Fly Too High: a compendium of Janis Ian
Dylan’s Turn of Phrase
I was lucky to get a pass to a pre-release viewing of A Complete Unknown, the new Dylan biopic, this week. The event included a free drink (which turned out to be a Thatchers Gold Apple Cider in a can, which is so wrong on several levels) and an ‘Australian exclusive’ interview with director James Mangold and leading man, Timothée Chalamet. A great night.
The film itself was very good. I can’t think of another film where an actor captured a character many of us think we know intimately, with near perfection. It was almost as if Dylan himself had morphallactic-ly returned to his early years in the physical form of Chalamet. All the essentials were there. His smirking disdain, his obsessions, his hair, the shades and the voice, bursting at the seams with creativity. A stellar artistic performance by the actor.
[Not to be discounted is Edward Norton as Pete Seeger. His understated performance as Dylan’s early champion is worth the price of a second ticket. The crushing disappointment he conveys when Woody Guthrie makes it clear Dylan is to be his successor, not Pete, is so good.]
The Australian exclusive interview was prerecorded. It featured a local B grade entertainment interviewer who knew little of Dylan’s mystique or music and who received each response from Chalamet with a cooed ‘Ooo, that’s so great!’, more appropriate to an interview with parents of a severely disabled child or a granny fighting back against online scams. Chalamet was pissed and swilled big gulps of vodka straight from the bottle. His answers were disjointed, sometimes coherent. He seemed to be channelling Dylan’s own irritated approach to dumb interviewers. For his part Mangold tried to keep disaster at bay by praising the drunken luvvy next to him and speaking of how they had ‘sculpted’ the performance and their relationship over ‘many years’. O.K.
Definitely go see this film.
As I walked to the cinema, I reflected for the umpteenth time on what it is about Bob Dylan that I love so much. I’m sure I could dig out several dozen reasons but the one that immediately jumped to mind was his ability to turn a phrase. Though I’m a Dylan lifer, there are few if any songs of his that I could recite in their entirety. Maybe Blowing in the Wind if the wind were behind my back. But I can rattle off dozens of phrases that absolutely live within my soul every day.
All I really want to do, is baby be friends with you
It ain’t me babe
He not busy being born is busy dying
She wears an Egyptian ring that sparkles before she speaks
I contain multitudes
Flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
I used to care, but things have changed
Lincoln Country Road or Armageddon?
A few words, seemingly simply, even thoughtlessly, placed together stand out like sparkling jewels throughout his work. They are adornments. In Indian/Sanskrit aesthetics these are known are ‘alankara’, poetic ornaments or decorations designed to enhance the joy and delight of the reader/listener.
I find myself repeating Dylan’s phrases at random moments and situations. I get a kick out of marrying Dylan’s words with the situations and events of my meagre life. That feeling of delight, according to the ancient Indians, is the entire purpose of poetry, music, art and literature. According to Vijay Kumar Roy, Associate Professor of English, University of Allahabad, “all artists are expected to have a kind of gift, through which imagination can provide the reader [something to] ‘savour’ or ‘relish’, [rasa, in Sanskrit], which is the highest form of joy or supreme bliss (delight). (1)
Sometimes Dylan seems to throw all manner of phrases together, seemingly indifferent to whether they make sense as a whole narrative. For years scholars and fans have tried to unpack and dissect the meaning of each of Dylan’s songs to find a coherent message. Yet if you look at a song like It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) the phrases pile up and it’s hard to draw direct links of meaning between them.
Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying
Temptation’s page flies out the door
You follow, find yourself at war
Watch waterfalls of pity roar
You feel to moan but unlike before
You discover that you’d just be one more
Person crying
These verses are full of brilliant lines. Indeed, each line is full of meaning, but you’d be hard put to say exactly what he’s singing about. A simultaneous solar and lunar eclipse? Is the page of temptation a book or a young lad? I’ve seen waterfalls but don’t know what a waterfall of pity is and what that has to do with said page.
But as the song progresses it’s clear Dylan is conjuring a scene of madness, darkness and confusion. He is describing a disjointed disconnected modern society and so there is a certain rasa/taste to this song. Indian aesthetics identify 8 main ‘rasa’ or flavors that an artist may induce in a reader, observer or listener. One of them is Raudra: The Rasa of Anger and Fury which Dylan employs to demonstrate his righteous fury over the state of his country, society and times. It’s a heavy song. It’s got the weight of Jeremiah or Isaiah. But it is decorated and ornamented with the most beautiful turns of phrase.
Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
While money doesn’t talk, it swears
You never know how future generations will view yesterday’s heroes but it’s hard to imagine Dylan’s writing being forgotten. His turns of phrase, dozens of them, have entered our daily banter.
The times they are a changing.
Blowing in the wind.
It ain’t me, babe.
You gotta serve somebody
Pick up any of his records, or read his poems/lyrics on line and you’ll discover hundreds of magical delightful phrases that capture the whole gamut of human emotions. But which also mark Dylan as one of the greatest manipulators of words.
Here is one of his phrases I use regularly, in a lot of situations.
A change in the weather is known to be extreme
But what’s the sense of changing horses in midstream?
I’m going out of my mind, oh, oh
With a pain that stops and starts
Like a corkscrew to my heart
Ever since we’ve been apart
(You’re a Big Girl Now, Blood on the Tracks, 1974)
- Roy, Vijay Kumar. 2012. “Indian Aesthetics and the West” In Explorations in Aesthetics, edited by Alka Rastogi. New Delhi: Sarup Book Publishers.
The Night Bus to Tarbela
This photo was taken at the massive Pirwadahi bus station in Rawalpindi. It is from Pirwadahi that long haul buses commence and it is at Pirwadahi that they end their journeys. At least up it was until the early 1990s, when my time in Pakistan came to an end.
I took this photo at my favorite time of day, an hour or so before sunset. It was winter, probably January or February 1989/90 giving the light a warm golden hue. The bus’s windscreen and body had just been washed so the usual dust and streaks of wipers are not a hinderance.
Pakistani bus decorating is one of the country’s great folk arts. What often looks like garish sticker-mania in fact often can be decoded. In this instance starting from the lower left: a religious poster depicting Hazrat Hussain, the Prophet Mohammad’s (PBUH) grandson and spiritual icon to Shi’a Muslims all over the world. The large script at the top of the windscreen is a Q’ranic or other spiritual saying and at the very top you can the words 1988 Model. Signifying the year not of the manufacture of the bus but of the decorations. Multiple stickers of vases and flowers reference one of the most popular design motifs from the Persian world. Scholars find many pre-Islamic references and continuities in such images. In this case, I would imagine the bus’s owner (a Shi’a) has used the stickers merely as pretty decoration, just like the image of the two kittens in the far right lower corner. The open palm stickers, like in many ancient cultures, represent an attitude of blessing and protection as well as invitation. Signaling to the passengers, “Come in, god Bless and protect you on your journey.” As these iron behemoths are not insured, its about as much assurance as you can expect. The calligraphy that balances the Hussain poster notes the destination of the bus, Tarbela Dam, one of Pakistan’s major pieces of infrastructure completed between 1968 and 1976. The pièce de ré·sis·tance is the pair of drapes which can be pulled close when the sun is too bright!
The following piece appeared first on my original blog Washerman’s Dog (17 May 2012). It included a mixtape of music you would be likely to hear on such a trip. The road system in Pakistan has improved immensely since I lived there (’86-’91.) And the music is a bit dated to that era. If you would like to download that mixtape check out the Downloads page.
When I first landed up in Pakistan I was surprised to discover that the way you got around between major cities was not by train, as in India, but by road. Unless your destination was Karachi or Quetta, in which case you flew. And for your road trips you had several choices of transport: bus, Flying Coach or wagon.
Bus: usually a Bedford, gloriously liveried in multiple colours, decorated with beaten tin, twinkling lights, curtains, festooned with flowers (plastic, real and painted) and covered with pithy aphorisms like ‘Maa ki dua/Jannat ki hawa’ (A mother’s prayer is a breeze from heaven). Clientele: general public; those who have more time and less money.
Flying Coach: a no-nonsense and business-like large Mazda or Toyota mini-bus with hydraulic doors that sigh when they open, excellent air conditioning and in most instances reclining seats. Clientele: businessmen, foreign students; those who want to get ‘there’ quick.
