6

Blinded by the Subterranean Homesick Muse: The Poet as Virtuous and Virtuoso

RANDALL E. AUXIER

 

 

 

Bruce Springsteen is a poet, a very good one. But poets and philosophers have been on bad terms in the Western world for at least 2,500 years. In the Republic, Plato refers to the quarrel between poets and philosophers as “ancient,” so it may be a lot older, but if Plato didn’t start the fire, he has certainly been stoking it for the last two and a half millennia.

Why? Well, Plato declared poets to be a pack of liars and excluded them from his ideal city, the city to be ruled by a philosopher king. Plato thought that poets cannot be trusted because they say just anything they damn well please, and they say it so prettily that the mass of people believes them. And you just can’t expect the masses to choose the True over what seems Beautiful, and, having chosen what pleases their fancy, they’ll also claim it’s the truth. That’s why many religious people today (not all) like to believe in the Bible. It pleases them to do so and it makes them feel like they know something divine. And people are, by and large, both gullible and frightened of the unknown—I don’t exempt myself from this, of course.

In Plato’s day, people treated the epics of Homer the way today’s fundamentalists treat the Bible. And on that account, Plato had a low opinion of the intelligence and judgment of ordinary people; the Greeks called them the hoi polloi, the teeming and chattering unwashed masses.

In ancient Athens the trouble was all these damned poets going around with their clever words, invoking various Muses as their guides, to sanction their authority, and then telling scandalous stories about the behavior of the gods. These stories make the gods seem less admirable—and less moral—than ordinary human beings. It was sort of like watching the celestial divines take turns on the Jerry Springer Show. The behavior of the God of Abraham in the Bible is a close parallel.¹⁰ And the people ate it up. In our day, it’s television invoking corporate sponsors and then depicting our leaders as, well, people who seem less admirable than we are ourselves. And we eat it up. The more things change, the more they stay the same. What can be done? Plato suggested that any city or community that wishes to keep its own soul from rotting simply has to ban such people.

He also explained why the poets lie—it’s because they don’t really see the truth. They think they do, but they believe the world of the senses is reality, matter in motion, and so they use their imaginations (which depend on the senses), instead of the power of reason, to create their songs. Their words become a verbal copy of the physical world, and when these words are nicely arranged, people recognize their own sensory and emotional experiences in them, and they are pleased, or angered, or saddened—or (and here’s the point) they feel whatever the poets want them to feel. Because the people feel it strongly, they only see what the poets want them to see. That would be fine, Plato thought, if poets knew anything, but they don’t—they make things up, and with the encouragement of applause, poets become convinced that they are speaking the truth, even though they really know they’re making it up.

I’m sure that more than a few readers here have noticed what a problem television is, especially to uncritical people. The mass audience sees an image on CNN or Fox News, and they forget about the corporate powers that sponsor those images, and also edit and select and manufacture them—to serve a number of interests, mainly financial. But the TV viewer thinks he has a truth, because he thinks he saw something with his own eyes. What’s actually happening is that the images seen stir feelings in the viewer, and the feelings then dictate the opinions a viewer forms about the images he has seen. In time, he sees only what accords with the habits of feeling that have developed while watching the canned images. Springsteen recently adapted an old maxim to this situation when he says “believe none of what you hear, and less of what you see” in the song “Magic.”

How many of us would be tempted, if made king, simply to ban the TVs? Or perhaps many others among us would seek to control the images ourselves for some higher purpose? We don’t want to serve ourselves or control others, we just don’t want them to be misled, right? Well, Plato isn’t interested in controlling the poets either. He suggests that we offer them a laurel and invite them to go to a different city, one that is already corrupt, to ply their trade. Plato is sort of a “Poetry NIMBY.”

I may sound sympathetic to Plato up to this point. I like Plato as well as the next philosopher, but on this matter I am not in sympathy with him. I think he’s a dangerous elitist, and I don’t like people who think better of themselves and their own abilities than those of their fellows. Blame it on my working-class family origins, or call it a democratic disposition, or call it plain common sense. I can’t stand elitists. Psychologically speaking, poetry is a threat to philosophy because philosophers want their own stories about “reason” and “truth” to be believed, but they don’t tell the stories well enough to bring applause from the masses, let alone conviction. And so, while people pay good poets a lot of money to sing their songs, they ignore the “truths” of philosophy, and they think of philosophers as daft and unaccountable dreamers. That pisses off the philosophers. Philosophers, in general, secretly harbor the conceit that they’d all be better leaders than the ones chosen by the people. There are a lot of crypto-totalitarian personalities studying philosophy, and Plato is their leader.¹¹ Be extremely wary of anyone who likes Plato too much. That person really wants to be obeyed, not argued with.

