Annals by Greil Marcus
A trip to Hibbing High School
“As I went out–” Those are the ½rst
words of “Ain’t Talkin’,” the last song
on Bob Dylan’s Modern Times, released
in the fall of 2006. It’s a great opening
line for anything: a song, a tall tale, a
fable, una novela, a soliloquy. The world
opens at the feet of that line. How one
gets there–to the point where those
words can take on their true authority,
raise suspense like a curtain, and make
anyone want to know what happens
next–is what I want to look for.
For me this road opened in the spring
de 2005, upstairs in the once-famous,
now-shut Cody’s Books on Telegraph
Avenue in Berkeley. I was giving a read-
ing from a book about Bob Dylan’s “Like
a Rolling Stone.” Older guys, people my
edad, were talking about the shows they’d
seen in 1965–Dylan had played Berkeley
on his ½rst tour with a band that Decem-
Greil Marcus is the author of many books, incluir-
ing “Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock
’n’ Roll Music” (1975), “Lipstick Traces: A Secret
History of the Twentieth Century” (1989), "El
Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s
Basement Tapes” (2001), “Like a Rolling Stone:
Bob Dylan at the Crossroads” (2005), and most
recently “The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy
in the American Voice” (2006).
© 2007 by Greil Marcus
ber. People were asking questions–or
making speeches. The old saw came up:
“How does someone like Bob Dylan
come out of a place like Hibbing, mín.-
nesota, a worn-out mining town in the
middle of nowhere?"
A woman stood up. She was about
thirty-½ve, maybe forty, de½nitely
younger than the people who’d been
talking. Her face was dark with indig-
nación. “Have any of you ever been to
Hibbing?" ella dijo. There was a gener-
al shaking of heads and murmuring of
no’s–from me and everyone else. "Tú
ought to be ashamed of yourselves,"
the woman said. “You don’t know what
you’re talking about. If you’d been to
Hibbing, you’d know why Bob Dylan
came from there. There’s poetry on the
walls. Everywhere you look. Hay
bars where arguments between social-
ists and the iww, between Communists
and Trotskyists, arguments that started
a hundred years ago, are still going on.
It’s there–and it was there when Bob Dy-
lan was there.”
“I don’t remember the rest of what
she said,” my wife said when I asked her
about that night. “I was already planning
our trip.”
Along with our younger daughter and
her husband, who live in Minneapolis,
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A trip to
Hibbing
High School
we arrived in Hibbing a year later, co-
incidentally during Dylan Days, a now-
annual weekend celebration of Bob Dy-
lan’s birthday, in this case his sixty-½fth.
There was a bus trip, the premiere of a
new movie, and a sort-of Bob Dylan Idol
contest at a restaurant called Zimmy’s.
But we went straight to the high school.
On the bus tour the next day, we went
atrás. And that was the shock: Hibbing
High.
In his revelatory 1993 essay “When
We Were Good: Class and Culture in
the Folk Revival,” the historian Robert
Cantwell takes you by the hand, guides
you back, and reveals the new America
that rose up out of World War II. "Si usted
were born between, apenas, 1941 y
1948,” he says–“born, eso es, into the
new postwar middle class”–
you grew up in a reality perplexingly di-
vided by the intermingling of an emerg-
ing mass society and a decaying indus-
trial culture . . . . Obscurely taking shape
around you, of a de½nite order and tex-
tura, was an environment of new neigh-
borhoods, new schools, new businesses,
new forms of recreation and entertain-
mento, and new technologies that in the
course of the 1950s would virtually abol-
ish the world in which your parents had
grown up.
That sentence is typical of Cantwell’s
style: apparently obvious social changes
charted into the realm of familiarity,
then a hammer coming down–as you
are feeling your way into your own
world, your parents’ world is abolished.
Growing up in the certi½ed postwar
suburban towns of Palo Alto and Menlo
Park in California, I lived some of this
vida. Though Bob Dylan did not grow up
in the suburbs–despite David Hajdu’s
dismissal of Dylan, in his book Positively
4th Street, as “a Jewish kid from the sub-
urbs,” Hibbing is not close enough to
Duluth, or any other city, to be a suburb
of anything–he lived some of this life,
también.
Cantwell moves on to talk about how
the new prosperity of the 1950s was like-
ly paradise to your parents, how their
aspirations became your seeming inevi-
tabilities: “Very likely, you saw yourself
growing up to be a doctor or a lawyer,
scientist or engineer, maestro, nurse,
or mother–pictures held up to you at
school and at home as pictures of your
special destiny.” And, Cantwell says,
You probably attended, también, an over-
crowded public school, typically a build-
ing built shortly before World War I . . .
[tú] may have had to share a desk with
another student, and in addition to the
normal ½re and tornado drills had from
time to time to crawl under your desk in
order to shield yourself from the imagined
explosion of an atomic bomb.
So, Cantwell writes, “in this vision of
consumer Valhalla there was a lingering
note of caution, even of dread”–but
let’s go back to the schools.
