25 May 2024. Walking | Dylan

It’s not about the going there, it’s about the coming back. // Talking London 1962 Bob Dylan blues [#575]

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1: It’s not about the going there, it’s about the coming back

There’s a long piece by Nick Hunt in Noema magazine in which he reflects on a seven month walk he made a few years ago from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul, 2,500 miles in total. Once there, he flew back, which took less than a day. For various reasons that we’ll get to, he realised, afterwards, that this was a mistake.

The walk first—because some readers might recognise those starting and finishing points. Hunt was following in the footsteps of a famous walk by Patrick Leigh-Fermor in the early 1930s, which became the subject of one of the great travel books, The Time of Gifts (which I wrote about here), and two later volumes.

(An acknowledgment here to John Naughton, who mentioned this article in his Memex 1.1 blog).

This is the good part of the walk:

I slept on couches, in the ruins of castles and abandoned hunting hides. I got lost in graffitied city streets and in snowbound forests. I spent the vast majority of those months alone, talking to myself with a lack of self-consciousness that at times alarmed me. Birdsong, the roar of cars, church bells, cowbells, outraged dogs, the rush of rivers and the patter of rain kept me steady company. The sound I heard more than anything else was the crunch, crunch, crunch of my boots on the road.

But by the time he got to Istanbul he was exhausted and his boots were full of holes. He had planned to go back to England slowly, by local buses and local trains. But

I was just too tired. I’d done what I set out to do. My purpose seemed concluded.

It turns out, though, that he hadn’t finished. The article is about why this is, because it takes him another seven months—as long as the walk had been—to feel that he has returned to his life at home.

He mentions a couple of other people who had written about this:

The Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta, who journeyed 70,000 miles across much of the 14th-century Islamic world, wrote that “traveling gives you home in a thousand strange places, then leaves you a stranger in your own land.”

George Orwell said something in the same vein about his return from Catalunya, although, of course, he had been involved in a war while he was there:

I was struck by a similar sense that, during the time I’d been gone, the place I’d left had been in a state of suspended animation. Nothing had changed, and yet, confusingly, nothing was what I remembered... It was as if my body had arrived but some other vital part of me had not. I seemed to have dropped it on the road to Istanbul.

As he digs further into this, he discovers that the coming back is as important as the going there. And he had undermined that by flying home:

the achievement of my walk — all the struggles, hardships, joys and revelations — had in some way been negated by the manner in which I’d returned. Flying had undone the walking, raveling it all back in. Much later I came to understand that, on a spiritual level, it had. I had not completed a walk, but half a pilgrimage.

Pilgrimages are an example of a ‘hero’s journey’, as described by Joseph Campbell, and such journeys have three stages: departure, initiation and return. The destination of the pilgrim is their own front door:

Of these, the latter is the least examined yet perhaps the most important. After leaving ordinary life and overcoming obstacles, a pilgrim, crucially, must return home to integrate whatever knowledge they gained into their community.

This relates to an idea that the soul travels at the speed at which we walk. In an essay, Alain de Botton relates the speed of the soul to the speed of the camel—which is also three miles an hour. This is a recurring idea in literature. Bruce Chatwin—who knew Leigh-Fermor—writes about it in his book Songlines. Nick Hunt doesn’t mention Ivan Illich, but speed was a recurring theme in his work.

Rebecca Solnit says something similar in Wanderlust, her history of walking:

I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought.” In other words, thoughts — or souls — can get left behind if their hosts move too quickly.

I don’t think that Rebecca Solnit means this literally, although I couldn’t find my copy of Wanderlust to check. But finding some good notes online, the idea that walking and thinking were associated with each other emerges with Rousseau in the 18th century, although it gets back-projected quickly in the general direction of the ancient Greeks. So it is possible that it’s also a product of the idea of the outdoors and the “sublime” that emerged around the same time.

I asked my son about the neuroscience of this, and he said that it was hard to even formulate it as a neuroscience question. He did some sums for me about what we know about the processing speeds of the brain, but these vary a lot depending on the situation. There’s also not much of a concept of distance inside the brain.

(Jean Dubuffet, ‘The Lost Traveller’. Photo: Lluis Ribes Mateu/flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

So let’s take it as a metaphor, as Hunt does:

At three miles an hour, the world is a continuum. One thing merges into the next: hills into mountains, rivers into valleys, suburbs into city centers; cultures are not separate things but points along a spectrum. Traits and languages evolve, shading into one another and metamorphosing with every mile. Even borders are seldom borders, least of all ecologically. There are no beginnings or endings, only continuity.

Hunt met someone at an event who believed that the soul travelled at the speed of walking. So when you caught a train, or a plane, it took days or weeks or months for your soul to be reunited with your body. She was a computer programme who said she was going to write an app so that people could watch their soul heading towards you:

The idea was meant to be entertaining, but I found it haunting. In the age of mass transit, our restless world must be thick with ceaselessly roving souls, wandering imagined maps with no hope of reunification.

