Can you let deadly calm possess you?
Can you let stillness confess its wordless secrets
On this windless morning?
You want to give everything,
But you have nothing to give.
You want to be yourself,
But do you know who that is?
You do not want to speak,
But you expect to be heard.
You do not want to be swayed,
But you demand to be stirred.
Can you let the river of unknowing stir you?
Can you let mystery endure amidst the empty uproar
On this wind-strewn afternoon?
You want to get out of here,
But you don’t know which way.
You want to say it all so clearly,
But you don’t know what to say.
You do not want to weep,
But you’d love to be honest.
You do not want to be surprised,
But you demand to be astonished.
Do your unending demands astonish you?
Do your own offending hands admonish you?
Feel the wind die down in the early evening.
Even it does not pretend to acknowledge you.
You want to change everyone else
So long as you can remain the exact same.
You want the world to be different
So long as you don’t have to feel any pain.
You don’t need to be with anyone
So long as they all want to be with you.
You are just fine with being all alone
Just so long as you are being pursued.
Can you let happiness pursue you?
Can you get out of your way long enough
To let the wind that picks up at dusk
Cut you back down and pull you through?
You want to remember how it was
So long as it was better back then.
You want to imagine how it will be
So long as it gets better again.
You don’t want to stay stuck here
So long as there’s someplace better to go.
You don’t mind stickin’ around
So long as someone here still enjoys your show.
Can you feel the agony of all your divisions?
Can you kneel over every one of your tragic decisions?
You open the window, no wind blows inside.
In the darkest part of the motionless night,
The silence pierces you with deadly precision.
He’s out on the road, to break out of the mold
He vows he will never come back
He feels under siege, like his soul has been seized
His very lifeblood is under attack
She rides off into the night, rides on out of sight
A prisoner of longings and dreams
She has to get near to what she can no longer hear
Before it all comes apart at the seams
The truth can’t be heard, it lies beneath the word
The rooster now crows at midday
The grass won’t stay down, it grows while we drown
In all too predictable ways
The wino is out on the curb, he takes another swill
As men full of hate smile broadly and proclaim goodwill
And the sick man’s got no money to pay his hospital bill
He hears the spokesperson shout, ‘Have no fear!
The long-awaited remedy will soon be here!’
Now the market has crashed, the city is being thrashed
By sellers and buyers and thieves
He looks to the east, there’s no sign of the peace
That all the fighting was supposed to achieve
She takes a look inside, where the true war resides
And nothing in there makes any sense
Everything’s gettin’ harder, no one’s any smarter
The inaugural address is being given in past tense
The future can’t be heard, the past is lost in the words
Of a writer who doubts he can last
The strong have long gone, the spectacle drags on
With actors who have all been miscast
The fashion model is fired for the pound she is overweight
While her car gets impounded for the minute she is late
And as the romantic wiles away the time waiting for his soul mate
He hears the spokesperson shout, ‘Have no fear!
The long-awaited remedy will soon be here!’
“We have named this type The Individualist because Fours maintain their identity by seeing themselves as fundamentally different from others. Fours feel that they are unlike other human beings.” (https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-4/)
In the next few posts, I will look at Bob Dylan as an Enneagram 4. If you don’t know the Enneagram, I suggest reading the above link or checking out a book on it from the library. One of the best ones I’ve found is Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery by Don Richard Riso (http://www.amazon.com/Personality-Types-Using-Enneagram-Self-Discovery/dp/0395798671). That book goes over the levels of each type, from healthy to average to unhealthy, the relationships that can occur between different types, and the wings of each type, as well as other Enneagram functions. The book is ideal for explaining the incredible complexity of the Enneagram with words and concepts someone who has never heard of the system can understand.
I cannot pretend to explain the Enneagram in full, but I will try to explain some of it as I go along. I did some research on Dylan as an enneagram 4 for a presentation I gave in a psychology class on personality, but I will go more in depth with it here. Because of an unfortunate circumstance, I now have a lot of time on my hands. I thought I would use the time productively and write, part of why I’ve written more in the past week than I probably did in the month and half prior. This will be a sort of psycho-biography on Dylan through an Enneagram lens. I am not sure how many parts it will have.
