06 Jun, 2008 Bob Dylan – Lotus Effect
Bob Dylan and the Lotus Effect
” Writing is a lonely thing. You cut yourself off from friends and family to find that necessarily quiet place in your mind. You have to disassociate and detach yourself from just about everything and everybody. I didn’t like that part of it at all.” So says Bob Dylan, chiming in on the theme that I gave thought to recently.
Tortured artist, lighthouse keeper, and submariner of the soul. Call him what you want, Dylan will be all that and then some more. A “Maestro” to mostly all who work with words and melodies, so how can it be then that I – a mere monk – am currently turning my back on guru Bob by heading to Glasgow where I will be with family and friends as we close in on the writing of our album.
Well, I guess that is just the way it is!
Or at least that is the kind of reply Dylan would most probably offer, should I out with my exaggerated dreams ever get the opportunity of provoking one from him. But exaggerated dreams are precisely what is it all about at the moment as we weigh up the potential in the ideas that we have conjured up over the last months and years.
To be fair I would say that the music pulse has definitely returned and with quite some force. And so soon after a period where even the task of grasping the most basic creative initiative all seemed too far out of reach.
Equally it is remarkable how in those bleak periods of stasis, I easily get myself in a mild panic when creatively speaking, “the tide is out.” – and I don’t know why?
But then the very ocean tides themselves are hardly independent, being governed by the gravitational pull of moon etc.
And likewise I suppose the emotional cycles we all go through affect me within my own scarce periods of creativity. Seemingly and for some reason it is either feast or famine on Kerr’s oyster farm and with little in between.
Getting blood out of a stone, and rolling rocks uphill only to have them tumbling back down upon me. Choose the metaphor as fits. The writing just will not write occasionally. And patience no matter how frustrating, is all that can be offered at those times as it enables me to do not much and yet somehow be constantly taking stuff in. My guess is that my natural imagination is always humming away quite fine and that the song writing groundwork is happening automatically even if unknown to me at the time.
And that “stuff” I refer to? Well it swirls round in my head I reckon, and although it could easily be dismissed as a sludge of images, somehow a distillation is underway. Ideas and images do amazingly start to sprout eventually from somewhere in that void and song titles and phrase hooks then kick in. Of course, once that happens I am off and away!
For the record, the Sacred Lotus is my favourite plant and I can think of almost nothing more beautiful.
It is a symbol of absolute purity and yet it springs from putrid waste!
There is definitely something within that transition to behold, and it is something that I dwell on when I feel bereft of any evidence that I am moving forward within my life and in my work. When I am stuck…in other words.
Little surprise then that I have written something called Lotus Effect.
Bring on the next song please!
Jim Kerr