From Deseret News archives:
Dylan lyrics show religious themes
Although many of the singer-songwriter's lyrics echo the Zen philosophy of seeking enlightenment through experiencing life, questioning assumptions and soul-searching, many of them also reverberate with Judeo-Christian precepts of believing in a higher power, obeying moral codes and submitting to judgment, Heine said.
Speaking recently at Utah State University, the history and religious studies professor from Florida International University said Dylan's Judeo-Christian lyrics evoke a "dualistic" world view. (Dualistic in the sense of two competing forces: good and evil.)
"The duality side is where he's looking for a higher power to offer solutions," Heine said. "The higher power provides a kind of justice, judgment, a sense of retribution for social ills for people that are not following the high moral standards. It's kind of a prophetic view going back to the Old Testament prophets that Dylan has embraced in some periods of his career."
Heine cited lyrics from "Shelter From the Storm" as an example: "In a little hilltop village they gambled for my clothes;/A bargain for salvation, and they gave me a lethal dose."
"The nonduality view is where he sees that instead of one, single truth that is making a judgment and offering retribution, he sees more of a relativistic truth, a relativistic worldview where the relation between reality and illusion breaks down," Heine said.
He quoted a line from "Tangled Up in Blue" as an example: "All the people I used to know are an illusion to me now."
Heine said Dylan's emphasis has swung like a pendulum between the two worldviews throughout his more than 45 years as a recording artist. During Dylan's folk-protest era, 1963 to 1964, his lyrics often invoked themes of morality and justice, Heine said.
But during his folk-rock period, 1965 to 1967, Dylan's work was more enigmatic and searching, Heine said. For example, Heine said, in "Tombstone Blues" Dylan sings, "I wish I could relieve you from your useless and pointless knowledge."
Heine said that echoes a passage from Zen literature that says, "True knowing, true understanding, is not something that's knowing or not knowing.
"They're using language in a special way to go beyond ordinary knowing to go into what a medieval Christian mystical text called 'the cloud of unknowing,' a kind of intuitive knowledge that is beyond ordinary logic and understanding."
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Great piece. Interested readers might want to read "Dylan's Vision...
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