Bob Dylan - "I And I" Lyric Interpretation

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by RayS, Aug 17, 2015.

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  1. lschwart

    lschwart Senior Member

    Location:
    Richmond, VA
    Yes. That's in part how I see his specifying "in creation." The nature of the creature, a fallen one in the Christian schema, can neither honor nor forgive, and when the creature sees itself truly, it can't bear it, let alone do anything about it. It can't honor or forgive, but given conscience (the "knowing with") by grace, it can judge, discern or "divide the word of truth." The problem isn't seeing so much as getting the will to act on what it sees. In Christian thought, the fall is a much bigger problem for the will than it is for perception, although it's thought to have affected perception too.

    L.
     
    Last edited: Aug 17, 2015
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  2. lschwart

    lschwart Senior Member

    Location:
    Richmond, VA
    He had a spell of re-engagement with his Judaism, and with Zionism, too, at the time. Not a rejection of his conversion, but a turn toward the Judaic. One way of being a Christian.

    L.
     
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  3. Thievius

    Thievius Blue Oyster Cult-ist

    Location:
    Syracuse, NY
    This is just Bob's way of saying he got lucky last night. :laugh:
     
  4. lschwart

    lschwart Senior Member

    Location:
    Richmond, VA
    Yes. Followed by a very long walk of shame.....

    L.
     
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  5. lschwart

    lschwart Senior Member

    Location:
    Richmond, VA
    One thing I'd really like to say about this song is that I love the recording on Infidels. The drum sound is maybe a little bigger and more processed than it needs to be, but the piano and electric guitar parts, and above all the vocal are so good it makes no difference. The whole thing has a terrifically spooky, desolate sound that is perfectly evocative of the story the lyric tells. Knopfler just shines on this track. I'm not sure what's going on in the chord progression (someone with a better grasp on that can comment), but it's a very effective cycle of chords, there's movement and drama, but not a lot of tension, and that fits the stillness of the story, in which not a lot happens beyond someone getting up in the night and then walking alone and never returning or meeting with any sort of crisis except the ongoing inward one he carries with him.

    And it's really one of Dylan's great vocal performances. Every syllable feels carefully weighed, and yet it all flows with an effect of expressive spontaneity. It's the cumulative effect of little things, like the way he stresses "my" in the first line, or stresses most, but not all the repetitions of the "e" sound in the second (a pretty amazing assonant chain). The hint of complaint in "nothing ever does;" the way that that rhymes both in sound and inflection with the way he spits out "whatever was." The pain expressed along with awe in the way he sings "beautiful" in the description of Justice's face--a painful recognition (like he's staring into that face for just a few bearable seconds, wincing before he has to turn away). Above all, there's the way he improvises a higher harmony line above the usual talk/sing melody when he comes to "Someone else is speakin’ with my mouth, but I’m listening only to my heart." Dylan does that sort of thing often enough, but it's not always as powerful as it is here. This particular harmony line he sings is something he used a lot on the 1981 tour, but I don't know of that many instances of it in the studio.

    More about the lyric later tonight.

    L.
     
  6. RayS

    RayS A Little Bit Older and a Little Bit Slower Thread Starter

    Location:
    Out of My Element
    I think you summed this up very well. The studio track has a certain claustrophobic quality to it, and Bob's vocal captures the despair in the song well. You did a very nice job of hitting the vocal high points.

    Dylan's folks are diligent in their quest to limit what can be found on YouTube, so the earlier version of the track is not readily available for linking here. The echoing guitar effect in the original is probably better dropped, and I think "smoking down the track" replacing "or for something to crack" was a major upgrade to the lyric.
     
  7. Muddy

    Muddy Large Member

    Location:
    New York
    Would it be terribly ignorant of me to suggest he may have found the inspiration for this song from speaking with Sly & Robby?
     
  8. RayS

    RayS A Little Bit Older and a Little Bit Slower Thread Starter

    Location:
    Out of My Element
    Dylan is typically vague: "One year a bunch of songs just came to me hanging around down in the islands."
     
