The Burning House of 21st-Century Muddy Dylanology: check the furnace, Michael

Dedicated to Prof John A Bryant, the worlds greatest Dylanologist and the Mr Jones of human origins. John to me, August 2004:
I dont agree with Michael about JOKERMAN being about Jesus, hes wrong.

Michael:
I really don't want to reveal anything about a character or a song because I can remember, as a teenager, a record falling into my lap, and how magical and mysterious and revolutionary and unbelievably life-altering even one song on a record like that can be. I would hate to diminish or be unfaithful to that notion. Plus, I maintain that my take, my interpretation of what my songs are about, is, in the whole world, the least important take. I wrote them but that does not give me some divine insight into their meaning. JOHN: Im only the professorial finger of the new Dylanological wisdom. I want a little conversation with your gray matter. MICHAEL: Away!

Michael was in the house of mud, in the burning house of hot mudcake creature. He checked the furnace in the burning house of Dylanology. Intertextuality on the muddiest superhighway in the universe.
Youre a man of the mountains, you can walk on the clouds Manipulator of crowds, youre a dream twister Youre going to Sodom and Gomorrah But what do you care? Aint nobody there would want to marry your sister Friend to the martyr, a friend to the woman of shame You look into the fiery furnace, see the rich man without any name

(Punctuation, or the foggy lack of it, as per bobdylan.com.) Michael notes approvingly that Dylan castigated, he hopes, Christ for noting the rich mans torment in the fiery furnace approvingly (Luke 16). Prof John Bryant did not note Michaels sloppy furnace checking approvingly. http://www.geocities.com/aballadofathinman/chronology5.html (now defunct):
CHRONOLOGY / A DIARY OF EVENTS 1990 - 1999 ---1990 Aug. 23 - Dylan's boyhood home in Hibbing is sold to an annonymous buyer for an undisclosed amount. When asked for comment Dylan replies "check the furnace".

Intertextuality. The burning house of 21st-century Dylanology: building a richer house in the best tradition of cut-and-paste. How to build it: burn it down and check the furnace (and poison: especially Greil Marcuss). From somewhere on the muddiest superhighway in the universe, resting in the fields:
MO N D A Y , J A N U A R Y 0 3 , 20 1 1 Frank, you're right of course: I certainly wasn't joking re Jokerman. I think you sum up its strengths very economically - and anyone in doubt about these, and my view of them, need only read the long section on this song in Song & Dance Man III or the edited-down, amended version offered as the entry on the song in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia.

And indeed people have: weighed in the scales and found wanting. A sympathetic airing to doubt? Only when a gray area isnt black and white. Standing on the waters pissing away [your] [critical] stature with spurious Passover Eccles cakes flecking your piss; A little learning is a dangerous thing indeed especially when included in the footnote. Intertextuality. Michael liked the taking-the-piss allusion to Popes An Essay in Criticism: fools rush in where angels fear to tread - especially when you dont realise mudcake creature was the Jewish equivalent of zombie. You know, that thing the Dylan literati didnt do. But Michael has the unbroken vision, not like yours or mine which see(r)s only fragments. He has the Gehenna Vision, from one end of the world to the other.
Scratching the world with a fine-tooth comb, Youre a king among nations, youre a stranger at home.

Michael never thought to unravel baby talk he was too busy spattering. From somewhere gloriously detached from the muddiest superhighway in the universe:
By the standards Dylan so toweringly set over the years, Infidels is a real mudcake creature, failing in a small-minded, cheating way, so that to listen to that voice trying to do a salesmans job on it is distinctly discomforting. As I wrote in reviewing the album at the time, what comes across is a lack of self-regard on Dylans part: as if he were beginning to piss away his stature as an artist

And:
it was all too obvious, even in the murky dusk of 1984, that this wasn't a tyger at all. No fearful symmetry here, no burning bright, no fire in the eyes. This was the runt of some domesticated mongrel litter, by Hollywood out of Tin Pan Alley, set loose just for the tourists. A real Bob Dylan tyger wouldn't have looked at it twice.

The no fire in the eyes comment is highly ironic in the context of JOKERMANs iron-head opening, which nevertheless, strangely, glows with inspiration, and Daniel 3:25 when placed in wider context with 10:6 and the

fact that JOKERMAN alludes recurringly to the Babylonian captivity not that Michael noticed. Freedom just around the corner. But with the truth so far off Sunday Times, 1 July 1984 Week in Focus p 15. Mick Brown exclusive interview:
Bob Dylan tugged at a cigarette, stroked the beginnings of an untidy beard and gazed pensively at the stream of traffic passing down the Madrid street. 'What you gotta understand,' he said at length, 'is that I do something because I feel like doing it. If people can relate to it, that's great. If they can't, that's fine too. But I don't think I'm gonna be really understood until maybe 100 years from now. What I've done, what I'm doing, nobody else does or has done.' The messianic tone grew more intense. 'When I'm dead and gone maybe people will realize that, and then figure it out. I don't think anything I've done has been evenly mildly hinted at. There's all these interpreters around, but they're not interpreting anything except their own ideas. Nobody's come close.'

