When Bob Dylan finally met with the Swedish Academy on the 2 April, 2017, half a year after his Nobel win was announced, Sara Danius, then the secretary of the Swedish Academy, published a blog post in which she describes the experience:
“Earlier today the Swedish Academy met with Bob Dylan for a private ceremony in Stockholm, during which Dylan received his gold medal and diploma. Twelve members of the Academy were present. Spirits were high. Champagne was had. Quite a bit of time was spent looking closely at the gold medal”.
What Bob Dylan would have seen as he was inspecting his Nobel medal, was, on one side - the profile of the eponymous Alfred Nobel, inventor and philanthropist. On the other side, a scene depicting the poet and the Muse: holding her lyre, the Muse is standing before the poet, who awaits her song, pen in hand. The two figures are surrounded by a Latin inscription that comes from Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid. It reads, “Inventas vitam iuvat excoluisse per artes”, which translates to “And they who bettered life on earth by their newly found mastery”. The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem, that describes the early mythology of the founding of Rome. It was written between 29 and 19 BC, and it was a kind of counterpart to the Homeric epics, and draws heavily on the form and plot of The Iliad and The Odyssey. This quote on the medal is describing the souls in the Elysian fields, a kind of paradise, which the hero Aeneas visits during his descent into the underworld.
[theme music]
What was it about this medal that so transfixed Bob Dylan? Was it the figure of the muse that resonated with him? Or was it the inscription that promised the new Nobel laureate an afterlife in paradise?
Welcome back to Definitely Dylan, a podcast about Bob Dylan, his music, and anything else. I’m your host, Laura Tenschert, and this is Chapter 2 in my series on Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways. And yes, I’m not yet done talking about the influence of the Nobel Prize on Rough And Rowdy Ways, and you might have also noticed that we’re once again talking about muses and ancient epics, and heroes descending into the underworld - and all of this is no coincidence either, but we’ll get to that…
When you think about it, every artistic endeavour, and songwriting is no exception, exists somewhere between an outward and an inward impulse. On the one hand, there is within the artist a deep certainty that they must pursue their urge to create, and this act of creation, from the moment that inspiration strikes until the work is done is one of focus and determination. It's an intimate, personal, and often solitary process. On the other hand, songs need an audience: it’s the old “if a tree falls in a forest” question – is a song even a song if no one hears it? So what I would call the outward aspect is related to the question of what happens to the song once it is created. How is it received? How many lives does it touch? I think that both these impulses are beautifully represented in the image on the Nobel medal - the moment of creation in the figure of the muse, and the outward, communal aspect expressed in the inscription from Virgil’s Aeneid.
As I started explaining in the last chapter, I believe that Rough And Rowdy Ways is quite a personal album, in the sense that the songs strike me as very reflective. I see them as Bob Dylan’s meditations on his career, on his work, and on his relationship to that work, almost as a kind of stocktaking. Part of that is surely due to the fact that Bob Dylan is turning 80 this year. But I think that being the first ever [popular] songwriter to receive the Nobel Prize probably also had something to do with it, and his Nobel lecture is evidence that it prompted him to consider the medium of songwriting in new ways. Today, I want to focus on two songs on the record, “My Own Version Of You” and “Mother Of Muses”, which I think serve as vehicles for Bob Dylan to explore what it means to be a songwriter. Taking as our model the two sides of creativity symbolised in the Nobel medal, we’ll explore what these two songs can tell us about the creative process, as well as about what happens to the song once it’s created, and how the songwriter figures into it. On first listen, these songs may appear to be total opposites, but a closer look reveals some intriguing parallels.
I’m really excited to share some of the wild and fascinating things I’ve discovered with you, so I hope you’ll join me in my exploration of the myth and mystery of creation in the songs on Rough And Rowdy Ways!
Chapter 2: The Other Side of the Coin
[J.J. McClellan playing Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, (1910)]
We all know that a great song is so much more than the sum of its parts. So how do these parts come together? And what does it take to… bring them to life? [Thunder crashing]
[audio clip from Frankenstein (1931), dir. by James Whale]
Colin Clive as Dr. Frankenstein: “It’s alive, it’s moving! It’s alive, it’s alive! It’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive! In the name of God, now I know what it feels like to be God!”
