Dylan of the Week, Mk. 1

“You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”
Blood on the Tracks – 1974
Bob Dylan



“Situations have ended sad,
Relationships have all been bad.
Mine've been like Verlaine's and Rimbaud.
But there's no way I can compare
All those scenes to this affair,
Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go.

I'll look for you in old Honolulu,
San Francisco, Ashtabula,
Yer gonna have to leave me now, I know.
But I'll see you in the sky above,
In the tall grass, in the ones I love,
Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go.”

The lady leaves, unexpectedly. I waited for her for a couple hours, then she left. I wanted her to say things like “I love you” or “Have you ever read Seneca?” I spew invectives. I talk to Alex – smell some of her on him, smell some of that. Sometimes the worst thing is maturity – Rash, Rash, Rash! (cholera dances through my eyes like a drunken otter) The worst bit is that we do see them “in the ones I (we) love”. The universe’s conceit is to pull us into relationships with others like the ones we’ve got, but maximized, leading to the sky, leading to transcendence. Does she want to stay? Impatience or impertinence. I looked for a while (maybe not in “old Honolulu”), but couldn’t find the original diamond. But oh! those beginnings, those middles before it went to vituperative shit. Sublimity! Does anything compare? NO! Not since the beginning of time has man conquered or invented its likeness. It is because we cannot “compare / All those scenes to this affair” that we loiter after the lope. Hands in pockets, heads down, hearts in stomachs, thoughts in the dirt. Ultimately I am lonesome, but that lonesomeness has conceptual companions, even if I don’t have actual ones. Its accompanied by serenity and self-pity. Revelations will take their time before they appear again. They can still be heard, though, in Bob’s harp. Listen to the way he blows after the final verse – almost like he’s sighing into the harmonica. He’s got a handful of disintegration and he’s letting everyone know it, with his playful lugubriousness.