BOB DYLAN, OR ON RESTLESSNESS

(85 years of prophecies, songs, and metamorphoses in the restless heart of America)

There’s a rain coming down beyond the highways, you hear it before you even see it, and a skinny boy with clear eyes and bones light as wooden sticks wanders around with a guitar thrown over his back and the wind against him, a wind that blows carrying the smell of gasoline, dirty snow, burnt coffee, and dreams that can’t stay still. Inside his songs there are wolves howling at the moon, white stairways climbing into nothingness like in the feverish dreams of prophets, little steps lost in the embrace of endless horizons, waves crashing against destiny, and boundless, absurd visions spat out from the verses of Revelation and the nights set on fire by cursed poets. That’s where your language is born, Bob Dylan, in that unrepeatable mixture of dust, poetry, asphalt, blues, and premonition that would split popular music in two and put the pieces back together in a new form. When The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan arrived, you still weren’t the eternal face printed on the walls of the world, you still weren’t the ghost crossing decades changing skin like the great sacred serpent of the American road, a god of tar and electricity demanding the sacrifice of your dusty twenty years. And in that photograph with Suze Rotolo walking beside you through the freezing streets of New York, everything is already there: the cold cutting through your hands, the silent complicity of two kids lost inside winter, the rush to keep moving without stopping. You arrived in New York in 1961 the way all America’s mystical drifters arrived, pulled by an invisible magnet toward Greenwich Village, which back then was a nocturnal continent made of smoke, wine, penniless poets, sleepless musicians, girls in black sweaters, and revolutions whispered across café tables. You were chasing Woody Guthrie the way outlaws are chased, and Guthrie was sick, consumed, hospitalized, but still enormous, gigantic like the shadow of a mountain. The Village was harsh, legendary, a kind of last harbor for misfits and kids who wanted to change the world with three chords and a broken voice. You moved from one club to another with the songs of Fred Neil and Odetta stuffed into the pockets of your memory, absorbing everything, stealing every word, every face, every heavy-bottomed glass. John Hammond saw you, like those old gold prospectors who recognize the spark in the river dust. One look was enough for him to understand that there was a fire inside you. He brought you to Columbia, and the journey started from there, slow and unstoppable. From the very beginning you seemed allergic to any definition. Folksinger, prophet, poet, traitor, revolutionary — all words too small to contain you. In 1963, backstage at The Ed Sullivan Show, the gods of television decided that Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues could not be broadcast. That ballad scratched too deeply at the hysteria of a paranoid America afflicted with a McCarthyite fever that had elevated suspicion into a religious dogma. Faced with the ultimatum of censorship, you chose the silence of refusal, a modern Bartleby whispering his I would prefer not to. You weren’t looking for the prophet’s scepter or the leader’s pulpit; you refused to become the herald of a youth searching for fathers. Your only imperative was a profession of faith: to preserve a middle ground, a limbo of total expressive anarchy, in order to give voice to everything fermenting inside you. You wanted to be free to sing hell and grace, the distortions of the mind and the fiercest truths, paranoid delusions and the incomprehensible beauty of reality. Like at Newport, in 1965, the electric guitar, the boos maybe, and in any case it doesn’t matter, because from that moment rock definitively devoured the American tradition and transformed it into something new. You had opened a door and behind you would pass all the boys in leather jackets with eyes full of the future. It was like watching a storm opening above the Mississippi. Highway 61 Revisited threw open a new highway together with Mike Bloomfield, Al Kooper, and that whole gang of musicians who seemed to play with fire in their hands. Folk, rock, blues, surrealism, sirens, Beat poetry, the Bible, and hallucinations fused into a single current impossible to stop. Your songs became films projected directly into the mind: Albert Einstein disguised as Robin Hood, queens submerged by metaphors, ghosts and lovers crossing motels and endless nights where nobody could distinguish dream from reality anymore. Blonde on Blonde completed that trilogy, the last feverish monument recorded among smoke, insomnia, and creative flashes. In Visions of Johanna, Dylan took tiny details, a light left on, a half-finished kiss, music coming through the walls, and transformed them into explosions of imagination. And meanwhile your face became more and more unreachable, elusive like the reflection of a neon sign soaked by rain. In Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back, you can be seen crossing the 1965 English tour like a tired and nervous animal: sarcastic, impatient, cutting toward anyone trying to turn you into a formula. But beneath that shell there was still only a boy terrified by the idea of losing his own freedom. Then the motorcycle accident, the silence, the retreat from the noise of the world. You disappeared like an old gunslinger leaving town at dawn. And in the silence songs, records, continuous mutations kept being born. John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline arrived, the poetic refuge from the frenzy of rock, the intimate journey stripping music down to its most spectral roots in order to light itself with the warmth of Nashville. Blood on the Tracks, the cinematic fresco of a love falling apart, where you transformed the private pain of goodbye into a universal map of wounds. The spiritual disorientation of Slow Train Coming, the luminous and twilight return of Oh Mercy, all the way to the records of definitive maturity, Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, and Rough and Rowdy Ways, where your voice seems to come from a frontier inhabited by ghosts, murderers, preachers, and forgotten bluesmen. Yet you remained faithful to the idea that an artist must escape even from himself. I hear it in your memoirs, Chronicles Volume One, told with that tired and lucid simplicity of someone who has slept too many nights on other people’s couches. I hear it in Tarantula, that hallucinatory flow without a compass, words rolling like stones thrown onto the counter of a bar. I hear it in your magnificent contradictions: the refusal of Woodstock and the appearance at the Isle of Wight Festival, or that day in Bologna, when after Forever Young, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, and A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, you slowly removed that great white hat in front of the Pope and hundreds of thousands of people like a cattleman arriving at the end of a dusty trail. With the Nobel in 2016, the world began debating as it always does whenever something escapes categories. But you let the songs speak. You sent Patti Smith to accept the prize and we understood that verses are born to be sung, not nailed onto dead pages. And you were perfect that way, because you have always existed on that shifting border between literature, music, the road, and legend. Maybe this is your greatest legacy: having transformed the twentieth century into an endless journey through harmonicas, motels, wars, loves, revolutions, Bibles, nocturnal hallucinations, and roads crossing America without ever ending. You were the boy who on the first record wondered why loving so much, and you became the storyteller capable of slipping into a single stanza all the weight of history and the mystery of being alive. Happy birthday, happy 85th, Bob, Zimmerman, Elston Gunn, Blind Boy Grunt, Lucky Wilbury, Jack Frost, my traveling companion through an endless night. Let the wind keep carrying away your works, throwing them across the rooftops of our urban solitudes. They are the nights of those searching for meaning in the disorder of the world. Let us hope that that black flood, which you had seen coming from far away when you were only an apprentice singing the end of everything, stops scourging our lives like a sentence we no longer know how to decipher.