So what of it? I want to see whether I can, as a chastened philosopher (whose cats won’t even obey him), invite the poets back into the city and see what they know—about Beauty, about Goodness, and about Truth. I have a feeling that poets do know something more than the world of the senses, and I think we should begin the reconciliation by examining their Muses—the deliverers of the Beauty, Goodness and Truth that the poets “know.” We might as well start with the scariest and most potent poets alive.

A Grudge Match

There’s a certain type of song that only the virtuoso poet-songwriter can pull off. It may even seem to be a genre unto itself. Some examples everyone knows are Don McLean’s “American Pie,” Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and of course, Bruce Springsteen’s “Blinded by the Light.” There are certainly others by lesser-known virtuoso songwriters, such as “When I Go” by Dave Carter, and “The Bishop and the Ghost of the Nazarene” by Jonathan Byrd, and “Stained Glass” by Danny Schmidt.¹² Astonishing, impossible songs! The songs I mention here are all in the domain of white-boy folk music, but other styles of music have their own close equivalents. I’m not speaking of the merely clever poetizing of the better then average song-writerly song, I am speaking of the completely overthe-top, testosterone-laden, swashbuckling wordsmithery that only a young man (or a man with a young Muse) would even dare to attempt. This is a sowing of lyrical wild oats in the far-flung back forty of the human imagination, and only the chosen few reap a harvest there. That field, when plowed, is dangerous to the soul and the mind, a place on the edge of sanity itself.

There are numerous studies by people, both amateurs and professionals, who spend their precious energies trying to puzzle out all the references and allusions in these songs, and I’m not saying that is total a waste of time. It can be fun, but it’s mainly beside the point. What is this sort of swaggering of the poets?

As far as I know, the song genre doesn’t have a contemporary name (I’ll try to name it before the end of this essay), but this type of song has been around for a very long time, longer than recorded history. The ancient Greeks apparently called it “dithyramb,” although that name is not Greek and came into their language from some mysterious place beyond history. In the days of Plato, the dithyramb was a kind of ecstatic song sung to the god of wine, Dionysus. But Dionysus was a late arrival in the Greek pantheon, a young god as gods go, and the dithyramb is much older than he is. It was originally sung to the goddess, not a god.

In the dithyramb, the singers would face off against one another and have poetizing contests. It probably looked like a scene from Eight Mile. It’s still alive. But men have apparently been doing this sort of song for a long time—for about as long as there have been women. And that may be a great part of the point. We will get to that. Some men have a gift for the spontaneous demands of the contest, but most men can’t do it at all. The contest is one way that, among poets, the men can be separated from the boys, the virtuosos from the merely virtuous. If you’ll excuse the image (and it is the first of many you’ll have to excuse), the dithyramb is a poetic licking contest, and the guy with the trickiest tongue wins.

And how do poets know who wins? In a sense, everyone just knows, when it’s over, and it’s like a poetry slam in which the audience decides, but pushing it off on the audience only defers the deeper question. Grant that the audience just knows who won; how? This is not a rational process of developing criteria and measuring each contestant against some objective standard. In truth, the poets are comparing Muses, and they are not saying “I love my Muse more than you love yours,” they are saying the converse: “my Muse loves me more than yours loves you, and I can prove it, you pantywaist . . . watch this”:

. . . Madman drummer bummers and Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat, in the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps his head into his hat . . .

It may seem juvenile, but I have to propose a grudge-match: Dylan and Springsteen. Whom do the Muses love the most? Picture Bob and Bruce, in concert, at The Meadowlands. We are all in a circle, no lyric sheets allowed. Oh, and Weird Al Yankovic is the Master of Ceremonies.

The Tenth Muse

A Pause. The reader of a feminist bent may already have had more than enough of all this boyishness. Yes, yes, I know. We all talk too much and say too little—as Gertrude once put it to a long-winded man, “more matter, less art.” But you like Springsteen, right? And you can tolerate (or perhaps secretly enjoy?) his constant objectifications and eroticizations and romanticizations of the “fairer sex”? If you really don’t want to be put on a pedestal and sung to by an impassioned man, why don’t you listen to (and read about) someone else? I think you do want that, and that you do want to be adored, and you do want a man who would die for you—or at least a woman who would, which is why you also like the Indigo Girls. Amy Ray is Bruce Springsteen in drag, or vice versa, because when erotic desire gets that intense, frankly, it doesn’t matter who is doing whom.

