Present (VI)

     My prediction was correct: the song I heard when I first entered the basement summed up the joy of a shared comradeship, magnifying both.

    All these years I´ve spent searching for it -in my memory, in my dreams, in collections appearing since 69 under the symbols of the miracle or the tree with roots, on labels of the genuine or, recently, the complete... but the song just doesn´t come up. It´s just not there.

        Perhaps it was never recorded, perhaps it´ll show up  tomorrow in a lost tape.

        The song is not recorded because it possibly doesn't exist.

        It might be the one I´m trying write,

        now,

        here,

        as if we sang it.

Caravan (8) Mid-June 1967

     I´m spending the first few hours of the afternoon looking over some material I´ve been collecting for my literary biography project. By chance, I come across a 1962 interview, one of the first Dylan gave on New York´s WBAI Radio where he talks about the performances he used to give in Greenwich Village, at the Gaslight and Café Wha? :

     “I sang down there during the afternoons, played my harmonica for this guy there . . . he used to give me a dollar . . . play with him every day from two o'clock in the afternoon. Play till 8:30 at night. . . . He gave me a dollar, plus a cheeseburger."

   

     Things must feel pretty different now, to be playing with friends, no timetables, no wage. The sessions in the basement are not usually as long as those in the Village, though sometimes they do go on into the early hours. I´ve got to wait till seven today to go down – Robbie´s tone left me no doubt. I´m finding it hard to contain myself. Luckily, at about four a smiley face looks in through the front windscreen of the caravan.

     “Come in, Rick.”

     “No interrupting anything, am I?”

    “No, not at all, I was just making some notes, just whiling away the hours till it´s time to come down to the basement to listen to you.”

     “Yeah, Robbie told us this morning…. Richard and I kind of like the idea of having you as our audience, even if it´s just for a while….”

     “Well, we´ll see how long either of us can take it! Already know what you´re playing today?”

    “No fucking idea. That´s always decided- I think- when Dylan comes down the basement stairs, depending on what he´s got or not in his hand, could be a text, some chords, a newspaper, the harmonica, even just the face he´s got on him, or both. From below, we watch him come down those steps, sometimes it´s slowly, sometimes it´s two by two. We just set to tuning up wearing our Poker face, or light up a cigarette waiting to see what he says…. Sometimes it feels like when you toss a coin up into the air and it takes hours to come down.”

     I´m finding it hard to accept that I´m going to miss that moment- Orpheus, katabasis, a hundred thousand discordant associations around the pleasure of descent-, to accept that this evening I won´t see Dylan coming down the stairs to meet his pals. By the time I get to the basement it´ll be half past seven and the five will have been playing already for a while, will be absorbed in their instruments and in their mutual understanding, so they will not notice how I sit in a corner, looking at them from the floor, hands together, fertile ears and eyes gaping open.

     Today I will not see Dylan descend, but whatever song they´re singing when I sit down to listen to them on the concrete floor of the basement will be as rapturous as the image of the five of them gathered around that shared joy: the perfect soundtrack to a secret, intimate and anarchic glory.

Caravan (7) Mid-June 1967

     Like Rick, I enjoy watching the sun as it shines behind the house at this time of day.

      I started painting the house on a horizontal canvas, 70 x 50, three thousand five hundred centimetres in area and two hundred and forty in perimeter striving to contain the wrapping of a universe, spherical, enormous and pink. Other colours sprout from the music which most afternoons escapes out of the open windows. Though far from being my masterpiece, the image is developing, smooth like a rhapsody. 

 

      - Ready for the basement, Nar?

     The question rings out behind me, breaking off my futuristic wanderings.

      - Hi, Robbie. You startled me ...

    - I didn´t mean to. I only came to tell you that you can come down and listen in this evening, if you like. Dylan said he wants to meet you.

     The brush falls out of my hand, oil paint staining the grass blue. Robbie stares at it for a moment, pulling a face that turns into half a smile. Then, turning on his heel, he walks back to the house and calls back:

     - Don´t come before seven!

 

     Seven

     Seven, minus two  =  five    :-:

     Five words  ~  the key to the treasure    :-:

                                    DYLAN  WANTS  TO  MEET  ME  *

Back Pages - Brown Notebook - Bright Summer Night 1967

          I see a light come shining

          From the summer unto the winter.

          To be here and then

          After decades and now

          Sharing the brightness of a star.   

Back pages – Brown Notebook (d) Early June 1967

There are some things not spoken about,

and others
that are spoken about without being things ...

