{"id":157603,"date":"2020-04-06T12:00:36","date_gmt":"2020-04-06T11:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=157603"},"modified":"2020-04-04T11:38:25","modified_gmt":"2020-04-04T10:38:25","slug":"bob-dylans-midnight-message-to-jfks-ghost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/04\/bob-dylans-midnight-message-to-jfks-ghost\/","title":{"rendered":"Bob Dylan\u2019s Midnight Message to JFK\u2019s Ghost"},"content":{"rendered":"

3 Apr 2020 – <\/em>\u201cFor murder, though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ.\u201d<\/em> — Hamlet<\/p>\n

On May 1, 1962, President John Kennedy was meeting in the Oval Office with a group of Quakers who were urging him to do more for peace and disarmament.\u00a0 As he kept explaining the great political opposition he was facing within his own government, they kept urging him to do more.\u00a0 He listened very closely to their words and finally said, \u201cYou believe in redemption, don\u2019t you?\u201d<\/em>\u00a0 By the next spring he had turned decisively toward the peacemaking the Quakers had urged upon him, resulting in his murder in the fall by treacherous government forces, led by the CIA, which opposed him all along.<\/p>\n

Now that Dylan has burst forth from behind his many masks and gifted the world with his incandescent new song about the assassination, with a title taken from Hamlet<\/em>, from the mouth of the ghost of the dead King of Denmark \u2013\u201c Murder Most Foul<\/a> \u201c\u2013 we have entered a new day in an odd way.\u00a0 For those who have wondered over the years if Dylan had \u201csold out,\u201d here is their answer. For those who have wondered if he would go to his grave reciting the words of T.S. Eliot\u2019s J. Alfred Prufrock \u2013 \u201cI am no Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be\u201d \u2013 here is Hamlet\u2019s booming response. Not only does this song lay bare the truth of the most foundational event in modern American history, but it does so in such a powerfully poetic way and at such an opportune time that it should redeem Dylan in the eyes of those who ever doubted him.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Bob Dylan<\/p><\/div>\n

I say \u201cshould,\u201d but while the song\u2019s release has garnered massive publicity from the mainstream media, it hasn\u2019t taken long for that media to bury the truth of his words about the assassination under a spectacle of verbiage meant to damn with faint praise.\u00a0 As the media in a celebrity culture of the spectacle tend to do, the emphasis on the song\u2019s pop cultural references is their focus, with platitudes about the assassination and \u201cconspiracy theories,\u201d as well as various shameful and gratuitous digs at Dylan for being weird, obsessed, or old.\u00a0 As the song says, \u201cthey killed him once and they killed him twice,\u201d so now they can kill him a third time, and then a fourth ad infinitum.\u00a0 And now the messenger of the very bad news must be dispatched along with the dead president.<\/p>\n

The media like their Hamlets impotent and enervated, but Dylan has come out roaring like a bull intent on avenging his dead president.<\/p>\n

He has the poet\u2019s touch, of course, a hyperbolic sense of the fantastic that draws you into his magical web in the pursuit of deeper truth.\u00a0 In many ways he\u2019s like the Latin American magical realist writers who move from fact to dream to the fantastic in a puff of wind.<\/p>\n

Dylan is our Emerson.\u00a0 His artistic philosophy has always been about movement in space and time through song.\u00a0 Always moving, always restless, always seeking a way back home through song, even when, or perhaps because, there are no directions.<\/p>\n

\u201cAn artist has got to be careful never to arrive at a place where he thinks he\u2019s at somewhere,\u201d<\/em> he\u2019s said.\u00a0 \u201cYou always have to realize that you are constantly in a state of becoming and as long as you can stay in that realm, you\u2019ll be alright.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sounds like living, right.<\/p>\n

Sounds like Emerson, also.<\/p>\n

\u201cLife only avails, not the having lived.\u00a0 Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.\u00a0 Thus one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cMurder Most Foul\u201d is Dylan\u2019s soul becoming.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cA song is like a dream, and you try to make it come true.\u00a0 They\u2019re like strange countries that you have to enter.\u00a0 You can write a song anywhere \u2026. It helps to be moving.\u00a0 Sometimes people who have the greatest talent for writing songs never write any because they are not moving,\u201d<\/em> he wrote in Chronicles.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cMurder Most Foul\u201d is a moving song in every sense of the word \u2013 a trip to truth.<\/p>\n

