Dear Bob Dylan,

I’m studying philosophy.

So far, all I’ve learned has taught me:  a question will always remain a question.  And so I face the times before me and those beside me and read the current realistic approach.  I proceed slowly, take one aspect at a time, try to grasp my own humility.  So, even if I don’t agree with some current or past philosophical view, to keep an open-ended mind.  To question myself.

As for life…..dear God, mine is half over at least and still I find myself falling backward.  Into standards yet unknown to me, the terminology of philosophy stuns me as much as any question itself.

I can’t tell you how much I adore your Christmas video.  I’ve watched it at least three dozen times.  My daughter and I go around singing it, linking arms and high-kneeing it through the kitchen.

I try to have clarity.  I try to merit my ideas of you and your music & words into something substantially significant.  I’ve learned while learning, to talk myself into believing in you.  I, for one, don’t dream in reason.  I dream the impossible and conceive with each dream a new impracticality.  I used to wake up happy.  Now I just wake sore, tired.  As though I never slept at all.

I am returning to school in the Fall.  Forty years old and I’m returning.  I’m challenging myself to learn from others.  To quit accepting my and only my point of view, to think I could learn new things simply by studying new things.  I need a personality different from my own.  A wise old owl of a professor telling me things and showing me days I never knew.

I won’t continue on this rhetorical path of writing.  I’m still a pre-student.  I have so much to learn.  I picture myself as a young child, mousy brown hair, bangs cut to the quick of my forehead, striped hand-me-down t-shirt.  Funny I don’t have a thumb in my mouth.  Father off shooting tin cans, mother collecting cartridge shells.  Brother pissed at having to spend so much time with the family.  Sisters galloping like gazelles through the hills, their images like the philosophy of aesthetics.  Their limbs in mathematical harmony with nature.  Jennifer’s long wheat hair.  Tori’s tiny frame imitating the architecture of stone.

Your Christmas album is insanely brilliant.  I’ve neither dreamt nor imagined it.  It’s really real and really wonderful.

Dear Bob Dylan,

Sharp, cool and unafraid, still the winter night detonates me.  Imagine this:  seven days of melancholy for seven straight and upset days, twenty four hours apiece, each hour melancholic, every minute afraid.  And here I state:  sharp, cool and unafraid.

I have not written a word since your appearance here in Arizona.  I’ve meant to many times.

You were magnificent.  At one point I had my hands upon my knees but felt I was clasping my heart.  Which means, my heart was in my knees.

Sir, nameless Sir, much of my happiness ended long ago but seeing you that night, my daughter beside me, all of that returned.  The feeling smothered my sadness, crushed any sob my throat might have held.  Extinguished all conscience thought of everything amiss.  Dear heart, when it rains it pours.  Like a London rain here lately.  Each drop equals a thousand more.

And so, what’s a girl to do?  I let the water sizzle me.  I sit and blink and stare at the stars thinking they all look like silk flowers with pinched smiles.  The war inside my heart ended years ago so why does every God given impusle happen now?  If my son feels thunderhead blue, if my daughter thinks she is a shaken coin dropped carelessly into these hands (mine), if in elfish light I once held grace but now hold flakes, I look to the sick rose of heaven and pray the prayer of a sick man, trails of hair and poetic eyes or not, we’re all the same.

So, life be damned.  You were great.  You drove us all into an embrace that never happened.  Still.  We all ran into your iron gate.

In all fairness, I’ll be as white as I can with the truth, you are not a toy, a thing we can all boast about observing, but then again, there you are.  Right in front of us.  Mister Legend.  Mister no more sixties.  All them feathers are alike.  Not you.

I’ll take my sweet babe pilgrimage of a life and live it.  You will always be to many something we can never solemnly grace or call our own.  You make a million happy.  I’ll say no more.

Dear Bob Dylan,

I was born of a carpenter and a seamstress.

~Molly Bashaw

The sun is half-cocked again.  Sweltering and tepidly so.  My house is like a hot wire tempted to explode.  I wish it were Autumn.  I wish the leaves were falling from the trees like broken teeth.  I wish it was October so soon I would hear your textured voice frisking like moonlight through my core.

I’m addicted to “Forgetful Heart”.  In every stroke of the word.  It’s funny how that song of every song on your new album drapes me in gloom, as if I were trapped in a lion’s den.  I love its urgency, without being urgent.  I love its lightheadedness, jambing to follow its full leafline.

