先来一点吧,太长了.    

【北溟】 于 06/07/00 15:54:29 加贴在 闪亮的日子 ：

   "The Songs Are My Lexicon"
by Alan Jacobs

  About the time I became a Christian, in 1978 or so, Bob Dylan did too. Of course, I didn't know about his conversion at the time--no one did, or almost no one, and when word started to creep out it was greeted with disbelief. Even when Dylan's first Christian record, Slow Train Coming, was released, Jann Wenner, the founder and editor of Rolling Stone, would trust none of his writers with the review but instead wrote it himself. I smiled for weeks over Wenner's ingenious attempts to argue that the record didn't prove that Dylan was a Christian, his desperate protests that songs like "I Believe in You" and "When He Returns" didn't necessarily refer to Jesus. I smiled because Bob Dylan--Bob Dylan!--was on my side of the cultural street.  
   Of course, I knew how Dylan's conversion looked to people in New York or Los Angeles: they saw him selling out to the dominant culture--just what people said he had done fifteen years earlier when he went electric. But didn't look that way to us down in Alabama. You might be able to make the argument that a certain kind of polite genteel Christianity was part and parcel of the power structure of America, but that wasn't the kind of Christianity we practiced down South. We were low-church, Bible-thumping, amen-and-hallelulahing, Jesus-loves-me-this-I-know, repent-of-your-sins-while-there's-still-time Christians, and were then treated with pretty much the same public scorn then that our brothers and sisters today receive. That Dylan would become one of us, preaching our Gospel and talking our language, was like a Providential confirmation of the validity of our cause.  
   It is hard for me to express how confirmed and sustained I, as a young Christian, felt by Dylan's conversion, or how laughable I felt the widespread outrage and disbelief to be. I saw Dylan perform on his first tour after his conversion; he had already been greeted by boos and whistles on earlier stops on the tour (just as he had been when he went electric), and when I entered the auditorium people were handing out anti-Christian pamphlets. But the critics turned out to be a tiny minority that night: most of the audience, in my Bible-belt home town of Birmingham, Alabama, swayed and clapped as the gospel singers opened up, and listened quietly and intently when Dylan played the pure-bred Gospel songs that would turn up a few months later on Saved. Someone even unfurled a big banner that said "Jesus Loves You Bob," and Dylan smiled and pointed approvingly at it. He seemed happy on stage, and moved by the applause that we roared out--applause that he hadn't been receiving lately. We left thinking--perhaps wrongly, but I still believe it--that we were the only audience on the tour thus far to be on his side, and that just maybe we gave him the strength he needed to keep walking the strait and narrow path that leads to God. When Saved was released I was convinced that that blurry cover photo was taken, probably by the sound man, in Birmingham that night, and that that picture was Dylan's tribute to the first audience who celebrated with him his new life.  
  As I said, it was great to hear Dylan sounding like one of us, but the more I listened to those first two Christian records the more something started nagging at me. Saved became especially troublesome after a while, because it seemed as though Dylan had wanted to make sure that there was no wiggle room even for the Jann Wenners of the world to misread him or overlook his meaning, and made his lyrics as unambiguous as they could possibly be. "I'm saved by the blood of the Lamb." Can't get any straighter than that. And in a way that was the problem. Now, I loved that record, and still do--musically it's underrated, I think: it's poorly recorded, but Dylan and his backup singers get into some deep gospel grooves throughout the record, with Spooner Oldham's shimmering organ filling on every song, and Dylan playing some of his best harmonica licks ever (especially on "What Can I Do for You?", which in the Birmingham concert was an incandescent ten minutes long). But what came to bother me was the way Dylan took on the classic gospel voice to such an extent that his own voice was altogether submerged. I don't mean his singing voice, I mean his poetic voice: I was thrilled that Dylan would go before the world and say "I'm saved by the blood of the Lamb" or "I'm pressing on to the higher calling of my Lord," but anyone could say those things. I wanted to hear my faith filtered through Dylan's distinctive sensibility: I didn't want to hear him sound exactly like any other preacher or gospel singer.  
  That's why I was so pleased when Shot of Love came out and I saw that there were some love songs ("In the Summertime" knocked me out) and even a song about Lenny Bruce. And the specifically Christian songs were more Dylanesque, as in this kick-ass "Positively Fourth Street"-like chorus:
