Bob Dylan, Faith, and the Language of Darkness

I was looking at two songs by Bob Dylan. The first is "Gotta Serve Somebody" from his 1979 album Slow Train Coming, which was one of 3 (I believe) issued during a time when he committed himself to Jesus Christ, in a charismatic, evangelical environment, and so made that leap of faith, that commitment to a personal relationship to Christ known to Bible believing Christians.  

Gotta Serve Somebody https://share.google/qdKHTmB00Y348j3hk

The second is Not Dark Yet from his 1997 album Time Out of Mind. Looking at the lyrics of these two songs, and also understanding from later interviews that Bob Dylan is still a man of faith, I thought I might explore the differences in the language and themes of these two songs, and think about Bob Dylan's development and use of lyrics in those intervening years, which might also reveal changes in his approach to his faith. This is what emerged.

Not Dark Yet https://share.google/npqK5oXCa3ujm09Bx 

Gotta Serve Somebody  is direct, declarative and prophetic. Its message is clear: every human being ultimately serves either God or the devil. The lyric proceeds with the certainty of a sermon. Social distinctions are stripped away, and the listener is confronted with a spiritual choice. The voice is authoritative, reflecting the confidence of a recent convert who believes he has discovered a fundamental truth about existence.

Nearly twenty years later, Not Dark Yet presents a very different voice. Here there is no proclamation, no doctrine, and no explicit reference to Christ or salvation. Instead, the song inhabits a mood of weariness and mortality. The famous refrain, "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there," evokes aging, decline, and the approach of death. Rather than offering answers, the lyric dwells within a state of consciousness.

Some Christian listeners have viewed this change as evidence of a weakening of faith. From an evangelical perspective, life "in Christ" brings assurance, hope and spiritual renewal. The New Testament proclaims victory over death and despair through Christ's resurrection. If this is so, why should a believer continue to speak in the language of darkness? Why contemplate suffering rather than transcend it through prayer and trust in God?

This objection seems to me to raise an important question, which can only be answered by highlighting the distinction between faith and art. Faith enables a proclamation of truths and offers answers, and indeed lives within them. Art often seeks to describe experience in all its complexity, even when no resolution is immediately apparent.

Going down the route of art, we find for example the literary critic Christopher Ricks who draws attention to the affinities between Not Dark Yet and John Keats's Ode to a Nightingale. Both works explore weariness, mortality, and the attraction of release from suffering. Neither arrives at a final conclusion. Instead, each remains suspended between life and death, hope and uncertainty. The power of Dylan's lyric lies partly in this refusal to define precisely what the approaching darkness means.

At the same time, Not Dark Yet can be understood within a religious tradition older and broader than post-Lutheran evangelicalism or the preoccupations of the English Romantic poets. The voices of Job, Ecclesiastes and the Psalms all find expression in darkness, lament and questioning. These texts are not records of unbelief but of faith wrestling with the realities of human existence. They remind us that  life in the Spirit has always contained both confidence and anguish.

What emerges, is not necessarily a contrast between faith and doubt, but rather a contrast between two modes of spiritual expression. One mode emphasises certainty, redemption and proclamation. The other emphasises contemplation, mystery and the honest acknowledgement of suffering. The first finds its natural home in preaching and testimony. The second often finds its home in poetry and song.

This distinction helps explain why Not Dark Yet continues to resonate with listeners of many beliefs. The song does not argue for a doctrine. It gives shape to a universal human experience. In doing so, it occupies a space shared by biblical wisdom literature, Romantic poetry, and modern existential reflection.

The journey from Gotta Serve Somebody to Not Dark Yet may therefore be understood not as a movement away from spiritual concerns, but as a movement from proclamation to meditation. The 1979 Dylan speaks as a witness. The 1997 Dylan speaks as a poet. One announces a truth; the other explores what it feels like to live in the shadow of mortality.

Whether one views this development as a loss of certainty, a deepening of wisdom, or simply an evolution of artistic voice will depend largely on one's own understanding of faith. Yet the enduring fascination of these songs lies precisely in their ability to sustain a meaningful contemplation, inviting us to consider whether faith abolishes darkness or teaches us how to live within it.

Voyages Through Time: Rose of Nevada

 

Today I caught up with the movie Rose of Nevada.  I came away with that familiar feeling  with movies of this genre,  that a coherent meaning was obscured  from view. As  a consequence it was difficult to find sympathy for the characters and their relationships in each time frame. Without some kind of signpost we find ourselves using much of our mental and emotional resources just to piece together and grasp a narrative. 