Wagon: a Ford van imported from England by Kashmiris. Painted only one colour. Body dented. A few perfunctory invocations of Allah’s blessing on the front. Seats hard. No aircon. Clientele: the slightly better off member of the general public; those with high-risk appetites.
One of the several issues confronting those who choose to travel long distance by road in Pakistan is that the vehicles (with the exception of the Bedford buses) are imported. They can move quite quickly and powerfully, designed as they are for motorways in Japan or UK. The Pakistani highways, alas, are narrow, rutted, poorly lit and crowded. The combination, especially when blended with a driver who is exhausted, just learning his trade or stoned on charas (all three at once, is a permutation I’ve encountered) can give rise to anxiety.
I shall never forget the dear driver (with me in front seat right beside him) who, as we sped into the fast-setting sun that nearly blinded us, decided to change the cassette and light a cigarette at the same time. He did it! And we made it to Gilgit in one piece 12 hours later!
For some reason whenever I found myself on the road it was evening heading into night. Though the hazards increased significantly once the sun went down, I found barreling through the night in some strange way, relaxing and appealing. Probably because there was inevitably a good concert of music to be had. After the first 45 minutes of the journey, most passengers were nodding off or whispering quietly to their companions. The driver would light another cigarette and turn up the cassette and entertain us with a selection of current and evergreen hits.
Inevitably, the concert would include the patron saint of all vehicle drivers, Attaullah Khan Niazi. Indian film music, qawwali and few sharabi ghazals, some folk and other odds and ends like a piece or two from the driver’s home region, often the Northern Areas around Gilgit.
I loved those trips because I was introduced, anonymously, to so much good music.
Sometimes I Lie Awake at Night and Wonder
Tonight I’m in Phnom Penh and can’t sleep. I seem to always wake up at this time, when the day is still dark and the only sound is that of lazy thoughts shuffling inside my head. On the other side of the hotel window a boat bangs softly against the jetty.
It is windy and the monsoon is nearly at an end. I was told Cambodia is a land of dusty sunsets but I find the county resplendent with green paddy and the gurgle of the pale brown Mekong in flood. I expected, too, to meet a morose and sullen people. But the Cambodians are warm and can’t repress their smiles.
Throughout the town small but smart restaurants cater to the foreigners that work for the NGOs and UN agencies that finance and prop up the social welfare system of struggling countries like Cambodia. Banners pronouncing tourism as a ‘tool to build cooperation’ droop in the thick air. The tourists are back. Backpackers from Australia, packs of Japanese and most ominously, ugly aging men on the prowl for sex with young Khmer girls and boys. Cambodia is challenging Thailand as the premier destination for sex tourism. Such are the hairline cracks of a poor country’s development.
There is another macabre little industry in Phnom Penh centred around the horrific torture chamber known as Tuel Sleng or S-21. Tucked deep inside a residential neighbourhood the former high school transformed by the Khmer Rouge into a laboratory of evil, S-21 is a ‘must see’ for any visitor to Cambodia. Along with the temples of Angkor, part of the grand tour. Moto drivers call out to you, ‘Tuel Sleng. Look at Khmer Rouge jail’. You can buy T-shirts with disgusting recreations of faces behind bars on the backs. They also sell bags and skirts made of bright Khmer silk right next to building B where Pol Pot’s most important enemies were kept in tiny wooden cages before being cut open like animals and fed to the demon, Angkar, ‘the Organization’.
I certainly remember the name Pol Pot but his crimes were still unknown outside of Democratic Kampuchea in those years, 1975-1979. It’s an old story now, how this country was transformed, almost overnight, into a giant slave camp. Cities were evacuated and left empty and the population forcibly moved from province to province to reshape the face of the land. Canals were gouged out of the earth. Dams glued together. Millions of paddy fields planted. All done without the help of machinery, with only bare hands and fingernails. Machines were deemed impure and imperialist. Money was abolished as was religion, privacy and even talking. Democratic Kampuchea was a massive experiment in applied paranoia. The people were starved and then themselves became fodder: sustenance for Angkar. Hundreds of thousands, even more than one million, perished. There is not a family here that doesn’t harbour the loss of a sibling, parent, child or spouse.
Why didn’t we hear of this when it was happening, I wonder?
I recall an exhibit at S-21. Instructions painted on a signboard to those under torture. Among the many protocols is the command not to ‘yell out or make any sound when you are beaten with electric wire’.
