"Do you know what it feels like to make some butter sculpture? Do you know what it feels like to actually ooze that butter around and create something of fantastic worth?"
Ah, the thrashes of a tormented poetical vision. This is pop hero Bob Dylan at his rhetorical worst in his book "Tarantula," which was re-released last week after a decade out of print.
Dylan's first published literary effort, written at the unripe age of 23, is a batch of meterless musings on American urban life in the 1960s. As juvenile as his poems may be, the "Tarantula" verses offer some slight insights into that spell of free love and flower children that modern eyes regard with a mixture of nostalgia, embarrassment and sometimes disgust.
Appropriately enough "Tarantula" too elicits all these emotions in the reader through a maddening inconsistency of phrase and metaphor, so integral to the sophomoric "deep thought" of the 1960's counterculture. "Life is not so simple after all ... in fact, it's no more than something to read and light cigarettes with," scribbles Dylan sophistically near the beginning.
He proceeds to obscure his work with a veil of nonsense which some readers, no doubt, will find delightful. For example: "do you / water your raisins daily? do / you have any raisins? is there / anything that does make sense / to you? are you afraid of twelve / button suits?"
Occasionally, Dylan is distinctly above average when his subconscious latches onto something interesting: "paint your shoes delilah," he writes, "ye walk on white snow where a nosebleed would disturb the universe ... ye just might change your way of sleeping on nails." Passages like these, besides bearing some kind of hazy depth, are fine proof of Dylan's keen ear.
Unfortunately, Dylan's keen ear too often seems to have been disconnected from his brain, and potentially powerful segments flounder at the hand of his hit-and-miss method. "The sky, changing into a sexy spaghetti odor" - a nicely unusual figure - degenerates into the ridiculous by what shortly follows: "Gonzalas, meanwhile, sports a can and tries to hide his korean accent / edgar allen poe steps out from behind a burning bush ... ."
Even if Dylan's meandering stream of consciousness frequently diverts itself to a stagnant pool or murky puddle, the book is at least structurally even. "Tarantula" alternates narrative with epistolary sections with a good degree of success. These chapters are often subtly linked to one another, producing two simultaneous storylines to build reader interest.
Themes in "Tarantula" are not exactly developed, but they do recur. Dylan seems to be preoccupied chiefly with Aretha Franklin, Adolf Hitler, sundry foodstuffs (fish, sausages and sauerkraut, to name a few), and less surprisingly, music in general. If we give him the benefit of the doubt, we might infer that he is deliberately trying to subvert the all-too-conventional wisdom of traditional verse with his bizarre devices and unrestrained style.
The more plausible conclusion, however, is that Dylan, in penning his Alice-in-Wonderland type of fantasy, has merely submitted to the narcotic Woodstock mentality.
One should remember that "Tarantula" is a 1960's artifact, and as such, representative of that indulgent period.