I found myself finally able to accept this technique, but by then my feeling was disinterested detachment from character, and I looked more at the surface techniques, including the extraordinary realism around the storm. It is the kind of movie, such as Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer or Memento, where time slicing is a vital part of the narrative. So, a second viewing becomes more enlightening and the experience becomes richer.

Such  films that fragment time ask us  to do significant intellectual work, but there is usually an emotional anchor that keeps us invested while we solve the puzzle.

 In Memento, it is Leonard's desperate search for meaning; in Oppenheimer, it is Oppenheimer's moral and psychological journey. Even when the chronology is fragmented, the emotional trajectory remains relatively clear.

Rose of Nevada seems less interested in such emotional identification. It works around atmosphere, memory and place. The characters often feel like discrete, disconnected figures in a folk tale or legend rather than fully developed psychological individuals. That may be intentional, but it comes at a cost. We expend  energy simply trying to establish "where" and "when" they are. For me at least, not a lot left over for  empathy.

So, "disinterested detachment" sums up my initial response. Maybe this mirrors the way the film is crafted?  I have learned after viewing (I tend not to read reviews before seeing a movie)  that the movie was shot without sound, and all the sounds – voices as well as all else, were dubbed in afterwards. Oddly distant dialogue, the slightly unreal soundscape, and the fragmented timescales all placed  a layer of distance between me and what was in front of me.

The storm sequence is perhaps the clearest exception to this direction of trvel in the film. Here, narrative uncertainty becomes irrelevant in these isolated action snapshots. The sea, the boat, the weather, the physical peril—these are immediate and comprehensible. Here, the technique adds to  the experience rather than obscuring it. I found these sequences, and the business of catching, gutting and storing the fish,  among the most compelling for exactly that reason.

So yes, a second viewing of Rose of Nevada  is for the best, though I think there is an important distinction with Rose of Nevada compared, say, to a  second viewing of Memento. Here, a second viewing (I haven’t tried it yet) should reveal how meticulously the narrative has been constructed. We expect the  puzzle pieces to click together, because that is the story, and the story lose ambiguity and brings a clarity by its end. With Rose of Nevada, I am not entirely sure that a second viewing would lead to that kind of resolution. Rather, it would just help me to stop worrying about the puzzle and attend to other things: the imagery, the sound design, the symbolism, the sense of Cornwall as a place haunted by its own past. And all that.

So , thinking on awhile, Rose of Nevada  has something in  common with modernist literature than with puzzle-box cinema. For example, reading The Waste Land for a second time – or even umpteen times -  does not necessarily “solve” it; instead, once we are  less anxious about understanding every reference, we begin to notice patterns, echoes and moods. The experience deepens without becoming entirely transparent.

That raises the question of what kind of satisfaction a film owes its audience. I suppose over these years of looking at  traditions around  modernism through art cinema and modernist poetry, we know that ambiguity and uncertainty are watchwords. But for me anyway,  ambiguity works best when there is still something solid to hold onto—character, emotion, theme, image, or story.

So for me,  Rose of Nevada is too ambiguous. It asks  too much of the audience before it has earned an emotional investment. It’s not just me saying  "I didn't understand it."  The film’s  artistic method and  ambitions compete with, rather than support, its human drama.

I will see it again: I am confident my opinion will shift, like those gutted fish on the trawler's deck!

 

The Problem of Pleasure

Here's a question:

Why do temporal experiences, those moments of pleasure, of insight, of joy, so often awaken desires that temporal existence cannot finally satisfy?

In simple terms we can say that human beings are capable of experiencing finite things as if they disclose something infinite. Beauty, love, memory, achievement and moments of profound presence are genuinely good, but they are all subject to time. 

Yet our response to them can exceed their temporal boundaries: we do not merely enjoy them; we want them to last. We want to possess what cannot be possessed, to return to what cannot be recovered, and to make permanent what is passing.

Here I explore the proposition that this is not simply a psychological defect. It may be a clue to what human beings are. We are creatures living in a time bound state, who nevertheless have an orientation towards the eternal. Thus the failure of finite things to satisfy us completely may not mean that they were inadequate gifts.

Here are six writers who give us six different versions of that proposition.

Augustine — the restless heart

In Confessions, Book I, we read: 'You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.'

Augustine gives us perhaps the simplest theological formulation. The problem is not that we desire too much. We desire the wrong things as ultimate things. The heart moves from one finite satisfaction to another because nothing finite can finally provide the rest for which it was made. Thus the human capacity for desire is larger than any temporal object capable of satisfying it.

Kierkegaard — the temporal and the eternal

In his Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, Kierkegaard makes the distinction explicitly:

'But the Eternal is that which is set over all.'

And in his opening prayer he describes the problem even more starkly: 'What is all his striving, could it even encompass a world, but a half-finished work if he does not know Thee?'

