‘Mind Like a Trap'

Suze Rotolo, in her memoir of the early days in Greenwich Village, wrote that ‘Bob was charismatic; he was a beacon, a lighthouse. He was also a black hole’ (Rotolo, 273). And in the early New York days Dylan’s inspiration does flash forth most authentically against a background of darkness, vacancy, or obscurity. What is evident from 1961 or 1962, fully-fledged when so much else about his artistic sensibility is in development, is Dylan’s lifelong capacity as an interpreter to dissolve himself within the often tragic situations and voices of traditional songs. ¹ His gift resembles a Keatsian ‘negative capability’, his subjectivity accepting of mystery, and invisible in what it brings to expression. ² In particular, it allows the twenty-year-old to sound out, as if by some occult correspondence, deep subtractive realities of experience within a song’s own scenario. As he leaves himself behind, so Dylan’s strange sixth sense dramatically registers someone who is fatefully lost to him or herself, whose powers of expression have become captive to addiction, homelessness, affliction, prostitution, alcoholism, guilt, or heartbreak. In song after song the burden is an irrevocable predicament of consuming loneliness and silence. So, he will intuitively create moving effects out of voicing the fractured self-hood of a cocaine addict (in ‘Cocaine, Cocaine’), a blind man (‘It’s Hard to Be Blind’), the girl in ‘House of the Rising Sun’, a vagrant (‘I Ain’t Got No Home’), an abandoned woman (in ‘Dink’s Song’), a grieving friend (in ‘He Was a Friend of Mine’), and many others. In third-person ballads also the voice will turn on its inwardness with murdered victims in ‘Omie Wise’, ‘Hezekiah Jones/Black Cross’, ‘Railroad Boy’, ‘1913 Massacre’, or ‘Poor Lazarus’.