Dylan has long been accused of abandoning his youthful idealism and protest music.\u00a0 I think this is a bum rap.\u00a0 He was never a protester, though his songs became anthems of the civil rights and anti-war movements.\u00a0 There is no doubt that those songs were inspirational and gave people hope to carry on the good fight.\u00a0 But in turning in a more oblique and circumspect musical direction, following his need to change as the spirit of inspiration moved him, Dylan\u2019s songs came to inspire in a new way. You could always tell his sympathies lay with the oppressed and downtrodden, but for decades he didn\u2019t shout it, with perhaps the one exception being the powerful, hard-hitting, and mesmeric Hurricane<\/em> in 1975.\u00a0 With that one he stepped into the ring to brawl.<\/p>\n

But for the most part over the years, a listener has had to catch his drift. If you go to the music, and dip into his various stylistic changes over the decades, however, you will find a consistency of themes.\u00a0 He deals with essentials like all great poets.\u00a0 Nothing is excluded.\u00a0 His work is paradoxical.\u00a0 Yes, he\u2019s been singing about death since twelve, but it has always been countered by life and rebirth.\u00a0 There is joy and sadness; faith and doubt; happiness and suffering; injustice and justice; romance and its discontents; despair and hope.\u00a0 His music possesses a bit of a Taoist quality mixed with a Biblical sensibility conveyed by a hopelessly romantic American.\u00a0 He has fused his themes into an incantatory delivery that casts a moving spell of hope upon the listener.\u00a0 He is nothing if not a spiritual spell-binder; similar in many ways to that other quintessential American – the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, whose best work was a poetic quest for an inspired salvific poetry.<\/p>\n

While speaking the unspeakable truth about President John Kennedy\u2019s murder might seem hopeless, it is actually a sign of great hope.\u00a0 For our only hope is in telling the truth, which Bob has done.<\/p>\n

This is art, not theory, and art of a special kind since Dylan is an artist at war with his art.\u00a0 His songs demand that the listener\u2019s mind and spirit be moving as the spirit of creative inspiration moved Dylan.\u00a0 A close listening will force one to jump from line to line, verse to verse \u2013 to shoot the gulf – since there are no bridges to cross, no connecting links.\u00a0 The sound carries you over and keeps you moving forward. If you\u2019re not moving, you\u2019ll miss the meaning.<\/p>\n

I have no wish to explicate the poet\u2019s brilliant work.\u00a0 It speaks for itself.\u00a0 It says far more than it actually says about a system rotten to the core, a country where everything went wrong since <\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe day the killers blew out the brains of the king\/Thousands were watching, no one saw a thing.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you listen to Dylan\u2019s piercing voice and follow the lyrics closely, you might be startled to be told, not from someone who can be dismissed as some sort of disgruntled \u201cconspiracy nut,\u201d but by the most famous musician in the world, that there was a government conspiracy to kill JFK, that Oswald didn\u2019t do it, and that the killers then went for the president\u2019s brothers.<\/p>\n

Your brothers are comin\u2019, there\u2019ll be hell to pay<\/em><\/p>\n

Brothers? What brothers? What\u2019s this about hell? <\/em><\/p>\n

Tell them, \u201cWe\u2019re waiting, keep coming,\u201d we\u2019ll get them as well<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is an in-your-face tale, set to music with a barely tinkling piano, a violin, and a soup\u00e7on of percussion, whose lightest words, as Hamlet\u2019s father\u2019s ghost said to him:<\/p>\n

Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Thy knotty and combin\u00e8d locks to part,<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And each particular hair to stand on end<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Like quills upon the fretful porcupine.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cMurder Most Foul\u201d truly startles.\u00a0 It is a redemptive song.\u00a0 Dylan holds the mirror up for us. He unlocks the door to the painful and sickening truth.\u00a0 He shoves the listener in, and, as he writes in Chronicles<\/em>, \u201cyour head has to go into a different place.\u00a0 Sometimes it takes a certain somebody to make you realize it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bob is our certain somebody. In these dark times he has offered us his voice.<\/p>\n

You believe in redemption, don\u2019t you?<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>. Website: <\/em>Behind the Curtain<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you listen to Dylan\u2019s piercing voice and follow the lyrics closely, you might be startled to be told, not from someone who can be dismissed as some sort of disgruntled \u201cconspiracy nut,\u201d but by the most famous musician in the world, that there was a government conspiracy to kill JFK, that Oswald didn\u2019t do it, and that the killers then went for the president\u2019s brothers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":108249,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[1895],"class_list":["post-157603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-bob-dylan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157603\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}