I think that is why Plato (who was something akin to gay) called Sappho, the poetess from Lesbos (who was either a lesbian, or not, or poly-amorous and omni-sexual, or not, depending upon which expert you ask and when, and what sort of mood you’re in when you hear the answer . . .), anyway, Plato called Sappho the “Tenth Muse.” We will spend some time on the other nine Muses shortly, but for now, be aware that Plato didn’t say this because Sappho was a woman, he said it because she was so very good at poetry that it seemed divine to him (if not sufficiently divine to win her a place in his ideal city). In the ancient world, the idea that a woman should be poetic came as no surprise at all—it was expected. In the world before history, everyone understood that women can do directly what men can do only derivatively—whether that is creating words or creating babies, both of which were seen as pretty magical back then (and still are by anyone with any sense).

The simple point is that when a woman could do the poetizing thing, this was regarded as entirely natural. Of course women have the power of the word. That’s why they ruled the whole world for about ten thousand years before recorded history. ¹³ What is surprising, to the ancients, is when a man can do anything creative at all. And then as now, no real man would be stupid enough to take credit for the achievement—he credits the woman who loves him, his inspiration, his Muse. None of this happens without the blessing and power of the woman in charge, and the man receives the words as a gift, just as he receives children. All the Muses are female. How absurd would it be to have a male Muse? But feminine authority, creativity, and generosity do not begin or end with just the Muses.

For example, Socrates wasn’t called the wisest man in Athens because some dude told him so. It was a woman, the Oracle at Delphi—and she added an interesting left-handed compliment. If Socrates was wise, it was because he recognized the full extent of his personal ignorance. Just the sort of thing I hear from the women in my life, minus the part about being wise. Socrates took that oracular observation as a blessing anyway. Only once did he become so full of himself as to claim he really knew anything, and the only thing he claimed to know was love—eros. He had reason to regret having said that afterwards, but that’s another story.¹⁴

So if you my dear feminist would rather throw away the key to your chastity belt than entrust it to a man, I can’t blame you. Men are pigs. But we’re all pigs for you, baby, and I’ll need to ask you to read a different chapter. But I will grant you one thing for sure: the idea that there are only nine Muses, with just one Mother, is definitely a male invention. Men get nervous when too many women start generating too much of that delectable energy, and when men get nervous, they start counting things. “Nine of you and no more!” said Herodotus. In truth there are infinitely many Muses, as many as there are actual women and possible women. Please don’t be too harsh with us when we are frightened. If you only understood what you do to us, it would scare you too.

The Early Rounds: History, Tragedy, Comedy, and the Stars

You’ll have to wait for the main event between Dylan and Springsteen while we warm up. How did it come to this, the battle royal between the two titans of the white-man dithyramb?

Well, in the early eliminations we saw some able poets. For example, in the eastern semi-finals, Michael Stipe did “The End of the World as We Know It,” and Billy Joel sang “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” but the audience knew that these were not the purest and most powerful deliverances of the Muses. Still, Stipe and Joel made it to the semis by backing up their poetic claims with “Fall on Me” and “Only the Good Die Young,” which are pretty impressive pieces of rhyme, if not quite the pinnacle. But their weakness is exposed when we consider that it is not so difficult to turn actual history into rhyme. Any able wordsmith can do it. The Muse of history is Clio, and she isn’t the Queen Mother of the Muses. The problem with history is that, well, it’s over. Her songs, the ones she inspires without help from other Muses, may serve as a clever record of past experience, but they don’t burst into the future. The Muses together do not only sing of what was, they sing of what is and will be again. To make it into the finals, the offering must transcend the past, and that is why Billy and Michael were eliminated in the Urban White-boy Division.

And they were eliminated by Paul Simon, when he did “Sounds of Silence.” He had set them up for the take-down with “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover.” But when Simon came up against Springsteen in the regional finals, he pulled out his best, “You Can Call Me Al”: “A man walks down the street, says ‘why am I short of attention? Got a short little span of attention and oh my nights are so long’ . . .” It was good, but Bruce won by a nose with “Spirit in the Night”: “We’ll pick up Hazy Davy and Killer Joe / And I’ll take you out to where the gypsy angels go / They’re built like light and they dance like spirits in the night . . .” Clearly a whole gathering of Muses, no?

