Bob Dylan and the art of ageing

Click here to watch Fakhry's video introduction to the talk - with a commentary on Dylan's life and career so far.

The Titanic sank on 14th April 1912, on its maiden voyage.

100 years later – 50 years, almost to the day, since the launch of his own career – Bob Dylan released an album, Tempest, whose title track commemorates the sinking of the great ship. 

In 13 long minutes Dylan paints a picture of lives tragically cut short, taking us through the hours in which the reaper slowly, methodically carries out his task. The song is gripping, its gaze grim, harrowing and unflinching. Yet, there is unmistakable compassion in the telling; it is a work of beauty, the culmination of what has come to be thought of as a whole new phase – a late flowering – in the creative life of this extraordinary artist.

The theme of my presentation is that Tempest can be seen to reflect a deep engagement with the emotional reality of the artist’s own declining capacities, leading inexorably to death.

Drawing on psychoanalytic perspectives on later stages of psychic development – e.g. Erik Erikson and Elliott Jaques – I use lyrics from earlier phases of Dylan’s career to show how it is the depth of his engagement with the process of mourning that has laid the foundations for this late flowering.

I suggest that echoes from this lifelong inner journey can also be heard in the lyrics of Tempest, and that it is his remarkable ability to articulate in his work an oscillation between paranoidschizoid and depressive ways of being that has honed the capacity to engage creatively with the painful challenge of facing ageing and death. Identification with the artist’s aesthetic capacity may, unconsciously, put the listener or fan in touch with, or deepen their emotional involvement with, these difficult facts of life. 

I hope to illustrate points I make with short excerpts from Dylan’s songs.