I’ve been writing a bunch of short stories that past couple weeks, and somewhere along the line I ran into this 60 Minutes interview with Bob Dylan. It’s got me really thinking about what being a creator means (I started to type “artist,” but I don’t know that it’s the right word. I like “creator,” though. I suppose the difference doesn’t matter, though).
Since finding it, I’ve listened to it three or four times.
Dylan is a remarkable person, an enigma, of course. He is a creator/artist beyond all things, and I think this is what makes him so hard for people to understand–I think he ties into things that move him, and he puts those things on the wire. He lets them free, regardless of his personal attachment to them. And, listen to him. Sentence by sentence. Almost every phrase he utters has a unique depth to it. Almost every word he uses has a purpose. People understand him because his ability to cut cloth into the exact shape it winds up in is so pristine. And so a lot of people followed his lead–a lead that Dylan himself never wanted or expected, a lead, in fact, that Dylan doesn’t even really see. At one point in the interview Bradley says, “… but some of your songs did stop people cold, and they saw them as anthems, and they saw them as protest songs, It was important in their lives, and sparked a movement, I mean, you may not have seen it that way, but that’s the way it was for them. How do you reconcile those two things?” And Dylan’s response is so … lucid … so lucid, but also so hard to comprehend without really separating things inside you, without parsing your intellect so crisply from your emotional self.
Think about that a little.