His most recent album at the time was Infidels. A confident hunter, a bloodhound of London with a dont-give-a-damn attitude, wrote:
The cowboy and the cowpuncher, the dandy and the Pied Piper; yet another instance of Dylan at play. It should also stand as a clear example of why one should never underestimate Dylan or take him at his word. The scope of his schemes is so vast that it is going to take years to unravel them, especially when writers like Wilentz insist on poisoning the well and selling their subject short.

Michael could be unravellin (or unravelin Blind Willies travelin shoes) while the wider code in the lyrics of Infidels and the Infidels sessions, their fearful symmetry, goes barefoot. Chronicles p 218:
I know he wanted to understand me more as we went along, but you cant do that, not unless you like to do puzzles.

JG writes:
Follow the Riddler into the labyrinth, but let a thread unwind as you go, or you may end up lost in there. A final quote from Northrop Frye. Of Blake he says: He is not writing for a tired pedant who feels merely badgered by difficulty: he is writing for enthusiasts of poetry who, like the readers of mystery stories, enjoy sitting up nights trying to find out what the mystery is.

But JG cant quite seem to make up his mind whether there are any mysteries or not. He seems to set up indecisively a false dichotomy between (pass) secret code on the one hand, and fearful symmetry, the larger form, the Blakean total form of literature, on the other. Never underestimate Dylan. Intertextuality on the muddiest superhighway in the universe.

The road was full of mud. And, according to JG technology makes this transparent, clear as mudcake creature. What complacency. Resting in the fields, far from the turbulent space; found that? Its at bobdylan.com, isnt it? Intertextuality on the muddiest superhighway in the universe. Found that? The new Dylanology, the professorial finger of the new wisdom, mysterious and revolutionary, already hurts. I seen the arrow on the doorpost. Myopic schoolboy infatuation with Blind Willie McTell and Blind Willie McTell causes telling blindness to Jokermans* shifting time frame and the wider Infidels code in the lyrics and fearful symmetry. Or maybe the myopic infatuation is the inevitable result of a pre-existing blindness, whereby Michael is bogged down in a fossilized, motionless shifting time frame of the fens and dens of a more-thanparadoxically Miltonian Reagans America (on the waters of Galilee) instead of New Orleans? Michael, paradoxical critical jumbi that he is, doesnt see his own fearful asymmetry. Hoodoo Bobcats say that Michael is? Some say an expert on nursery rhyme; others an expert on the blues. But what about you, hoodoo you say that Michael is? (A blind expert on Blind Willie McTell?) Je est un autre. Blind Willie could be someone else, Rimbaud. Michael the Plainly Unrepentants awkward footgear is almost worn out. In the human heart an evil jumbi can dwell (by denying its own existence; Je est un autre; juok liftest up the sick). Again from outside the muddiest superhighway in the universe:
'Jokerman' is always welcome, always alive and benign, always rich and complex, always habitable, always ready to open up its labyrinthine possibilities.

The thread in the labyrinth leads you. Critical Hercules Michael liftest up the thick; and this failure is heroic (particularly in its strangling of snakes in a context completely devoid of the biblical salvation history he is otherwise so keen to have a go at). But do remember to check the furnace - adequately. But which one? There are two. Michael only checked, albeit erroneously, the one in Luke 16, entirely omitting the one in Daniel 3, where the term fiery furnace is actually used at least in the version of the bible used by anyone with reel feeling for language. In time. (He was too busy speciously bumping together breadcrumbs to make spurious Eccles cakes at the wrong time of year.)
The scope of his schemes is so vast that it is going to take years to unravel them

Especially when Michael sells his subject short. But a confident hunter is no hayseed. From Anthony Scadutos Dylan biography pp 82-83:

Van Ronk: Being a hayseed, that was part of his image or what he considered his image at the time. Like, once I asked him, Do you know the French symbolists? And he said, Huh?the stupidest Huh you can imagineand later, when he had a place of his own, I went up there and on the bookshelf was a volume of French poets from Nerval almost to the present. I think it ended at Apollinaire, and it included Rimbaud, and it was all well-thumbed with passages underlined and notes in the margins. The man wanted to be a primitive, a natural kind of genius. He never talked about somebody like Rimbaud. But he knew Rimbaud, all right. You see that in his later songs.
This edition published in 1996 by Helter Skelter Publishing Helter Skelter Limited, 4 Denmark Street, London. Copyright Anthony Scaduto, 1971

Scratching the muddiest superhighway in the universe with a fine-tooth comb. Prof John Bryant checked Michaels checking of the furnace, weighing it in the scales, and found it wanting. I feel a change comin on. Maybe we could start a fire? Also check out Graham Cookes Jesus in the Fire on Youtube. Check the furnace. Michael *JGs style of formatting song titles covers up a multitude of breadcrumb sins. Michael. Paul Kirkman June 2011