Even before we know what “My Own Version Of You” is about, the music sets the tone with some haunting pedal steel, a dark, descending bass line and some rhythmic guitar stabs before Bob Dylan’s vocals come in
[audio clip of Bob Dylan’s “My Own Version of You”]
“All through the summers, into January
I've been visiting morgues and monasteries
Looking for the necessary body parts
Limbs and livers and brains and hearts
I'll bring someone to life, is what I wanna do
I wanna create my own version of you”
What an opening, who had that kind of thing on their Bob Dylan bingo card? The first verse introduces us to the singer and his singular mission: to build a creature from dead body parts, and then bring them to life. Even without explicitly saying it, it’s easy to recognise that Dylan is channelling the protagonist of one of the most famous and most chilling Gothic tales - Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein. Most of you are probably familiar with the plot of the novel, but in the quickest recap possible, it’s the story of a young scientist who conducts some, shall we say, ’unorthodox’ scientific experiments to create a living creature out of dead body parts – and then they lived happily ever after. Sike! Things go wrong and people die and it’s all just... bad news. But we’re not there yet in the song, here the singer is still pursuing his mission to “bring someone to life”. But who or what he’s trying to bring to life? That fact actually remains ambiguous. In her review of the album for the Guardian, Kitty Empire writes that this song is a feminist’s nightmare because she reads it as Dylan’s attempt to create a woman out of female body parts, someone to save him and do his bidding. And that would be very problematic. But when you look at the song more closely, it turns out that the “you” in the song is never identified, and it’s actually never specified that the “you” is a love interest, or even a woman. And the same, consequently, also goes for the creature the singer is building. In fact, even if we assume the “you” addressed in that first refrain is a woman, this would be counteracted later in the song when the singer talks about including elements from “the Scarface Pacino and the Godfather Brando”, mixing them “up in a tank and [getting] a robot commando” - that’s as stereotypically masculine as you can get, in my opinion. So I personally don’t think that Kitty Empire’s reading holds water.
But I actually think the question of who or what the singer is trying to create is less important here. Instead, the focus of this song is the act of creation: it’s about the strange and obscure process that leads up to the moment the “creature” is brought to life. It’s not much of a leap to assume that Dylan is using this song about literal creation as a metaphor to reflect on his own creative work as an artist. The choice of analogy might seem perplexing at first. A 19th century Gothic novel perhaps best known via the myriad of b-movies it’s inspired… - in other words, what on earth does Bob Dylan have in common with Victor Frankenstein? Well, I actually think this analogy works on more than one level. One thing that immediately came to my mind when I heard this song was the curious parallel between Victor Frankenstein’s occult experiments and Bob Dylan’s own creative process, because Dylan, too, likes to create something new out of old parts!
Bob Dylan’s writing has always involved borrowing, but especially in the last couple of decades, he has relied heavily on a “patchwork method”. I spoke about this a bit more in my episodes on “Murder Most Foul” and “I Contain Multitudes”. This means that Dylan’s songs incorporate a mix of lines from a variety of eclectic sources; novels, films, travel guides... usually with plenty of historical and cultural references thrown in. And references like these are not just limited to Dylan’s lyrics either: Dylan has always borrowed musically, too. One of the more controversial examples is the music and arrangement of “False Prophet”, which borrows heavily from Billy “The Kid” Emerson’s song “If Loving Is Believing”. We discussed this in a Definitely Dylan radio episode last year, and I’ll put the link to that in the show notes. Dylan uses these references like colours in his palette, and out of the assembly of these parts arises a song that is somehow 100% Bob Dylan.
We see plenty of evidence for this patchwork method all over Rough And Rowdy Ways, and “My Own Version Of You” is no exception of course. Some of these references are easily recognisable: you don’t need to read Hamlet to recognise the line “to be or not to be” as Shakespeare. And some sources are more obscure. The line “gunpowder from ice”, for example, comes from Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. The effort to try to identify the sources for these borrowings has definitely ramped up in the new millennium, probably because the internet has made that kind of sleuthing so much easier. But in my opinion there’s something special about this song, “My Own Version Of You”, and its story about the Frankenstein-like creator. Fans and critics are usually motivated by the hope that the knowledge of what book Dylan has been stealing from will give them a deeper understanding of his songs. Maybe the retracing of his steps will even allow an insight into his creative process. So what if Bob Dylan has just given us a song about this very process? An example of a Frankenstein-like creation in the form of a song about a Frankenstein-like creation. In other words, it’s pretty meta!
Let me give you a fun example - we understand that the song is referring to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, even though it’s never explicitly stated. We can simply infer this from the subject matter. However, what if I told you that Bob Dylan is quoting the novel Frankenstein in the opening lines of the song? Well, actually, not quite. The opening lines come from the cliffsnotes summary of the novel’s plot. (You know, cliffsnotes, the study guide?) There, the summary for chapter 4 reads, “Visiting morgues and cemeteries for the necessary body parts, Victor fails several times before successfully bringing his creation to life.” Well, isn’t that interesting? This wouldn’t be the first time that Dylan has borrowed from a study guide, since he also used it for parts of his Nobel lecture. I think there’s something hilarious about the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature borrowing from cliffsnotes. To me it is testament to Bob Dylan’s sense of humour because, full disclosure, I totally only discovered this by accident when I was looking at the cliffsnotes summary to refresh my memory of Frankenstein’s plot. And there I found Bob Dylan, winking at me, and I felt like I was being let in on a joke. But not everyone thinks this is funny. Bob Dylan has repeatedly been criticised for this method of working, and has been accused of plagiarism. In a 2012 interview with Rolling Stone, he got the chance to address those that saw his generous borrowings from Civil War poet Henry Timrod on the album Modern Times as lack of imagination. Dylan says, “And as far as Henry Timrod is concerned, have you even heard of him? Who’s been reading him lately? And who’s pushed him to the forefront? Who’s been making you read him? [...] And if you think it’s so easy to quote him and it can help your work, do it yourself and see how far you can get”. Bob Dylan is saying that he has indeed given new life to Timrod’s words by using them for his own songs. In other words, he has created his own version of Timrod. He also rejects the idea that this way of working is simple or easy. It’s not easy to bring something or someone to life; the singer in “My Own Version Of You” can tell us a thing or two about that. In the song, this takes the shape of the physical and emotional work involved in the creation of a creature: it takes time, effort and determination, something that can equally be applied to an artist’s creative process.
