from this not-caring to any other state of mind. Thank Somebody that there is, elsewhere in Dylan, a world elsewhere:
Happiness is but a state of mind
Anytime you want to you can cross the state line
So sings Waitin’ for You,147 and very happily, too. But unhappinessis convicted, convinced that there is nothing, nobody, to wait for. And it has long ceased to see any point in making an effort. “Ain’t no reason to go anywhere” – and that includes going across the state line into the state of mind that is happiness.
“Time passes slowly and fades away” – this, too, is an estranging thing to say. There is a glimpse of the lethal state of mind that asks only to kill time. But old Father Time never dies, he only fades away, or rather fades from our fading sight.
Clothes Line Saga
The not-caring, the nothingness, the depths beyond apathy even, at the heartland of Time Passes Slowly is as nothing compared to the vacuity of Clothes Line Saga, which raises small talkative mindlessness and affectlessness from down there in the Basement. Family values, of a sort, flat, faithful, not careless, just not caring. The two things that make it possible for us not to scream (“Why aren’t they screaming?”, in the words of Philip Larkin, The Old Fools) are that the song is stringently straight-faced and that it does give an adolescent’s-eye-view. The adolescent, after all (it may be a long time after – the song begins with the words “After a while”), usually turns out to be a worm that turns. (“Well, I just do what I’m told” – Do you now . . .) Time passes slowly, and so does adolescence but it does pass. Teenagers age. Meanwhile here is a vinegary vignette, the vinaigrette dressing that is Clothes Line Saga. It is sung levelly at a steady sturdy rhythm of monumental unconcern.
CLOTHES LINE SAGA
After a while we took in the clothes
Nobody said very much
Just some old wild shirts and a couple pairs of pants
Which nobody really wanted to touch
Mama come in and picked up a book
An’ Papa asked her what it was
Someone else asked, “What do you care?”
Papa said, “Well, just because”
Then they started to take back their clothes
Hang ’em on the line
It was January the thirtieth
And everybody was feelin’ fine
The next day everybody got up
Seein’ if the clothes were dry
The dogs were barking, a neighbor passed
Mama, of course, she said, “Hi!”
“Have you heard the news?” he said, with a grin
“The Vice-President’s gone mad!”
“Where?” “Downtown.” “When?” “Last night”
“Hmm, say, that’s too bad!”
“Well, there’s nothin’ we can do about it,” said the neighbor
“Just somethin’ we’re gonna have to forget”
“Yes, I guess so,” said Ma
Then she asked me if the clothes was still wet
I reached up, touched my shirt
And the neighbor said, “Are those clothes yours?”
I said, “Some of ’em, not all of ’em”
He said, “Ya always help out around here with the chores?”
I said, “Sometime, not all the time”
Then my neighbor, he blew his nose
Just as papa yelled outside
“Mama wants you t’ come back in the house and bring them clothes”
Well, I just do what I’m told
So, I did it, of course
I went back in the house and Mama met me
And then I shut all the doors
The song makes its point about pointlessness, and the title as given in Lyrics 1962–1985, Clothes Line, was the better for not letting sarcasm have the last word, as against Clothes Line Saga.
It feels like a parody of a way of lifelessness. And so it is, while taking a shot at a previous shot at this: Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe, which had been a hit with its doggèd tedium, its Papa said, and Mama said, and Brother said. Hard to get flatter-footed than the Ode.148 Hard, but not impossible. For along came Dylan and levelled it some more, the flatly faithful flat-liner. Full of mindless questions, the song is an answer of a sort, and something of a parody.
As so often in Dylan, there may be a touch of the nursery rhyme (and nursery rhymes like to accommodate parodies).
The maid was in the garden hanging out the clothes,
When down came a blackbird and pecked off her nose.
The song avails itself of this in its nose / clothes lines, but its social setting doesn’t have any maids to help out around here with the chores. And there will be nothing as penetrating as a peck, although there is a pecking order: “Papa yelled outside ‘Mama wants you t’ come back in the house and bring them clothes.’”
It starts bored, and it stays that way.
After a while we took in the clothes
Nobody said very much
To put it mildly. This is classic boredom, the more so because not really admitted to, with not just the vacancy but the vacuum of smalltown small talk. Why are you telling me all this? “Well, just because”.
Just some old wild shirts and a couple pairs of pants
Which nobody really wanted to touch
Really? And they are bleached of any real wildness, those “old wild shirts”. The Oxford English Dictionary has, under “wild”:
U.S. slang. Remarkable, unusual, exciting. Used as a general term of approbation . . . “amazing range of colours (including some wild marble-like effects)”.
Exciting? Amazing? Forget it. “It was January the thirtieth / And everybody was feelin’ fine”. (“Feelin’ fine” has never been so evacuated in the delivery. Not tonic, catatonic.) January the thirtieth, eh. Why that day? (King Charles I’s deathday? The birthday of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had run