  9. jeddy

    jeddy Forum Resident

    I seem to remember reading that Dylan hadn't gone back to Jewdaism but that he was in Israel for his son's Bar mitzvah? and the photos of him with the scullcap and at the wailing wall etc. was just him being jewish in Israel . He is jewish after all...
    Also outside of his concerts at the time there was always the "jews for jesus" assemblers milling about with their pamphlets...

    The whole "returning to Judaism" thing was really propagated by the press.
     
  10. Shem the Penman

    Shem the Penman Forum Resident

    Location:
    Pittsburgh, PA
    Interesting discussion, can't add much about "I & I" but I've always liked how "Sweetheart Like You" takes what seems like a rote premise and turns down on all these paths of patriotism, class, business, politics, etc. It makes me think there's something more going on there. But what? Like how if you take "As I Went Out One Morning" at face value, it almost seems crass with a story about two guys & a kept woman, but if Tom Paine is the Tom Paine and the woman is America then you've got something totally different. Don't mean to derail or get into a political thing cause I'm not even that invested in that aspect, but deep Dylan is always good stuff.
     
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  11. MaximilianRG

    MaximilianRG Forum Resident

    Listen to the song with Dylans Transfiguration in mind. Thats what the song is about.
     
  12. lschwart

    lschwart Senior Member

    Location:
    Richmond, VA
    So, about this lyric.....

    The song opens with the singer, it seems, talking to or musing to himself at night, after, it makes sense to assume, having made love to a woman he's only recently met. She's asleep, he's restlessly awake. She has something that seems sweet and free to him (sleep), something he can't have.

    It's worth pausing for a moment to consider the nature of his address. As the song reveals, he's in a state of isolation, more than just loneliness. That's implied right away by the fact that he's awake and his lover is asleep, but then the rest of the song reveals that his state of isolation is much more profound than that, as he wanders off aimlessly and alone through the night and far into the next day. At least on a subconscious level raises a question: why his he talking? We're usually pretty quick to assume what I assumed in my first sentence: that he's just "talking to himself," thinking about things (about her, about what he wants to do, what he's done in the past, what he sees on the long walk he ends up taking). But the last line of the final verse reveals, late in the game, that he's actually addressing a "you." Not someone in the house with him or walking with him, but someone he senses is there and addresses, even if he's knows it's just his imagination: a sharer or companion to which he can and does address his innermost thoughts. That could be God, given the song's investment in biblical allusions, and that would make the song into a particular kind of confession. But in the line that reveals the "you," the singer says that he makes shoes for "even" this you (he makes them for everyone, even this "you" who I suppose we should say isn't someone you'd expect him to make shoes for). I suppose it's possible that that could still be God, but I think there's another possibility that makes richer and more consistent sense. The you can be us, that is the song's listeners, making the last line of verse 5 a moment in which the song reveals what it's really most centrally about. In the way art is often self-referential, it's about itself, it's own making and what it means to be the maker of such things. Dylan is no shoemaker, he's a songwriter, and the song's figure for life is walking. Songs are to life what shoes are to walking, they make it possible to bear it out longer with less pain and wear. So this guy is a maker of shoes who himself goes barefoot, an artist who makes things that others can use, but that he cannot.

    Back to the story: It's the first time he's had a "strange" woman in his bed in a long time. He describes the woman in idealized terms, imagines what her dreams must be like from the way she sleeps, how she seems to be someone who lived an extraordinary life before this one. This one, the life he shares with her when she's awake as opposed to the one he imagines she has in her dreams and in a past life, has its sweetness (one mark of which is the beauty that makes him think about this at all), but also, as the song goes on to reveal, it has a large measure of loneliness and restless imperfection. Sex is obviously one available solace (after all, there must be reasons she's in his bed), but this doesn't seem now--and won't seem once the song is over--like the kind of thing that's likely to have a lot of sweetness going forward. It won't look in the end like it has much of a future at all, given the surprise at the beginning of verse 5. Up to that point it seemed like he was going to get back before she wakes up, but verse 5 reveals that his walk extends into the next day and shows no signs of ending at all. Down that long lonesome road, and where he's bound, he can't tell.