These words sound so insensible.  It’s difficult to describe a song when you aren’t a song-maker.  It’s as simple as me saying:  I am a martyr to the echo you leave in an upreach of vocals I can not define.

Regardless, it’s immeasurable.

Still I remain here beneath this blue-ribbon sky, cursing the heat, apprehensive of time, waiting like a bed for somebody to come lie in it.

It seems to me that rhythm and rhyme are your sentences where fluent patterns fly up like dreams from the mind’s heart, or dolphins from the water, or even like dilated eyes.  How much you can read about a person’s innermost desires by looking at their eyes.

I get nervous as your arrival draws near.  I’m such a fool, the bowl of my belly full of butterflies, ambitious with poems- trying to write something rich and varied while surrounding myself with calmer things:  a glass of wine, candles and incense-

meanwhile I’m unstable as a trapped bird.  I play busy at work.  Drive like I’m chasing a fire.  Eat next to nothing because food weighs me down and I feel safer and more agile when I’m empty.

So it is.  You’re coming to my neighborhood.  After the Glendale cancellation I thought death upon the desert.  I attribute your announcement for October to a break dance in the cell of all unified thought.  I, of course, will carry the length of me and go, regardless of the weather or tangy menagerie of Fair goers.

For your next appearance, I am mute with love.  Dead of sound, my heart hypnotizes my mind, my mind, in reproof, does the same.

I was born of a carpenter and a seamstress.

~Molly Bashaw

The sun is half-cocked again.  Sweltering and tepidly so.  My house is like a hot wire tempted to explode.  I wish it were Autumn.  I wish the leaves were falling from the trees like broken teeth.  I wish it was October so soon I would hear your textured voice frisking like moonlight through my core.

I’m addicted to “Forgetful Heart“.  In every stroke of the word.  It’s funny how that song of every song on your new album drapes me in gloom, as if I were trapped in a lion’s den.  I love its urgency, without being urgent.  I love its lightheadedness, jambing to follow its own leaf line.

These words sound so insensible.  It’s difficult to describe a song when you aren’t a song-maker.  It’s as simple as me saying:  I am a martyr to the echo you leave in an upreach of vocals I can not define.

Regardless, it’s immeasurable.

Still I remain here beneath this blue-ribbon sky, cursing the heat, apprehensive of time, waiting like a bed for somebody to come lie in it.

It seems to me that rhythm and rhyme are your sentences where fluent patterns fly up like dreams from the mind’s heart, or dolphins from the water, or even like dilated eyes.  How much you can read about a person’s innermost desires by looking at their eyes.

I get nervous as your arrival draws near.  I’m such a fool, the bowl of my belly full of butterflies, ambitious with poems- trying to write something rich and varied while surrounding myself with calmer things:  a glass of wine, candles and incense-

meanwhile I’m unstable as a trapped bird.  I play busy at work.  Drive like I’m chasing a fire.  Eat next to nothing because food weighs me down and I feel safer and more agile when I’m empty.

So it is.  You’re coming to my neighborhood.  After the Glendale cancellation I thought death upon the desert.  I attribute your announcement for October to a break dance in the cell of all unified thought.  I, of course, will carry the length of me and go, regardless of the weather or tangy menagerie of Fair goers.

For your next appearance, I am mute with love.  Dead of sound, my heart hypnotizes my mind, my mind, in reproof, does the same.

Dear Bob Dylan,

While visiting the bookstore yesterday I happened upon a journal called Thought Provoking Thoughts.  Apparently it’s “the philosophers magazine”.

One article in particular that stuck out in my mind was written by an assistant professor of philosophy in Memphis.  Goes by the name of Andrew Terjesen.  His article is titled:  More than a feeling.

Headed up with:  Why Watchmen’s Dr Manhattan is a stoic sage for our times.

Shall we find out?

He begins by stating that when a person hears the word “stoic” today, they tend to think of a person who shows indifference to pleasure and pain.

I disagree.  My father was stoic.  I know he felt pleasure and I know for a fact, he felt pain.  And more importantly, exhibited both.  Granted, my father, like Dr Manhattan, did in fact, seem indifferent to the needs of his daughters, even if he did, in all actuality care about us.  Who just doesn’t visit their three daughters but one handful of times in ten years?  A stoic man, as I, his daughter thought stoic meant, or a stoic man as Terjesen writes he is, emotionally indifferent?

There is a not so pleasant symmetry in all of this.

My father is dead.