Paul Simon’s primary Muse is named Melpomene, the Muse of tragedy. If you think about it you’ll see that the vast majority of Paul’s lovely words depend on the sense of tragedy and loss—even when he is chipper enough to be singing about the color film in his Nikon camera, he still just worries that his mother will take it away from him. Bruce is not so limited. Your mother is not going to take your film, Paul. Chill. It makes me wonder if the “mother and child reunion,” the one that was “only a motion away,” actually ever occurred. Paul left us all hanging on the outcome. Maybe Mama Pajama just spit on the ground and sent the boy to the house of detention. Paul has issues, but he’s a grand poet. I am not sure he wants to be loved by his Muse. He seems to be doing straight time in her house of detention, and she’s a Nun with a big ruler for his hands. Where’s the radical priest when you need him?

Bruce, on the other hand, shows that he has the favor of Clio in songs such as “Youngstown” and “Nebraska,” and he is on better than formal terms with Melpomene in songs like “Streets of Philadelphia” and “Reno.” Yes, history and tragedy are there, and they are not cruel nuns. They like Bruce and he likes them. The audience just knows.

But speaking of Melpomene, word has it that Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters are scheduled for the finals in the Delta Blues Division down at the crossroads in Mississippi; the Devil himself is making the calls there, since they have both already cashed in their mortal chips. And it’s down to Jimmie Rogers and A.P. Carter in the Dead Hillbilly Division, but there are rumors that Carter lifted some of his lines from his kinfolk, and then someone’s daddy came looking for him with a shotgun. Hank Williams and some Honky Tonk Angels (hopefully not too many for a pinhead) are the judges in that one.

When it comes to blues and country and hillbilly music, this is a collaborative effort between Melpomene and Thalia, the Muse of comedy and nature poetry. Bruce leaves the nature poetry to John Denver and other wimps who change their names,¹⁵ but he does do comedy. Bruce doesn’t write “ha-ha” funny songs, but he does write songs made from funny stories, and his favorite comic trope is irony.¹⁶ A good example of Thalia’s efforts with Bruce would be “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On),” in which Bruce also calls on the help of Urania, the Muse of the celestial sky. In that tune he buys a satellite dish, points it at the stars, and “A message came back from the great beyond / There’s 57 channels and nothing on.” He finally shoots the TV, a tribute to Elvis. You’ll find simply countless lines about the sky, the stars, the sun and moon, and the “great beyond” in Springsteen’s poetry. He and Urania are pretty tight, and Bruce doesn’t like the way “the Giants of Science spend their days and nights” trying to control her skies and count everything (see “Santa Ana” from Tracks if that bit of lyric evades your memory).

Sam Houston’s Ghost

However those contests may unfold in the great beyond, what we will have at the Meadowlands is a truly impressive contest for the (temporarily) living. But this is like the Super Bowl—you have to endure a lot of commentary before kick-off, but the game will be worth it. Probably. Never trust a philosopher.

This may come as a surprise, but maybe not. Texas has its very own Muse, and all songwriters have to pay homage to her. It’s true that whatever Texans can’t buy they will simply steal, whether it’s oil, culture, Iraq, or Texas itself, and their Muse is no different. They stole their Muse from Mexico, but the Mexicans had already stolen her from the Spanish, and the Spanish stole her from the eastern Mediterranean in the Middle Ages. Her name is Calliope, the very one who crashes to the ground in “Blinded by the Light.” Calliope is a big woman, pear shaped, fertile, Texas-sized; she likes gravy and greasy bar-b-cue and she ain’t satisfied with a short poem or a little tally-whacker (that’s what they call it in Texas, in polite company). That is why Townes Van Zandt couldn’t write a short song. He was from Texas. I don’t know about his tally-whacker, but I do know that Calliope liked him better than he liked her—she wouldn’t leave him alone, couldn’t get enough of him. Townes was supposed to face Steve Earle in the finals of the Drunk and Drugged Cowboys Division of our contest, but he died. Calliope crushed his skinny ass. Steve Earle wasn’t willing to let the thing go, so he has been trying to die ever since then, just so he can get his match. Some people, especially Right-wing politicians and the corporate powers of Nashville’s Music Row wish Steve well in his quest for the other side. But I don’t. I like him right where he is, and Townes can wait.¹⁷

