All I can do is be me, whoever that is. —Bob Dylan

Live as if you were already dead. —Zen admonition

1. About the Dead Man and Dylan’s Names

Who were Elston Gunn and Blind Boy Grunt, Bob Landy and Robert

Milkwood Thomas, Tedham Porterhouse and Lucky Wilbury, Boo

Wilbury and Jack Frost—who was Sergei Petrov?

When the Swedish Academy gave him the Nobel, the grumps got huffy

and, wouldn’t you know it, the squares got hip.

Ah, but the dead man is the one who knows what it’s worth and what it’s

not worth, so too the performer who thought up “The Never Ending

Tour.”

The dead man knows that being a grownup means knowing that things

end.

The dead man understands in his bones that a lifetime is an interlude, not

yet a flagged sixteenth in a century of whole notes.

To bend the genres as Dylan did meant holding up the sky and spending

his reserves.

We do not ask for propriety when the music starts, nor for civic good, nor

do we await the return of sounds traveling a spherical universe.

We do not ask the music of the spheres to notate the progression of

dissonance to harmony and back—it would take forever.

Who is Bob Dylan, and who was Bob Dylan, and who will have been Bob

Dylan?

It is not incumbent upon the artist to know, nor need a witness come forth.