The single most important factor in the success of Pol Pot’s revolution, according to most scholars, was the carpet-bombing by American B-52s between 1970-1975. By the time Phnom Penh fell the people of Cambodia were massively traumatized from years of dodging falling explosives that wiped out their villages, families and animals.
I used to work in Iraq. One night the Kurds went wild and fired their machine guns into the air. We lived in tents against the side of a hill. We ate under a thatch and open sided cabana. For several minutes I felt the terror of having no control over my well being. Shells from the celebrating Kurds’ guns rained down from the sky thwacking into the earth and cracking into rocks. I ran for cover but why, I don’t know. There was nowhere to hide. How was a canvas tent to protect me from a hot piece of iron falling from the sky?
And how was a Cambodian peasant to protect himself from a massive cluster bomb falling from an unseen American warplane? And not just once but night after night, week after week? When the Khmer Rouge came to town they didn’t have to ‘recruit’. The people swarmed to anyone who claimed they could stop the bombing.
Daylight is breaking over the city. I can hear street children laughing now and the sky is white. It’s going to rain some more today.
I wonder.
In the 1970s an American President doggedly pursued the ‘national interest’ and filled the air with airplanes and bombs and mighty words about the need to stop communism from sweeping across the world. More quickly than Presidents Johnson, Nixon or Ford could have imagined and certainly more inelegantly than the American people were led to believe, communism and the horror that the planes and bombs were to supposed to eliminate, ran the Americans out of town. And tore apart the people and society they were supposed to save.
A year ago another American President began massive bombing against another weak and troubled Asian country. “We’re going to get him dead or alive” the world was told. And something else too. “This time we’re not going to let the Afghan people down. We’ll change the leadership, establish the rule of law and stick around to rebuild the country.” One year on the Taliban are gone but still active on the periphery. Osama is neither confirmed dead nor alive, apparently relegated to the ‘too hard basket’. The rule of law remains a fantasy in Afghanistan and donor fatigue has already set in. Of the billions pledged to rebuild Afghanistan to ensure that terrorism has no room to hide, much has not been delivered. The Afghans, it appears have once again been sold a line by their ‘saviours’.
President Bush is once more in dogged pursuit of American interests. Come hell or high water, right or wrong, support or not, we are told he must “change the leadership in Iraq, establish the rule of law and get the UN to pay the billions needed to rebuild the country”.
Sometimes I lay awake at night and wonder.
What sort of new horror is going to arise from the ashes of Afghanistan and Iraq, similar to that arose here in Cambodia? Will Americans wake up and see the links between their crusades against communism and their wars against terrorism and the misery and hatred that follow in their wake?
Phnom Penh, Cambodia 2003
Early Morning
Early morning.
Listening to the most amazing birdcall I have ever heard. A loud series of confident, audacious chirrups, growls, clicks, whistles and scratches. At times a low coarse growl (very un-bird like) then a piercing whistle or two. Now, one, two, three, four; the strange almost metallic sawing sound like the inner workings of an old office chair that hasn’t been oiled in years. Just as quickly the creature finds its birdness again and lets loose a lovely syncopated series of crystalline, round, delicate squeaks. For a moment it is silent, then as if it were a one-man band playing an upbeat number, (thumping the loose bass strings, the tinkle of the cymbal, the squeak now and then of a sax and a droning harmonica) the concert begins again. Right outside my window. She taps her beak against the branch on which she is perched, like a maestro tapping the podium. And then as that elongated moment of expectation stretches out, at last, the music, in a frantic tumble of tones, begins again.
This experience, this birdsong, is rare or seems so in this place. It has a lustiness and vibrancy of a tropical setting: a Thailand or southern India. Not a bleak washed out Central Asian winter morning. But it is lovely and nearly humourous. She’s a prophet. A voice from God reminding us that He is always with us-even in the most alien, isolated and uninhabitable places.
It is quiet now. The bird has gone. In the distance further away and more subdued and barely audible above the morning traffic that is starting to whoosh through the streets, I can hear the slight, timid calls of a flock of small birds. This is how I will recall Russian Asia. Ordered, unspontaneous, uninspired. But how also will I remember Khojand—-in the winter nonetheless-—for the laughably unexpected concert that woke me up and got me on my way.