We can also see that Dylan has changed one word from the cliffsnotes summary for the opening lines: “morgues and cemeteries” becomes “morgues and monasteries” - a phrase that jumped out at me right away, because we expect the word “cemeteries”, since both are places that hold dead bodies. But Dylan subverts that phrase in favour of an alliteration (“morgues and monasteries”), and as a result the line becomes less predictable and more ambiguous, as well as more Gothic. It’s an example for how Dylan makes little tweaks to his borrowings that can have a big effect.
I think we can see this story of the creation of a creature as a metaphor for the creative process, and the artist’s relationship to their own work – the obsessive pursuit, the hard work, as well as the skill that it takes to put the parts together and create something new. And what I love about “My Own Version Of You” is that it’s a song in which its subject matter is mirrored in the way the song is written, in other words, that the story about an act of creation out of different parts is told in a song fusing together bits and pieces from different sources.
So we can see that the song tells us something about the creative process, about the journey towards the finished work. This is what I called the inward aspect of creation at the top of the episode, which is symbolised in the image of the muse on the Nobel medal. However, this song about someone trying to play god together seems to be a far cry from the scene of a poet humbly listening to the goddess for inspiration. I think the difference lies in the fact that the singer in “My Own Version Of You” is largely motivated to build his creature for selfish reasons. There’s a reason why the singer’s creative endeavour is not described as, I don’t know, building a house from old bricks. The building of the creature is not just a means to an end, but rather, it’s the act itself the singer is aspiring to. Our Nobel laureate approved source, cliffsnotes, has the following to say about Frankenstein’s motives: “although Victor Frankenstein claimed to be creating his monster for the betterment of humankind, it's more likely that he did so out of arrogance, or out of a desire to become like God.” Victor wants to believe that his motives are altruistic, but in truth he is driven by hubris. “He wants to figure out how to cheat death, and he had allowed himself to be overcome by ego,” cliffsnotes says, “If successful, Victor would be revered by the creature(s) he creates and his creations would make Victor a human god, or so he thought”.
Artists and writers have also traditionally also been labelled as something akin to “human gods”. In fact, the English word “poet” comes from the Greek word for “maker” or “creator”. In the 16th Century, the Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sidney explains in his Apology for Poetry, that the “poet is a second maker”, who imitates god in his/her creation of worlds that don’t exist. But by invoking Frankenstein in “My Own Version Of You”, Dylan is showing the limitations to this creation. What sets the singer apart is that he, unlike a divine creator, cannot create out of a vacuum. This applies to artistic creativity as well, because when you think about it, every artist draws upon something preexisting in their work, be it their experience, the world around them, or other people’s works that inspire them. Because he cannot create out of a vacuum, the singer in “My Own Version Of You” instead resorts to trying to bring dead things back to life. And in the lyrics, there is a constant tension between life and death, between being and non-being.
[audio clip of Bob Dylan’s “My Own Version of You”]
“Can you tell me what it means, to be or not to be
You won’t get away with fooling me”
“You won’t get away with fooling me”, the singer declares, as if the question was rhetorical in the first place. We get the impression that the singer revels in the power of presiding over life and death, of playing god. He is seeking to “balance the scales” after all. It all culminates in the last verse, which, unlike the previous verses, which all consist of either 4 or 8 lines, is 20 lines long and an absolute tour de force that leads us on a trip through history, through hell, up until the moment when the actual act of creation is imminent – but this is also the moment in which the limits of the singer’s powers become evident”
[audio clip of Bob Dylan’s “My Own Version of You”]
“You got the right spirit - you can feel it you can hear it
You got what they call the immortal spirit
You can feel it all night you can feel it in the morn
Creeps in your body the day you are born
One strike of lightning is all that I need
And a blast of ‘lectricity that runs at top speed
Show me your ribs - I’ll stick in the knife
I’m gonna jump start my creation to life”
It’s he introduction of the “immortal spirit” that offsets the song’s push and pull between life and death, while its description as “[creeping] into your body the day you were born” stands in stark contrast to the singer’s violent method of creation, which involves a “blast of ‘lectricity” to “jumpstart” the creation to life, as if we were talking about a car or something. Unlike the singer’s creation, which is an undoing of death, the spirit is associated with birth, and comes from a divine creative force that ultimately eludes the singer.
What I find really interesting here is that the rhyme of the word “spirit” with “you can feel
it, you can hear it” is an echo of Dylan’s gospel song Solid Rock from the 1980 album Saved.
