Bob Dylan - "I And I" Lyric Interpretation

Me too! A very odd thing for Dylan not to handle in a clearer way.

Thanks for the mention of "It's Alright Ma's" "Darkness at the break of noon!" I was thinking about the lines from "She Belongs to me:" "She can take the dark out of the nighttime/ And paint the daytime black," a song he seems to have had very much on his mind when he wrote "I and I." Maybe that has to do with the intense concentration on isolation. The woman in the song inspires nothing of the awe that the women (or woman--maybe Sara) he wrote about in that string of songs from '64-'65 ("Spanish Harlem Incident," "She Belongs to Me," "Love Minus Zero..."). And yes, these images of dark or black noon are all evocative of the crucifixion in their different ways.

The "narrow lanes" does sound connected to the passage in Matthew. Makes the choice (no choice, really for the singer) between stumbling and staying put even tenser--and more ambiguous. He can't stumble (no place to fall), but is it that he also can't stay still in the narrow lanes, can't walk that straight path of truth? Or is it that he is walking that path, a true one, but it's a path--for him--that offers no rest, requires endless forward motion but with no clear sense of where he's going?

L.

 

The tie-in to "She Belongs To Me" had never occurred to me - great catch.

The "I can't stumble or stay put" line also reminds me of The Grateful Dead's "The Wheel" - "The wheel is turning and you can't slow down, you can't let go and you can't hold on, you can't go back and you can't stand still" - in certain situations even inaction is an action (a choice).

The righteous path does require constant effort for the narrator ("the call of the wild is forever at my door, want me to fly like an eagle while being chained to the floor"). Without a pro-active approach, the narrator will surely backslide (Satan always has another woman for him).

It's also occurring to me for the first time how much "I And I" shares with "Ain't Talkin'". The narrator, out for a walk in the merciless world, with nothing to say but loads on his mind to share with the audience.

 

You're right about "Ain't Talkin,'" although it's a more contented stretch of the long lonesome road. Maybe contented isn't the right word, but it's not a song in which the singer is singing out of a crisis. Maybe it's "post-apocalyptic?" After all, apocalypse means "revelation." Something about his essential nature has maybe been revealed to the singer of a lot of Dylan's later songs, and he sings in the voice of someone who has accepted it. Maybe that's why the tone and practice has been so similar for so long? There hasn't been a new Dylan, after all, in more than 20 years, just that voice pacing the same road and wearing a steadily deepening groove down the center of it.

L.

 

Geez you guys are masters at dissecting lyrics. How much drugs (and which ones) did you do or did you NOT do in your early days? This is an excellent conversation, by the way. I loved reading every contribution, thanks

 

I've been mainlining poetry since my late teens. Daily habit.

L.

 

Agreed, point well taken. The Dylan of "Not Dark Yet", "Highlands", "Things Have Changed", "Ain't Talkin'" and numerous others is post- ... something. Post caring? Post holding out any hope? The Dylan of "I And I" is isolated and disappointed in himself but he had yet to give up the ghost.

To get back to your earlier point about the fleshed-our female characters of 1964-1965, it's revealing that the "strange woman" in "I And I" is made of cardboard. He knows (and/or cares) so little about who she really is that he invents a past for her. In his eyes she is apparently blameless and "free", although they've committed the very same act (a male double standard at work?) He can leave for hours upon hours and she'll still be there waiting in the same position ... sort of like the furniture.

 

No drugs, honest. Just decades upon decades of listening, mostly. And the refusal to date women who say "Who cares what it means, it's just a song!"

 

I'm still searching for my main line.

 

I have also enjoyed the discussion here. I'm just wondering if maybe the "strange woman" sleeping in Bob's bed is being interpreted too literally. What could this be a metaphor for otherwise? I have no answers.

 

I'm open to ideas, but I can't think of anything that would apply. Throughout the Gospel period issues of the flesh seemed to be a major concern of Bob's. i think it makes sense that a one night stand would elicit such a strong response of self-reflection and recrimination.

 

Ouch! man, you musta been lonely often!!!
that was my misogynistic moment of the day

 

No, there are plenty of smart women out there who appreciate song lyrics.