    But before he decides, as he does in verse 2, to get up and leave her there while he goes for that long walk, there's a slow-motion crash into the chorus, which turns things up a notch poetically and introduces the psychological and theological questions we've already raised in this discussion:

    I and I.... In creation where one’s nature neither honors nor forgives
    I and I.... One says to the other, no man sees my face and lives

    More later.....

    L.
     
  13. cc--

    cc-- Forum Resident

    Location:
    brooklyn
    I've found this a tough song to get into... in a way, the '80s-current, tech-heavy production supports just the kind of bleak, alienated imagery that the lyrics create. In another way, though, that makes it hard to pick up on the subtleties in Dylan's vocals that L. writes so carefully about. Some of Dylan's very human, spoken-style variations get lost in the mechanical tones that make "Jokerman" and "License to Kill" work as anthems. Dylan sounds uncomfortable, almost wanting to get the song over with--which goes against the static quality that's also been noted.

    I kind of wish he had different lyrics for the repetitions of the chorus, as he so often does (although not much if at all on this album). It would make the song more aurally interesting. I agree that the lyrics call for a kind of self-examination, an honesty that's unpleasant. It's interesting that the dominant emotion I get from Dylan's vocal tone is not anger, but disgust.
     
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  14. Criminy pete

    Criminy pete Forum Resident

    Location:
    Eugene, OR
    I and I is a Rastafarian credo, am I right?
     
  15. culabula

    culabula Unread author.

    Location:
    Belfast, Ireland
    Not a credo as such, but just part of their ideals....they replace "we" with I and I believing it more fe' true, seen?
     
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  16. Criminy pete

    Criminy pete Forum Resident

    Location:
    Eugene, OR
    Yes, true. Are you Rastafarian?
     
  17. culabula

    culabula Unread author.

    Location:
    Belfast, Ireland
    That would be a solid 'no' .
     
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  18. In "Changing of the Guards" he sings

    Gentlemen, he said
    I don’t need your organization, I’ve shined your shoes....

    Shoe festish, maybe? Just kidding
     
  19. RayS

    RayS A Little Bit Older and a Little Bit Slower Thread Starter

    Location:
    Out of My Element
    Joking aside, I think there's validity in mentioning this lyric:

    Apart from shining shoes, he's also moved your mountains and marked your cards. He's performed the servile and the impossible while also (apparently) breaking his own moral code. It certainly seems that these claims are aimed at his audience, just like making shoes for the unnamed "you" while he himself goes barefoot.

    If he could stick his hand in his heart and spill it all over the stage, would it be enough?
     
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  20. lschwart

    lschwart Senior Member

    Location:
    Richmond, VA
    I agree that "Changing of the Guards" is a relevant analogue for "I and I," another in the string of self-reflexive songs Dylan has written over the years. But it does come from a more confused moment in his artistic life--before he tried taking that "untrodden path"--and the mode of expression is much more occulted than it is on the Infidels songs that share in the theme.

    For me, the best gloss for "I and I" from the Infidels songs is this pair of lines from "Jokerman:"

    Shedding off one more layer of skin,
    Keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within.

    L.
     
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  21. lschwart

    lschwart Senior Member

    Location:
    Richmond, VA
    Unfortunately for him, no, it would not be enough.

    Although of course any one or two songs (take your pick) is actually more than enough.

    L.
     
  22. RayS

    RayS A Little Bit Older and a Little Bit Slower Thread Starter

    Location:
    Out of My Element
    In thinking about "I And I", this song keeps coming back to me. A very straightforward description of the temptations that Bob felt we would be facing. "I And I" seems to be about having failed to avoid these temptations.

     
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  23. lschwart

    lschwart Senior Member

    Location:
    Richmond, VA
    A couple more comments:

    I think we've covered the key things about the song, but there are two odd things about the lyric that we haven't discussed and that have always puzzled me. I'd don't know if they're puzzles that can be worked out by tying their details to a pattern I haven't noticed yet (or come context I'm not aware of) or if they're just flaws.

