Driving past the IFC at the break of dawn a few weeks ago, the words DYLAN SCORSESE ROLLING THUNDER REVUE caught me, but by the time I’d gone to the market, had 5 cups of coffee, and driven all over Manhattan, my early morning siting had faded into a possible hallucination.  A few nights later, the same words show up on my TV, and I immediately begin watching.  What do I see the first time? The magical flowers hat, of course, in its many iterations: new flowers every night tucked into bouncing baby’s breath and maybe a feather; Scarlet Rivera pronouncing “Mud-dy Wah-ters”– her cadence of speaking as if she’s receiving a direct transmission from another dimension; Bob Dylan driving the tour bus; Allen Ginsberg’s vulnerability; the rest of them all playing fast, hard, and agitated, like the speed or coke or maybe just Mick Ronson is one step ahead of them, and they’re frantically trying to keep up; Bob Dylan’s KISS-mocking hippie Kabuki sincere whiteface, his blue eyes blazing inside of heavy black eye-liner; a rotating community; Patti Smith stealing the show, and she wasn’t even in the band.

I took a screenshot of her spoken word sequence and sent it to you. Patti: our secret saint.  You reporting to me on her from your quiet place backstage.  A setlist. A witness to her vitality, her lapses, her spitting into the crowd.  She mattered, and from her began a long list of other things that actually mattered, but that is a different story.  I sent you the picture, and you, not having seen it yet, admitted that it took a minute to realize you weren’t looking at Mick Jagger.  Like a Rolling Stone. Cranky old Dylan in the new footage in regular pancake make-up claiming he can’t remember anything about Rolling Thunder and practically hissing that: “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Or finding anything. Life is about creating yourself. And creating things.”

What I saw the second time: wilting irises, gerbera daisies. Scorsese’s packaging.  The opening sequence is an old-timey magic trick.  The full title is Conjuring the Rolling Thunder Re-vue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese. The clues he gives us: this is a re-view of Dylan.  I can’t imagine anyone falls for the interviews in the new footage, but in the editing of the first ten minutes: Dylan/Patti/Ginsberg, I saw the framing of an argument for Dylan, the shy winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, too.  (“Someone’s got it in for me/they’re planting stories in the press.”) Patti in an East Village bar swimming in an oversized flouncy white button-down shirt and black jacket. Impossibly confident in total Rimbaud mode talking to the crowd Jagger-faced, Jagger-armed, hands holding her head together: “You know like how the ground was in 16th Century Japan?” Everybody knows, right?  She tells us: “It was black and green like a  chessboard. So the archer was walking on the black part.”  The poem slides into a rhythm: “Started walking/in another direction/started walking/in another dimension/He moved in another dimension/I MOVE IN ANOTHER DIMENSION/I MOVE IN ANOTHER DIMENSION.” (An early draft of ‘Ain’t it Strange’?)  Still no music, but she starts to move. Starts to clap her hands. Her voice shifts from reading to singing. The guitar comes in, “And he kept on walkin’. And he walked real slow.” Cut to Dylan walking to the stage. Back to Patti: “He was the first archer.” Dylan. Patti: “In rock and roll.” Dylan walking up to the stage, carrying his guitar, magical flower hat in place, pulling on his black leather jacket: “He walked to the Palace.” Dylan on a beach fumbling around with a trumpet like a court jester: “HE TOOK BIG STEPS/HE TOOK BIG STEPS.” Angry-faced whiteface Dylan. Scarlet on stage by his side.  Patti’s little bird arms fly up: “He freed the elements.” Extreme close-up of Dylan sliding up to the microphone. “A hurricane just burst from his hands.”  And we’re back in the tiny room applauding for her, Dylan watching respectfully.  I close my eyes, playing back the way you shake sound waves into storms.  (“And it’s all about diffusion.”) So many hurricanes from your fingers. Passing through me, through the room. Over my skin as I take the little bundles of toilet paper out of my ears. More. Please. I open my eyes, and Buddha Ginsberg is passing out beers to his little gang. (“When I’m there/ she’s alright/ then she’s not/when I’m gone.”)

I finally watch the reading of Dylan’s speech in absentia at the Nobel ceremony. A woman reads that he thanks the academy warmly.  She reads that he assures them he is there in spirit.  (“I wish I was there to help but I’m not there/I’m gone.”)  He says that when he received the shocking news that he had been awarded the prize, he began thinking about Shakespeare.  From a Nobel Prize winner, this feels too easy and somehow too grand. You’re ambivalent about accepting this thing but you’re comparing yourself to SHAKESPEARE? My eyes start to roll back in my head. But he explains himself: “His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. ‘Is the financing in place?’ ‘Are there enough good seats for my patrons?’ ‘Where am I going to get a human skull?’… I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare’s mind was the question, ‘Is this literature?’ ”

I also listened to his “Lecture in Literature.”  Buddy Holly. Leadbelly. Ancient ballads. Country blues.  Appalachian ballads. Cowboy songs. Stagger Lee. And a lot of your comrades had been wrapped in white linen. Don Quixote. Ivanhoe. Robin Crusoe. Moby Dick. “All Quiet on the Western Front is a horror story. This is a book where you lose your childhood, your faith in a meaningful world, and your concern for individuals.”  None of his sources are hanging out on a shelf somewhere. They aren’t a collection. They animate his waking life.  This is how we listen to records and how we talk about them. You send me something and tell me Sonny Sharrock, and I go back and forth between the two of you for days until I can hear the reference and the difference. I make you books on tape. We listen, not to be able to provide a catalogue, but to create one.

After the scene where Ginsberg passes out the beers, he’s on the beach describing the tour: “Sort of like a con man carnie medicine show of old… His idea is to show how beautiful he is.  To show how beautiful we are.  By showing how beautiful the ensemble is.  To show the actual community.  Which is the way life is.  The life of poets is.” There’s a beautiful scene where Dylan and Ginsberg go to Kerouac’s grave, and they both know poems from Mexico City Blues by heart.  Patti. Dylan. Ginsberg. Scorsese is showing us: this is the way the life of poets is.  Or maybe, this is the way the life of poets was.  And later on, Sam Shepard tells a very similar story about Shakespeare:  “And then he wrote those fuckin’ plays.” i re-watch Patti stumbling on “Hard Rain” at the Nobel Ceremony. She was the brave one. She went in his place. Every time I watch it, my face is hot and wet with tears. More mundane matters to consider and to deal with. It’s not about finding yourself. The archer was walking on the black part. And I lost her hesitating.  Are we finding or creating? Already sad, I make Maggie drive with me to see Big Pink. Strange in its actual presence. Strange for there to be a sort of there there.  We pushed past the “No Trespassing” warnings.  I thought about tiny motorcycles and ancient lucky recording devices and a man who was probably wearing a white scarf.  She said you want to stay? I said if you want me to, yes.