 

I don't think she's a metaphor, although she is certainly symbolic of something. In other words, she's meant to be taken as a literal woman in the world the song represents, but the way she's described, and the situation suggest some symbolic meanings.

I have to say, however, that I don't get a sense that the speaker's problem is rooted in recriminations about the sexual aspect of the relationship. I don't think he feels guilty or sinful over that. I just think he knows that the encounter, however pleasant it might have been earlier, however lovely she looks in her sleep, hasn't broken through his isolation, given him something that's more intimate and maybe abiding, something that would do more than lift his essential loneliness for more than maybe a passing few hours--and not even during that time, really. To paraphrase Cohen, the night was fine....for a while. So his self-reflections and recriminations are, I think, about that. Why is he like this? I thick that's the reason the song has so little investment in the reality of the woman. That's key to the singer's experience and his problem.

L.

 

Don't forget that Dylan is the King of double entendre. In many of his songs (like this one) he's actually telling two stories using the same words. The woman in the song is definitely more than one subject, one most likely being an actual person.

 

We're going to have to disagree on this point. Guilt and self-recrimination over a one night stand seem almost too pedestrian to write a complicated song about, but the numerous examples I keep pointing to in his other work in this period show that it was a big concern for Dylan. I do agree that the narrator feels loneliness and isolation and this relationship does nothing to assuage either. Given a chance for a connection, he's got nothing to say.

The narrator's apparent (to me anyway) concerns with controlling his carnal desires brings another song to mind - one by Dylan's fellow "religious" Wilbury, George Harrison. For all his other religious concerns, George seemed far less concerned about sex (in his case, sex outside of his marriage). The "preacher" in "Horse To Water" could almost be Gospel era Bob:

There's a preacher out there warned me about Satan
Could be that he knows him
'Cause he acts like he's possessed
I said 'Hey man let's hear about God realization
For a change'
He said "We ain't got time for that
First you must hear the evils of fornication"

 

I don't see the woman as 'made of cardboard' in any way.

She has multiple lifetimes, she once owned the world, and she survives the end of this world as well... "the world could come to an end tonight... she would still be there sleeping''.

She certainly has a life outside of Dylan... she seems to come and go as she pleases ..'been a long time since' she 'slept in his bed'...

When she is 'wed' to kings they seem to have the gift of writing songs....or maybe certain types of songs.. do 'righteous kings' write righteous songs?

I see the woman as the key to the song.

 

I disagree. We don't know that the woman is ANY of those things. The narrator speculates on what she might have been in previous lives simply by looking at her sleeping. I suggest that he speculates because he doesn't know a thing about her.

It's been a long time since A strange woman has slept in his bed - not THIS strange woman (and if they had slept together before, it would certainly be odd for him to refer to her as a "strange woman").

The "righteous king" (David) did write "righteous songs" (David is sometimes credited with composing a large portion of the Book of Psalms) - but he also stole a woman (Bathsheba) away from her husband, impregnated her, and then tried to manipulate the situation (granting her husband a furlough) to hide the result of his actions. David eventually confessed to God and as punishment his child died shortly after birth. More guilt and self-recrimination over the inability to travel in the "narrow lanes".

 

Bob Dylan wrote righteous songs at one stage...

 

David did more than that. After Uriah (the husband) kept refusing to sleep with his wife during the furlough (it was traditional for warriors to abstain from sex during active duty), he arranged to have him placed on the front lines of the next military action and left more or less exposed to the enemy. It worked, so David was also a murderer. Punishments, denunciations, and severe recriminations (including, traditionally, the composition of certain of the psalms) ensued.

L.

 

Yes, and the 3rd verse reflects back on that period, but I don't that addresses the question about what the song does or doesn't tell us about the woman or why. It seems clear to me that he imagines those past lives because of how sweet she looks to him sleeping there. There's no indication that what he says about her is true beyond giving us a vivid sense of how sweet she looks to him right then. We just don't know anything about her beyond that. It does, however, tell us important things about him, including the implication that the situation she is in with him is different from owning the world or being "faithfully wed" to a righteous king.

It's also pretty clear that however worthy he might have at one time felt of being able to write righteous songs and "divide" the word of truth, that's not how he feels at this particular moment and not what the song expresses.

L.

