Course:Visions of Johanna by Bob Dylan
When you learn to sing a song, memorize and internalize it, wrap your body and your voice around it, it becomes your song. It's like this for me with Visions of Johanna, Bob Dylan's dreamlike masterpiece from an album of masterpieces, Blonde on Blonde. I covered it with my former bandmate in the early days of our collaboration, pulled out with the acoustic guitar at open-mics, parties, campfires. I sang it with my future-husband when we were just kids, in drunken midnight street-light a-cappella. The lyrics changed my idea of what a lyric could be. I tend toward tidiness and clarity. But Dylan's images are slippery, elusive, a handful of rain. They play tricks.
Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin' to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin’ you to defy it
It’s hard to say exactly what Visions of Johanna is about. The speaker considers two women: his lover, Louise, who is physically present, and another whose vision 'conquers' his mind, the absent Joanna.
Louise, she’s all right, she’s just near
She’s delicate and seems like the mirror
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Johanna’s not here
The ghost of ’lectricity howls in the bones of her face
Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place
Beyond this we encounter a series of riddling, cryptic meditations on proximity, time, permanence and guilt. The song feels like a mind cut loose to run wild, and this is reflected in the form.
And Madonna, she still has not showed
We see this empty cage now corrode
Where her cape of the stage once had flowed
The fiddler, he now steps to the road
He writes ev’rything’s been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain
While I know what it means to me, the song refuses to be pinned down. I love that about it. I love what it evokes: the intoxicating guilt of being with one person while thinking of another. Visions of Joanna is what it feels like to be haunted, and it's given me permission to keep some secrets in my writing, to hint and suggest and save something just for myself between the words. In this way, a poet can make space for their audience to howl in the bones of a song.