hypnagogue said:
I wasn't aware of that really (though certain parts have resonances with that idea that I've picked up on in the past). I looked around on google though and there doesn't seem to be any authoritative interpretation or even much of a wide concensus. Where'd you get the idea that it's all about altered states?
I'm not saying it's about drugs or anything, but the speaker of the lyrics is experiencing his world in a rather odd way. I can give you my full interpretation:
Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're tryin' to be so quiet?
This says to me that his senses are playing tricks on him. He's seeing and hearing things that aren't really there.[/color]
We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it
This gives the first hint that he really does not want to be where he is, both literally and figuratively, and isn't doing a very good job of pretending, either.[/color]
And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin' you to defy it
While I've always taken Louise to be a real person, she can also be seen as the embodiment of determinism. She is what seems to be fate, that which you don't believe you can change.[/color]
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there's nothing, really nothing to turn off
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind
It can be argued that the context in which this song first became meaningful to me is coloring my interpretation a bit, but I've always taken this to mean that Louise is his lover, and while he is there with her, he cannot get Johanna out of his head. Every time he is with Louise, his thoughts turn to Johanna.[/color]
In the empty lot where the ladies play blindman's bluff with the key chain
And the all-night girls they whisper of escapades out on the "D" train
We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight
Ask himself if it's him or them that's really insane
In addition to the night playing tricks, this is where I begin to get the sense that his experience is being altered, as he speaks of disjunct images and people wondering whether they're insane. I see at least two layers to this line. The obvious meaning is literal. You have two sets of people: girls that stay out all night, taking the subway trains to illicit encounters of one sort or another, and a security man that works the third shift. Both seem to be leading rather pointless existences and so cannot help but wonder whether they are off their rockers to be doing this. On a deeper level, though, their questioning of their own existence is not just a questioning of whether what they are doing is what they should be doing, but whether what they experience is even real or not. This will take some justification, which I hope comes below.[/color]
Louise, she's all right, she's just near
She's delicate and seems like the mirror
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Johanna's not here
The ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face
Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place
On the surface, this reinforces Louise's position as a natural default, but it does more than that. Given the overall tone of the song, I interpret this passage as saying that he is literally beginning to see Johanna every time he looks at Louise, and since he also sees himself, his self-image is being replaced by this pseudo-Johanna.[/color]
Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously
He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously
And when bringing her name up
He speaks of a farewell kiss to me
He's sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all
Muttering small talk at the wall while I'm in the hall
Again, it's possible that this was not Dylan's intent, but I take this as being a third-person reference to himself. If the image of Johanna has replaced his own self-image, then that self-image has been displaced into a semi-psychotic episode. I don't think that he is encountering a real person here. The "little boy lost" is his doppelganger, glorifying the situation that the speaker is in and allowing him to be contemptful of himself without being overtly contemptful of himself.[/color]
How can I explain?
Oh, it's so hard to get on
And these visions of Johanna, they kept me up past the dawn
Of course, sleep deprivation doesn't exactly help when you're already experiencing the world a wee bit strangely.[/color]
Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
Hear the one with the mustache say, "Jeeze
I can't find my knees"
Oh, jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule
But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel
There are again two ways of taking this. If we take it literally, he is simply walking through a museum and musing about some rather odd paintings, and the Mona Lisa. Given his sleep deprivation and the dreamlike way this is narrated, however, I question whether or not this is really occurring at all. Though I do think he probably is in a literal museum, the artwork is obviously not actually engaging in the actions he describes.[/color]
The peddler now speaks to the countess who's pretending to care for him
Sayin', "Name me someone that's not a parasite and I'll go out and say a prayer for him"
But like Louise always says
"Ya can't look at much, can you man?"
This is what leads me to believe that he is actually in a real museum, but also that he is losing it, as he is beginning to share his delusions with Louise, confusing her in the process. Irony creeps in here, however, as it is only through the sharing of his delusion that he begins to be honest with her at all.[/color]
As she, herself, prepares for him
And Madonna, she still has not showed
We see this empty cage now corrode
Where her cape of the stage once had flowed
The fiddler, he now steps to the road
He writes ev'rything's been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
The city seems to have merged with the world of "Desolation Row" here.[/color]
While my conscience explodes
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain
And yet again, I see two ways of taking this. On the one hand, the visions of Johanna are all that remain of Johanna. She is gone and will almost certainly remain gone. On the other hand, the visions may very well have taken over the whole of his phenomenological world at this point.[/color]
In a way, this song can be misleading with regard to why I chose it for you. I don't see you as longing for a woman you cannot have while trolling through the city with one you don't really want. I can, however, see you trolling through the city while experimenting with different modes of perception and beginning to have strange visions and maybe even driving yourself insane.
I'll freely admit that I might be reading a little too much into the lyrics (is that even possible with Dylan, though?), due in part to my own identification with the song. It first became meaningful to me after a girl named Jenny broke up with me. (Ironically, her name is derived from "Giovanna," the Italian form of "Johanna.") I trolled around my own city with another girl shortly afterward for a few months or so, but could not get the image of Jenny out of my mind. The whole experience resulted in quite a few parallels, including me displacing my own personality into the third person to scrutinize it and even having what seemed to be hallucinations in which I literally saw Jenny in places where she could not possibly have been (she's going to film school in New York and is not anywhere near me geographically). The ordeal, combined with other developmental processes, has, in quite a real and noticeable way, changed the quality of my everyday experiences. The functioning of my sense is the same, but those aspects to our experience which are non-sensory, the theoretico-culturo-self-imago way in which we interpret the sense data, are far different than what they used to be. Maybe you could say I just see a little too much of myself in this song, and it's possible I chose it because I see a little of myself in you as well.
I wouldn't. You'd look stupid. You'd probably feel more comfortable wearing a vest, briefs, garters, fishnet stockings, and arm mitts. And be sure to let them know you're a virgin.
And I remember hyp having fun with the haikus. It also has a rather haunting cadence, and I can see him listening to it when he gets into one of those special states he's so fond of.)