All of Calliope’s boys know that they stole her from Mexico (see “Pancho and Lefty” from Townes’s catalogue), and they’ll tell you so if you ask them. Bruce learned the story. He had to. He kept on singing about Spanish girls (definitely an obsession of his) until one day the big ole woman said “you have to write about Texas, that’s where I live; and as for your little ditty about Go-cart Mozart, I don’t care for it; I was not sneezing and wheezing when you tripped me, and I am not a silicone sister, these are real . . . so you owe me.” Bruce gave her an epic, “Galveston Bay,” and then told the story of her kidnapping in “Santa Ana.” Penance done. Bruce has always been a good, pious Catholic.¹⁸

Canadian Border Five Miles from Here

There are some pretty poets north of the border. Leonard Cohen won the Shivering Canucks Division, when Gordon Lightfoot made the supreme mistake of singing “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” in the final round. The audience fell asleep, and anyone could see that this wasn’t Clio’s best work. Cohen had advanced to the finals with a victory over Joni Mitchell (the Canadians are so damned egalitarian that they let women into these things). But Cohen got to go first, and proved the better woman by singing (or attempting to sing, which is about all he can do, but that never stopped Dylan either) “Joan of Arc.” In that astonishing procession of lyric, Cohen actually has the audacity to depict the fire, yes, the fire, as Joan’s amorous suitor. The fire stalks her all of her (short) life and then “marries” her at the stake, and consummates that desire by consuming her body—and with some coaxing, she wants it. Holy shit! That is what I said the first time I heard the song. Love’ll do that to you if you aren’t careful. The “Joan” reference wasn’t lost on Joni, and she decided to forfeit. Discretion is the better part of valor. Good call Joni. Leonard is a little bit unstable.

Then Cohen clinched the deal over Lightfoot in the finals with “Hallelujah,” which I know you’ve heard. This is an impossible song, but it isn’t the same sort of song as “Blinded by the Light.” It’s a hymn. Cohen works with all the Muses, and it’s a good thing Springsteen doesn’t have to compete with him (due to the immigration restrictions the Canadian government, adopted in 2002 to keep all thinking Americans from overcrowding Toronto in search of safety and genuine civil liberties). But Leonard’s favorite Muses are Erato and Polyhymnia. Erato, as you might guess, gives her boys erotic poetry and marriage songs. “Joan of Arc” is principally hers. Polyhymnia, as you might also guess, is responsible for hymns—sacred song of all kinds, and she worked together with Erato on Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”

Bruce knows Erato and Polyhymnia very well indeed, as any Springsteen fan can attest. Religious imagery shows up in almost every Springsteen song, and when he gets religious, it’s almost always about some woman. My current favorite is “I’ll Work for Your Love,” from the new CD Magic, in which Bruce takes the Ecstasy of Saint Theresa and turns it into a seduction song for a bar maid who catches his eye. “I watch the bones in your back like the stations of the cross,” says he. This tune may be the best collaboration of Erato and Polyhymnia since “Hallelujah,” but with the added help of Thalia. Where Cohen’s song is so overthe-top that it borders on giving way to simultaneous joy and despair (if that is even possible, which I wouldn’t have believed until I heard the song), Springsteen’s tune displays ironic wit—he surely snickers at himself as he says “I watch your hands smooth the front of your blouse and seven drops of blood fall.”¹⁹ It’s too much; it’s funny.

Dancing in the Light

We are down to just two Muses now, so the pièce de résistance can’t be far away. Their names are Euterpe and Terpsichore. They are performing Muses, the ones who descend on the performers and the audience and create the magic in the music (that’s Euterpe’s part) and the ecstatic dance (that’s Terpsichore’s part). The contest is not just about the words, it’s also about the delivery, the energy, the communication between the poet and the crowd. Some artists specialize in just this part of the poetic process—performing other people’s songs and doing it so well as to enchant us all. Undoubtedly, in recent times, the darling of Terpsichore and Euterpe was Elvis Presley. He wasn’t much of a songwriter (he didn’t suck, it just wasn’t his gift). When Elvis sang and danced, we all wanted him, women and men. There wasn’t a dry seat in the house. How can one man possess that much erotic energy? Euterpe and Terpsichore wore Elvis out, and us too.

