Can We Allow Bob Dylan to Be Himself?

This was why Dylan thought it made sense to visit and play at the Tuscarora Reservation after he and his entourage performed at Niagara Falls. Ramblin’ Jack recounts: “Bob was seated across the table from me and said, ‘Do you remember Peter [La Farge]’s song about Ira Hayes?’” The film then shows Dylan singing the song from memory for his Iroquois audience. (Ira Hayes was a Pima Indian and U.S. Marine who helped hoist the American flag at Iwo Jima. After the war he struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder and died from hypothermia and alcohol abuse near his home in Arizona.) Mad Bear from the Tuscarora Reservation presents Dylan with a necklace whose beads, he suggests, might just be the same ones Peter Minuit is said to have used to purchase Manhattan Island from the Lenape. But he closes with the following words: “Somewhere along the line, something has failed, and we hope this country can straighten out before too long, because there’s many things that’s going to happen to shape not only this country but the whole world.”

Throughout the movie, Dylan wears white-face paint, a hat with flowers on its left brim, and a scarf, inspired in large part by the nineteenth-century mime Baptiste (portrayed in the legendary 1945 French film Les Enfants du Paradis),
while singing with unusual ferocity. Toward the film’s end, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter—the former middleweight boxer about whom Dylan wrote the eponymous song that helped free Carter from prison, where he was languishing on an apparently trumped-up murder charge—makes a smiling, voluble appearance, describing Dylan as a perennial searcher: “I always ask him, ‘Have you found it yet, Bob?’ And Bob says, ‘Yes, I’ve found it,’ but I know he hasn’t, because he keeps searching.” Dylan responds, “I’d say, ‘Well, Hurricane, I’m searching for the Holy Grail … and I am gonna search until I find it, like Sir Galahad.’”

Dylan’s official Instagram account quoted Scarlet Rivera, who asserted the following: “It was confirmed for me that I was with a living genius, on the level of Shakespeare of our time.” The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges imagined Shakespeare, on his deathbed, pleading with God, “I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself.” Dylan, like Shakespeare, has adopted many guises, which in his case have taken musical forms with theatrical aspects, some of them very painful for him. Perhaps, as the end nears, Dylan will finally achieve a whole and integrated self. We should hope. God bless.