Bob Dylan was born in Hibbing, Minnesota, a middle-class town in middle America known for its coal mining. Dylan’s 4-ness was evident from the start. In most of the Enneagram books, the author explains how childhood events lead to the forming of a certain Enneagram type. I’m of the opinion, though I have no evidence to back it up other than personal experience, that people are born with an Enneagram type and childhood experiences are only used in order to explain the way we already were before the experiences occurred. For the Enneagram 4, the childhood story is usually some sort of abandonment, whether physical or emotional, some sense of not being understood, of being disconnected. “Fours are disconnected from both parents. As children, they did not identify with either their mother or their father” (Riso 1988). This is a massive generalization and cannot possibly be true for all 4’s. However, the generalization does seem to ring true for Dylan. He was not physically abandoned—In fact, he left his family and hometown at 18—but he did have the felt sense of not being understood. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Dylan says, “Sometimes your parents don’t even know who you are. No one knows but you. Lord, if your own parents don’t know who you are, who else in the world is there who would know except you?” And in his autobiography Chronicles Dylan writes, “My father was the best man in the world and probably worth a hundred of me, but he didn’t understand me.” There could be few clearer expressions of the Enneagram 4 stance. ‘Worth a hundred of me’ hints at the distinctive 4 self-renunciation and ‘he didn’t understand me’ directly states Dylan’s feeling of being different from others and misunderstood.
Because 4’s feel some sort of disconnect with their parents—or unrelated to their parents—some sort of disconnect in general, the main goal of 4’s becomes to understand themselves, to turn “to themselves to discover who they are” (Riso 1988). Or, as Sandra Maitri puts it in her insightful book The Spiritual Dimension of the Enneagram, “Like a boat loosed from its moorings, the inner experience of a Four is of being a separate someone who is cut off from Being and set adrift…at root is loss of contact with Being. What is left is a sense of lack and of lostness…There is a great longing to reconnect, to become anchored again in the connection that has been lost” (Maitri 2001, p. 139). In understanding themselves, in reconnecting, the Four hopes to “not feel so different from others in the deep, essential way that they do” (Riso 1988). Introspection is necessary for self-understanding but it can also result in excessive self-consciousness, which further separates the 4 from other people. In time, the 4 begins to “develop a sense of ego identity based on their difference from others”; They begin to focus on how they are unique and ignore or simply do not notice the ways they are similar to other people. “Being ‘unique,’” Riso writes, “feels like one of the only stable building blocks of their identity.”
Dylan’s obsession with uniqueness is evident in interviews and songs. Unlike some 4’s, Dylan succeeded in an impressive way with this primary 4 goal. No one who listens to his songs can say he is ordinary. In his autobiography, Chronicles, which is apparently not an altogether truthful account of his life (not exactly a rarity for a 4), Dylan writes, “Billy [From Columbia] asked me who I saw myself like in today’s music scene. I told him, nobody. That part of things was true, I really didn’t see myself like anybody” (Dylan 2004, p.8). Whether or not this conversation actually occurred (Dylan wrote the book more than 40 years after the fact), it is a striking example of the 4 stance: ‘I didn’t see myself like anybody.’ And it was probably true that Dylan didn’t see himself like anybody in popular music. He ended writing songs like no one else was writing or could write and playing music in a way no one else was playing.
Even the way Dylan (born Robert Zimmerman) decided on a name fit with the viewpoint of the 4. “There already was a Bobby Darin, a Bobby Vee, a Bobby Rydell, a Bobby Neely and a lot of other Bobbys. Bob Dylan looked and sounded better than Bob Allyn.” There were already a lot of Bobby’s, so Dylan chose Bob. To make a probably harsh and fictional comparison, this is the same thinking a certain Tom Riddell had when he changed his name. There were already so many Toms. The name was so…common, so ordinary. Most likely Voldemort had a 4-wing; but his drive for power, notorious fame, and recognition are closer to the viewpoint of the pathologically unhealthy 3. I will save that for another post, however. It would be interesting to look at Harry Potter through an Enneagram lens.
In the next post, I’ll continue discussing Dylan through an Enneagram lens, getting into his early career and his struggles with identity, a 4 preoccupation.
And here is a song by Dylan that beautifully expresses aspects of the 4 I haven’t touched on yet: pain and melancholy. The lyrics also speak of disconnection:
“Well, my sense of humanity has gone down the drain
Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain
She wrote me a letter and she wrote it so kind
She put down in writing what was in her mind
I just don’t see why I should even care
It’s not dark yet but it’s getting there”
My soul is broken until all souls can be bound together,
Yet each soul can remain a separate and unique manifestation.
My soul breaks when I see another broken soul.
Did I say another?
My soul breaks when I see soul, broken.
My soul will continue to break until there are no broken souls.
My soul breaks for the loneliness of the human condition,
The sense of separation we all feel from each other,
And from the truth of ourselves.