That caravan parked behind the house

- when I arrive the sun shines just above it

and I see it shine

and I stay for a while watching it

(narrowed eyes)

and I know there's someone (on the) inside,

who I still don't know

                              :

the caravan

as a metaphor for myself

in these spring days

as my Olivetti takes up

some old rhythms

- yes, I'm thinking in terms of rhythm, too, these days-

and at the same time

it accompanies with a corn-spike-green torrent

from which joy and reaction keep rising,

the complicity of a band

that is myself before and myself now

If we talk about it,

or better yet play it together,

perhaps,

what I still don't know

could join us any afternoon now,

in the basement

Who is it that inhabits that "metaphorical caravan"?  

                               ( psychedelic pillows:

                                     why should surrealism be

                                            the patrimony of a single side? )

Talk to me, Nar!

- the guys told me you have this name,

sort of Shakespearean jester style ...

… Now I wonder how might your voice sound like .

Caravan (6) Early June 1967

   

     

     I get back to the caravan and Richard is sitting on the steps, still finishing his coffee. He smiles at me, doesn´t ask me where I’ve been, but I explain anyway by answering the question he´d asked himself earlier, including a reminder that I am still waiting.

      - I´ve been thinking that maybe you´ve told me about the “Upstairs, Downstairs” thing only because you want to share it with someone who is not on the “inside”, because you are interested in my perspective from the “outside”. I´ve not been invited down to the basement yet, so I haven´t got that image of Dylan on the basement stairs going up and down, then up again, engraved in my mind. You must be truly obsessed with it if you take it with you to dreamland …

       - OK.  You know I mentioned to them the other day that you might  join  us  any  afternoon  now  in  the  basement  to watch us play  - ´cause we all know you listen to us anyway, from the outside – but it´s not my fault they haven´t brought the idea up again. Anyway, I´m not talking about dreams in other people´s hands – your fault, Nar- but of an image of uncertainty – I don´t know if you get it- which has something to do with the feeling I´m getting as I try to write this song…

    - What are you unsure about? Is it more the words or the music?

   - Well, I´ve been talking about uncertainty, actually, which is more suggestive than the word ´unsure´… But since you ask, it is the words I´m most hung up on … The chords I´m clear enough on, you´ll see.

 

    Leaping up, he disappears into the caravan and emerges holding one of my guitars. He plays five chords, droning random words to a descending melody which at times recovers its verticality, climbing sharply alongside his burning voice. When he finishes, we sit in silence. He breaks it himself:

 

    - From now on, Nar, I´ll be coming to your caravan every Wednesday at 9:30 so we can discuss the matter further - he says putting his hand on my shoulder, looking rather serious.

      - I don´t believe you, Richard

      - You´d be wise not to.

 

      Getting up, he leaves his empty coffee cup on the bottom step and sets off towards the forest, waving goodbye with his hand. I watch him head off, barefoot, and somehow I know I have just heard the untaken photograph of a legend: with my ears, with my eyes, with my anticipatory love for myths in the making   .-.-.-

 

      If you find me in a gloom or catch me in a dream

                                                                                                                             .-.-.-

Caravan (5) Early June 1967

“Yesterday, I decided to sleep in the basement, you know? The vibe had been especially good, real good vibrations all evening long – the Voice of Conscience microphone was connected and the light felt like a gift from heaven on his birthday. I thought I might just keep the vibes alive if I went to sleep ...

     ... And there, on the basement sofa, I had a dream, you know? I dreamt I could see Dylan like I do most days, on the stairs, just there, as if suspended between levels of reality, like he´s looking at something no-one else can see …

     ... But I also saw him as inside a song, or the idea of a song, and now that is harder to explain … though I´ll try anyway.

      I´ve been thinking about this stuff for weeks: “Downstairs, Upstairs” or “Upstairs, Downstairs”, as you like. How when you see Dylan on the basement stairs you have no way of knowing if he´s going up or down. Sometimes, he does both things at once (I swear, Garth said so the other day too). And when he´s in this trance, the guy always has a piece of paper in his hand, sometimes a whole bunch, and it´s from there that stories and sounds seem to come during our sessions, and they amaze us all, starting with him.

      And I want to make a song with all this, you know? And I´m writing it, though it´s hard to do. Maybe that´s why I still haven´t talked about it with anyone, not even Rick. I don´t know what the hell I´m doing telling you here, now, when I haven´t woken up properly from the dream ..."

     Richard is telling me this the next morning, on the caravan steps, where we are sitting cradling mugs of coffee and something to smoke in the other hand. Suddenly, he stops talking, his gaze fixed in the distance, and it´s like he has gone.

 

     I get up slowly, leave him to his thoughts for a while.