes from the stars.  Petrarch thus echoes and translates Arnaut's language ("voler" becomes "desir") turning the drama of desire into a metaphysical drama about the place of the poet in the universe.

 

Arnaut's poem, like most Troubadour poems, is constructed of discrete single lines of meaning that are complete within themselves.  Lines may consist of lists of adjectives, or descriptions of situations.  Verbs and nouns go together within each poetic line: "I will take pleasure in my joy, in a garden or a chamber," ends the first stanza of Arnaut's poem, in a nice complete sentence.

Here are some more sample lines from Arnaut, in Fredrick Goldin's translation (slightly amended by me):

 

         Let me be hers with my body, not my soul

         let her hide me in her chamber

         for it wounds my heart more than blows from a rod

         and where she dwells her servant never enters.

 

         [Del cors li fos, non de l'arma,

         e cossentis m'a celat dinz sa cambra!

         Que plus mi nafra-l cor que colps de verga

         car lo sieus sers lai on ill es non entra]

 

As we can see, Arnaut gives us a set of periods that map easily onto the rhythmic form of the lines.  Each one is balanced and each makes sense by itself. 

 

 Not so Petrarch.  The key moment in his sestina comes in the fifth stanza, when he points out that he will soon die.  Before he goes up to the stars in heaven, however, he expresses the hope that he will see pity for him in the face of his beloved:

 

         Before I return to you, bright stars,

         . . .

         might I see pity in her, for in but one day

         it could restore many years, and before the dawn

         enrich me from the setting of the sun.

        

         [Prima ch'i' torni a voi, lucenti stelle,

         . . .

         vedess' io in lei pietà, che 'n un sol giorno

         può ristorar molt' anni, e 'nanzi l'alba

         puommi arichir dal tramontar del sole.]

 

What is important are the enjambements or run-on lines that articulate the expression of desire.  In contrast to what we see in Arnaut, Petrarch's line ending with the phrase "in but one day" cannot stand on its own.  It is only completed by the first half of the following line, "it could restore many years."  The same holds for the line ending in "before the dawn."  The message of these phrases can only be conveyed across two poetic lines.  The phrase begins in the middle of one line and ends in the middle of the next. 

 

In contrast to the Troubadour practice of generating meaning in discrete, grammatically complete lines, Petrarch breaks the form. 

He pushes against the rigid structure of the sestina, which marks out time as it unspools.  Just as he tells us in the opening lines that he is outside of nature—unable to sleep when all the other creatures in the universe are resting—so here is he outside of the form of his own poem, twisting the rigid structure of the sestina in order to give voice to his despair and hope. 

 

Petrarch's ability to push against the form of the sestina has something to do with the medium of the written text.  Troubadour songs are sung.  Petrarch's lyrics are meant to be read.  Petrarch's virtuoso manipulation of Arnaut's form is primarily visual.  To experience the poet's dislocation from the natural world we have to see where meaning stops at the end of a line, causing us to pause. To read, it would seem--or to write in order to be read--is no longer to be a Troubadour.