My soul breaks for and is mended during the journey we must all undergo
From separation to connection,
From apartness to closeness,
From painful loneliness to the unburdened aloneness
That we feel when we connect to and accept ourselves in our entirety,
Realizing the wholeness within that has been there all along.
My soul is not mended yet.
My soul yearns to be broken and shattered,
It yearns to be overtaken and sink under,
It yearns for years of suffering.
My soul yearns to be unbroken and whole,
It yearns to be given over and rise above,
It yearns for years of joy.
It is a soul full of desire.
It desires also not to desire,
How can the soul not desire that?
Will the soul be broken until it no longer desires to be unbroken?
Will the soul be broken until it is no longer?
Does the soul remain after it is no longer broken?
Was the soul ever unbroken?
Is the true nature of the soul unbroken and whole?
Questions, questions:
The soul is curious about itself,
It is a mystery to itself,
It is restless until it rests in itself,
It seeks until it finds itself at rest.
Will the soul ever be at rest?
Is the nature of the soul restless?
Or is the nature of the soul at rest,
And it is only restless until it finds itself?
How can the soul find itself?
Questions, questions:
The soul is curious and restless and the soul is broken.
The soul breaks when it feels the spirit of another broken soul,
The soul breaks down in weeping and fills up with joy,
The soul breaks, it yearns to be broken and to be unbroken.
The soul will continue to break until there are no broken souls.
Why does wilderness therapy work when other therapies don’t work? The word is wilderness. No person is healing another person. No one is the healer, no one the healed. Out in the wilderness, away from everything that makes it necessary to need healing, healing comes naturally. It doesn’t even look like healing, like recovery. In wilderness, recovery is not the final goal. What good is recovering what you have lost if you don’t uncover anything new? The wilderness allows for uncovering in addition to recovery. You begin by recovering the aspects of yourself that were lost to the addiction, compulsion, mental disorder, whatever. Then you begin to uncover aspects of yourself that you had never known about. You uncover aspects of yourself that do not belong to you alone. You uncover aspects of the world that also happen to be aspects you share. You recover the fact that you are capable. You can hike many miles in a day, you can make a fire, make a shelter. You can survive; you are worthy of your existence. You uncover the fact that you are more than capable, more than worthy. You discover a power that has nothing to do with superiority over other people; you discover a love that cannot be expressed, a love that comes into you from nowhere and out of you towards no definite object; you discover a sense of belonging that does not need to be identified and has nothing to do with other people. You discover the stillness at the heart of things, and in your own heart. You wake up the morning after the storm, and all the trees are still standing. You look at them and feel their strength, their robust aliveness.
The wilderness heals when words fail. And don’t words always fail? Ain’t talking, just walking. Let us walk together through the woods, both of us pilgrims, “searching ones on the speechless, seeking trail.” What are we seeking? If we knew, would we be speechless? Perhaps we would. Don’t we seek life, and is it true that life also seeks us? It certainly seems that way. Each person is sought by life, let’s call it, to give what only that person can give. We are sought and called in order that we might call back in answer, ‘I am here, and I will remain. I am here to answer the call of the one who seeks me, the one who I seek.’ And is it one who I seek? It could be one, it could be none, and it could be many. I seek the place where the one are many, and the many are one. I seek the place where there are none but myself and yet I am not the self I thought I was. Not another soul is there, but is that the truth? I seek the place where I become no one. Nemo. Everett Ruess disappearing into the red rock canyons.
What does it mean that wilderness therapy works? Is that the right word for it? Yes. This is Gurdjieff’s Work here, the work of awakening, of becoming one’s authentic self. Do you think you are already yourself? Maybe you are, I couldn’t know that. I know I am not, not completely. I am a fragment of the whole self. There is always further to go, more work to be done. I’m not there yet, but in the wilderness I do not worry about being not there. Where am I not? Where I am not is unimportant. Where I am is what matters. Being where I am is how I move towards who I’m not yet, who I could be.
Of course, there are moments of despair even in the pure clean air. There are moments of despair everywhere. Nothing we can do to escape those, especially when we’re in the wilderness. Where to go? What to say? What to do? Can’t drink, can’t get prescribed anything, can’t drive through the night, can’t rob a bank. Just keep walking, I suppose. Walk straight into it. Will the despair pass through and away like a storm from the east? Who knows? No use in minimizing it, rationalizing it, idealizing it. No use in talking about it at all. Ain’t talking, just walkin’. But even in the wilderness, that strange human desire for verbal utterance is still there. Very well, speak then. But it is important to choose your words carefully. The human words must somehow do justice to the inhuman beauty of the place. This is exceedingly difficult, and oftentimes it is better to melt into the silence. To become a part of the inhuman we become inhuman ourselves. Inhuman not meaning ‘unfeeling’ or ‘cold’ or ‘cruel’, but as defined by the poet Robinson Jeffers in his philosophy of Inhumanism: “A shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence.”
To become part of the inhuman, we must not focus so much on the human. What was your relationship with your parents like? With your romantic partners? What do you remember about the trauma you suffered at age 7 when your parents accidentally packed you tuna for lunch, forgetting that you preferred pb + j? Well, I think I was enmeshed with my parents, or maybe abandoned by them. All my romantic partners left me, or maybe I left them all. The trauma with tuna, I think, is still affecting me in a deep and significant way today, as I instinctively recoil whenever I see anything remotely fish-like. Whatever. These human questions and answers fade into insignificance in the wilderness, as they deserve. They are not integral to The Work.
What is integral to The Work? Jeffers knew it. It is integral that we recognize the beauty of the inhuman world and feel a part of it. Recognize the human and the inhuman within us. Envy and equanimity. Anger and serenity. Vanity and authenticity. Fear and courage. The jealous, prideful, and possessive love, and the detached, humble, object-less love. The desire to fade into the shadows and the desire to be pierced with and surrounded by light. The passion for success and recognition, the continual striving; the sea receding from shore in the night, the vast sky overhead filled with light.
Often it’s best to be silent
When all around you are speaking,
To be like a captain out at sea
In the midst of storm:
Calm but deeply focused.
People may say:
Don’t be passive,
Speak your mind,
Come out from your shell.
These people misunderstand
Your stillness for passivity,
Your silence for fear,
Your depth for a protective shell.
They may ask:
What are you thinking?
What are you feeling?
Why don’t you share?
Why don’t you join in?
Are you shy?
Are you upset?
Let these questions come and go,
These people do not understand you.
They want to draw you out onto the surface
You need to be drawn back down into the depths.
They want you to be light and cheerful,
You need to be true to how you are truly feeling.
They want you to be who they want you to be,
You need to be who you are.
They do not understand
That underneath your calm surface intense storms rage,
That saying nothing does not mean you have nothing to say,
That spoken words and surface forms mean little or nothing to you,
That you would prefer to spend your days with the silent desert,
Your nights with the wordlessly powerful sea,
Hours of darkness passing in you like winds through a tree.
You are the captain of your own ship.
Why should you let anyone else captain your ship?
In the midst of storm,
You remain calm but deeply focused.
In the midst of fire,
You remain cool but not cold.
You let your emotions run their course
In the complex inner rivers of your heart and mind.
In the midst of the earthquake,
You remain steadfast and unshaken.
In the midst of the hurricane,
You remain the eye that observes
Without being disconnected from what you observe.
You remain the eye to be connected with the more-than-I.
So when the next person asks:
Why don’t you talk more?
When the next person says:
Don’t be so passive,
Speak your mind;
When the next person tries to draw you out onto the surface,
Tries to pull you up like a prize fish from the deep, still water…
Well, now it’s gotten dark
I got nothin’ to do
I walk wistful through the park
Wishing I could stop thinking of you
I stop in a teashop and find an empty chair
I look around and observe the scene
I try to absorb the tension in the air
Feels like not a soul in the place is at peace
Some people are on computers
And the rest are on phones
A few people sit by themselves
But no one lets themselves be alone
The lone man is suspect
The lone woman rare
I can’t help but detect
Insanity in the air
Abstract paintings on the inside walls
A real life hobo sleeping out on the curb
That cute cashier could be my downfall
I’d get up and talk to her if I had the nerve
All I wanted was to see it through
Now all I want is to be left alone
All you wanted was for me to be with you
Now all you want is to be well-known
The hobo sings a mournful dirge
The woman next to me gives a mighty sigh
I think how we three will never merge
And how difficult it is to be unified
The hobo is suspect
And brought to despair
Does it pain you to detect
The insanity in the air?
