Freewheelin' Ekphrasis
thoughts about ends and beginnings
I wasn’t out of bed this morning before I sensed the stinging blend of loss, nostalgia, and uncertainty on my face. Of course those tears do come around every few days since the end of my long marriage. Today they were called up by a short essay from Howard Axelrod, posted in Peter C. Baker’s online magazine, Tracks on Tracks, a collection of short essays about the role of a song in someone’s life. Below, I am posting a link to Axelrod’s piece about long friendships and breakups and a favorite Bob Dylan song, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” As good writing does, it quickly sent me into my own emotional landscape.
Art is always on some level about the life of the creator. And because so much of every artist’s life is naturally, necessarily absorbed by the study and enjoyment of art, the subject is often their relationship to another piece of art. This mode of creation is called ekphrasis, a Greek word that means only “description” but has come to represent a wide range of literary narrations, reflections, and expansions on another piece of art.
The most recognizable example may be “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” an 1819 poem by John Keats (1795-1821). This one has been called “notional” ekphrasis because the urn Keats describes and worries over was a product of his own imagination, though inspired by some real Greek art he had seen in the new British Museum and by an engraving of a vase he found in a book. Axelrod’s piece about Dylan’s song is also ekphrasis, as are all the artistic personal essays, or lyric narratives, in Baker’s publicationTracks on Tracks.
Whenever I see the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, as I did at the bottom of Axelrod’s story this morning, I go to the day in April of 1998 when I met my former husband. I was working as a bartender/cocktail waitress at the Star Bar—a live music venue in Atlanta’s Little Five Points neighborhood—while taking classes for my PhD at Emory. I had gone in on my night off to have a drink and see some acoustic songs from a member of a band called FLAP.
These few paragraphs are my own multi-ekphrastic overlay, inspired by Axelrod’s narrative riff on Dylan’s evergreen song about knowing there’s nothing left, and nothing left to say, but still saying something anyway.
I had my first conversation with Ryan sitting on stools at the far right end of the bar. He maintains he had been coming in and giving me good tips on $2 PBR cans for months before that day. Most nights that place was packed, so how do I know.
His car was broken down in the rear parking lot, so I offered him a ride home at closing time. Already, there was no kind of wall between us, so it was natural for him to pop open the glovebox the moment he sat down in my 1990 VW Cabriolet. The Freewheelin’ cassette tumbled out, and somehow that was a connection that fired up the next 25 years. I still have the cassette, though I don’t have a way to play it.
This weekend Ryan is finalizing his departure from Jacksonville—where we moved together more than 20 years ago—back to Georgia. So right now in spite of my plans for the day, I’m stuck—like the imaginary lovers frozen before the kiss, listening to “ditties of no tone,” engraved on one side of Keats’ urn—or like the empty little mountain town that may never see its people again on the other side—just mulling away over nothing and everything.
Technically, he has already moved away. He left Jacksonville three days ago to start the new job. Though the leaving was more like a gradual removal. There was a going away dinner several days before he left. Movers had been scheduled to follow with his belongings, but the plan went sideways, the reservation was cancelled, and we decided to move the stuff ourselves this weekend.
So there was another going away dinner, followed by some final drinks at the neighborhood bar inside Riverside Liquors. As it turned out, he had been there on a date just the night before, between his two going away dinners with the family. This was material for an awkward pause and then a good laugh with the bartender Dan.
When he gets back here late tonight, he can stay in the small bedroom our 18-year-old may or may not have already moved out of as he drops hard into his own new relationship, and tomorrow morning our older son will help him load the apartment into a rented van. I’ll drive up to Georgia with him, check out the new digs, and then—because I am forever required by the Universe to enact the most annoying symbolisms—I’ll drive an empty moving van home to the city I’ve never lived in without him, though we’ve been separated by about a mile for the last eighteen months.
Last night, while being picked up for a date myself and walking through Boone Park to a new wine bar, I explained this week’s carousel of changing plans that now have me participating in my ex-husband’s move and going to hang out with him in his new city for a day. My date wondered, fair enough, whether I needed to be so involved in this, after the divorce. I get how it looks—like I’m caught up in things I don’t need to be caught up in. There are some objective responses, though. I can and did say: 25 years. I can and did say: two kids. I can and did say: this is how I am and who I want to be. But my mind is in a deeper place than those reasons for helping my ex with his move.
I’ve been meditating on what we do with the past, what it means to end a relationship that is part of the fabric of self after so much time and the entire passage from youth to middle age. Nigerian poet and independence fighter Christopher Okigbo (1932-1967) wrote these lines about ends and beginnings: We carry in our worlds that flourish, our worlds that have failed.
Keats’ ode concludes with a famously ambiguous phrase—the reader isn’t even sure who is being addressed by whom. The lack of certainty, and its permanence, is captured by this stubborn wall of words that frequently moves through my mind, a silent retort against my struggle to understand, to change, to control the things I care about the most: —that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
But maybe it’s just plain obvious—not Keats’ hard ending, but my own reason to still engage with the husband of half my life and my children’s dad.
The best art functions like a prism of many faces where we each can find what we need as time changes our understanding. This morning, reading Howard Axelrod’s reflection on this song that cuts a track through his own life, working differently at different times, I stopped on a line I’ve heard a thousand times.
Today it came from another face of that prism, from a more gracious and accepting place than its creator intended, but I’ll take it like I take it, and the one who needs to know will know:
Well it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe.
Wow. Such a difficult moment, such an elegant piece of writing.
For the last several years, I've not been able to hear or think of Bob Dylan without thinking of you and Ryan, so here's a new chapter in that. I love you both.