Clarity at Last

Back on board, with many thanks for your patience!

Photo: Getty images

Dear Readers,

Thank you for your being here, folks. When I hit the Pause button a year ago today –needing time to think about how to tell my story, and in what form to publish it – I expected to be back in a month, maybe two. Well, it turns out I needed a year. It’s good to be back, and I’m glad to see you!

It took me that long to get a clear picture from what had been blurred together: I have two very different things I want to write about: the first is being on the road with Bob Dylan, an experience which was filled with the feeling that we were continuing a story we had begun in another time, one of the unsolved mysteries I refer to in the title, and something I’ll always wonder about when I hear his song, “Born in Time.” That is the story I’ve been writing here on Substack, the mystery of what was going on between us, both of us asking the other one for more clues, and somehow trusting that everything happens for a reason, or at least, as in a dream, everything symbolizes something that needs to be followed to the belief where it lives, like a bear to its cave. I also had to accept that my memory is no longer the faithful sight and sound recorder it once was, and a thousand details – like which port in Finland we landed in, all the names of people working backstage, the way each song was sung in each city, and every conversation we had – are no longer lined up like books on a shelf, but have returned like shimmering fish swimming at random in the primordial waters. Or, to be more precise, these facts now refuse to form a photo-realistic painting, but are spread at all angles across the mural of my memory like images in a Rauschenberg collage. In this long pause of self-reflection, I finally came to peace with this, surrendering to the fact I am not a Dylanologist, and hope not to disappoint any devotee or Bobcat who is searching for that kind of information. My story is what I went through and observed, and I hope it can in some measure teletransport you back in time to ride with us on the bus through the Temples in Flames.

The other, very different thing I’ve started writing will be an old-fashioned book you hold in your hands like a mirror, free to scribble your reflections in the margins, for that’s precisely what it’s for: reflecting. It’s a dozen or so soul lessons distilled from Bob’s words, actions, songs and surprising decisions, that I observed at close proximity: heartfelt principles he lives by, which are, to me, as powerful and inspiring as his songs. I’d wager anyone who knows him, and also knew, as I did, Michael Bloomfield – who Bob called his favorite guitar player, and loved – would agree that these two great artists are united in this holy handful of beliefs, all in some way aspects of compassion, not just for others, but for oneself as well, to lift humanity up to its divine potential. These tenets held sacred by these two artists – who by their joined creative forces, like flint and tinder, set creative fire to the world of popular song at Newport in ‘65 – are the ground their music rises up out of, the Earth their roots draw sustenance from.

This is how I came to resolve what was weighing on me:

Journal entry, 20 November 2024:

I give up, I surrender, let the broken shards of memory land where they may, I can't glue them back into the deep blue chalice they once were, through which the light of later years filtered, spreading that hint of infinity, the hue that streams through the high Rose Window of Chartres, that mystical temple of divine geometry devoted to the spirit of life, not death, not a crucifix in sight, whose circular maze in the tiles shows the path to God and one's true self, a path loaded with dead-ends and going back the way you came, and how close you come to the goal as you set out on the journey, pure passion without despair, pure desire without regret, following a muse with a golden harp.

And just like that blue light buckled my knees and opened my heart when I stood in its slanting beam, and the center of the labyrinth flooded my channels like a geyser of champagne from the center of the Earth, stepping into the center of Dylan's sphere gifted me with grace and dropped me to my knees.

Here, then, I climb back on the bus with Bob, traveling through Scandinavia on the Temples in Flames tour, September, 1987.

I also realized that, since this story is one of my most precious belongings, I will start asking people to pay for a subscription. I hope that’s alright with you.