Khojand, Tajikistan. 2001
A Note on the Image
Titled ‘The Great Hornbill’ this painting dates from between 1620-40 C.E. (1030-50 Hijri). The artist, Mansur, was a leading nature painter at the court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir; around 1600, he briefly also practiced as an illuminator. The emperor took a passionate interest in the natural world and established a compendium of natural history with Mansur’s help.
Mansur was extraordinarily talented for scientific documentation. His detailed careful depictions of plants and animals avoided all personal expression and are extremely valuable for their scientific accuracy as well as their artistic perfection. He became known as Ustad Mansur (‘Master Mansur’), and the emperor bestowed him with the title Nadir-ul-`Asr (‘Miracle of the Age’). The artist accompanied Jahangir on some of his travels and was then in charge of the documentation of plants and animals. Many of his paintings were left unsigned, and only one of his flower paintings can be clearly attributed to him today.
The Mughals (a corruption of the word, Mongols) were at their imperial apex at the time of Emperor Jahangir. They had conquered India several generations earlier and traced their lineage to the fearsome warrior/ruler, Tamerlane (Timur). I wrote this piece in the ancient city of Khojand (Leninabad), an ancient Silk Road city situated at the entrance to the Fergana Valley, the ancestral homeland of the Mughals.
What’s in a name?
The phrase that names this blog is a hackneyed one and one that seems to have popped simultaneously and spontaneously into a number of heads at the same time. It is now a dull commonplace that elicits grunts of acknowledment rather than laughs of revelation which it was designed to do.
It’s been used as a descriptor of all those who toil in ‘Aidland’ the vast global financial, institutional and spiritual infrastructure of those involved in delivering ‘aid’ to people in the ‘developing world’ or ‘global South’. Those people in the blue vests and red or orange hats with their employer’s logo splashed across them whom we see on TV in the immediate wake of a flood, tsunami, war or earthquake.
There is a whole school of research and writing on these people (of whom I am one) and perhaps one day I’ll read some it. But I am not interested in Aidland, or aid workers here in this piece. Rather, I’m interested in understanding why, when it came to naming this blog, this phrase jumped instantaneously to mind.
I was born into an actual missionary family in India. I am an MK, a missionary kid. I have done some pretty mercenary things in my life and know the temptations of that character. As for misfit? Aren’t we all?
What has inspired this blog is a frustration with how I make sense of my world. Of my experience as a mid-60s male who has had a privileged life. And there is an urge within me to, in some way, document my journey. Not because it is particularly unique or dramatic but because I have never had the time or space to reflect on it. To see how and whether and why these three strains of my personality and identity come together. Or don’t. Perhaps they are just frayed loose ends.
I’ve thought of writing a memoir. Perhaps an autobiography. What about a fictionalized life of a former missionary kid turned aid worker called Nate? But all attempts have fizzled. I haven ‘t been able to summon the energy to finish such a project.
But I have been writing all my life. Short pieces, novels, the first draft of a history book, text books, articles on music, politics, ‘Aidland’ and strange figures of history. I’ve written sitreps and reports on humanitarian disasters, and hundreds of funding proposals. I’ve translated books from Urdu to English. I’ve edited newsletters. I’ve written thousands of letters (though none in the last 25 years). Writing things down is how I validate myself and express myself. Some people like to chat. I write.
I’ve been blogging a long time too. I began in 2010 and since then have launched many blogs mostly on music, but also about photography and memoir. It’s a medium I know and understand and enjoy. After months of hemming and hawing about whether to join Substack, I’ve decided to remain a blogger. And use this new blog as a sort of laboratory, factory and think-tank; a messy sangam of the various streams that make up each of our lives.
Rather than a single volume ‘memoir’ this blog fills in as my ‘autobiography’. Read this and you should get a pretty good idea of who I am and how I got from a missionary hospital in south India to the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia.
Before I leave, let me riff on the triple-barreled phrase that fronts this blog.
How can you tell how long a missionary has been in India? Notice how they react to fly in their tea. 1-2 years, they grimace and politely push the cup of tea away. 5 years, they delicately pick the fly out and flick it on the floor. 10 years or more, they squeeze the fly of all the tea juices that have entered his drowned body and continue to sip the tea.
Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits 