70. I and I

A man rises from his bed in the middle of the night and goes out walking. He thinks, he observes. He reflects. He keeps walking. He doesn't stop walking. And he doesn't come back home.

Though far removed from the surrealist mode of Blonde on Blonde or the Basement Tapes, and in terms of narrative more comprehensible than Blood on the Tracks with its frequent unexplained shifts of scene and character, I and I has a set of lyrics that’s impenetrable to me. The gloss I wrote in the first paragraph sounds like an allegory for life: the young person at some point leaving the family home to set out into the world on her or his own, never to turn back. An allegorical reading like this perhaps clarifies, to some extent, the last line of the last verse: “I make shoes for everyone, even you / But I still go barefoot,” the bard-narrator owning up to how much comfort and guidance his work has spread throughout the world, while acknowledging his own poverty in the realm of wisdom.

But a general ignorance is no barrier to love for the song—at least, not a large barrier. The truth is that I have come to like I and I more the more I’ve been able to comprehend certain sides of its spirit. But no matter how thick the fog between the heart of the song and us, here on our side of the divide there remain, ever accessible, the tone, the music, and the imagery, which in Eyolf Østrem’s words is “way up there in the league where angels sing.”

There’s something to be said for the eyes with which the narrator sees the world. He lies awake in bed, looks upon the “strange woman” sleeping beside him, and sees someone who “in another life, must have … been faithfully wed / To some righteous king who wrote psalms beside moonlight’s stream.” Imagine somebody seeing that in you! Talk about a person whose insights and conversation would be worth enjoying. And we get to spend a whole song with him. Good.

I and I is a song of contrasts and complexities; despite the woman sleeping so sweetly (“how free must be her dreams!”) the narrator says, “Not much happening here / Nothing ever does,” and goes out walking. But reflects a little more before he does, elaborating on his reluctance to stay, “Besides, if she wakes up now / She’ll just want me to talk / Got nothing to say…” We’re in the company of a melancholy seer, someone like the narrator of Ecclesiastes. Such richness in his gaze at the world, and to him it doesn’t mean a thing.

The fourth verse is my favorite. We’re back for a moment in 1979, “on a train platform,” where two men are “waiting for spring to come smoking down the tracks.” Instantly the narrator’s thoughts turn to apocalypse, as so often did those of the character(s) who narrated Slow Train Coming. As Björn Waller puts it, the narrator is “watching with pity the people who expect ‘spring to come smoking down the tracks’ even though he has told them exactly what kind of train is coming.”

Next comes a line I’d always glossed over until I heard Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show talk about Infidels on Jeremy Dylan’s “favorite albums” podcast (Steven, thanks for sending that episode my way) : “The world could come to an end tonight, but that’s all right / She should still be there sleeping when I get back.” I paraphrase Secor’s words, but he described these lines as among the most powerful evocations of faith that he’s ever heard. In other words: how confident is the narrator that the woman (a “strange” woman, no less; they barely know each other, in any but the biblical sense) will cleave to him, will wait for him, will be true to him? The world itself could come crashing to its halt, and she’d still be there. It really is an incredible thought to have: this is the same woman to whom he has “nothing to say,” whose conversation he wants to escape! None of it matters. No matter how wayward he is, how unkind or unlovable even, she will wait for him.

There’s faith for you, leaping straight out into the abyss.

Which links back, in some way, to his imagining her “faithfully wed” to King David. So immediately we get another complication: is it the woman that the narrator trusts so completely, or is it his own imagination? An imagination based on something physical, something that he saw with his own eyes—a woman sleeping “sweetly” in bed beside him… 

Now what does that remind me of? An ‘imagination’ that’s rooted in or based on real, felt experiences, but not itself necessarily tangible? That’s one way (of countless different ones) to think about religious faith. That’s someone meeting Jesus in “a cheerless room, in a curtained gloom,” and being changed forevermore.

But these are all just thoughts and guesses. And guesses are the only things I can bring to bear on the refrain, too. “I and I / In creation where one’s nature neither honors nor forgives / I and I / One says to the other, ‘No man sees my face and lives.’” It sounds awesome, that’s for sure. And Dylan sings it like it means something important. Perhaps it’s a contrast between the narrator’s own human and divine nature? For it’s certainly not easy for us humans either to honor what is worth honoring, or to forgive. And the stories from the Hebrew Bible about God needing to show Moses His back rather than His face, lest Moses be destroyed by the glory (Clinton Heylin cites Exodus 33:20 as the exact reference) suggest that the second image is about divinity, perhaps a reminder to the narrator of the divine nature of which he also does, or is also supposed to, partake.

At the end of Joey, the narrator says, “Someday if God’s in heaven overlooking his preserve / I know the men that shot him down will get what they deserve.” Seven years later, in another song from the Infidels sessions, Blind Willie McTell, we're told that “God is in His heaven (and we all want what’s His).” No more “if.” And here in I and I, the narrator spits, “Took a stranger to teach me / To look into justice’s beautiful face / And to see an eye for an eye / And a tooth for a tooth.” Having passed through the fire documented in the 1979-1981 albums, things up above no longer seem as simple and straightforward as they did in 1976.

The I and I on Infidels is amazing. The performances are brilliant, the mix fantastic. I don’t know what that gray electronic sound that whooshes over the proceedings a couple times is, but it’s pretty powerful. Sly Dunbar’s drums provide the walking beat to match the peripatetic narrator’s footsteps (I can listen to nothing but the echo on Sly’s snare and feel satisfied) and the guitarists play together and around each other with subtlety that continues to captivate me every time I listen.