Here the issue becomes one of orientation. A human life may accumulate experiences, possessions, knowledge, accomplishments and relationships and still remain fragmented. The temporal world gives us many things, but Kierkegaard asks whether our lives have a single centre capable of holding those things together.

Thus meaning cannot finally be produced by accumulating more experiences; it requires an orientation towards something that transcends them.

Proust — paradise is already lost

In Time Regained, the final volume of In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust gives us perhaps the most beautiful secular expression of the paradox:

'The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.'

This is particularly important because Proust does not simply say that pleasure disappears. Something much stranger happens.

A moment from the past can suddenly return through taste, smell, sound or sensation. For an instant the past seems present again. The experience is extraordinarily powerful precisely because it has escaped ordinary chronological time. Proust describes the moment as producing an experience of renewal; yet the paradise is simultaneously recognised as lost. And most strikingly:

'I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal'

It is in the famous 'Madeleine moment ' described in Swann's Way, the first book of Proust's epic where this assertion is made. The experience does not merely remind him of a pleasant childhood Sunday. It temporarily alters his relationship with mortality and time.

So for Proust, our deepest experiences may derive some of their intensity from the fact that they cannot be permanently possessed. And that introduces the extraordinary possibility that loss itself can reveal the nature of our desire.

T. S. Eliot — the still point

Eliot takes the problem into poetry: here are the opening lines to his Burnt Norton:

'Time past and time future / What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present'. 

Eliot is especially interesting because he does not simply contrast time with eternity. He explores the possibility of an intersection between them.

And here, in Dry Salvages:

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts

The 'unattended moment' is not an escape from temporal existence. It is a moment in which the ordinary movement of time seems to disclose something beyond itself.

That connects interestingly with Proust, for whom a sensation can suddenly make the past present.

For Eliot, the present can become the place where time and the timeless intersect. The  moment in time may become transparent to something beyond time.

C. S. Lewis — desire as evidence

In his 'The Weight of Glory' Lewis approaches the question from another direction. He asks why particular earthly experiences can produce a longing for something that earthly experience cannot quite provide. He says: 'The earth can offer some scent of the beyond.' and he describes our deepest desire as a longing for a country we have never visited.

Perhaps the fact that finite things repeatedly awaken an apparently infinite desire is not evidence that the desire is absurd. Perhaps the reverse is true. Perhaps the desire tells us something about the object for which we were made. Lewis therefore points us to the possibility that the experience of longing may itself be evidence that human beings are oriented towards a reality beyond the finite world.

Ecclesiastes — everything beautiful, everything passing

Here we arrive at the Biblical declaration which names the issue in clear terms:

'He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart.' -Ecclesiastes 3:11

Everything beautiful — in its time. Not everything beautiful forever. The beauty is genuinely there. But it belongs to time.

And then: 'Eternity in the human heart'.  We encounter something beautiful in its time, but we respond to it with a longing that seems to reach beyond that time.

The human problem is not that temporal things are insufficiently beautiful. It is that we have been given an appetite for eternity while living within time.

And Ecclesiastes refuses to solve the problem by telling us to despise temporal pleasures. Instead, it repeatedly tells us to receive them as gifts. The failure of pleasure to become ultimate meaning does not invalidate pleasure; it reveals that pleasure was never designed to carry that burden. 

I might mention here, that as I researched for this discussion, I found that perhaps the Hebrew is more difficult than that English translation , here using the NIV version, suggests.

We find that the key Hebrew word, ʿolam', can bear meanings associated with an indefinite duration, age, perpetuity or eternity. Some translations therefore render the passage rather differently. The NET, for example, has “ignorance” rather than “eternity”, with a substantial textual note explaining the difficulty. But my discussion follows the NIV, which carries the majority interpretation.

Temporal experiences do not fail because they are unreal, nor because they are insufficiently beautiful. They fail when we ask them to become what they cannot be: permanent, ultimate and self-sufficient.

Ecclesiastes 9:7-10 has it clear: 'Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for God has already approved what you do. 8 Always be clothed in white, and always anoint your head with oil. 9 Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun—all your meaningless days. For this is your lot in life and in your toilsome labour under the sun. 10 Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.'

The paradox is that the very experiences which reveal the goodness of temporal existence can awaken a longing that temporal existence cannot fulfil. A beautiful landscape, a piece of music, love, friendship, memory, achievement or a moment of profound happiness may seem to give us something beyond time. But the moment passes. We remember it. We long for its return. And sometimes, in remembering it, we discover that what we really wanted was not simply the experience but the permanence of what the experience seemed to disclose.

It is that permanence which can only be found by recognising its source and opening ones heart to that source - the Giver outside time.