Dancing Beneath the Diamond Sky: Reading Dylan’s ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ in its Visionary Contexts

Laurence Coupe places Dylan’s famous song in the context of the visionary tradition.

E-Magazine 29 (September 2005), pp 58-60

It is forty years since Bob Dylan’s important album, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), was released. It was important because it marked Dylan’s transition from ‘folk’ music to a new, more experimental form – referred to at the time by commentators, rather inadequately, as ‘folk rock’. In his own words, he had done with the ‘finger-pointing songs’ which characterised his earlier albums: sung to the accompaniment of an acoustic guitar, in keeping with the ‘folk’ convention, such songs had dealt with the wrongs of contemporary society, whether general (‘Blowin’ in the Wind’) or specific (‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’). With this new album, Dylan not only went electric musically but also seemed to have turned inward thematically, appearing to be less preoccupied with society than with the self.

However, that did not mean that his words now amounted to nothing more than introverted rambling: rather, he explored the mysteries of the inner world in such a way as to provide a new perspective on the outer world. Indeed, he could hardly be said to have abandoned his accusatory stance: ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. ‘Maggie’s Farm’, ‘It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding’ and ‘Gates of Eden’ were savage indictments of the materialism and commercialism of the USA of the mid-nineteen-sixties. What was new, perhaps, was the attempt to go well below the surface of society and to summon up the spiritual and imaginative possibilities which it had suppressed.

True, Dylan had spoken the language of the spirit before – most notably, his early songs had been studded with allusions to the Judaeo-Christian Bible – but now his sense of spirituality became less conventional. In short, it was more associated with the unpredictable power of the imagination. In taking this step, he was only following the example of his favourite writers: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and other ‘Beats’.

Kerouac’s novels might seem to the uninitiated to be merely a celebration of crazy young people travelling hectically around America, but the quest outlined by Kerouac is inner as much as outer, spiritual as much as spatial. Again, Ginsberg’s influential poem, ‘Howl’, an extended cry of pain in the face of a world devoted to wealth and warfare, succeeds in simultaneously celebrating all those who would rather be thought mad than to subscribe to its deadly logic.

For both Kerouac and Ginsberg, to be ‘Beat’ did not mean only to be inspired by the ‘beat’ of jazz, nor even to be ‘beaten down’ by the ‘square’ world, but above all to be capable of the ‘beatific’ vision. It is no coincidence that ‘Howl’ ends with the seemingly endless repetition of the word ‘holy’: it is, the poet proclaims, the outcast artists who are capable of glimpsing the sacred dimension of life — denied or (perhaps worse still) domesticated by a society given over to the pursuit of money and power.

If Dylan admired the Beats, Ginsberg (and to some extent Kerouac) were happy to return the compliment. Indeed, towards the end of his life Ginsberg went so far as to state that he regarded Dylan, with whom he had become friendly about the time that the latter was working on Bringing It All Back Home, as the greatest living American poet. Moreover, he had no doubts that both he and Dylan were working in a visionary tradition which went back at least as far as the English poet, William Blake (1757-1827). That Dylan himself was conscious of this legacy early on is brought out by a response he gave to a question posed at a press conference in 1965. When asked if his music should be called ‘folk rock’, he replied: ‘I’d like to think it of it more in terms of vision music.’ Nor should we overlook allusions made to Blake in other interviews at the time.

Known widely as the first of the Romantic poets, Blake it was who affirmed the power of vision against the forces of ignorance. He famously declared: ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.’ His avowed aim was ‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.’ In doing so, he would demonstrate the supremacy of imagination over reason, of spirituality over materialism, and he would stand up as one who ‘kept the divine vision in times of trouble’. Reading ‘Howl’ in the light of Blake, one realises that when Ginsberg claims to see holiness everywhere, even in the sordid streets of urban ghettoes, he is  deliberately invoking his master’s visionary affirmation: ‘Everything that lives is holy.’

Turning back to Dylan, we note that the song on Bringing It All Back Home which is most explicitly concerned with the nature of vision is ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. Unfortunately, the glib consensus over the years has been that its subject-matter is drugs. Besides the fact that Dylan himself has denied this hotly, it must be said that to interpret the figure of the tambourine man as a drug dealer is offensively reductive. To do so is to cut oneself off from the imaginative and spiritual potential of a great poem. In referring to the song as a poem, I am endorsing Ginsberg’s judgement, bearing in mind that Dylan’s is a poetry of performance rather than of the printed page. Relevant here is the fact that, though ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ is featured on the first album of Dylan’s electric phase, the song itself is sung chiefly to the accompaniment of an acoustic guitar (as with the earlier work): it seems to invite us to ponder the lyrics in depth, all of which are articulated with precision by the singer-songwriter. If we pre-empt their meaning by simply ‘ticking off’ any possible allusions to drugs, we are hardly doing it justice.

