For more than sixteen years, I have been publishing a daily blog posting, and I have mentioned my list of "Memorial Songs" more than once. As I go walking around the town, I am, quite often, listening to those songs, which are being piped from my phone directly into my hearing aids. When it's time to say, "hello" to someone, or otherwise to engage in a conversation, I have to take out my phone, and shut off the music.
As I do listen to my playlist of songs - all but one by Bob Dylan - I am sometimes struck by something, by some meaning, that I hadn't really ever thought about before. Not too long ago, as an example, Bob Dylan's song, "I'll Keep It With Mine," gave me a new thought as to what Dylan was singing about. If you click the link just provided, I believe that you should be able to listen to Dylan sing the song. I have included the full lyrics, below.
Up until I had my latest thought, I had always focused on the following lyrics as the most important and central in the song: "How long, babe, can you search for what is not lost?" In fact, this is what so many of us do, don't you think? We don't see our lives as already "full," and "complete," but we labor through our years with the constant sense that something is missing: fame, fortune, love, or accomplishment, whatever it is. We are always "searching" for something that is "missing," that is "lost," and we might not even know, really, what that missing piece is - the one we are so desperate to find and acquire. Dylan's lyrics suggest that, in fact, nothing is "missing." Nothing is "lost." By defining our lives as our own creation, we constantly count ourselves and our lives as incomplete. But Dylan's lyrics suggest that this is the wrong way of looking at life. What if nothing is "lost," after all, and what if we should be appreciating all that we have, and are, instead of looking at our lives as deficient?
This is, I think (and I hope you agree), a pretty important insight as to one way that we should think about our lives.
I definitely continue to think that's true! However, I recently had another thought about, "I'll Keep It With Mine," and since my newest idea about the song relates directly to the title, I have begun thinking that maybe this is Dylan's "main point." The lyrics I am talking about also appear in every verse in the song, which is perhaps another indication that these particular lyrics are the key to the "main point" of the song.
Here are the lyrics I am talking about:
"If I can save you any time: Come on. Give it to me. I'll keep it with mine."
Our time and our life are equivalent, and particularly as one gets older (my own condition, precisely) a person is tempted to start getting very nervous about how much "time" she or he has left. "Saving" one's time is an effort to stay alive, to "keep on cooking!"
As I think I may have said before in one or another of my blog postings, I believe that Dylan's lyrics are often best understood as if they were coming from God, or the Creator. The person voicing the lyrics may be Dylan, but what's being said is coming "through," not directly "from" him. If the lyrics of "I'll Keep It With Mine" are to be understood this way, and our Creator is the singer, then the promise being made is pretty substantial. The Creator is offering to "save" our time, and to keep "our" time with the Creator's "time," which is actually beyond our own time, and is "Eternity" itself.
The two ways of thinking about Dylan's lyrics that I have just outlined are compatible, and both proclaim that "our" lives are not, in the end, self-generated and to be attributed solely to our personal actions and efforts.
Quite a nice little "Sunday Sermon," don't you think?
I hope so!
oooOOOooo
Bob Dylan, 1965
You will search, babe
At any cost
But how long, babe
Can you search for what’s not lost?
Everybody will help you
Some people are very kind
But if I can save you any time
Come on, give it to me
I’ll keep it with mine
I can’t help it
If you might think I’m odd
If I say I’m not loving you for what you are
But for what you’re not
Everybody will help you
Discover what you set out to find
But if I can save you any time
Come on, give it to me
I’ll keep it with mine
The train leaves
At half past ten
But it’ll be back tomorrow
Same time again
The conductor he’s weary
He’s still stuck on the line
But if I can save you any time
Come on, give it to me
I’ll keep it with mine
Copyright © 1965, 1968 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1993, 1996 by Special Rider Music
Image Credit:
https://coldcasechristianity.com/writings/jesus-is-evidence-that-god-exists/
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