Never again can I ask him a question or follow his ways on my own path to virtue.  Never again can I see him upset, genuinely unhappy or excessively thrilled.  I have no idea if what I say today he might hear or have an opinion of.  If he does, I prefer a natural tone father and not one of billions of thoughts combined after years of death, or one of unhappiness at what I’ve become.

I think it right for me to write to you today, dearest impulse, if only to find some way of knowing, some way of articulating what I feel into what I think or vice-versa.  I have never been able to fully understand relationships, not any I’ve had or any I’ve witnessed.  What makes a person love another?  Is there some mechanized process I’m unaware of?  Do others feel as unsettled as I do, and does their uneasiness set upon them like a wart on a toe?

At any rate, I think your profundity out stands us all.  I was going to write:  up stands, which is probably also quite true, but I can not be certain of any term now-a-days.  What means one thing to me means something entirely different to somebody else.

Along this same journal, Douglas Murphy explores the meaning of death.  He says:  death cannot be said to be in any way harmful to the person who has died.

Thank God for this, right?

Thank God for the intellectuals and philosophers view.

You’ll be here on October 17th.  Somehow I feel credited by this knowledge.  I also feel dependent on it.  To see you in person is to survive some massive intellectual equation.

God bless your coming and may all the thoughts of those who pay to come to see you face in, at the very least, some interpretational gathering.

Of course, as Tony Wright recommends:  Don’t ever think too much.

So I won’t.  I’ll just wait.

Dear Bob Dylan,

For a moment I felt like that “brother dear” in Dead Souls by Gogol.  When you canceled your Arizona show.  I actually cried.  Contemplate it.  An average woman reads the news via email that the Glendale, Arizona show is canceled and begins tearing up, everyone in the house thinks it’s funny.  Such an unpleasant outcome.

Then today I read that you are the headliner at the Arizona State Fair in October.  Well, in that case, I still love you, God forbid, for the past ten years in a row.  You’re simply wonderful and beautiful and true and I can’t give you anymore than that.  May the devil upset my course in some sagacious pose if what I write to you is not true.

I can’t wait to see you in October.

Love and affection,

Lisa Marie

Dear Bob Dylan,

Roland Jooris wrote a poem called Village in which he states in the first stanza:

a village is a circle/ drawn by a hand/ around a church;

It’s been so long since I’ve been to church.  Oh, if only Fernando were alive, instead he’s not and can not woo me with his sense of boredom and disgust.  If only you were not so distant to me now.  I think I’ve lost touch.  Your every move is no longer a heartfelt preservation in my mind, more like an objective idea.  To this day people, random strangers write to me to discuss your latest ‘goings on’ and what can I say?  But:  did he really?  Where did you hear that?  I haven’t heard that!

At any rate, I’m still making my way out of congruity.  Still plugging along, as they say.  Still scouring with brutality the digital news I can gather, here and there, when I’m not working or driving somewhere or writing some silly poem.  I will be among the many attendees August 11th in Arizona.  I’m sure you’ll be great.  I’m equally sure my heart will be torn into a thousand pieces of red.

I love your new album.  I listen to it every single day.  It is of a different temperature, full of nostalgia.  I love it.  I eat nostalgia for breakfast.  I swallow blue imagination until my throat bursts.

Dear Bob Dylan,

I can’t not write.  I can’t not take the time to hold a pen and write you a letter, even if my pen is my keyboard, I can’t not when my heart just keeps pushing, pushing.

I learned about your tour, how you’re coming to Arizona in August.  The 11th.  And how presale tickets go up on the 11th of May and that is when the air began folding in.  And that is when everything in existence began with the number eleven.  Like brand new, gleaming, even if a conscience echoed here and there, even if my perception was all azure and cloud-like, I found out you are coming.  Here.

To this terrible State with its terribly hot weather and all facades will fall because you will be here.  Right here.  I’ll make a room for you.  I’ll burn you breakfast because I’ll have no desire to cook.  I’ll have no sense about me so I might forget to wear make-up.  I might hurry about because I’ll have lost all reason and direction.  You see, I love you and my love for you remains unmarried.

I try and try to go about my daily life and then you announce you’re coming here.  To Arizona.  Right here.  My own backyard.  And what am I supposed to do?  I swear I will probably leave tracks in the asphalt on my way to the show.  I will surrender once again to the expanse of your music.  The hour may be dark, the month may be tepid, but all I can care to think about is you drawing close.