[audio clip of Bob Dylan’s “Solid Rock”]
“It's the ways of the flesh to war against the spirit
Twenty-four hours a day, you can feel it and you can hear it
Using every angle under the sun
And He never give up 'til the battle's lost or won
But I’m hanging on”
So this is Dylan borrowing from himself, which we actually see a few times on this album. Although “Solid Rock” and “My Own Version Of You” are two totally different songs, both feature this contrast of flesh and spirit, or, the human and the divine. But the idea of the life-giving “immortal spirit” is also directly contrasted with the destructive act of taking a life: “Show me your ribs, I’ll stick in the knife / Gonna jumpstart my creation to life”. It’s as if the singer was luring us in, waiting with a knife behind his back, telling us about his plans, and only just now revealing that it was our body parts that he needed to complete the creature. But this line also functions as a symbolic undoing of the act of the creation of Eve out of Adam’s rib, which also echoes Shelley’s novel and Frankenstein’s refusal to build a female companion for his creature. Come to think of it, have you ever considered how essential it is to the novel’s narrative that Victor Frankenstein is a man? Because I feel like a woman would be a lot less likely to obsess over the idea to create a person from dead body parts, since most women have the natural ability to develop life inside their bodies and to give birth. So is this simply a case of womb envy?
For all his ambition and determination to bring someone to life by himself, the last verse makes it clear that dead body parts are not the only required ingredients. What’s essential for the act of bringing the creature to life is the strike of lightning and the blast of electricity, which kind of function as a substitute for the spirit. If we apply this to the creative process of a songwriter, it takes us back to Dylan’s quote in the 2012 Rolling Stone interview, “if you think it’s so easy to quote [someone] and it can help your work, do it yourself and see how far you can get”. Perhaps Dylan is saying that skill alone is not enough, and that, no matter how determined you are, you still need the help of a force outside of yourself, whether it comes in the form of receiving a song from the muse, or a strike of lightning.
Even though the promise of being god-like clearly plays an important role in “My Own Version Of You”, the singer is not a super villain, and he repeatedly also expresses the desire to do good, even if the song ultimately ends with the singer wanting to stick a knife in someone’s rib. For example, at one point in the song he insists that he will be executing his mission “with decency and common sense”. And in this impulse to do good I see a particularly curious and intriguing parallel between “My Own Version Of You”, Frankenstein, or the Frankenstein cliffsnotes, and the inscription on the Nobel medal. Let me just remind you what cliffsnotes said about Victor’s motivation: “although Victor Frankenstein claimed to be creating his monster for the betterment of humankind, it's more likely that he did so out of arrogance, or out of a desire to become like God.” Remember how I told you that the inscription on the medal comes from a passage in Virgil’s Aeneid? The Nobel website describes that inscription as coming from a passage where Aeneas travels to the underworld and “sees the spirits of past human beings whose creations and discoveries in the arts and sciences have made great contributions for the betterment of humankind”. Hm. So we see that both Frankenstein’s cliffsnotes, which Bob Dylan quotes in the song, and the Nobel website about the medal that Dylan was so interested in both use the phrase “for the betterment of humankind”. And this same phrase is also echoed in “My Own Version Of You”:
[audio clip of Bob Dylan’s “My Own Version of You”]
“I study Sanskrit and Arabic to improve my mind
I wanna do things for the benefit of all mankind
I say to the willow tree, "Don't weep for me"
I'm saying the hell to all things that I used to be”
Ok, Dylan has slightly changed the phrase, “betterment of humankind” has become “benefit of all mankind”, but it’s still very similar, it’s the same number of syllables, and I suspect that he changed it either because it rolls off the tongue more easily, or perhaps taking the exact wording would have been too obvious? [Edit: Scott Warmuth has since alerted me to the fact that the exact phrase, “benefit of all mankind”, also appears on cliffsnotes, in the article on the major themes in the novel Frankenstein!] But I think this parallel cannot simply be dismissed as a coincidence, especially because the rest of that line, “I study Sanskrit and Arabic to improve my mind, I wanna do things for the benefit of all mankind” is also taken from the Frankenstein novel via its cliffsnotes summary, from a passage that describes how Victor Frankenstein has taken to the study of foreign languages in order to distract himself from the depression he’s fallen into after his disastrous experiment. Although the singer in “My Own Version Of You” hasn’t even completed his experiment yet, he too seems intent on leaving the past behind by saying , “the hell with all things that used to be”.
Th concept of “serving mankind”, delivered in combination with the idea of “hell” shows up again later in “My Own Version Of You”.
