My caravan
moves almost fifty years forwards linking Dylan´s slamming of the
door at Big Pink to the bewildered echo that followed his silence
after being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature a few weeks ago.
The noise then and now this thundering silence full of resonances
provoke in my soul a similar feeling -as antagonistic modes of
eloquence, anyway. Though separated by reverb and by decades of time,
they were contiguous at the end of that scene about a biblical bet
initiated by a stranger with a dusty voice. This is what I remember
of it:
After
accepting the challenge with his laconic response, Dylan had
disappeared into the house leaving behind the echo of an angry
gesture that raised a murmur of voices in the groups close to the
back door. He soon reappeared at the threshold, his figure sculpted
in a silence that resounded in the air silencing everyone before him.
First loudness, then echo, then nothing, successive chapters in
Dylan´s special rhetoric -that night of July 1967 and these nights
of autumn 2016: "Sometimes
the Silence can be like the Thunder."
Standing
at the door, his mute eyes looked for me among the crowd, some people
already beginning to retreat back into the shadows. I approached with
a gesture that mimicked a half-smile, my shoulders shrunk, my hands
open. He raised his own hands: in his left he carried two pieces of
paper, a pen and a pencil; in his right, a mandolin which he propped
up against the door. His silence extended the time. For a while, with
a chill, I felt that Dylan was looking straight through me. My breath
faltered but I managed to keep quiet until I heard him say:
-
“Let's have that bet, Nar. We both agree the quotation is from the
Book
of Isaiah
but
I find it hard to believe that you know the Bible better than I do,
and I still don´t understand why you had to contradict me in front
of all these people. What were you hoping for? An applause, a medal,
the Super Bowl of annoyance, maybe?”
- “I´m
not in the business of collecting trophies. The truth is I had no
intention of…”
Dylan
interrupted me, raising his voice and tilting his head in a defiant
gesture:
-
“The absence of intention does not free you from its consequences,
Nar, and that man in black by the fire has thrown down a gauntlet
that
you
are
going to have to pick up!”
He came
over and handed me the pen and one of the two pieces of paper,
roughly, without giving me the option to refuse or even choose.
-
“Let´s
do a blind bet. We´ll both write down what we want from eachother if
we win. The
size
of the prize doesn´t matter. Do you get it? See you in a while.”
Then he
turned and walked to the front entrance of Big Pink, where he had
parked his car. His silhouette, as it moved away, was once again
carved in silence. A rolled up piece of paper hung from his left
hand: a still blank edict.
Nearly
fifty years later, as I write these notes by the big round box that
would eventually become my trophy from the bet, I imagine a memory of the future: another paper, this time framed as a Prize diploma. Maybe more S i l e n c e .