The public schools I attended–Eliz-
abeth Van Auken Elementary School
(now Ohlone School) in Palo Alto, y
Menlo Atherton High School in Menlo
Park–were not built before World War
I. They were built in the early 1950s,
part of the world that was already chang-
En g. The past was still there: Miss Van
Auken, a beloved former teacher, era
always present to celebrate the school’s
cumpleaños. When our third-grade class
read the Little House books, we wrote
Laura Ingalls Wilder and she wrote back.
But the past was fading as new houses
went up all around the school. A few
miles away, Menlo Atherton High was
a sleek, modern plant: one story, flat
roofs, huge banks of windows in every
aula, lawns everywhere, and three
parking lots, one reserved strictly for
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Annals by
Greil
marco
members of the senior class. The school
produced Olympic swimmers in the ear-
ly 1960s; a few years later Lindsey Buck-
ingham and Stevie Nicks would grad-
uate and, a few years after that, make
Fleetwood Mac the biggest band in the
world. The school sparkled with subur-
ban money, rock-and-roll cool, surfer
swagger, and San Francisco ambition–
and compared to Hibbing High School
it was a shack.
“I know Hibbing,” Harry Truman said
en 1947, when he was introduced to Hib-
bing’s John Galeb, the National Com-
mander of Disabled American Veterans.
“That’s where the high school has gold
doorknobs.” Outside of Washington,
CORRIENTE CONTINUA., it was the most impressive public
building I’d ever seen.
In aerial photographs, it’s a colossus:
four stories, 93 feet high, with wings 180
feet long flying out from a 416 foot front.
From the ground it is more than any-
thing a monument to benign authority,
a giant hand welcoming the town, todo
of its generations, into a cave where the
treasure is buried, all the knowledge of
mankind. It speaks for the community,
for its faith in education not only as a
road to success, wealth, seguridad, reputa-
ción, and honor, but as a good in itself.
This town, the building says, will have
the best school in the world.
In the plaza before the building there
is a spire, a war memorial. On its four
sides, as you turn from one panel to
otro, are the names of those students
from Hibbing High who died in World
War I, World War II, the Korean and
Vietnam Wars–and, on the last panel,
with no names, a commemoration of the
terrorist attacks of 2001. Past the memo-
rial are steps worthy of a state capitol
leading to the entrance of the building.
It was late Friday afternoon; Había
no students around, but the doors were
abierto.
Hibbing High School was built near
the end of the era when Hibbing was
known as “the richest village in the
world.” A crusading mayor, Victor Pow-
es, enforced mineral taxes on U.S. Steel,
operator of the huge iron-ore pit mines
that surrounded the original Hibbing.
Elected after a general strike in 1913, él
fought off the mine company’s allies in
the state legislature and the courts in
battle after battle. When ore was discov-
ered under the town itself, Power and
others forced the company to spend six-
teen million dollars to move the whole
town–houses, hotels, churches, público
buildings–four miles south. The big-
ger buildings were cut in quarters and
reassembled in the new Hibbing like
Legos.
Tax revenues had mounted over the
years in the old north Hibbing; at one
punto, the story goes, when a social-im-
provement society took up donations
for poor families, none could be found.
But in the new south Hibbing, in a ma-
neuver aimed at building support for
lower corporate tax rates in the future,
the mining company offered even more
money in the form of donations, o
bribes: school-board members directed
most of it to what became Hibbing High,
which Mayor Power had demanded as
part of the price of moving the town.
With prosperity seemingly assured,
the town turned out Victor Power in fa-
vor of a mayor closer to the mines. Soon
a law was passed limiting public spend-
ing to a hundred dollars per capita per
año; then the limit was lowered, y
lowered again. The tax base of the town
began to crumble; with World War II,
when the town was not allowed to tax
mineral production, and after, cuando el
mines were nearly played out, the tax
base all but collapsed. Por último, el
mines shifted from iron ore to taconite,
low-grade pellets that today ½nd a mar-
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A trip to
Hibbing
High School
ket in China, but Hibbing never recov-
ered. In the 1950s it was a dying town,
the school a seventh wonder of a time
that had passed, a ziggurat built by a for-
gotten king. Yet it was still a ziggurat.
When it opened in 1924, Hibbing High
School had cost four million dollars, un
unimaginable sum for the time. A la mitad
it was the ultimate consolidated school,
from kindergarten through junior col-
lege. There were three gyms, two indoor
running tracks, and every kind of shop
that in the years to come would be com-
monplace in American high schools–as
well as an electronics shop, an auto shop,
a conservatory. There was a full-time
doctor, dentist, and nurse. Había
extensive programs in music, arte, y
theater. But more than eight decades lat-
es, you didn’t have to know any of this to
catch the glow of the place.
