Identity and the Absurd
Arthur and Bob
For those of you paying attention, Arthur Rimbaud preceded Albert Camus and his absurd philosophy by a good few years :)
However, one of his most famous quotations offers a wonderful insight into the absurd line of thinking.
That saying is of course:
“I is another”
While the absurd focuses on the alienation between human beings and the world in which they live, Rimabaud offers another layer by suggesting that human beings are alienated even from themselves.
The idea that identity is constructed and fluid is one with which Bob Dylan is perfectly familiar and he echoes it one of his most famous quotations:
“All I can do is be me, whoever that is”
Something that he said in a 1965 interview, at the peak of his absurd and surreal creative writing phase .
Bob Dylan also namechecks Rimbaud in one of his classic songs from Blood on the Tracks:
“Situations have ended sad
Relationships have all been bad
Mine have been like Verlaine's and Rimbaud's
But there's no way I can compare
All them scenes to this affair
You're gonna make me lonesome when you go”
Maybe just because it was a good rhyme for “go” or maybe it was because Bob had long admired the poet’s approach to the fluidity of identity and time … ideas that he worked with at some depth around this time, inspired by the painter Norman Raeben.
After he came back from 2 months working with him, Bob Dylan was quoted as saying:
“It changed me. I went home after that and my wife never did understand me ever since that day”
The themes of identity, alienation and the fluidity of time underpin the absurist philosophy and are rarely absent from the work of Bob Dylan.
As we shall see.
Well, with Bob, even Sara, the perfect wife for him, had to be aware of this aspect of mutability. He was gonna change, that was always the only constant. So later on, yet again in his permutations, he claims to have been transfigured, not exactly clear in his explanation of it, something to do with a dead Hell's Angel named Zimmerman, people ascribe drugs to these kinds of pronouncements, but he also declared the Budokan tour band to be the final real Dylan band (the best batch yet!) and it's just a characteristic of his being, that whatever he believes in at any moment, he believes a thousand percent, and there's not much reflection or perspective, except with a few of the songs themselves that have lost favor in his view. I wrote about Dylan's transcendence of the concept of identity here on substack, link below... https://philosopheaz.substack.com/p/non-self-fixed-identity-and-bob-dylan on another substack Philosoph-ease ... when you're a visionary it's incumbent on you to trust your visions and no one else... I'm sure he could have explained his art to Sara if he'd really felt like it, but it's an excuse, he needed out of the marriage, he couldn't create any longer within it. But that sort of honest assessment of his life is beyond Bob while he's in the middle of things... Norman Reuben was someone to hang his hat on while he walked out the door.