[audio clip of Bob Dylan’s “My Own Version of You”]
“Step right into the burning hell
Where some of the best-known enemies of mankind dwell
Mr. Freud with his dreams, Mr. Marx with his ax
See the rawhide lash rip the skin from their backs”
The singer greets us like a carnival barker, as he leads us through hell, like Virgil leading the pilgrim through Dante’s Inferno. We are shown the tortured souls of sinners - those who, according to Dylan, have committed crimes against mankind. But what exactly did Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx do to qualify? One thing they both have in common is that they both have become emblematic for Western society’s increasingly secularised, modern way of thinking, reflecting the changing role of the individual in both society as well as the family unit. But Marx and Freud are also prime examples for writers whose works have been instrumentalised, be it by politicians or by advertisement, perhaps even to the point where they, in Dylan’s eyes, might have done more harm than good? I mean, without Freud, I definitely wouldn’t have pondered the concept of womb envy earlier…
But that is the downside to the outward aspect of creation. The work needs an audience, but the artist or creator has no control over how the audience receives it. As a consequence, any creator faces the risk of having their work misused or misappropriated. In his 1965 poem “Advice for Geraldine On her Miscellaneous Birthday”, Bob Dylan advises, “do Not [sic.] create anything. it will be / misinterpreted. it will not change. / it will follow you the / rest of your life.” Creating anything, particularly art, really is like creating a monster in a sense: once the work is completed, the artist loses all control. As a result, the powerful act of creation is immediately followed by a loss of power over the work that’s been created. A song, for example, much like Frankenstein’s creature, ultimately takes on a life of its own. An artist like Dylan, who has always refused labels like prophet or voice of a generation, must have thought a lot about how his songs have been used and appropriated in circumstances that are beyond his control.
One key difference between Frankenstein and “My Own Version Of You” is that the song, unlike the novel, ends before the moment the creature is brought to life. So the song is about the process that leads up to the moment of creation. At this point the singer is still filled with ambition and hope, still pushing to achieve his goal. He hasn’t found out yet whether he has created a monster.
The song also reminds me of a different Bob Dylan song about creation. In his interview with Dylan for the New York Times shortly before the release of Rough And Rowdy Ways, Douglas Brinkley asks about the song “When I Paint My Masterpiece”. Dylan responds:
“I think this song has something to do with the classical world, something that’s out of reach. Someplace you’d like to be beyond your experience. Something that is so supreme and first rate that you could never come back down from the mountain. That you’ve achieved the unthinkable. That’s what the song tries to say, and you’d have to put it in that context. In saying that though, even if you do paint your masterpiece, what will you do then? Well, obviously you have to paint another masterpiece. So it could become some kind of never ending cycle, a trap of some kind. The song doesn’t say that though.”
A lot of what Bob Dylan is saying about “When I Paint My Masterpiece” can be applied to “My Own Version Of You as well”. Both are songs about “achieving the unthinkable” and both their singers are related in the obsessiveness of their pursuit, and their determination. And I could imagine that it’s a similar determination that has kept Bob Dylan going for nearly 60 years now, and touring for over 30!
We can even see the song “My Own Version Of You” itself as the creature that the singer is creating, as various sources and references are being fused into something new, we are witnessing the creative process and as we listen, the song is coming alive.
[music: Aaron Copland Appalachian Spring, Suite (Part 1), played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, recorded 1946]
In a way, “Mother Of Muses couldn’t be anymore different from “My Own Version Of You”. Musically, while “My Own Version Of You” is haunting and spooky, “Mother Of Muses” is majestic and soothing – it has a hymn-like quality to it, which is matched by Dylan’s stately vocals. When I heard it for the very first time, it reminded me of Dylan’s version of “Stay With Me” from the album Shadows In The Night. The lyrics also indicate that we have landed in a different universe: the morgues, monasteries and laboratories have been replaced by a pastoral idyll - mountains, the deep dark sea, a forest that is home to nymphs… Nonetheless, what the two songs share is the theme of creation and creativity, even though the portrayals differ considerably.
Before I get into that, let me just say one thing. I don’t have any sponsors for this podcast - although I know it sounds like this episode is sponsored by cliffsnotes! So if you enjoy my thoughts on Bob Dylan and on Rough And Rowdy Ways, you can either support the show by going to definitelydylan.com/shop, where you can buy a t-shirt or a tote bag, or you can go to buymeacoffee.com/definitelydylan, where you can either buy me one or more virtual coffees, or you can become a monthly member. It takes a lot of time and effort to create this podcast, and all these things really help me out. So thank you! – Now back to our story!
After Bob Dylan thoroughly inspected the image of the Muse on his Nobel medal in Stockholm, the relationship between the poet and the Muse obviously stayed on his mind. Two months later, he even called out to the Muse in the closing remarks of his Nobel lecture.
[audio from Bob Dylan’s Nobel lecture]
Bob Dylan: “I return once again to Homer, who says, “Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story”.
On Rough And Rowdy Ways, this relationship has undergone a bit of a transformation. For one, the singer is no longer asking the goddess to sing in him, but for him – he has become her audience, much like in the image of the medal. And the Muse herself has also been transformed and replaced by her mother.
