Books: The last column

I have a couple of questions, if you don’t mind?

In 2016, when the Swedish Academy announced that Bob Dylan would receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, what did you have to say, if anything at all?

Perhaps you felt that the world had slipped a little, its anchor dragging across the smooth sand at the bottom of clear water, the lurch clouding matters, a vortex of debris muddling everything up?

Maybe, when a friend and fellow journalist whose judgement you trust tweeted out approvingly, shortly after the word from Stockholm, “Don’t think twice it’s all right”, you understood, then, with bedrock certainty, how the world was divided into two types? Namely: those with the capacity to vibrate along to the perfect pitch of certain immortal tinkerers with language – that is, those who understand what great poetry, great prose, great writing, great literature sounds like – and those who conflate the fugue states of musical delirium and mass cultural hysteria with a genuine encounter with art; and never shall the sensibilities of one cross the threshold and enter the realm of the other?

But despite this, did you touch the brim of your hat in Leonard Cohen’s direction after he said, in reaction to the news, “it’s like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain”, which carried the genuine pathos of a mortal who has locked eyes with the sublime and been forced to look away? It was impossible to dispute the truth in Cohen’s bitter utterance, wasn’t it? With one phrase he made the Nobel committee look small and pitiful, and also right, didn’t he? And Cohen’s deflating remark helped alleviate what was otherwise a ridiculous situation for world letters, just a bit, didn’t it?

Then – what of the award ceremony? You saw how the mountain did not move a millimetre, but sent, instead, the American ambassador to deliver his lecture, and fellow folk artist Patti Smith to sing one of his songs, right? And as you watched, and heard Patti Smith’s voice falter, and restart, and falter again, and restart again, groping through the wilderness of Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, with the world reeling from the shock of witnessing, the previous month, a syphilitic blight grip the absent Laureate’s homeland, did you find yourself awestruck at how the moment was made perfect by the mistakes, and transcended the times?

Well?

Lately I’ve been having a strange problem with my own voice, difficult to describe – can I tell you about it?

It now rings with a metallic edge, like I’m speaking across a sheet of aluminium foil, and the situation, apparently permanent, has led me to ask: is this one of those minor harbingers that points towards the shifting of the slope, the start of the downhill coast?

Like me, do you think: hell, probably not, get over yourself?

Did you know that some of the low hills you encounter in the veld, random humps approximately one herd of elephant across, which seem to have no reason for being there at all, are in fact enormous termite mounds smoothed out on top and reaching deep into the bowels of the Earth, and that these mounds move a few metres north, south, east or west every decade or so?

If the termites can do it, so can we, the tinny-voiced and non-mountainous, hey? Despite the lassitude, and the ache, and the paralysis from the helter-skelter scurrying of our own, ever-restless, internal white ants, we pick up our mounds and move them in unexpected directions, don’t we?

Did you ever pick up your mound and head with your wife to the Lensic in Santa Fe, just off the Plaza, in the middle of the week, to catch a live performance of Cat Power singing the songs of Bob Dylan’s 1966 concert at the Royal Albert Hall?

Was the setup for the first seven songs very much like Patti Smith’s setup in Stockholm, a singer and a guitarist pacing off a liturgy, almost floating away together in the theatre, Cat Power’s aching serenade reaching out from the foggy ruins of time to put her audience into a trance?

Did the alchemy of the lyrics sung by lighter voices – Patti Smith’s, Cat Power’s – finally corkscrew down into the clear water, quelling the swirls of loess and sand?

And did you buy the album at Cat Power’s merch table, somewhat guiltily ignoring the T-shirts on the table next to it – the ones with “1973” blazoned across them?

And the next evening, with the children home from school, did you put the record on after supper, as everyone gravitated towards their books, with the last of the summer breezes lazing through the house, Cat Power and Bob Dylan performing for the gleam of the late sun, which lingered to bathe in their music, your kids’ bodies a soothing weight as they put their legs up and leaned against you on the couch, burying their noses in their books and not moving for the whole of Side A – did you get drunk on every last drop of it all?

Well, did you? DM