I wait sincerely like a tenant of some barren holding room.  I wait inside of my skin.  I’m so thrilled you are coming!  I can’t wait to see you.

Dear Bob Dylan,

In the heart’s slaughterhouse, my mind is forever transformed.  It’s what emerges afterwards which is the problem I must reconcile.  I was in Virginia for lecture when you released a free version of Beyond Here Lies Nothin’.  I looked for a computer in between my obligations.  Nonetheless, I was forced to wait until today to hear the song.

Like me, God is not deaf.  The song is fierce, I write to remember it now and find I must play it again as I write, for the fifteenth time.  Butter, bread and salt.  Salt and water.  Soft bread and sweet butter. I’m in over my head waiting for the 28th to arrive.

I love you, absolutely.  And there is nothing you or anybody can do about it.

Dear Bob Dylan,

For days on end I give my heart to the roaring shadow of your life.

I speak the language, transform the voice of your guiding light-  I want to restrain myself.  Almost to the point of negation, but nobody is buying it.

What’s with you, they ask.

I can only say-  the attitude of God.

Stops them dead in their tracks.

I imagine you drifting through European corridors on your way to your next stage performance (as I wait here in Arizona) where terrible tailors await to mend you suits and cobblers stand with hammer in hand to build you a new pair of boots.  I wait.  A non-woman/non-person, under the sun, reflecting my views at no one.  

Even within these monotonous moments, I think of you.

Hearts eye, my soul’s national holiday.

Did you realize the release date of Together Through Life is my son’s eighteenth birthday?

Back and forth, back and forth I ride.  The poet Visar Zhiti claims a cry runs barefoot.

I just look forward to you coming home.  Cry or no cry.

Dear Bob Dylan,

Once I got used to the idea I would never be Gertrude Stein and like her wished I had died when I was a little baby so as not to feel anything I changed my mind.  Every person has inside of them a person, the very person they know or wish or want or dream they are (could be/should be).  Why so many of us keep this “other” person hidden is beyond me.  Such beautiful powers of apprehension we have.

So now is the time to question my own apprehension, my many fixed habits with less than little comprehension.  It’s like I’ve been worn and rubbed down by life, the city I live in, its insecurities and alienation, nature mixed with pavement, soccer moms in their suv’s repeating and replicating, ornaments on the freeway.  The pace and stride of my mind is so unlike the people I’m surrounded by.  One too many common sentences by one too many disconnected women and before you know it, I’ve said it too.  I say inwardly, “Don’t worry about it.  Sometimes words slip out and meanings don’t have any meaning and on behalf of another person sometimes you’re just trying to be nice.”  But I hate it.

I made a promise to myself once.  I made a determination to always be myself.  To love what I love, to do what I love, to live eat speak breathe dream know what I love as if the love of it itself was who I am, as though my spirit were hazed with a light of gold.  To not care who I impressed or who was listening, to avoid the drama and be my most logical self.

You know what I love about you?  I mean besides your comfortable voice and your attractive face and your awfully unblocked and unburdened way of living, I love your fractured-ness.  I love how you’ve made friends with both life and death.  I think the name Bob Dylan translates into treasure.  It doesn’t matter what language is used.

If all of us could live our life even a smidgen of one degree to how you live your life, the world would be a bigger and better place.

I hear you, I listen to your music, I read your poetry and articles and books and interviews, I watch the videos.  I thank you for your trouble, for your roof and outlined life, for the swing of your song, for the ups and downs of your performances.  I’m like a beetle waiting to be turned over with each new announcement of news.

When you sing I walk out of myself.  The person inside of me comes around.  Smiling and springy, less talkative, more attentive.

I believe there must be something wrong with me.  I’m like a bicycle without a chain, an engine without any oil, a hairpin turn with both headlights gone.  Without you I’m very shy and old fashioned, a mute, a barely noted observation, an inaudible voice.  Books piled around me, poets I read just out of curiosity, sentences that say so little to me as if they were visitors, cousins on vacation,  and I still have to go to work.

You are like the mouth of a room, an entire creation beyond each wall and fence and borderline.  I walk in freely, anticipating every single thing like a frightened bird.  I walk out crying.  Ashamed by my own lack of intelligence.

To which all things return.  Such beautiful powers of apprehension I have.  In my worry and doubt I turn to them.  For life I hide in the shade frowning.  For you I smile easily.  For life I hide in the shade frowning.  For you I release my bewilderment and flower with affection.