[audio clip of Bob Dylan’s “Mother Of Muses”]
“Mother of Muses sing for me
Sing of the mountains and the deep dark sea
Sing of the lakes and the nymphs in the forest
Sing your hearts out - all you women of the chorus
Sing of honor and fame and of glory be
Mother of Muses, sing for me”
Before we get into the significance of why Bob Dylan is addressing the mother of Muses instead of the Muse directly, it’s important to understand who the Muses were. In Greek mythology, the nine Muses were goddesses of inspiration. Nonetheless, when the singers and poets in ancient Greece prayed to them, they wouldn’t actually directly ask for inspiration, as in, “hey Muse, send me some inspiration!”, but rather they would pray to become a vessel or a channel for the Muse to sing her song through them. So all the credit for the story therefore actually went to the Muse, who, as an omniscient goddess is said to have heard everything and who was therefore able to truthfully pass any story down through the poet. The poet or singer’s claim to fame was to be divinely chosen to tell that story. I can see this idea of inspiration resonate with Bob Dylan → in interviews he has repeatedly spoken about how he feels like his own songs come from a source outside himself. For example, in 1978, he told his friend and biographer Robert Shelton:
“It’s not me. It’s the songs. I’m just the postman. I deliver the songs. That’s all I have in this world are those songs! That’s what all the legend, all the myth, is about - my songs.”
Nine years later in 1987, Dylan told Kurt Loder,
“Now I can look back and see that I must have written those songs ‘in the spirit,’ you know? [...] There’s no logical way that you can arrive at lyrics like that. I don’t know how it was done”.
In both instances, Bob Dylan doesn’t take responsibility for his creations, but insists that he was merely a vessel for a force outside of himself. This idea of creativity, of inspiration coming through the poet or singer from a divine source, obviously differs significantly from the kind of creation described in “My Own Version Of You”, where the singer plays an active part in his creation, even to a fault, going even so far as to bend the laws of nature. Instead of invoking a goddess, the singer in “My Own Version Of You” is trying to play god himself. But of course in “Mother of Muses” the singer isn’t addressing the Muse, but her mother. The mother of the nine Muse was Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, and their father was head honcho of the gods, Zeus. Mnemosyne was one of the Titans, and she was considered really important. It’s easy to understand why when we think about the crucial role memory played in the time before writing, when all important information and even long epic poems, had to be relayed orally from memory. So the fact that Dylan is calling on Mnemosyne in this song means essentially that the singer is calling on memory personified, and consequently that he’s not asking for inspiration, but asking to remember.
The song is divided into two halves: in the first half, the singer is asking Mnemosyne to sing about exterior things – the land, and about heroic men, whereas the second half turns introspective, and the singer reflects on his own relationship with the mother of Muses.
So why is this significant? Well, when you think about it, memory plays a pretty important role for what Bob Dylan does as an artist. As a performer on stage, Dylan, much like Homer and his contemporaries, has to sing his songs from memory. But memory is also crucial for Dylan as a writer. His artistic roots lie in the folk tradition, where songs and stories are in constant flux, and the line between traditional and original are more than a little blurry. These songs were often passed down orally for centuries without ever being written down. So it’s perhaps no surprise that for Bob Dylan, inspiration and memory are inextricably linked. He talked about this at length in his beautiful and insightful speech for Musicares in 2015, in which he once again insisted that his songs come from a source outside of himself, but this time while also giving credit to the importance of his influences.
[audio clip of Josh White playing “John Henry”, 1942]
If you sang “John Henry” as many times as me – “John Henry was a steel-driving man / Died with a hammer in his hand / John Henry said a man ain’t nothin’ but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down / I’ll die with that hammer in my hand.” If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you’d have written “How many roads must a man walk down?” too.”
Like the ancient poets crediting the Muse for their stories, Bob Dylan is crediting the folk songs he memorised. Learning and committing these songs to memory has turned Bob Dylan into the artist he is today, in other words, it has, in other words, really “forge[d] [his] identity from the inside out”, as he sings on “Mother Of Muses”. So in that sense, memory truly is the mother of inspiration, of the Muse in Dylan’s case.
Remembering the old lets Dylan imagine something new, and in this, astonishingly, and despite all their differences, we recognise a parallel between the idea of creation from memory in “Mother Of Muses”, and the allegory of creation out of different body parts in “My Own Version Of You”. What the singers in “My Own Version Of You” and “Mother Of Muses” have in common, in terms of their creative process, is that neither can create out of a vacuum. Instead, they both draw on the past to help them make something new. And in this the two songs reflect two different sides to Bob Dylan the artist.
To me there’s no doubt that these songs must be seen as counterparts on the album, their main difference being the role that the singer plays in the creative process, and how this inward aspect of creation is portrayed. In “My Own Version Of You” the singer is described as predominantly self-serving, while the singer in “Mother Of Muses” acts as a divine vessel for Mnemosyne’s song. In the former, the singer wants to create in order to “turn back the years”, which is contrasted in “Mother Of Muses”, where the singer declares that he has already “outlived [his] life by far”. These contrasting impulses make total sense in the context of the songs, and I could also imagine that an artist like Dylan himself might be oscillating between ambition on the one hand, and contentment on the other.
Let’s take a look at some really interesting lyrical parallels between the songs that show both the parallels and the differences.
