Quote:
Originally Posted by Lance Levens
What happens when you push semantic boundaries? Either you create hitherto unanticipated words and meanings (Joyce: the agenbite of inwit(?)) or you wrench old words to open up to include more than the conventional meanings, so "fortuned bone":
Is it a
a.wealthy bone?
b.legendary bone?
c.lucky bone?
d.cursed bone?
|
e: Fore-tuned - ready in anticipation - prepared, erect.
f: Subject to the whims of fortune; or of Fortuna (as opposed to providence or wisdom) and thus more animal-like than God-like.
g: 'Fortune', like 'bone', is part of Dylan's vocabulary of somatic symbols. A man's fortune, the wealth one inherits, is the inheritance of the flesh through his seed, fortune=wealth=seed/semen=the inheritance of flesh, the fortune bound up in his bone - he blows his load, his fortune, and is 'spent'. He uses 'bone' quite frequently in his poems, as a symbol of death and life, the skeletal corpse and the boner whose 'marrow' seeds life.
I, in my fusion of rose and male motion,
Create this twin miracle.
This is the fortune of manhood: the natural peril,
A steeplejack tower,
Other words we find here from his vocabulary of symbols are 'O' and 'wax':
'O' ~
O all I owe is all the flesh inherits,
Deliver me, my masters, head and heart,
Heart of Cadaver's candle waxes thin,
When blood, spade-handed, and the logic time
Drive children up like bruises to the thumb,
From maid and head,
For, sunday faced, with dusters in my glove,
Chaste and the chaser, man with the cockshut eye,
I, that time's jacket or the coat of ice
May fail to fasten with a virgin o
In the straight grave,
His work is certainly well peppered with 'O's - must be one of his favourite words, and subjects (along with his 'bones'). In those of his poems which deal with birth, sex and death, or uses some version of the womb/tomb trope, which is one of his common themes, then his use of O often also serves the double duty of referring to the
c(o)
un/t/ree of the corpse (nation/family/clan, the tree of life, generation to generation) : the nothingness that lies between a maids legs from which we come and in which we end: the 'o' -
HAMLET Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
[Lying down at OPHELIA's feet]
OPHELIA No, my lord.
HAMLET I mean, my head upon your lap?
OPHELIA Ay, my lord.
HAMLET Do you think I meant country matters?
OPHELIA I think nothing, my lord.
HAMLET That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs.
OPHELIA What is, my lord?
HAMLET Nothing.
- is the nothingness from which this corpse we inhabit is generated and to which it returns: life is a deathly cycle running from generation to generation perpetuated through sex/love, from man through son of man - from Adam through son of (mac) Adam -
Joy is no knocking nation, sir and madam,
The cancer's fashion, or the summer feather
Lit on the cuddled tree, the cross of fever,
Not city tar and subway bored to foster
Man through macadam.
And so we owe our inheritance of flesh to 'O' the womb and the marrow of the bone, and what we owe to our fellows in 'O', those bones in the grave, is to pass our inheritance, the marrow of the bone, the fortune of the bone, on in a never ending chain of birth and death.
0 my true love, hold me.
In your every inch and glance is the globe of genesis spun,
And the living earth your suns.
wax ~
Wax clothes that wax upon the aging ribs;
Wax, like bone marrow and fortune, is another of his euphenisms for semen - he often uses it in connection with the phallic
candle or
tower; to wax, waxing = to come, coming; wax clothes, sheets = semen stained = Adam and Eve's garments of skin they wear after the fall, which brings death/time into the world; red wax = the staff/candle/tower of life = the 'bone' swollen red with blood and eager to bestow/blow its wax/marrow/fortune/semen; he also uses the old waxing/coming figured as a 'little death' or 'murder':
The blood got up as red as wax
As kisses froze the waxing thought
The spirit racked its muscles and
The loins cried murder...
----
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood;
That drives the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
---
And love plucked out the stinging siren's eye
Old cock from nowheres lopped the minstrel tongue
Till tallow I blew from the wax's tower
---
The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,
Bright as a fig;
Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.
...
Re: ambiguity/obscurity
Yes, one could rarely accuse him of clarity - he also used inversion and the biblical technique of metathetic parallelism to the point of obscurity - and when you decipher it and realize, for example, while he may be talking figuratively of the act of writing poetry, on a more literal level he is talking about having a wank in a toilet (
My Hero Bares his Nerves), well perhaps a little obscurity may serve for the purpose of being publishable. One is drawn to his work through its sound, its eloquence - you must also be a lover of puzzles if you want to go beyond that into deciphering what the hell he is going on about. A little knowledge of Freud, Frazer, the Bible and his poetic techniques will see you through most of it. Much of his stuff, its themes and the techniques he uses also has echoes in the work of the occultists of the time - so perhaps his obscurification techniques proved no challenge to his 'discoverer', Aleister Crowley's old paramour Vicki Neuberg.
The seed-at-zero shall not storm
That town of ghosts, the trodden womb,
With her rampart to his tapping,
No god-in-hero tumble down
Like a tower on the town
Dumbly and divinely stumbling
Over the manwaging line.
The seed-at-zero shall not storm
That town of ghosts, the manwaged tomb
With her rampart to his tapping,
No god-in-hero tumble down
Like a tower on the town
Dumbly and divinely leaping
Over the warbearing line.
Even in his own time he was something out of step with his contemporary poetry scene, but neither that nor his obscurity or promotion of sound over sense, highly personal metaphors or vocabulary of somatic symbols seems to have dented his popularity.