So, having decided to take the work seriously, we have to ask ourselves who we think the ‘Tambourine Man’ of the title really is. Here we could do worse than to consult the text that Dylan has previously drawn upon, namely the Bible. In the Judaic scriptures, the playing of a tambourine is frequently associated with spiritual ecstasy. Thus: ‘Some of the people of Israel were playing music on small harps…and on tambourines… [King] David and the others were happy, and they danced for the Lord with all their might’ (2 Samuel 6:5). Dylan’s central symbol would seem, then, to be that of transcendence – or at least the desire for transcendence.  In other words, the quest is for an apprehension of holiness, for a sense of the sacred. But his song is secular rather than conventionally religious, so perhaps it is indebted as much to Blake as to the Bible. That is, the aim is to cleanse ‘the doors of perception’, to experience ‘Eternity in an hour’, in defiance of the dead weight of conformist consumerism. Here again  we note the ‘Beat’ connection, for the tambourine man is the bearer of  the ‘beatific’ vision, even while the singer sings of being ‘beaten down’: specifically, he asks him to ‘play a song for me’ at the moment when ‘My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet…’

The figure invoked, then is no more a religious teacher than he is a drug dealer: rather, he is the spirit of poetry or music. It is he who has the visionary power to transport the singer ‘upon your magic swirling ship’ and to ‘cast your dancing spell my way’. In this light, we might be tempted to see him as the traditional figure of the Muse; but we need to bear in mind both that the Muse has always been thought of as feminine, and that the function of the Muse is to inspire poets rather than to actually create poetry. Though we might want to say that Dylan is the poet/singer seeking inspiration, his own song is an appeal to some superior force to create the ultimate ‘song of songs’. Thus, the tambourine man is a personification of the power of poetry – poetry being understood, in traditional terms, as inseparable from music.

While the singer’s initial request to the tambourine man is that he ‘play a song for me’ in order that he can be followed in the ‘jingle jangle morning’ – a morning brought alive by the sound of the tambourine – the figure addressed is more than a mere fellow-practitioner. He represents the force of art itself, which transcends time even while those who are touched by it necessarily remain in time. For if ‘evening’s empire has returned into sand’ – the sand of an hourglass, presumably? – then we know that, so long as we live and breathe, we are part of the cycle of daily existence, during which evening and morning are endlessly repeated. The paradox is that though time may wear us down – ‘the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming’ – it is always possible to ‘fade / Into my own parade’: that is, to lose oneself in the exercise of imagination. Such moments of self-transcendence are both in and out of time.

We can get closer to the heart of this paradox if we are open to the rich ambiguity of a line such as the following: ‘And but for the sky there are no fences facing.’ Now, the endless sky is an image of total freedom, but Dylan’s song reminds us that, though we have a great more spiritual potential than our society allows for, we are all of us necessarily constrained by the need to articulate our yearning for eternity and infinity in time and space. Hence the singer addresses the tambourine man as follows: ‘And if you hear vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme / To your tambourine in time, it’s just a ragged clown behind, / I wouldn’t pay it any mind, it’s just a shadow / You’re seeing that he’s chasing.’ Poetry itself – this very poem, which calls out for another poem (‘play a song for me’) – works through certain agreed principles, such as ‘rhyme’. Even the ‘tambourine’ must be played ‘in time’. The ‘ragged clown’ who follows ‘behind’, as a ‘shadow’, knows this, even as he celebrates the vision of eternity which he attributes to the elusive figure whom he invokes and pursues. As Blake tells us: ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time.’ If the poet is he who can reveal eternity to us, he does so by means of the ‘skipping reels of rhyme’: in one aspect, they are what keeps us where we are (as in the act of skipping); in another aspect, they are what makes possible the vision of eternity. The tambourine man would not exist in our imagination if some ‘shadow’ such as the singer of this song had not invoked him through the incantatory power of language.

So it is that the song concludes with the ‘ragged clown’ (he who is, we might say, ‘beaten down’ by time) knowing himself to be part of the ‘dance’ which the tambourine man creates (the ‘beatific’ vision, as it were). After the singer’s situation has been described in a series of negatives (‘there is no place I’m going to … I have no one to meet … my hands can’t feel to grip’), we come to the moment of affirmation:

‘Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free…’ Here the sky represents eternity, but we are not intended to forget that the very image of eternal freedom is one that involves temporal movement.

After all, ‘to dance beneath the diamond sky’ is a moment of illumination that the singer hopes for rather than one he claims to have had. If he were ever to reach a state ‘far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow’, he would have to be taken ‘Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves, / The haunted frightened trees…’

That is, the imagination would have to comprehend all the trials and tribulations of human experience. Even then, on the ‘windy beach’ he would be ‘silhouetted by the sea’ and ‘circled by the circus sands’. Such images are deeply ambiguous. The sea might represent death just as much as dream, oblivion just as much the infinite potential of the unconscious mind. The ‘circus sands’ might represent the absurd cycle of time just as much as the play of art which produces vision.

The affirmation stands, however, by virtue of the paradoxical relationship between time and eternity, between rhyme and vision, which the song revisits. The singer is entitled to feel that ‘memory and fate’ – past and future – have been ‘driven deep beneath the waves’, and that he can ‘forget about today until tomorrow’; but he knows that there is going to be a tomorrow, in which today will have become yesterday. Again, when he dances to the tune played by the tambourine man, he has ‘one hand waving free’: this is an image of constraint and abandonment simultaneously. But then, that is the very nature of imagination: it works through the dialectic between form and improvisation, between what one receives and what one gives.

It might be worth ending with Dylan’s response to another question which he was asked at about this time: did he think of himself primarily as a singer or as a poet? He replied that he thought of himself ‘more as a song and dance man’. No doubt intended to undermine the more pompous claims made on his behalf, such as ‘spokesperson for a generation’, his choice of words is nonetheless revealing. His song, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, is a celebration of the power of the ‘song’ which is also a ‘dance’: one that releases us from the burden of time even as it follows the rhythm of time. Thus, perhaps ultimately the tambourine man represents that potential within ourselves to ‘cleanse the doors of perception’ and ‘to hold Infinity in the palm of your hand’. The ‘ragged clown’ will always be ‘circled by the circus sands’, but in his capacity as ‘song and dance man’ he will surely find a way to ‘see a World in a grain of sand’.