Bright college girls talking about their travels
Something about it all is making me sick
I wonder how quickly I can unravel
I wonder if anything I’ve learned will stick
Wish I had a pair of sweatpants
Seems like they’d be nice to wear
I feel like melancholia
Has got me in a trance
It won’t let me go or stay anywhere
I go outside and stand on the corner
I’m trapped and wrapped up in cyclical thought
I feel like some lonesome wordless foreigner
His only claim to fame a spot-on jump shot
The foreigner is suspect
The native is ensnared
Everywhere I go I detect
Insanity in the air
Thought I had something for a second
Well, I lost it fast
Tomorrow the weather will be sunny, I reckon
While I’ll feel frozen in the heartless past
Thought maybe things would be different
All I know now is that I was wrong
You know I can feel awfully deficient
Wherever I go I’ll never belong
I’m watching people and doubt their actuality
I’m watching myself slowly slip away
I thought I’d get better acquainted with reality
Now I wake up disgusted with the break of day
Everyone is suspect
Especially the solitaire
Tonight it’s clear and so direct
I can almost touch it
The insanity in the air
For the mid-morning light that streams through the window as I write this,
Making even the cobwebs that span the length of the windowpane beautiful,
As they both reflect and let through the light,
Allowing the spiders to reside with me in this space.
For the chance to sleep in a bed, rising without alarm, when the body feels rested.
For melting snow that falls from cabin roofs
As sun warms January mornings in Arizona.
For the meeting I went to last night,
Men and women talking about falling,
About rising,
About warming up to themselves,
About connecting to the Source of all warmth itself.
There is much to be grateful for this morning.
For the bike I may ride later today,
For the physical strength I feel when riding,
For the time spent climbing up the steep grade,
And the time spent rocketing down.
For the time spent with those in the process of climbing up a steep grade,
For their path of salvation through pain.
For the hard and harsh road, the rocky road, the blocked road.
For all those who feel blocked and stunted,
For the passion and fire hidden in them that will not die,
For those who do not know who they are or why they are,
For those who knew and then forgot
And now are forced to seek to remember.
For memory:
Remembering late-May days spent on Delaware beaches,
Remembering late-December nights spent on black couches with cousins,
Remembering laughter and good food,
Remembering tears and good-byes.
For departures:
For sitting still on a train that is moving on,
For the westbound train that moves to the sea,
For the southbound train that moves to the desert,
For the northbound train that moves to the forests and mountains,
For the eastbound train that moves back to the hometown.
For arrivals:
For the restless excitement felt in a new place,
For the opportunity to uncover new facets of oneself,
For the sense that life is beginning anew.
Gratitude also for the sadness that underlies the excitement,
For the future departure that is attached to each arrival,
For the thoughts and feelings that come
When one stays moving, remains a traveler, an eternal transient,
Just passing through.
I am here to better understand why I am here
I am here to come nearer to what cannot be understood
I am here to suffer through three or nine unclear years
I am here to recover the silent knowledge for good
I am here to hear why I am here
I am here to be steered by the voiceless and lost
I am here to wait until a voice becomes clear
I am here to dance ’til the spirit stands aloft
I am coming to say less
Coming to mean more
I’m leaving to remember
What it is I’m living for
I came to marry memory and hope
I left to seek the unexplained
I returned to listen for the unheard note
When I leave,
I’ll lose
All I’ve strived to gain
I am here to better understand how I got here
I am here to stand still, listen to the creek flow by
I am here to let go of an illusion I’ve held dear
I am here to hold on to a truth that is not mine
I am here to see clearly what else is here
I am here to return, to remain, and to move on
I am here to look for home, like a dispossessed seer
I am here to turn towards an ever new dawn
I am coming to say less
Coming to mean more
I’m leaving to remember
What it is I’m living for
I came to listen for silence,
I left to speak softly with rain,
I returned to marry stillness and chaos,
When I leave,
I’ll have lost
All I strived to gain
I am here to better understand why I am here
I am here to give shelter, here to bring storm
I am here to feel the sun as the clouds disappear
I am here as the snow melts, as it loses its form
Not all passion can be seen
Not all love should be known
I can’t tell you what it means
When no one knows where to go
All I want is to want no more
All I can take is distance and lack
No one remembers where they’ve been anymore
No one makes it forward
No one goes back
Take it all far away from me
As I seek on the road what I can’t see at home
Take yourself far away from me
I’d be gone myself if I had anywhere to go
Not all people find their meaning
Not all bodies find the soul
When you tried to heal what needed bleeding
I knew I had to leave
But I had nowhere to go
All you want, you say, is to be who you are
We all want to give what none of us own
We all wish to be what none of us are
Where would you be if you had somewhere to go?
Bring it all back to me now
I’ve been at this too long
I need to relax
If you’d bring yourself back somehow
I could be myself
I could drop the act
Not all movement can be seen
Not all knowledge should be known
No one knows what any of it means
How could anyone know just where to go?
All you want is the whole world
All you can take is nearness and excess
You told me you were sure where I should go
All I had to know were the people to impress
Take yourself far away from me
All you tell me is all you’ve been told
Take it all far away from me
While I take my leave
As if I had somewhere to go
Brian Leibold 