And this is the point that Hunt eventually gets to in his piece, the moment of reunification, via a story found in many cultures about someone who goes travelling but discovers the treasure only when they return home. (It’s also the story of The Wizard of Oz):

A pilgrimage works on two levels, external and internal, and while outwardly I was home, inwardly I was still plodding along, trying to make sense of what I had been through and what I had returned to... The moral — that true treasure lies at home — initially seems obvious, but what really strikes a chord is the deeper suggestion: that you cannot see that treasure until you have seen the wider world. You cannot know home by staying at home; you must first have gone away.

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2: The talkin’ 1962 London Bob Dylan blues

It’s a holiday this weekend in the UK and the USA, so I’m sharing something a bit different here, since it was Bob Dylan’s 83rd birthday yesterday. This is the great British folksinger Martin Carthy reminiscing about hanging out with Dylan in late 1962 while he was in London for a few weeks. Carthy is an almost exact contemporary of Dylan’s, and this is a story of two 21-year olds just finding their feet in the world. It was first published a few days ago at the modest folk music blog Salut! Live, where I am a contributor.

During his ‘In Conversation’ with Jon Wilks last year, Martin Carthy inevitably got to talking about the young Bob Dylan, who spent some time in London right at the start of his career. Dylan was brought over by the BBC to take part in a television play, ‘Madhouse on Castle Street’, which involved several weeks of rehearsals at the end of 1962.

While Dylan was here, Carthy had picked up a copy of the American folk magazine Sing Out! in Collet’s Music Shop on New Oxford Street, which had a Dylan cover. That evening, Carthy was playing a gig with the Thameside Four at the folk club at the King and Queen in Foley Street, in central London. During the first set, he said,

I looked at the audience and saw the cover of Sing Out! looking back at me.”

By Carthy’s account, Dylan’s new manager Albert Grossman was with him in London. Grossman was a fan as well as a manager, and he wanted his musicians to hear as much music as they could.

Carthy also noted that the House Un-American Activities Committee was quite virulent in late 1962, in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, and hinted that Grossman might have found it convenient to get Dylan out of the country for a while.

At the King and Queen Carthy asked Dylan if he’d like to like to come up on stage, and Dylan told him to ask him again later. After the interval, he noticed that Dylan now had his guitar with him, and sure enough he played three numbers. One of them was the ‘Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues’, which was greeted with a standing ovation, which it probably wouldn’t have got in the United States.

The following night, Carthy was playing the Troubadour folk club in Earl’s Court and suggested that Dylan should come and play again. This time, he played ‘Masters of War’, although for a while Carthy was expecting to hear ‘Nottamun Town’, the traditional folk tune that Dylan had adapted for ‘Masters of War’. At the end of the song, Carthy recalled,

There’s a particular silence that comes at the end of a wonderful performance of a wonderful song, and that’s what happened here. And then everyone started clapping.

Dylan apparently, would sometimes go home after gigs and write out all the songs he had heard that evening. But there’s also a story about going back to Carthy’s flat in Belsize Park after a Troubadour gig in that freezing winter and needing some wood for the heater. Carthy had an old and broken piano in the front room, which he’d been breaking up for wood, and a samurai sword that he’d been given by his “pretend aunt” Emily, who said she was an actress but seems to have been a spy.

As Carthy prepared to hack more wood off the piano with the sword, Dylan appeared between him and the piano, saying “You can’t do that! It’s a musical instrument, man.”

Carthy suggested that its playing days were behind it, and that it was very cold. After he’d made the first cut, Dylan piped up again: “Can I have a go?”

Like Paul Simon, Dylan was intrigued by Carthy’s arrangement of ‘Scarborough Fair’, and Carthy wrote it out for him. After being in London, Dylan spent some time in Spain before going back to the States. He turned ‘Scarborough Fair’ into ‘Girl From The North Country’, which he recorded that April for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

As for ‘The Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues’, that was intended for Freewheelin’ as well, and appeared on a rare pre-release copy of the LP. It was one of four tracks removed and replaced before Freewheelin’ was released.

The politics of this are murky, but Dylan had proposed singing the song on the Ed Sullivan Show on CBS in an appearance in May 1963. The network told him he couldn’t sing it, because it might defame the John Birch Society. (Yes, you might think the John Birch Society, which believed and said publicly in the 1950s that President Eisenhower was a communist agent, was quite hard to defame, but it seems you would be wrong.)¹ As a result Dylan refused to appear on the show.

The controversy affected his label, Columbia, which was also owned by CBS. When its lawyers learned that the song was slated for release on Freewheelin’, they ordered it removed.

Dylan took this opportunity to reshape Freewheelin’, removing three additional songs that he now felt were old-fashioned. Among the songs added to the record in their place: ‘Masters of War’ and ‘Girl from The North Country’.

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j2t#575

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1. When you read the Wikipedia entry for the John Birch Society, it is striking that their views of the world—well to the right of the mainstream Republican party in the early 1960s—are now the mainstream views of the party.