He's the property of Jesus Resent him to the bone You got something better You got a heart of stone.
The way Dylan said "stoooone," with a contemptuous sneer--now that was the Man come back again. And it seems to me that what we've heard since then, in Dylan's best work anyway, is a rich blend of the gospel wing of what Dylan used to call "historical-traditional music" and the characteristically Dylanesque.  
   It's amazing how many people want to know what Dylan's religious beliefs are; it's even more amazing how many people think they do know, as I have learned since I wrote an article that discusses Dylan's religious pilgrimage. But here's all, I think, we can be sure of: he has acquired a poetic vocabulary, a way of speaking with deep roots in American history and in downright human experience, that is so rich and so comprehensive that he'll never get to the bottom of it. As the great singer and guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe once said, "There's something in the gospel blues that's so deep the world can't stand it." That's part of what Dylan meant when he told David Gates of Newsweek:
Here's the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don't find it anywhere else. Songs like "Let Me Rest on a Peaceful Mountain" or "I Saw the Light"--that's my religion. I don't adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I've learned more from the songs than I've learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.  
   To Jon Pareles of The New York Times he also invoked Hank Williams's great country gospel song "I Saw the Light," and added, "I've seen that light too."  
   Time Out of Mind amply justifies his claim that the old songs are his "prayer book" (as he said to Pareles) and his "lexicon"--and, moreover, it confirms the hypothesis that when Dylan immerses himself in the world of "historical-traditional music" something powerful is likely to eventuate. Every song on Time Out of Mind is deeply, deeply saturated in that ancient music. Perhaps the strongest song on the record, "Trying to Get to Heaven," directly quotes as many as a dozen old songs: country gospel ("I've been walkin' that lonesome valley"), mainline American folk music ("I was ridin' in a buggy with Miss Mary Jane"), even bluegrass ("I'm just goin' down that road feelin' bad")--and then, of course, there's Dylan's self-citation, the echo in the song's refrain ("I'm just tryin' to get to Heaven before they close the door") of a secular hymn that has already entered the pantheon, and that he sang for Pope John Paul II in Bologna last September: "Knockin' on Heaven's Door."  
   But the songs themselves are part of the Biblical inheritance, a way of thinking and talking about life, a way of living. What Sister Rosetta Tharpe called "the gospel blues" is a way of describing the world that doesn't just go way deep but also way back: that lonesome valley Dylan is walking, and that countless others have walked before him, is of course "the valley of the shadow of death" that the Hebrew poet described for us millennia ago. That ancient description of our emotional lives has got hold of Dylan and I'm willing to bet won't ever let him go. Or maybe you could say that he won't ever let it go, it probably doesn't matter how you put it.  
   And this plays into what I think is especially important about Dylan, that he is one of the few truly great figures in American popular culture--Duke Ellington was another--who has never forgotten that he himself isn't what it's all about. In some ways Dylan's most consistent message has been, simply, "It ain't me, babe, its ain't me you're looking for, babe." Dylan never lets you turn him into a graven image to worship. That's part of the reason for his elusiveness and his tendency to transform himself: you couldn't make a graven image out of quicksilver even if you could catch it. Which you can't. But his music and his lyrics are always pointing us towards a great tradition of morality and spirituality that are simply bigger than any rock star could ever be. Dylan knows that, and tries to teach it to us. That's why my favorite moment from a Dylan interview came in 1991, when Rolling Stone interviewed Dylan on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday. When the interviewer asked him if he was happy, Dylan gave a curious but utterly characteristic response:  
   He fell silent for a few moments and stared at his hands. "You know," he said, "these are yuppie words, happiness and unhappiness. It's not happiness or unhappiness, it's either blessed or unblessed. As the Bible says, 'Blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly.'"  
   Alan Jacobs teaches English at Wheaton College in Illinois, but is an Alabamian by birth and inclination.  

请访问我们的网站GiveMe!NEt，参与论坛讨论