When I first heard visions of Johanna along with the other works of Bob Dylan I was in a state of making mistakes. I wasn’t oblivious to my mistakes but I was completely ignorant of the outcome. As I'm listening to this song again, only passing another monsoon with not that much time spent in between, I am already facing the consequences of my mistakes.
So if I tell you about this song you should keep in mind that our miseries get shifted time to time. So is the meaning of everything. A SONG HAS NO MEANING. Bob hated the concept of a song containing a specific meaning. Bob Dylan laughing at the helpless journalist who was convinced that a song has to have a message is to the date our favourite thing ever. Bob couldn’t care less about the trying to be smart corporal moody average American journalists. ANYWAY, TO THE SONG WE RETURN...
I have a faded memory. I can hardly recall my past experience in actual accuracy. I'll preferably try to convey the emotional encounter here with much of inaccuracy.
It was a rainy day I suppose. Or one of those ordinary days with no absolute reason to remember. Specially when one listens to 15 to 20 new tracks a day it's quite not overwhelmingly surprising that you come across a masterpiece everyday. "Great Song! OKAY NOW LET'S MOVE ON TO THE NEXT"... This has been the case.
I was miserable. I poured songs one after another like drops of alcohol. Using music to fill up the void occurred by music itself. I surely didn’t enjoy listening to things anymore even if they were great. I was just escaping my reality. And this song made sense then, "We sit here stranded.. though we're all doing our best to deny it.."
Worse than making mistake is knowing you are making one. Guilt is the price we pay for our mistakes. Our denial comes with an affirmation. With every hope for freedom there is a chance of getting lost. We change, Our music taste changes, From season to season. What goes, never comes back. We are not what is happening. We are what is left.
I don't pretend to understand Bob. I don't pretend to understand anything. I'll have my own interpretation of things that interest me. I only hope to get rescued for even daring to think such way.
I don't fancy what Bob Dylan ate for breakfast anymore like I used to do when I was 18. I am still a 20 year old. Well just turned 20. But not much different to what I was when I was 18. Bob was around 25 when he wrote this song. Not knowing it would make sense to an 18 year old middle class average girl with the hope of having everything or nothing. Bob will never know.
Then What he knew to write these words? What might have happened to him? Lover? Family? Friends? Culture? What might have triggered his emotions to become words. Or is it just a local bus he missed? We never know. A poet is also someone who's desperately trying to find himself We should not forget.
I am 20 now. Waiting for an absolution. Waiting to live, waiting to die. I can't think about Johanna anymore. I can't listen to it more than once. The burden of these words get me. Or it just could be the fear of recalling. You don't die when you’re young people say it around. It was never about age anyway. Your dreams have a fair share in that. While I am questioning and accepting everything at the same time, Bob is almost joking about me...
"Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously And when bringing her name up He speaks of a farewell kiss to me He's sure got a lot of gall, to be so useless and all Muttering small talk at the wall while I'm in the hall. How can I explain... It's so hard to get on "
It is Bob. 18 or 20 or 35 or 47 or 76. It is.
"But like Louise always says "Ya can't look at much, can ya man?" As she, herself, prepares for him And Madonna, she still has not showed We see this empty cage now corrode Where her cape of the stage once had flowed The fiddler, he now steps to the road He writes everything's
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been returned which was owed On the back of the fish truck that loads While my conscience explodes The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain... "