 

i'm enjoying the insights provided by these close reads,
i ' m inclined to lean towards the rastafarian tie - ins, but
for global interpretation, simplicity is key.

duality and duplicity are the main themes
an 'I' of the contemporary world, coming to terms with or going to battle against
an 'I' that is part of the large river of the universe, intrinsically equipped with proper, universal morals, etc,
and the conversation, or lifetimes of a gap between the two. the divide is not so far for a person who's taken
Dylan's trajectory. Both or all are in us, occasionally they transect or approach each other. if they don't, there are probably some memorable dreams that occur, and I think that dream is what the song is.

 

I think it's a matter of how you want to fill the spaces the song leaves open for implication. I'd incline more to what you're thinking and feeling about the situation in the song if the speaker actually reflected on a sense of sexual guilt. There's no question that the situation allows us to think that that might be animating him, but it seems to me if that were as central to the song as you're suggesting, it would--and certainly could--have been expressed more explicitly.

The fact that the speaker says nothing about it directly beyond the general sense that there's something inadequate and, as I've said, fallen, about the situation ("falleness" includes the difficulties of sexuality, but it's not identical with it), suggests that other things are more important--and it's a striking absence, given, as you rightly say, he's explored sexual guilt and the temptations of the flesh fairly explicitly elsewhere.

I wonder if the strange woman knows how to foxtrot, lope, and pace.....

L.

 

I do agree that he is no longer a righteous king, but the backstory is an important history to the internal conflict which the song describes, and hence the role of the woman in verse 1 seems important to me.

We do know something more about the woman from verse 2, that their relationship is now sterile, or at least unproductive 'nothing's happening here' and that he doesn't like to talk or to look back to 'whatever was' - well Dylan's told us that a thousand times.

So verses 1 and 2 insofar as they present the woman, her hypothetical background, and their current sterility are all part of the backstory for me. In verse 3 he looks back again, to a turning in the road and an unfamiliar path he took.. well we know that Dylan has continued to change creative paths, the move from folk Dylan to rock Dylan being perhaps the most abrupt but there have been others.. (including pushing rock Dylan off his bike, the Christian years etc).

Verses 4 and 5 show us that he is still on that path, that he still walks that dark road, where creativity comes at a high price, and that it has dangers - noontime (in this instance) and midnight are border points in Dylan songs and 'the world could come to an end tonight'.

At the end we've established that making shoes alludes to his creativity, and that although he has made 'shoes' (and will continues to do so) for everyone , even 'you' ( i pretty much never see the 'you' in Dylan's meaningful work as being his audience.. i'm not certain here whether the 'you' is the man i call the Dylan twin.. the other 'I"..ie the performing Dylan, the worldly Dylan however you like to describe him , maybe the woman but i suspect not, or even the other usually presented as female 'you' who appears in so many of his songs about his artistic life and who is the source of his creativity) he is still barefoot himself... he still needs spiritual replenishment , he has to continue on that path because the quest is not, and can't ever be , satisfied - ' Tonight you got the power to take it, tomorrow you won't have the power to keep it'..

So, as others have said above, I see this as about the spiritual conflicts within the creative artist.... i don't hear a religious struggle despite the language and allusions, but I recognise other interpretations exist.

 

I agree with most of that. It not that she's not central to the song. There's no doubt she is, it's just that all we know about her is his imagination of her and the details of the present situation as they feel or seem to him. We don't know anything about her actual past life as an individual outside of his response to her. That's very different from her not being important--or for that matter her not being evocatively described.

The only thing I don't agree with is the idea that "whatever was" alludes to the past of this relationship in particular. Again, I think she's "strange" in the sense of "unfamiliar," someone with whom he has no past beyond whatever happened earlier that day and/or night (or at most some very short period of time). So what he doesn't want to talk about would have to be his own past or hers. In other words, he doesn't want a relationship because, as you put it so nicely, there's something sterile about the situation. But I think it's the present situation that he finds sterile, not a relationship that has a past. What he wants no part of is the process of tying the present situation to his and her individual pasts, which is of course one of the first things you do when you want a relationship to have a future.

Certainly by the end of the song he has chosen not to go back to her. He just keeps walking into the next day. She recedes into the "whatever was"--about which in the end he has nothing to say--even to us.

L.