    The first one is pretty mild and comes in the second verse, where the singer is explaining that he thinks he'll get out of there and go for a walk. He wants to avoid conversation with the woman. I like the strange way he describes his sense of what happens (or doesn't) in that time after sex. And, of course, his having nothing to say to his lover, "'specially about whatever was," is a common thing for a singer in a Dylan song to claim (a version of "don't look back," although here it's turned on himself as artist/lover in a darker way--it's not at all clear he's got everything he needs--and it resonates with "I can't stumble" in the final verse, a tense version of "she never stumbles, sh'es got no place to fall"):

    Think I’ll go out and go for a walk
    Not much happenin’ here, nothin’ ever does
    Besides, if she wakes up now, she’ll just want me to talk
    I got nothin’ to say, ’specially about whatever was

    And this again crashes into the chorus in a dramatic and satisfying way. The problem is that in the next verse he starts doing exactly what he just said he doesn't want to do. He starts talking about what was (in this case the "untrodden path" he once took--or is that took once?). The best I can do with that is to consider what it means that he can't bear to talk about the past with her, but that he can and does readily talk about it to us, the "you" revealed in the final verse. That almost works for me, but maybe not quite.

    The second one is more jarring to me. In the fourth verse, the singer, after the very beautiful and evocative description of the men on the train platform "waiting for spring to come, smoking down the track" (I agree with Ray on how good a revision that was), we get an apocalyptic statement that gets Dylan in the same corner we found him in in our discussion of "Shooting Star" a few days back in the "Dylan's Worst Lyric" thread:

    Outside of two men on a train platform there’s nobody in sight
    They’re waiting for spring to come, smoking down the track
    The world could come to an end tonight, but that’s all right
    She should still be there sleepin’ when I get back

    I and I...

    Noontime, and I’m still pushin’ myself along the road, the darkest part
    Into the narrow lanes, I can’t stumble or stay put
    Someone else is speakin’ with my mouth, but I’m listening only to my heart
    I’ve made shoes for everyone, even you, while I still go barefoot

    In an earlier post I discussed the surprise that comes with the discovery, in the final verse, that he never went back that night but is instead still walking into the afternoon of the next day (this particular daytime, painted black). Key to the effect is the way the 3rd and 4th lines of the 4th verse set us up for it. They suggest not only that he intends to go back home before she wakes up and leaves, but that he's confident about her being there, and that this somehow makes the possibility of the end of the world OK. That doesn't add up for me. In the context of a song like this (not to mention in the work of an artist who had produced 3 records of bible-infused Christian songs over the preceding few years), the idea of the world coming to an end has to bring the full blown end-of-all-things to mind, and that jars against the mundane function it seems to have here. If the world ends, she won't be there sleeping when he gets back.

    Not sure what to do with this one. Seems like an odd thing to nod about in a song like this.

    L.
     
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  24. mfp

    mfp Senior Member

    Location:
    Paris, France
    Threads like this is why I love this forum. :love:
     
  25. RayS

    RayS A Little Bit Older and a Little Bit Slower Thread Starter

    Location:
    Out of My Element
    Thanks for the thoughtful and evocative post.

    First off, I must say after 30 years this is the first time I ever noticed the (intended or not) callback to "It's Alright Ma" - where we have darkness at noon. Of course that noontime darkness occurred when Jesus was crucified.

    The "narrow lanes" appear to refer to the path of righteousness:

    "Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. " Matthew 7:13-20

    Dylan could be referencing this verse, particularly since he apparently utilized it for "When He Returns" ("Truth is an arrow and the gate is narrow that it passes through.")

    Someone else is speaking with his mouth ... is "someone else" also sleeping with strange women? The other "I" - the one not travelling the "narrow lane"?

    It's truly interesting that the "it doesn't matter if the world ends tonight" stance that we were just discussing in "Shooting Star" appeared here first. The fact that it appears twice in Dylan's lyrics within a 6 year period lends it some import. Why is the man seemingly obsessed with the End Times not concerned about the apocalypse? I wish I had a good answer!
     
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