Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

One of the songs on this album, “All along the Watchtower,” is aparticularly good song with which to begin our exploration of Dylan’s work.Jimi Hendrix did a heavy-rock rendition of it, making it perhaps the bestknown and most widely-heard song from the John Wesley Harding album.The song itself has the advantage of being short, a mere twelve lines. Evenso, it is an extremely powerful example of Dylan’s mystery-language. Butthere is yet an even more important aspect to the song that recommendsit as a good place to begin. For this song contains an essential insight intothe unmanifested dimensions of man’s being which is part and parcel ofDylan’s spiritual perceptions. A clear understanding of this song will go along way toward helping us unravel some of the many riddles that are setin Dylan’s lyrics like so many jewels in a tiara.Before getting into the song itself, however, I would like to make a fewgeneral observations about the song and about Dylan’s method. The song iscomposed in four stanzas: two quatrains followed by two couplets. The firsttwo stanzas relate a brief dialogue; then the third and fourth stanzas moveon to paint a single picture viewed from a double-layered perspective. In thissong, as with so many of his songs, Dylan has interwoven the obvious withthe not-so-obvious in such an artful way that individual spiritual activity isdemanded of the audience in order to penetrate the song’s meaning.By spiritual activity I mean not just listening or even thinking, butmeditation. If it is realized that this song is the product of an honest andinner, and even prayerful, questing for personal yet universal truth, it willnot seem surprising that this song requires an equally sincere and honestresponse from the whole man, from the inner as well as the outer self ofthe listener, before it will yield up its full import. As a built-in barrier, thisrequirement serves as something more than a mere defense: it invites spiritualcommunion.Dylan could easily be accused, as he often is, of merely playing aclever game of intellectual mystification if all he intended to communicatewas information wrapped in attitude. But what he is really offering is anexperience of intuitive insight. “All along the Watchtower” is so constructedthat a meditative listener is led gradually toward the experience of a particularintuition. When the listener thus “discovers” the meaning lighting upwithin himself, he has all the “proof” he needs of its truth. Argumentationis then beside the point. And in the process, the listener has become somethingmore than he was before, both by virtue of experiencing this intuitioncoming out of himself and by virtue of having exercised his capacity for freespiritual activity in attaining it.238