Blowin' Right on Time

Bob Dylan lives and breathes in a kind of mystical union with the corporate soul of the American Midwest; just as you cannot listen to Leonard Cohen without feeling you are in Montreal. Accordingly, trains are a common and an important thing in his songs. I can easily understand that. My grandparents' farm was right on the old Grand Trunk/CN main line between Montreal and Toronto. We spent many mornings and afternoons watching the trains, waving at the brakemen, and putting pennies on the tracks.

Trains are something profound. So profound they inspired my older brother to become a railroad engineer.

To a kid in the Midwest, no doubt, as in Gananoque, trains meant freedom. Hopping on a train and going somewhere West into the night... Or, for that matter, East, to the big cities.

Bound For Glory: Album Cover, "Slow Train Coming"

But by dint of that, trains symbolize something else. Freud said it, and it is, I think, clear in Dylan's use of trains in his earlier work. Trains symbolize death, that ultimate passage.

This, I think, explains "Duquesne Whistle," the single from his new album. Dylan is now 71. He almost died a few years ago. Like Leonard Cohen, like all artists once they reach a certain age, if they are lucky enough to do so, death becomes their most important interest.

And, as with Cohen, the realization of impending death seems to be, to Dylan, liberating. He seems more lively and more creative than he has been for some time.

Superficially, "Duquesne Whistle" is a simple song about a man going home to see his sweetheart, apparently after being away for a long time. A classic folk theme--”Tie a Yellow Ribbon,” "Green Green Grass of Home," and all that.

But some lines just don't fit that concept. Most notably, “I can hear a sweet voice gently calling/Must be the mother of Our Lord.” Not a common experience riding the old CN main line, so far as I know.

References to the train whistle seem vaguely apocalyptic, and increasingly so throughout the song: “Blowing like it's gonna sweep my world away.” “Sounding like she's on a final run.” “Blowing like she ain't gonna blow no more.” “Blowing like the sky's gonna blow apart.” “You're like a time bomb in my heart.” “Blowing like it's gonna kill me dead.”

Clear enough, surely? Time's up. Sounds more than a bit like Gabriel's trumpet.

There is also the obvious anomaly that the woman in the song seems at the same time to be at the destination of the ride, on the ride, and with him before he starts on the ride.

Too Subtle an Allusion?: Album cover: "Blood on the Tracks"

“You're smiling through the fence at me/Just like you always smiled before” sounds like her greeting him at his destination. But then he says the whistle is “blowing like my woman's on board”--as though he is the one waiting for her arrival. And then he says, as if an aside, “I wake up every morning with that woman in my bed.”

All of this fits together, and avoids being nonsense, if and only if “that woman” is, in all cases, just whom she is identified as being: the “Mother of Our Lord,” the Virgin Mary. She is the woman who is always with us, even when we sleep; perhaps especially in our dreams; yet will greet us more directly, face to face, no longer just smiling through the fence, at our final destination.

The song is a disguised prayer, in which Dylan imagines heaven as an idealized Midwestern home town. As the Midwest as it appears in art and song.

Let him hear who has ears to hear.

Dylan Transfigured

Rolling Stone’s recent (September) interview with Bob Dylan suggests some interesting things about Dylan’s religious life.

First, it seems he experienced his religious conversion not in the seventies (traditionally 1978), but already by Blonde on Blonde, indeed in ‘64. He says in the interview that “Rainy Day Women” is based on the Book of Acts.

Second, he is still religious, as only some had suspected; he never left it. He still refers to Jesus as “Our Lord”—in fact, he also does so in the recently released song “Duquesne Whistle.” He planned his next album to be a collection of hymns. He says “No kind of life is fulfilling if you haven’t been redeemed.” Asked if the Bible informs his songs, he responds “Of course, what else could there be?”

He also, paradoxically, when asked about his faith, says “Who’s to say that I even have any faith or of what kind?” But he prefaces it with “O ye of little faith,” and immediately follows it with “I see God’s hand in everything.” Which seems to mean not that he has no religion, but that his religion has progressed past faith to certainty.

There are also some indications that he might actually be Catholic, or at least have studied Catholicism and accepted it as some sort of authority. He says he was “transfigured,” and when asked to clarify, says “you can go learn about it from the Catholic Church.” Sixties flashback: What was he talking about in “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine”? Wasn’t that a pretty Catholic song? And before his supposed seventies conversion? Of course, it was 1967, so we were all too drugged up to notice:

"I dreamed I saw St. Augustine
Alive, with fiery breath
And I dreamed I was among the ones that put him out to death
Oh, I awoke in anger, so alone and terrified
I put my fingers against the glass
And bowed my head and cried."

The image of martyrdom is a very Catholic one, and Dylan inserts it deliberately: the real St. Augustine was not martyred.

In his latest release, “Duquesne Whistle,” he says the train whistle sounds “like the Mother of Our Lord.” Isn't that a Catholic image? Isn't it Mary calling us to Jesus? To that Slow Train Coming?

Time to comb back through Dylan’s lyrics to 1964. There’s a doctoral thesis here…