My Heart’s in the Highlands.
In the imagined podium of great Dylan songs that I envision every Dylan fan constructs and carries within their own head, I hold ‘Highlands,’ the last track on Dylan’s 1997 album ‘Time Out of Mind,’ higher than many of the supposed hallowed classics. Even above, and forgive me, sacrosanct staples such as ‘Mr. Tambourine Man,’ ‘Ballad of a Thin Man.’ It’s an epic song in length and stature. A unique piece of writing, of a type Dylan had not attempted before or revisited since.
Cards on the table; I’m biased towards ‘Time Out of Mind‘ being the first Dylan album I bought new at the time of release. As a then 17-year-old, Dylan was a mystery to me. I had the Columbia Greatest Hits, but I couldn’t fathom that the voice singing ‘Don’t Think Twice‘ was the same as the one singing ‘Lay Lady Lay.’ I also had ‘John Wesley Harding,’ intrigued by the grainy black-and-white album cover from which Dylan peeked grinning, looking like a time traveller snuck into a photo from the 19th century.
On the ‘Time Out of Mind‘ cover Dylan appeared, not smiling, but equally looking like a sepia spectre, a man out of time. His cracked, aged voice, echoing as if from another time. His myth grew larger. For a misanthropic teenager in love with existentialist art, ‘Time Out of Mind‘ shaped my aesthetic. It was a meditation on mortality. A walk amongst the tombstones. Mired in mystery. I listened repeatedly, trawling its muddy river of semi-awake consciousness, decompressing my romanticist urges through all-night bluesy sessions of echo chamber despair. Tom Waits coined Dylan a planet to be discovered; well, ‘Time Out of Mind‘ is the sweaty wastelands, the mud plains, and seething swamp, the land of the all-night soul, a little across from ‘Oh Mercy‘ country.
Conversely, for an album of such morbidity, it represented a creative rebirth. Dylan out of the shadows and back to life to artistic and Grammy-winning success. Appearing off the back of a decade or more of critical indifference, ‘Time Out of Mind‘ was the album many thought would never appear; a legitimate great late masterpiece. Dylan, the now never-ending tourer, the erratic live performer, gnomish and incomprehensible, The cryptologist and crank who penned the ‘World Gone Wrong‘ liner notes, moaning mistrust to modern media and the myths and mythology of his own legacy.
This also the Dylan that almost “went to see Elvis,” following his hospitalisation the preceding year from a mysterious lung infection. But Dylan rebuked those who sought to reduce ‘Time Out of Mind‘ to a personal meditation on mortality, “People say the record deals with mortality – my mortality for some reason! [Laughs] Well, it doesn’t deal with my mortality. It maybe just deals with mortality in general. It’s one thing that we all have in common, isn’t it?”
The reduction that irked Dylan is perhaps over the misconception of who the ‘I’ is. It seems Dylan was not necessarily interested in the biographical ‘I’ but rather the universal ‘I’ that we all must relate to.
As throughout ‘Time Out of Mind,’ Dylan performs two acts; cataloguing both the universal complaint of man’s meaningless strut across the stage while also depicting the singular despair of the narrator’s journey. It’s a high-wire act most daringly accomplished on ‘Highlands.’ Throughout its 16 minutes, Dylan plays with confessional ‘I’—stretching into it wryly, performing an adept depiction of the absurdities of man’s existence, while all the while recounting an autobiographical tale. We later learned that several of ‘Time Out of Mind‘s lines were lifted from poems by punk rock renaissance man Henry Rollins (as identified by premier Dylan detective Scott Warmuth). For ‘Highlands‘ it’s not so much individual lines, rather Dylan paraphrases entire anecdotes, placing himself within Rollins’ shoes.
A passage from ‘High Adventure in the Great Outdoors’ recounts the following moment of internal monologue: “All these people in shorts and bikinis, having beers, playing volleyball on the sand, running around, laughing… Beautiful girls, all tanned and slim, smiling and talking with guys… they were laughing and talking just walking down the street, probably going to eat dinner and then go to a movie or a play… I would have traded places with the guy in a second.”
Which becomes, in ‘Highlands’ “I see people in the park forgetting their troubles and woes / They’re drinking and dancing, wearing bright-coloured clothes / All the young men with their young women looking so good / Well, I’d trade places with any of them / In a minute, if I could.”
Dylan leans on Rollins’ voice, Bukowski-esque and clipped. A hard-boiled response to the torture of everyday despair. It’s confessional poetry. It gives an urgency that doesn’t allow the matters to sail too far into the metaphysical. Dylan has adopted the confessional voice before, but the results have been arguably more overwrought (‘Ballad in Plain D‘), or pleasing but occasionally lyrically clunky (‘Sara‘).
‘Highlands‘ is a story song. A man wakes up; after a day, a week, a month… We don’t know. He’s alone. He goes down onto the street. It’s unusually quiet, seems like a holiday. He orders breakfast. He discusses art, eggs, and female literature with the waitress. He leaves back to the street and carries on down the road. In between, he dreams of the Highlands in the romanticised form of the Robert Burns’ ballad ‘My Heart’s in the Highlands.’
The story is a description of mundane circumstances filled with dead ends, red herrings, and jokes that fall flat. It’s an anti-story. Small theatre of the absurd, the off-cuts of a film noir, where the characters only walk around talk but don’t get anywhere. There’s little trace of Dylan’s trademark sneer. Dylan is not skewering anyone any more than he is skewering himself. What is being skewered is the absurdity of existence. If the joke is on anyone, it’s those scrutinising for narrative expectation. The default mode network to which the ‘Highlands’ narrator is also victim as he remains, “talking to myself in a monologue.”