[audio clip of Bob Dylan’s “My Own Version Of You”]
“I'll take the Scarface Pacino and The Godfather Brando
Mix it up in a tank and get a robot commando
If I do it up right and put the head on straight
I'll be saved by the creature that I create”
Now compare that to these lyrics in “Mother Of Muses”:
[audio clip of Bob Dylan’s “Mother Of Muses”]
“Mother of Muses, unleash your wrath
Things I can't see, they're blocking my path
Show me your wisdom, tell me my fate
Put me upright, make me walk straight
Forge my identity from the inside out
You know what I'm talking about”
Immediately we can hear the line “If I do it up right and put the head on straight” in “My Own Version Of You” mirrored in “Mother of Muses”: “Put me upright, make me walk straight”. These lines once again highlight that the creative agency is transferred from the singer to the goddess. This is further underpinned by the plea to the mother of Muses to “forge [the singer’s] identity from the inside out”, whereas the singer in “My Own Version Of You” is busy doing the forging and building his own creature.
And when you think about it, the figure of the mother that’s continuously invoked in Mother Of Muses even stands in contrast to the creation from dead parts in “My Own Version Of You”. The spirit that “creeps into your body the day you were born”, which was off limits to the singer in “My Own Version Of You” is therefore within reach and perhaps even implied in Mother Of Muses, which is by all accounts a spiritual song.
It’s also worth mentioning that there’s a parallel that arises out of the source material for Dylan’s “My Own Version Of You”. The full title of Mary Shelley’s novel is Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus, referring to the Titan Prometheus who was said to have created mankind. So arguably both songs at their core reference one of the Titans: Prometheus and Mnemosyne. So in other words, the difference between the singer in “My Own Version Of You” and the singer in “Mother Of Muses” is that the former wants to be god-like in his power to create, whereas the latter readily accepts that this power comes from a divine source.
The figure of the Muse, which symbolises inspiration, might not be the goddess called on in the song, but she is still a presence in the song “Mother Of Muses”. In the fourth verse the singer tells us about his feelings for one of the Muses in particular.
[audio clip of Bob Dylan’s “Mother Of Muses”]
“I’m falling in love with Calliope
She don’t belong to anyone, why not give her to me
She’s speaking to me, speaking with her eyes
I’ve grown so tired of chasing lies”
The object of the singer’s affection is Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry, which is perhaps surprising at first, because maybe Euterpe, the Muse of lyrical poetry might have seemed more appropriate, or Erato, the Muse of love poetry. But when you think about it, Calliope also makes perfect sense: she is believed to be Homer's muse for the Iliad and the Odyssey, and she is also invoked by Virgil in the Aeneid – and, crucially, Calliope is most likely the Muse depicted on the Nobel medal, since the lyre was her emblem. On the medal, the Muse is shown fixing her eyes on the poet, her mouth closed, which might have inspired the lines, “She’s speaking to me, speaking with her eyes”.
Since the muses were considered to be personifications of the arts they represented, I guess that means that the singer is by extension falling in love with epic poetry. And I suppose “Mother Of Muses” really is a love song to the world of the traditional epics. They certainly have a lot in common - Muses, Nymphs, and, crucially, an interest in heroic men!
[audio clip of Bob Dylan’s “Mother Of Muses”]
“Sing of the heroes who stood alone
Whose names are engraved on tablets of stone
Who struggled with pain so the world could go free
Mother of Muses sing for me
Sing of Sherman, Montgomery and Scott
And of Zhukov, and Patton, and the battles they fought
Who cleared the path for Presley to sing
Who carved the path for Martin Luther King
Who did what they did and they went on their way
Man, I could tell their stories all day”
About a third of the song “Mother Of Muses” is taken up by the singer urging the mother of Muses to sing about “the heroes who stood alone”, and of course through this act of asking her to sing, the singer himself is also singing about them to us. As I said, all this talk of heroes is another throwback to the ancient epics, where the Muse was called on to help the poet or singer tell the story of these heroic men and their heroic deeds. Dylan lists various generals from the 19th and 20th century, from different American wars, as well as the Soviet general Georgy Zhukov, who was instrumental in the battle that resulted in the defeat of Nazi Germany. And somehow, unlike in his song “With God On Our Side”, Bob Dylan no longer seems to have a problem memorising the names of the heroes. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that he now has the goddess of memory on his side!?
One reason why I think Bob Dylan makes a case for remembering these generals is because he sees the present as firmly tied to the past. Dylan, like many others including myself, believes that we need to remember the past in order to understand the present. In “Mother Of Muses”, Dylan cleverly fuses the ancient world of the Nymphs and Muses with our modern history in the form of these generals. Dylan does this all over the album, but another great example for this occurs, you guessed it, in the song “My Own Version Of You”, where Dylan sings
[audio clip of Bob Dylan’s “My Own Version Of You”]
“I can see the history of the whole human race
It’s all right there - it’s carved into your face
Should I break it all down - should I fall on my knees
Is there light at the end of the tunnel - can you tell me please
Stand over there by the cypress tree
Where the Trojan women and children were sold into slavery
Long before the first Crusade
Way back before England or America were made”
Here, too, we have a blending of the past and the present as Dylan claims to see the “history of the whole human race” in someone’s face – and in the context of a song about severed body parts being sewn together, I think the choice of words that this history is “carved” into someone’s face is morbidly appropriate. The line about the Trojan Women, is referencing a play of the same name by ancient writer of tragedies Euripides, which is set after the end of the Trojan War – so essentially in between the actions described in the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Aeneid. And “My Own Version Of You” also mentions a general, albeit of a different time, when he asks himself “What would Julius Caesar do?” Dylan describes the ancient world as a model for our modern times. He sings, “Long before the first Crusade / Way back before England or America were made”. And Dylan has spoken about this idea before. In 1991, he told Paul Zollo:
“A college professor told me that if you read about Greece in the history books, you’ll know all about America. Nothing that happens will puzzle you ever again. You read the history of Ancient Greece and when the Romans came in, and nothing will ever bother you about America again. You’ll see what America is.”
