Bargainin' for Interpretation: Zen expert brings Dylan's 'Middle Way' to Chicago

 

Throughout the span of Bob Dylan's 50-year career, his music has undoubtedly spurned countless epiphanies in the lives of his audience, be they substance-aided or cold-water sober. The songs in his musical catalogue -- a universe of fluctuating styles and genres -- have never shied from Zen-koan-like mind-benders. "Ah, but I was so much older then," Dylan sings in "My Back Pages" at the ripe old age of 23. "I'm younger than that now."
 

Author Steven Heine 

In his latest book, Bargainin' for Salvation: Bob Dylan, A Zen Master?, Japanese scholar Steven Heine writes, "There are two events from [the 1960s] that everyone recalls vividly -- where they were in November 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated; and when it was in the summer of 1965 that they first heard 'Like a Rolling Stone.'"
 

In Bargainin', Heine, who is Professor of Religion and History and Director of the Institute for Asian Studies at Florida International University, interprets the oeuvre of Dylan's career through a Zen Buddhist perspective and includes but digs much, much deeper than Dylan's obvious Buddhist influences -- the references in songs and interviews, his travels to Japan, his kinship with Allen Ginsberg and other Beat writers who were involved in Zen practice --  by presenting Dylan's entire career trajectory as a demonstration of attainment of the "Middle Way" in Buddhist teaching, or the avoidance of all extremes and the refraining from opposing positions.

"(At the early and middle stages of his career) Dylan zigzagged back and forth between so many kinds of approaches in terms of his 'philosophy'," Heine said. "Whether it was the protest or love songs, or the born-again songs, and his musical styles -- folk and rock and blues and other variations on those themes --he tried so many." One of those styles, the blues, reigns supreme in Heine's interpretation. In the particularly innovative third chapter, From Beat Blues to Zen, Heine assesses the blues' enormous role in Dylan's musical upbringing, its connection to Zen, and the parallels between bluesmen and Zen masters.

"But the Zen angle is that, in these last few albums (Time Out of Mind [1997], Love and Theft [2001], Modern Times [2006], and Tell Tale Signs [2008], the albums Heine refers to as a revival period), he's not veering toward one extreme or another. He's putting forth a view that looks for an answer, and accepts that there aren't any answers. And that's the Zen moment," Heine said.

That philosophical "view", in Heine's analysis, corresponds musically with the blues genre. "In his heart of hearts, he's a blues singer, and he's said that in a number of articles," Heine said. By returning to his blues roots in the "revival period" albums, Dylan finds the sound of his middle ground. "Even in the early '90s, he put out a couple of low-key albums that were covers of old blues songs, no originals at all," Heine said. "What I think he was doing was retooling and going back to those blues roots."

Both Heine's Bargainin' and Dylan's Together Through Life were released on April 28th of this year, a synchronicity that Heine interprets as a warning sign; an indication of the slipperiness of pigeon-holing He Who Shall Not Be Pigeon-Holed. "He's got that line from the famous song, 'Visions of Johanna': 'Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're tryin' to be so quiet?'  Well my version is, 'Ain't it just like Dylan to put out a new album just when you've written a book that sums up his career?'", Heine joked.

But unlike the stymied British journalists in D.A. Pennebaker's seminal 1967 documentary Don't Look Back, who tried so desperately to peg the musician, Heine is well-aware of the difficulty in defining Mr. D. "Dylan is perhaps best known by aficionados and more casual observers alike for his Sphinx-like, about-face quality, whereby little or nothing [he] says or does can or should be taken at face value," he writes in a chapter entitled A Simple Twist of Faith.

Heine seems to find the difficulty of definition irrelevant. "I'm not asserting that he is a Zen master. That's not my point," Heine said. Many scholars who have written about Dylan and religion tend to lean towards examining the Judeo-Christian influences. "But the Zen perspective allowed me to put together a larger package in terms of his philosophy," Heine said.
 
Heine posits that even Together Through Life, though released too late to be massaged into his hypothesis, maintains his "Middle Way theme". When asked which album would best serve as a soundtrack to the book, however, Heine cites Blood on the Tracks (1975), featuring the song "Shelter from the Storm", from which the book's title is borrowed. In response to the quintessential music-geek question -- What's your desert island pick? -- Heine tips his hat to Modern Times, at least as his pick from the "Middle Way" period. "It's the one that really captures that sense of weaving back and forth between 'I want a truth, there isn't quite a truth, so I give up on truth, but I can't give up, I have to find a truth,'" Heine said. "But without bitterness. It's just kind of a calm resignation, which to me, has a Zen flavor to it."

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Steven Heine will discuss Bargainin' for Salvation at Ancient Dragon Zen Gate, 1922 W. Irving Park Road, on Saturday, August 1 at 1:30pm. Suggested donation $25, sliding scale available. Pre-registration appreciated but not required. To register or for more information contact: info@ancientdragon.org