Stories are a method of human survival. Shaping order from chaos. Archetypal patterns that route deep in the human unconscious, as Carl Jung would have it. The anti-story is a type of rebellion. The assault of the avant-garde. What is ‘Highlands‘? A story, a song? Theatre? A film perhaps? Less Casablanca, more Maya Deren’s ‘Meshes in the Afternoon,’ abstract, a repetitive daydream sequence, portrait of afternoon shadows. Deren explained of her work, “It does not record an event which could be witnessed by other persons. Rather, it reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience.”
It’s a subjective emotional experience. A painting then. A diurnal equivalent of Edward Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks.’ Light illuminating the dust motes. The figures isolated, the waitress and the man frozen within frame. Destined to be stuck for all time in this nowhere cafe. Drawn blank. This subjectivity leads to the conclusion that ‘Highlands‘ is a meditation on the existentialist complaint. Dylan’s writing has always featured an existential theme, but never so obliquely.
‘Highlands’ narrator recalls the notional figure described by Colin Wilson in his 1956 breakout book ‘The Outsider,’ where he catalogues the titular condition: “The Outsider cannot accept life as it is, who cannot consider his own existence or anyone else’s necessary. He sees ‘too deep and too much.‘” Wilson’s Outsider is incapable of reconciliation with the everyday world and, despite moments of peak experience and expression, suffers for his alienation. “He retreats into his room, like a spider in a dark corner; he lives alone, wishes to avoid people.” And… “The outsider is beguiled and bemused by the everyday.”
Or as the protagonist of ‘Highlands‘ would have it: “Feel like a prisoner in a world of mystery…” The Outsider feels too purely, sees too much. A walking open wound. A martyr to mystery with an innate awareness of the ephemeral nature of man’s existence. His insight brings misery. To him, the everyday world is filled with strangeness and unreality.
Wilson references Hermann Hesse’s ‘Steppenwolf,’ whose titular melancholic hero sees himself as “a wolf of the Steppes”, a figure set apart in a world that is incomprehensible and brings no joy. He feels ill-suited to ‘normal’ society, specifically because of his existence, and is aware of the duality within nature between high spirituality and the low animalistic self, leaving only the dissatisfying compromise of man’s nature in between.
“There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.” Steppenwolf discovers the Magic Theatre; a place of unreality that exists outside of time, within which he experiences the dissolution of self. The Magic Theatre is an invitation to the infinite. A sweet balm to the tragic feeling of life. In ‘Highlands,’ it’s the “Honeysuckle blooming in the wildwood air / Bluebells blazing where the Aberdeen waters flow…” Cool waters, a place of spiritual rebirth, outside of time and outside of mind.
In Leonard Cohen’s 2001 track ‘In My Secret Life‘, the retreat is within. He walks through the world with a heart frozen over to a society where “the dealer wants you thinking that it’s either black or white” and can only console himself that “Thank God it’s not that simple / In my secret life.” The Highlands, The Magic Theatre… The secret life, all invitations to the infinite. But Dylan says he will cross over to the Highlands only when he feels “good enough to go”. Perhaps the Highlands offer something more. Dylan, after all, is a believer in the “Chief Commander on this Earth and in the World We Can’t See”.
He is not Sartre but closer to the father of existentialism, Soren Kierkegaard, who was a Christian but one who challenged the absurd notion of blind faith. Still, Kierkegaard sought a deeper relation with that universe than atheism could bring, wishing to raise his ‘eternal consciousness’ and pass into infinitude. “What labels me, negates me” he said, and “People understand me so poorly that they don’t even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.” Complaints that are positively Dylanesque.
‘Highlands‘ is a walking song. We keep moving, as that is all we can do. Even at its most bewildering. The proverbial shark who cannot stop swimming even when it sleeps. Our lives pass like shadows on the wall. You can imagine this story as one of Dylan’s fabled escapes, the morning of a show, hooded undercover, exploring some unknown city. Stopping for a coffee perhaps. To see him or to be him. Life is absurd, alienating from either perspective.
We next heard from Dylan on the Oscar-winning ‘Things Have Changed.‘ Dylan becomes the Knight of Resignation. Accepting of his fate, accepting of the limits of understanding. Resignation becomes the noble substitute for faith; God is on the mountain top, the path unknowable. It’s a sweet vial of nihilism. The music is professional, the mood cold as ice, the intention crystal clear, Dylan “used to care, but things have changed”. It’s a great song but one that represents a watershed of sorts in Dylan’s writing. From here a certain professionalism takes over. A decade and more of highly focused musical output, that shot Dylan into a third act of unexpected popularity.
Love and Theft’ and ‘Modern Times’ are controlled and professional. Dylan found new methods to write with regularity, inspired by lifted lines and old-time melodies. The music is exquisite and carefully crafted, filled with masterful misdirection, nearer to Tom Waits. It’s artful theatrics.
Something is gained, something is lost. Mod-Bob is locked in tight and out of range. I would imagine he likes it that way. The personal polemics and pains of the man are less apparent. Just as we will most likely not get songs again such as ‘Sara‘ or ‘Neighbourhood Bully,’ there will almost certainly never be another song like ‘Highlands‘. It’s a glimpse behind the sunglasses, a unique and vividly realised late Dylan diary entry. Existential blues. A dispatch from the nowhere cafe. Sunlit and sepia, the narrator and waitress, frozen outside of time. But you can go there any time; the jukebox is still playing, and that’s good enough for now.
It’s kind of a throwback to very early Dylan “talkin’ blues”, like this one: https://youtu.be/a6jfKyuL44U
The Dylan I knew in the60s.