Plato held such poets in special contempt. The Greeks had a name for poets who performed other people’s songs: “rhapsodes.” In contrast to the poets who create their own poems, who are simply deceived about whether they know anything, the rhapsode just sits around cultivating his own vanity, and hasn’t the moral fiber to realize that he’s just a wanna-be. Plato wrote a whole dialogue about the pretensions of the rhapsodes, called Ion (that’s the rhapsode’s name, and he was sort of the Elvis Presley, or more likely the Michael Bolton, of ancient Athens). Plato was hell-bent on making this type of poet look as bad as possible, so he depicts Ion as a total fool and a hopeless poser who really wants to be a military leader, but hasn’t either the courage or the knowledge to do anything except act. It sort of reminds me of Ronald Reagan’s service in the Second World War—and as President.

Obviously Terpsichore and Euterpe also love Bruce. They have given him a sense of the power of performance that exceeds most of the rhapsodes, if not quite coming up to the level of Elvis. And Bruce is no rhapsode, he’s a real poet. Of particular note for our purposes is that Terpsichore and Euterpe have a very uneven relationship with Dylan. More often than not audiences come away from a Dylan show disappointed. I have never heard anyone say that about a Springsteen concert. Dylan does not love or respect his audience, and he does not want to be loved by the Muses of performance, although sometimes they take hold of him whether he wants to be taken or not. Clearly Dylan knows these Muses, but he’s a ragged clown, and while the reels of rhyme may be skipping, Dylan himself is standing stark still, hiding under a hat, behind dark glasses, chasing shadows, just like he said. I wouldn’t pay it any mind.²⁰ Meanwhile Bruce is dancing in the light, and not too badly for a white boy (even the Muses can’t wholly counteract the genetic stiffness of a northern European heritage—which is why I have come to question whether Elvis was really white), and he’s dancing with Courtney Cox, who looks like the embodiment of Terpsichore to me. What a babe.

The Poetic Virtue

You can see that the fightin’ words are starting up at the Meadowlands. Both Dylan and Springsteen are virtuosos. They are, at least some of the time, loved by all of the Muses. That is what makes a poet a virtuoso. But that isn’t enough. What makes a poet virtuous? The words “virtuous” and “virtuoso” obviously come from the same root. It’s the Latin “virtutem,” which means moral strength, manliness, potency, excellence. The word “virile” comes from the same root, “vir,” which means both a man and a hero. “Virtuouso” comes into English from Italian as the man possessing the greatest skill, especially in music. I don’t suppose I have to point out that the word “music” comes from “muse,” but I just did anyway. This “virtue” is literally a certain relationship between a potent man and his Muses.

The virtuous poet is something akin to chivalrous in his response to the Muses. He loves and yearns for them, he would die for them willingly, and he sees them everywhere and in everything. I say this is akin to chivalry, and not chivalry itself, because the yearning isn’t chaste—not in the least. The virtuous poet is an amorous type, and nothing is off limits—he wants all the Muses at once, if he can persuade them—a ménage à neuf (dix, if you include the poetic member, but every poet has a dix, while only the best can get a neuf—sort of gives a new sense the line “I can’t get eneuf of your love . . .” ). And indeed, that neuftette is what creates songs of the sort we find in “Blinded by the Light” and “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” And that is the name I’m proposing for this sort of song—the Ménage à Neuf. It’s a special kind of song, needless to say.

How does it come about? Obviously I’m just guessing. I have never written any such song. The best my imagination can come up with is this: imagine a bar, the poet’s meat market. It’s simply packed with young men on the make. But there are exactly nine women. You already know their names. Now, in such a bar, the odds of going home with just one of them are not high, even for a pretty smooth talker. They are not coy, not chaste; they want to go home with someone in this joint, but they are picky. You’ll have to do better than “do you come here often,” or “your place or mine?” if you want any company tonight. I am way out of my league. I’ll be lucky even to get my face slapped. And these women are all very different. Clio is bookish, Urania is pretty spacey, Calliope just ordered an extra helping of gravy, Terpsichore won’t sit still, and Euterpe keeps trying to sing with the band. It’s bedlam in here.