In other words, memory can not only forge individual and artistic identity, it also plays an important role for society.
In bringing up these generals from our history books in a song which otherwise invokes the ancient world, Dylan is portraying them as modern day equivalents of the likes of Odysseus, Achilles or Aeneas. And like them, these military men are worthy of having their story told in song. If you listened to the last chapter, you might remember that there’s a term for that in ancient Greek: Kleos, meaning renown or glory, and translates more literally to “that which is heard about you” - it’s a fame that’s directly tied to having your story told. This term plays a hugely important role especially in the Homeric epics - for example in the Iliad, the hope to gain kleos serves as a motivator for Achilles to give his life in battle in the exchange of living on in song. These ancient heroes were hoping to have the story of their heroics told and retold even after their life had ended, in other words, they believed in finding immortality in song. In a way, we can imagine kleos as the ancient equivalent of our idea of going down in history, only that instead of history books, these stories were committed to memory. But there’s a difference between your name gathering dust in history books, and being actively remembered, for example in song
These generals, have earned their kleos, or in the words of the song, “honour, fate and glory be”, because of the sacrifices they made. Their actions have improved the world by paving the way for cultural and political revolutions. In other words, they have done things for the benefit of all mankind, and through this idea, “Mother Of Muses” and “My Own Version Of You” are linked in their shared preoccupation with the inscription on the Nobel medal!
The two songs we’ve looked at together today share a theme of creativity and creation, and must be considered in the context of an album that is dedicated to the power of songs. Despite their different approaches to the creative process, both reflect aspects of Dylan’s own creativity. What they say is that the origin of songs never truly lies with the songwriter alone, instead, the past is always present, be it consciously or unconsciously, through borrowings or memory. And yet, the process is always mysterious, inspiration is hard to come by. “My Own Version Of You” shows the work involved, and a singer who believes he as creator is in charge, yet he, too, still has to rely on lightning to strike. And in that, the song is really not that different from Mother Of Muses, where the source of inspiration is directly attributed to a seemingly otherworldly source outside of the singer: the goddess of memory. But of course, invoking memory for inspiration actually implies that the source for inspiration does lie within the singer.
Bob Dylan is not only reflecting on the creative process, in other words, what it means to be a songwriter, but also on the function of the songwriter in society, a rumination that might well have been prompted by the inscription on the Nobel medal that praises the laureates for having improved life on earth. That’s a pretty big claim after all, and one more easily attributed to achievements in for example medicine than literature or songwriting. In their own way, “My Own Version Of You” and “Mother Of Muses” engage with the question of what the songwriter’s purpose might be. In using the Frankenstein analogy, “My Own Version Of You”’s single-minded pursuit to create simultaneously implies the anxiety of potentially creating a monster. The road to hell is, after all, said to be paved with good intentions, something that the tortured souls of Freud and Marx are able to confirm. In “Mother Of Muses”, the singer is never burdened with the same kind of ambition that drives the singer in “My Own Version Of You”, instead, he is content singing the praises of others who have already achieved greatness. In this case, the singer preserves the stories that shouldn’t be forgotten, and in the process acts not just as a vessel for Mnemosyne, but becomes our cultural memory himself.
There is, however, one glaring irony that struck me almost as the missing puzzle piece in all of this: if we assume that what matters is the sum total of your achievements – has your work ultimately done more harm or more good? Have your creations been beneficial or detrimental to humankind? – then what the hell are we to make of the man who gave the Nobel Prize its name: Alfred Nobel. Before he became the namesake of the prestigious award, he was known for inventing dynamite and manufacturing cannons and other weaponry. Supposedly it wasn’t until he read a premature obituary which condemned him for profiting from the sales of arms, that Alfred Nobel started thinking about his legacy and established the Nobel Prize. I wonder if this entered Dylan’s mind as he inspected the man’s profile on the Nobel medal, the other side to the coin that describes the souls dwelling in Elysium. So where is Alfred Nobel now? Did he make it to the Elysian FIelds? Or is he in hell being punished as an enemy of mankind?
I don’t have the answer to this question, but instead I’d like to leave you with my favourite thing Bob Dylan has said about the purpose of the songwriter. In 1977 he told Jonathan Cott, “The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for anyone but inspire them?”
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[outro music]
I hope you’ve enjoyed the second chapter in my mini-series on Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways. Definitely Dylan is written, produced, and hosted by me, Laura Tenschert. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss out on the next episodes, and if you enjoy the show, I would really appreciate it if you could leave a rating and review. And maybe tell your Dylan loving friends about it.
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