~ Seven * Six [ * 6 ~ 7 ]

H a p p y  7 6 * ~ * 6 7 !

Present (XVIII) Relics of a bet (6)

       Dylan came back from the basement just a few minutes later, with a stormy look on his face, bringing the round box I´d won in that unexpected bet. He threw it at me with the same rage that infused his words.

       - Watch what's inside! It´s alive. And it bites.

       - Thank you for the warning.

      - You're an idiot, Nar. If you were so sure you´d win, why didn´t you go for something more valuable?

       - That's precisely the reason I went low -I said as I watched the box land at my feet.

       Dylan looked like he might reply but instead his face froze and he gave me a stare I found difficult to hold. Then he turned his back on me. Suddenly the scene was over.

      - Fuck you, "Nar of the Mysteries"!

      With a kick that followed his furious farewell, the box rolled towards the bonfire. It stopped just short of the flames, though it didn´t open. Groups of dismayed faces scattered to make way: with hands in pockets and seven-league strides, Dylan was disappearing again towards his car.

       Feeling the weight of everyone´s eyes upon my shoulders, I stared at the box for a moment before moving to pick it up. It seemed smaller now than when I´d seen it in the basement. Rather than hold it by its strap, I lifted it up and held it close to me with my arm around it, and casting my eyes downwards, I went to my caravan. People were silent. Dylan´s car revving loudly on the way out to the road sounded like a cracking whip in the midst of that mutism.

      I was opening my door when I heard what sounded like a slow, glum, arrhythmic clapping coming from the speakers at the living room windows. I turned around and saw Richard closing them from the inside, gesturing me with his hand.

      Everyone realized that the party was over.

Back Pages - Brown Notebook - July Of My Years

 
 

               I would probably be like a method actor,

 

                                                           whatever a method actor is ...

 

                                              … I could sing anything

                                      this warm July of my years

  

               Remembrance of things past, 

                                                     I do that all the time.

Present (XVII) Relics of a bet (5)

   

      The bonfire came alive as Rick tossed in logs under Sally’s sleepy gaze. I sat down next to them and facing the fire began folding the paper Dylan had given me before. Forced into a blind bet, I tried to fathom the enormity of the situation- if I won, I could have anything of his. Garth came over with some tumblers and a half-full bottle of whiskey. My sheet became a ship, my wish, five words, a sketch.

      “You know if you’re not sure, you can just throw it into the fire”, said Rick.

      I was about to do that when the hush that settled nearby told me that Dylan was coming back. I turned around and saw him walk up to the bonfire circle. He’d brought a brown, leather-bound book from which he produced a piece of paper, folded in four. It was a large well-thumbed Bible, with a very worn cover.

      “Here’s my part of the bet, Nar. You’ll be really pissed when you lose out.”

      He held out his paper to Rick and with one look made me do the same. He looked at my boat, hiding any surprise.

      “Rick can hold the papers and Garth can read from the Book of Isaiah. Here’s a King James. I said the quote about ‘standing upon the watchtower…’ is from Chapter 24 and you said it’s from …”

      “Chapter 21, verse 8”, I finished off, without shifting my gaze from the fire.

      “Pedant” he muttered as he handed the Bible to Garth.

      Sally poured whiskey into the glasses scattered across the floor. Dylan grabbed one, Rick too. I lit a cigarette and stood up to hear how this improvised duel was about to end.

      “ ‘My lord, I stand continually upon the watchtower in the daytime…’. Isaiah, Chapter 21, verse 8,” read Garth in an almost liturgical voice. And glancing down, he returned the Bible to Dylan who held it in silence while the people who’d gathered around us started to move away.

      “Don’t go without knowing what I’ve lost!”

      His shout stopped most people in their tracks and many turned to look at me as if waiting for a reaction. There was none.

      “Hard to believe but you’ve won, Nar. Now I just need to know what the fuck you’ve written on that ridiculous paper boat. What did you want to win off me to dare such a foolish move? Pass it over, Rick.”

      He held out my sailing boat on the palm of his left hand. Dylan grabbed it in his fist and unfolded it clumsily.

      “The round box in the basement...” he read out questioningly.

      He looked me straight in the eye for a few slow seconds, tilting his head first one way and then the other, forgiving me my life. His voice sounded like hail, I felt it fall on my face.

      “You’re more innocent than I thought.”

      He drained his glass of whiskey and threw it into the fire. Then he turned on his heel and strode over to Big Pink, going in through the back door. I went over to the living room window where Richard had just appeared.

    “What the fuck just happened, Nar?” he asked quietly. “Dylan’s gone down to the basement like a shot. And he looked seriously pissed off”.

      “I’ve just lost something by winning a bet. I’ll explain another time.”

      The man with the face like a mask walked right by us and, briefly raising his black hat, made a gesture as if to say goodbye.

Back Pages - Brown Notebook - Final Notes From The Watchtower

 

There are many who feel that life

is but a cut-up poem

But I’ve been through that

- drawing in the distance

the voice from the wilderness

Now a new time is approaching

                                                         and I will set it to music from the outside .

Back Pages – Brown Notebook – No Date (Passages of a Speech-Dream)

Passages of a Speech-Dream

   I took a deep breath
   turned around
   an’ ran ...

                            

                       … runnin’ down another road

                    an older road
                    through time an’ dignity
                    an’ I have never taken off my boots ...

                                        

                                                     ... t’ make new sounds out of old sounds
                                                            an’ new words out of old words
                                                               an’ t’ shout my singin’ mind

 

     anything that ain’t got no end’s
     just gotta be poetry in one
     way or another

                                               

                                an’ poetry makes me feel happy
                                                 for the lack of a better word

 

                   endless endless
                   it’s all endless
                   an’ it’s all songs

 

“ M u s i c ,  man ,  that’s  where  it’s  at . ” 

 

( Collage from “11 Outlined Epitaphs” )

 

Present (XVI) Relics of a bet (4)

       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 .