Now imagine some young buck strolls in and he leaves with all of them, while the rest of us have to settle for Rosie Palm and her Five Sisters (at least for tonight—we’ll be back).²¹ On a night like that, dressed to the nines and for the nine, you could get blinded by the light, because this affair isn’t done in the darkness. Or you could go seriously subterranean, because all these women, even Urania, come from underground, Gaia’s cave, and they’re always homesick. What can a poet say to woo them all? What impossible pick-up line can he invent? I mean all of these women are beautiful—well, there are eight beautiful babes and one big ol’ mama from Texas who will be a lot of fun in the sack.

There is a secret to it. The poet asks their Mother. She owns this bar, and it’s only by her good graces that any aspiring poet even gains entrance. You see, poets don’t just make up their words—they “remember” them. The Mother of the Muses is named Mnemosyne. In English we still use (or misuse) her name when we speak of “mnemonic devices,” meaning memory aids. Her name means “memory,” of course, and if there is a single master key to the poetic art, it is the art of memory. And my clue that this must be what’s going on is that the song that flows from the Ménage à Neuf is so devilishly hard to remember. It doesn’t follow chronology or history, it is so replete with extra rhymes and metrical tricks that if you want to learn such a song, even as a second rate rhapsode, you’ll have to spend days and weeks on it. And Springsteen and Dylan not only learned such songs, they wrote them. All nine Muses will go home with a poet if and only if he knows how to woo their Mother—to cultivate memory. And I don’t mean simply his personal memory. The poet has to tap into the collective memory of the human race, and to see in it all the configurations of the present and the future, what was, is, and will be again.

It requires a gift, but the gift is worthless without the discipline to use it, to become worthy of it. The two things the virtuous poet knows are: (1) that his creations are not his own, that he must approach them with gratitude and humility, because they can be taken from him at any time; and (2) that if he doesn’t work with his own memory and the memory of the race, he will never create anything worthwhile. The virtuous poet is grounded and disciplined, appreciative and humble to his Muses, if not toward the rest of us. That is why all good poets read widely, and among the things they study most intently are the lyrics and musical moves of their fellow songwriters.

You Can’t Tell the Players Without a Program

The main event is here. A hush falls over the Meadowlands. A young poet who expects to be a contender announces his arrival on the public scene with a piece of almost impossible poetry, a Ménage à Neuf, as proof that he has gotten the permission of Mnemosyne to enter the contest. And he saves that gift for the finals. Dylan has a lot of great bits, but he knows which song is his true Ménage à Neuf. He was so brash as to have Allen Ginsberg and Bob Neuwirth write out some of the poster-boards and stand behind him at a distance as he flipped them to the ground in the video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues”—the whole idea of a music video was quite possibly his creation. Those poster-boards are the very gauntlet. And Springsteen is there to pick it up. The winner gets to call Woody Guthrie his daddy.

Dylan doesn’t think any white man’s Muses love him more. These “niners” (I am tired of typing the whole French phrase, so we’ll call these songs “niners” for short) are punctuated with astonishing internal rhymes—where the poet of ordinary virtue settles for a nice rhyme or partial rhyme at the end of the line, Dylan says:

Get sick, get well, hang around a ink well
Ring bell, hard to tell if anything is goin’ to sell
Try hard, get barred, get back, write Braille
Get jailed, jump bail, join the army, if you fail.

The audience says “oooh.” And Bruce answers:

And some fleshpot mascot was tied into a lover’s knot with a whatnot in her hand

Now young Scott with a slingshot finally found a tender spot and throws his lover in the sand

And some bloodshot forget-me-not whispers daddy’s within earshot save the buckshot turn up the band.

Very fancy. Dylan edges ahead by a nose for economy and meter on the “internal rhyme” round. All poets know that using fewer words is better, and resorting to proper names for an internal rhyme is a sign of weakness. Now Bruce goes first:

Some silicone sister with her manager’s mister told me I got what it takes

She said I’ll turn you on sonny, to something strong if you play that song with the funky break.

In this round we add alliteration to internal rhyme. Bob impatiently answers:

Maggie comes fleet foot, face full of black soot
Talkin’ that the heat put, plants in the bed but
The phone’s tapped anyway, Maggie says that many say
They must bust in early May, orders from the D.A.

Note that he uses the proper name for meter, not rhyme. But this one has internal rhyme, alliteration, assonance, consonance. Notice how he gradually transformed the rhyme from “foot” to “but” by interposing “soot” and “put.” Masterful. Bob is trying to cut the contest short—skip ahead to the heavy stuff. “Top that, asshole,” he seems to say. Bruce says:

Some brimstone baritone anti-cyclone rolling stone preacher from the east

He says: “Dethrone the dictaphone, hit it in its funny bone, that’s where they expect it least”

And some new-mown chaperone, standin’ in the corner all alone watchin’ the young girls dance

And some fresh-sown moonstone was messin’ with his frozen zone to remind him of the feeling of romance.

