And watch the river flow.
Right now this is the right thing, young man Dylan sitting by old man river. (“But this ol’ river keeps on rollin’, though”.) No hurry. It’s got to be done sometime, why not do it then . . . You can muse as long as you like, for now at least, murmurously imagining (that, at least) that you might repeat yourself as a river contentedly does. To the unbitter end.
Watch the river flow
Watchin’ the river flow
Watchin’ the river flow
But I’ll just sit down on this bank of sand
And watch the river flow
The right kind of sloth, a good-natured indolence that acknowledges a realistic feeling for what life is like, had better be no more than a mood, something that must not harden into habit or addiction. So Baby, I’m in the Mood for You understands the link between being in the mood for you and being, sometimes, in the mood for vacancy:
Sometimes I’m in the mood, I ain’t gonna do nothin’ at all
But then again, but then again, I said oh, I said oh, I said
Oh babe, I’m in the mood for you
As printed in Lyrics 1962–1985, eighteen lines of the song each begin with “Sometimes I’m in the mood”, but this one, “Sometimes I’m in the mood, I ain’t gonna do nothin’ at all”, is the only one repeated. Very apt, too. “I ain’t gonna do nothin’ at all” – except just maybe say this again before long. This doesn’t happen as released on Biograph, where there are only four verses (plus an elaborated refrain at the end), in a different order and with different wording but with one excellent stroke, I must say: “Sometimes I’m in the mood, I’m goin’ to give away all my sins”. The innocent exuberance of the song ought to warn us against taking any of these moods other than lightly. Scarcely any sloth to give away, that’s for sure, despite “Sometimes I’m in the mood, I ain’t gonna do nothin’ at all”.
How light at heart the song is, to be sure, and what a contrast to the context within which A. E. Housman once imagined what a relief it might be to do (and perhaps feel) nothing at all. His characteristic letter is dated Boxing Day, 1930:
Between a Feast last night and a dinner-party this evening, I sit me down to thank you and your wife and family for their Christmas greetings and wish you all a happy New Year. Rutherford’s daughter, married to another Fellow of Trinity, died suddenly a day or two ago; the wife of the Emeritus Professor of Greek, who himself is paralysed, has cut her throat with a razor which she had bought to give her son-in-law; I have a brother and a brother-in-law both seriously ill and liable to drop dead any moment; and in short Providence has given itself up to the festivities of the season. A more cheerful piece of news is that I have just published the last book I shall ever write, and that I now mean to do nothing for ever and ever. It is one of my more serious works, so you will not read it.138
Housman’s is a stoically doleful challenge. The playful challenge is to convey a pleasure in leisure without being too too leisurely about it all. The word “lazy” – the only everyday term hereabouts – agrees to make light of the matter, easy-coming and easy-going. (Sin? “I say, ‘Aw come on now’”.)
Flowers on the hillside, blooming crazy
Crickets talkin’ back and forth in rhyme
Blue river running slow and lazy
I could stay with you forever
And never realize the time
(You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go)
“Running slow”: it is good of “slow” to be both an adjective and an adverb (The Oxford English Dictionary is no slouch in these matters), for this means that “slow” can preserve the proprieties and at the same time can keep the adjective “lazy” company. Not itself lazy, this, for all the predictable casualness by which “crazy” ushers in “lazy”. For there is plenty quietly going on: in the invoking of rhyme itself,139 and of the crickets working their little legs or wings off (for nature is not slothful, nor is the sloth); in the equable paradox of “running slow” (how slow would it have to be to no longer be running?); and in the assonance that is itself a form of staying, when “lazy” finds itself talking, three words later, with “stay with”. Laziness is prudently acknowledged and very prudently shifted: you’re not to think, my dear, that I’m the one that’s lazy, it’s the river that’s lazy. “And never realize the time”? But always realize the art, with honestly deceptive ease.
Winterlude, waltzing along on its skating rink, likewise takes its ease, but again not selfishly, since the song is in the unbusied business of giving ease, too, not just taking it. “My little daisy” effortlessly rhymes with “Winterlude, it’s makin’ me lazy”, and the ludic trick upon which the whole song turns – the telescoping of “winter” into “interlude” – depends on the mixed feelings that we have about such compactings. Lewis Carroll took out the patent on portmanteau words: “‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy’ . . . You see, it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word.”140 On the one (iron) hand, you might be sliding one word into another because you’re a busy man, packing for your business trip, in haste and under pressure, no time for both the words in full, economy of effort in the interests of economics (Federal Express takes too long, so FedEx it) . . . Or, on the other (velvet) hand, you might be smoothly idly sliding one word into another in quite the opposite spirit, not seeing why you should be expected to go through the effort of saying both “winter” and “interlude”, given that there is an overlap of the words, one word in the other word’s lap, relax, okay?
Either way, Dylan has a feeling for how laziness – which is how we prefer to think of sloth these days, making it lighter, less sodden – can be unlazily evoked:
And yer train engine fire needs a new spark to catch it
And the wood’s easy findin’ but yer lazy to fetch it
(Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie)
Off-hand, the off-rhyme of catch it / fetch it; you catch it, even if he couldn’t quite bring himself to fetch it. “And the wood’s easy findin’” – no excuse, really – “but yer lazy to fetch it”. Two ways of putting it, collapsed into one: You’re disinclined to fetch it / You’re too lazy to fetch it. Then we can hear the reducing of the effort down to the minimum. But you are too lazy to fetch it. Reduced to But you’re too lazy to fetch it. Further reduced, not just you’re to yer but too lazy to lazy. Can’t be bothered to say too right now, since I’m going to have to say to in just a moment. “But yer lazy to fetch it”.
All the Tired Horses
There is comedy in the thought that someone as up and about as Dylan might settle for what Keats called “summer-indolence”. Such comedy is in the air, even if the air is thick and heavy, in the first song on Self Portrait: All the Tired Horses. The wish to take the day off, surlily glad of the excuse of the heat (which even gets to the animals, you know), comes up against the faintly guilty acknowledgement that some activity or other does have a claim on you. The song consists of two lines of words, followed by a musing hmm sound that might be one line or two:
All the tired horses in the sun
How’m I s’posed to get any ridin’ done
Hmm141
– or rather
hmmmmmmmm hmmmm hmm hmm-hmm
This sequence arrives gradually from silence, and departs gradually into silence, and you hear it fourteen times. It’s that and that only. Oh, the orchestration of it varies and does some mock-pompous clowning around, but nothing changes, it’s just a matter of shifting weight while having to rest rather restlessly.
Dylan,