Thursday, May 28, 2009

reflection I

"If I wasn't Bob Dylan, I'd probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself. "

You will never be understood by anyone except for Bob Dylan, post-1980, post-salvation and return to orthodoxy and post transformation from folk "spokesman" to electric motorcycle mystery, but you will never be able to tell anyone this for fear of what adjectives will be tacked onto your own failure of a persona, and for this reason, no one will ever understand you.
So my first question corresponds to every other problem of cyclical creation: are you, by nature, a misunderstood protégé of the classic lyrical brooder, or did you choose to complicate yourself, masquerading behind esoteric phrases because you like to hear yourself talk or existing within a cigarette vacuum because compared to an iconic persona, lungs are an overrated commodity. What came first, your Bob Dylan impersonation or your poetically cobwebbed psyche?
But Bob Dylan didn't even come first for Bob Dylan; Bob Dylan doesn't, in actuality, even exist. He is no more than the idyllic creation of a Jewish Boy from Minnesota with an affinity for words and too many thoughts to contain in his head, and so in this way, you are as much Bob Dylan as Robert Zimmerman is. You may choose to market yourself behind feathered top hats and whitewashed face paints, or you may choose to rename yourself after a nineteenth century poet whose stanzas on youth and transience far exceed the capacity of either you or Dylan himself, but either way, you are choosing, like he did, to make yourself as novel and elusive as possible, because you are afraid that you are as much of a nobody as everyone else.  



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