And the whole audience knows Bruce is referring to Bob as the moonstone, and he is suggesting that Bob will be courting Rosie Palm tonight while Bruce goes home with all the choice trim. So Thalia really likes the part about the funny bone, and she always liked Bruce better than Bob anyway, and Terpsichore didn’t fail to notice the part about the young girls dancing, which Bob can’t do. So together they hatch a plan. Clearly this was going to be stand-off, a stalemate, a draw. Dylan is the more accomplished poet, but Bruce has the heart. He’s a scrapper. Don McLean’s people are off sulking in a coffee-house, singing Roy Orbison songs, but at the Meadowlands the crowd could only say “ooooh,” and look from Bob to Bruce, Bruce to Bob, and it just didn’t look like anyone was going to give an inch.

You know their stories. Year after year, song after song, the Muses kept delivering the goods to both Bob and Bruce. But time has told the story. After about fifteen years, something happened to Dylan. The Muses left. The songs started looking lame. It became undeniable when Dylan thought he had been born again. For heaven’s sake Bob, you were chosen in utero for a special life. Why don’t you just appreciate it?

Things were looking a little rough for Bruce too, during the days of Lucky Town and Human Touch, but he never lost his faith, like Dylan did. In1995, with The Ghost of Tom Joad, it was clear to those who were listening that Bruce’s Muses were all still with him, even if that was one of Melpomene’s albums—and they still are. In 2007 Bruce wrote:

I’m rollin’ through town, a lost cowboy at sundown
Got my monkey on a leash, got my ear tuned to the ground
My faith’s been torn asunder, tell me is that rollin’ thunder
Or just the sinkin’ sound of somethin’ righteous goin’ under?

It isn’t a niner, but it’s at least a fiver, and it’s been a long time since Dylan wrote anything comparable.²² Back at the Meadowlands, Thalia and Terpsichore have whispered something in the ear of our emcee, Weird Al Yankovic (Thalia plays in the sandbox with him sometimes, as you know): “Al, sweetie, we want you to prance right out between Bruce and Bob, and this is what we want you to say, and be sure to say it just like Bob would.” Al doesn’t need to be told twice:

Rise to vote, sir
Do geese see God?
“Do nine men interpret?” “Nine men,” I nod
Rats live on no evil star
Won’t lovers revolt now?
Race fast, safe car
Pa’s a sap
Ma is as selfless as I am
May a moody baby doom a yam? . . .

And he goes on and on like that, ending with the poetically impossible:

Go hang a salami, I’m a lasagna hog

. . . all to the tune of “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” You might overlook it at first, but study those lyrics very closely. The whole song is written in palindromes—the same backwards as forwards. Weird Al named the song, well, what else? “Bob.” Who’s the ragged clown now, Bob? The crowd at the Meadowlands gets the point. Bob doesn’t know what he’s talking about. No wonder the Muses left him to his own right hand. He treats them like they were his personal bitches, and they got tired of it. Taken down and bested by a geek, the Clown Prince of Pop. Anybody can do that trick, Bobby, even Weird Al.²³ You just take yourself so seriously. Have a little fun for god’s sake! And probably Bob has a small tally-whacker and never wrote a kind word about Texas. But pride goeth before the Fall, and I don’t think Bruce ever gave in to pride. I’ll bet a fiddle of gold that Bruce is a sensitive lover and would never do a quickie with a Muse (or two). Just my suspicion, but I’d wager. But there is a reason why, today, Bruce’s voice is regarded as a moral guide, while Dylan wields no moral authority at all. Just a good songwriter, or at least, he used to be.

That leaves only one thread hanging. Why are the philosophers so peevish about the poets? It’s simple. There is no Muse for philosophy; it’s boring, and the philosophers are just jealous, and they don’t stand a chance in that oh-so-excellent bar. But I could also point out that Plato started as a poet, a pretty good one, apparently. But not the best. And his ego wouldn’t take it, and we’ve all been paying the price ever since. Plato was just a philosophy geek, and I suppose he’s had his revenge, but I won’t be booking any flights to his city. I’d rather go to Asbury Park.