Non-self, Fixed identity and Bob Dylan
Photo - James Middleton
I change during the course of a day. I wake and I'm one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else. Bob Dylan
Science is discovering and apparently able to more or less prove, in scanning the brain and such, that there is no fixed self. ( Eastern philosophy says there is no "self." Science agrees - Big Think ) Congratulations, science, for uncovering this, 2500 years past the time that Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies delved into it in great detail. Someone else who knew instinctively that the self doesn’t really exist, is Bob Dylan. He’s demonstrated this consistently throughout his career, even before he became famous. He passed off a Hank Snow song as his own at summer camp, as a boy. Now, Dylan also has a healthy relationship with intellectual theft, and what could only be called lying, but there’s always been a plan behind it. His invention of a colorful past in his early days in New York city erased his parents, put him in traveling carnivals, way out west, in Mexico. All these things were totally made up to make his past more interesting, much more so than the actual - coming from Minnesota, with a father who sold furniture. But to Dylan, this has never been a problem in his mind. He’s always felt that he was who he imagined himself to be. His name isn’t his own. “You’re born, you know, the wrong names, the wrong parents. I mean, it happens. You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free.”
But this isn’t mere hucksterism, in Dylan it’s the recognition of there being no static self. If he didn’t actually have those adventures he embellished and placed himself in, he could have, in the capacity of his thinking. That to him was enough. Those imaginings of other lives were embedded in his songwriting, and thus became real. His musical trajectory has been one of constant reinvention, much to the consternation of fans who, once they’d become acclimated to his work, were unceremoniously set adrift into new musical territory. They yelled and screamed, one fan famously calling him Judas in his first electric phase, but though this might have shook Dylan some, his basic stance has always been, Hey, I’m the one making the music here.
In Buddhism and other Eastern thought, the self is more verb than noun. The idea of karma isn’t a finger of judgement, like the Judeo-Christian God bringing down wrath, it’s merely the accumulation of our movements, actions. Our tendencies, how we react, our decisions in life. There’s no one else to blame for the decisions we make in life but ourselves. Circumstance my force things upon us, but the reaction to those forces is always only and completely our own. George Harrison said that these lines of Dylan’s, “Look out kid, it’s something you did, god knows when but you’re doin’ it again,” perfectly described karma. Since karma is also stored up in us from past lives, it has a mysterious aspect to it, but it’s always been our actions that created it, we just don’t remember.
The only time Dylan grabbed onto and held a fixed identity was during the early years of his born-again Christian conversion. Then, he proudly, righteously, told the world he was the “property of Jesus.” The reason Dylan’s fans were so upset with him, came not from the fact that he’d accepted religion, in this case Christianity, but that he accepted a rigid form of it, where he turned his mercurial, constantly changing self into a static representative of certain Christian dogma. Also, the fundamentalist brand of Christianity he seemingly embraced had conservative political baggage. How much Dylan accepted the restrictive, political aspects of born-again Christianity is hard to tell, he kept his cards close to the vest on that, railing mainly, in his concert sermons, against the excesses of rock and roll and drugs, something he knew about.
Finally, the belief system Dylan seems to have become most comfortable within is the wisdom and philosophy found in songs. His recent book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, delves, most strangely, into that very thing. In writing about these songs Dylan loves and deems important, it’s as if they are, for him, some kind of portal to capture a view of life in motion. Songs are always set in the realm of the interior Now, the writer or singer directly relaying experience of life itself. Even in story songs like El Paso or Dylan’s own Black Diamond Bay, there is a narrative point of view that evokes a storyteller in the present moment. The fact that his songs are sung is their most important aspect, to Dylan. What this means is, they can always be sung again, differently, which is inevitable, since, in Dylan’s case, he says he changes every day, and evidence shows we can take him at his word. Indeed, the constant reimagining of his songbook, the endless reinvention, is unique and peculiar to Dylan. No one else in music has done anything like it. John Lennon came closest when he said to George Martin that he’d like to rerecord all of the Beatles songs. That, of course never happened, it was just Lennon talking. But Dylan’s non-self, whoever he is the next time he sings, will be the one making the song brand new, yet again.