as The Oxford English Dictionary records:
Mus. Applied to a note added or introduced below the notes of a chord, or to an upper note of a chord when used as the lower note (supposed bars) etc.
Passivity rules? But Dylan’s words have their unobtrusive activity, as does his syntax, his articulate energy. There is no verb in the first line, as if unable to bring itself to do more than just point to, point out: “All the tired horses in the sun”. Blankly, as though a verb (for the verb is the activating part of speech) would be too much of a bustle or hassle. And then no syntactical relation between the first line, which just adduces those horses, and the second line, which is nothing but a fatigued remonstration. “How’m I s’posed to get any riding done”. I ask you. Not that you need take the trouble to answer. It is in vain for any of us to kick against the pricks – and anyway kicking would be more of an effort than I’m prepared to make, I don’t mind telling you. Forget it. But don’t forget the song, even though Lyrics 1962–1985 does.
Self Portrait doesn’t leave it at that. For there are other occasions when the album puts us in mind of the lure of sloth, easy though queasy. Wigwam is happy to undertake its instrumental operations, its ineffable wordlessness, for three minutes, just singing over and over again “la” and “da”. If you were to complain about this, you would only come across as la-di-da. And there is Copper Kettle (attributed on the album to A. F. Beddoe), which Dylan sings with an exquisite slowness that languorously lingers in the knowledge that “sloth” is a noun from the adjective “slow”. So easy and so slow.
Get you a copper kettle
Get you a copper coil
Fill it with new-made corn mash
And never more you’ll toil
You’ll just lay there by the juniper
While the moon is bright
Watch them jugs a-filling
In the pale moonlight
“And never more you’ll toil”. Dylan, working against the grain of his own character and disposition, has found a way of imagining this with affection – thanks to another. (Maybe Beddoe didn’t have to toil at it, but he must have had to work at it, which is how it manages to sound so effortless.) “They toil not, neither do they spin”: those are the gospel words that Keats chose as epigraph for his Ode on Indolence. Dylan isn’t the type to envy the lilies of the field, but he knows why you and I might.
Time Passes Slowly
Whereas the cadences of All the Tired Horses are entirely at one (vocally, musically, verbally), Time Passes Slowly sets itself to set your teeth on edge. On the page, it looks at first entirely equable in its setting, at its setting out:
Time passes slowly up here in the mountains
We sit beside bridges and walk beside fountains
Catch the wild fishes that float through the stream
Time passes slowly when you’re lost in a dream
It never becomes a nightmare exactly, but it assuredly isn’t voiced as happily idle, a happy idyll. From the start, the song evinces the kind of contrariety that characterizes Watching the River Flow; Time Passes Slowly, too, is rhythmically and vocally bumpy, jagged, pot-holed, unsettled and unsettling, straining its musical strains, not soporific at all, at all. And more and more the song commits itself to the implications of the words that follow that first verse. “Once I had a sweetheart, she was fine and good-lookin’”. Time passes slowly; this love has passed but not the wrenched and wrenching memory of it. The rhymes refuse to stay right, and the voicing then does nothing to ameliorate this (the way of Dylan’s comedy, but then this is tragedy), rather it skewers the rhymes askew:
Time passes slowly up here in the daylight
We stare straight ahead and try so hard to stay right
On the page, you are likely to glimpse the having to try so hard; in performance, you are sure to hear it, compounded vocally and musically so that it really won’t stay right. “Up here in the mountains”, from the opening, has become, here at the closing, “up here in the daylight”, which is perfectly calm, but the rhyme of “daylight” with “stay right” is tense: you have to stay cautiously with “stay” for a moment, and you have to make sure that you get “right” right when it comes to the run of the words or rather to their halting.
Time passes slowly up here in the daylight
We stare straight ahead and try so hard to stay right
Like the red rose of summer that blooms in the day
Time passes slowly and fades away
This final verse plaits its rhymes as no previous verse had done: “daylight”
This is no love song, a no-love song. It would all feel less hopeless if things were over and done with. But. “Time passes slowly when you’re searching for love”. This entailing some sour soul-searching.
Those three words, “Time passes slowly”, open the song, open it up. They open the first and last lines of the first and last verses, and of the second (the remaining) verse they open the last line. They are perspicuously absent from the song’s bridge. Five lines of the verses’ twelve begin with “Time passes slowly”, five times the bridge rings no changes on a different tedium of words, five of them:
Ain’t no reason to go in a wagon to town
Ain’t no reason to go to the fair
Ain’t no reason to go up, ain’t no reason to go down
Ain’t no reason to go anywhere
This is obdurate, blockish, an evocation of a dangerous state of mind. Indifference can harden, before long, into something damnable: “accidie”, sloth, torpor. The Oxford English Dictionary says that this is “the proper term for the 4th cardinal sin, sloth, sluggishness”, and that when its Greek origin (= non-caring-state, heedlessness) was forgotten, the Latin acidum, sour, lent its harsh flavour to the word. Not-caring: or, Ain’t no reason to go in a wagon to town, or to go to the fair, or to go up, or to go down, or to go anywhere. No go. You name it, I’ll disclaim it. Can you reason with someone who just keeps saying Ain’t no reason to? It might even vie with the vista of the child’s Why?
“Apathy’ is a word that drifts to mind, but apathy doesn’t carry the bone-deep surrender that is the accent of accidie. “Her sin is her lifelessness”.145 Beckett could joke about “a new lease of apathy”; you can’t pull that off with accidie, the extremity of not-caring that has been characterized as “an acquiescence in discouragement which reaches the utmost of sadness when it ceases to be regretful”.146
The lines of the song’s bridge do have their equanimity all right, but it is an emptied equanimity that has