Climbing the enclosed stairway that
followed the expanse of outdoor steps,
we saw not a hint of graf½ti, not a sign
of deterioration in the intricate colored
tile designs on the walls and the ceilings,
in the curving woodwork. We gazed up
at old-fashioned but still majestic mu-
rals depicting the history of Minnesota,
with bold trappers surrounded by sub-
missive Indians, huge trees and roaming
animals, the forest, and the emerging
towns. It was strange, the pristine condi-
tion of the place. It spoke not for empti-
ness, for Hibbing High as a version of
Pompeii High–though the school, con
a capacity of over two thousand, era
down to six hundred students, up from
four hundred only a few years before–
y, de alguna manera, you knew the state of the
building didn’t speak for discipline. You
could sense self-respect, passed down
over the years.
We followed the empty corridors in
search of the legendary auditorium. A
custodian let us in and told us the sto-
ries. Seating for eighteen hundred, y
stained glass everywhere, even in the
form of blazing candles on the ½re box.
In large, gilded paintings in the back,
the muses waited; they smiled over the
proscenium arch, también, over a stage that,
in imitation of thousands of years of
ancestors, had the weight of immortal-
ity hammered into its boards. “No won-
der he turned into Bob Dylan,” said a
visitor the next day, when the bus tour
stopped at the school, speaking of the
talent show Dylan played here with his
high-school band the Golden Chords.
No matter that the power was cut on the
noise they were making: anybody on
that stage could see kingdoms waiting.
There were huge chandeliers, import-
ed from Czechoslovakia, forty thousand
dollars each when they were shipped
across the Atlantic in the 1920s, a quarter
of a million, half-a-million each today:
not merely irreplaceable, but unthink-
capaz. We weren’t in Hibbing, a redun-
dant mining town in northern Minneso-
frente a; we were in the opera house in Buenos
Aires. Yet we were in Hibbing; allá
were high-school Bob Dylan artifacts
in a case just down the hall. Había
more in the public library some blocks
away, in a small exhibit in the basement.
Scattered among commonplace talis-
mans, oddities, and revelations were the
lyrics to the Golden Chords’ “Big Black
Train” from 1958, a rewrite of Elvis’s
1954 “Mystery Train,” credited to Monte
Edwardson, LeRoy Hoikkala, and Bob
Zimmerman:
Well, big black train, coming down the
línea
Well, big black train, coming down the
línea
Well, you got my woman, you bring her
back to me
Well, that cute little chick is the girl I want
to see
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Annals by
Greil
marco
Well, I’ve been waiting for a long long
tiempo
Well, I’ve been waiting for a long long
tiempo
Well, I’ve been looking for my baby
Searching down the line
Well, here comes the train, yeah it’s
coming down the line
Well, here comes the train, yeah it’s
coming down the line
Well, you see my baby is ½nally coming
home
Al día siguiente, walking up and down
Howard Street, the main street of Hib-
bing, we looked for the poetry on the
walls. “a new life,” read an ad for
an insurance company–was that it?
Was there anything in that beer sign
that could be twisted into a metaphor?
What was the woman in Berkeley talk-
ing about? Later we found out that the
walls with the poetry were in the high
school itself.
In the school library there were busts
and chiseled words of wisdom and mu-
rals. The murals told the story of the
mining industry, all in the style of what
Daniel Pinkwater, in his young-adult
novel Young Adults, called “heroic real-
ism.” There were sixteen life-size work-
ers, representing the nationalities that
formed Hibbing: native-born Ameri-
cans, Finns, Swedes, Italians, Norwe-
gians, Croatians, Serbs, Slovenians, Aus-
trians, Germans, Jews, Francés, Poles,
Russians, Armenians, Bulgarians, y
más. There was a huge mine on the left,
a misty steelworks on the right, y, en
the middle, to take the fruit of Hibbing
to the corners of the earth, Lake Superi-
o. With art-nouveau dots between each
palabra, the inscription over the mine
quoted Tennyson’s “Oenone”–
lifting·the·hidden·iron·that·
glimpses·in·laboured·mines·
undrainable·of·ore
–while over the factory one could read
they·force·the·burnt·and·yet·
unblooded·steel·to·do·their·
will
That was the poetry on the walls–but
not even this was the real poetry in Hib-
bing. The real poetry was in the class-
habitación.
After stopping by the auditorium and
the library, the tour made its way up-
stairs to Room 204, where for ½ve years
in the 1950s B. j. Rolfzen taught English
at Hibbing High–after that, he taught
for twenty-½ve years at Hibbing Com-
munity College. Eighty-three in May of
2006, and slowed down by a stroke, conseguir-
ting around in a motorized wheelchair,
Rolfzen sat on the desk in the small, sud-
denly steamy room, as forty or more
people crowded in. There was a small
podium in front of him. Presumably we
were there to hear his reminiscences
about the former Bob Zimmerman–or,
as Rolfzen called him, and never any-
thing else, Roberto. Rolfzen held up a
slate where he’d chalked lines from
“Floater,” from Dylan’s 2001 “Love and
Theft”: “Gotta sit up near the teacher /
If you want to learn anything.” Rolfzen
pointed to the tour member who was
sitting in the seat directly in front of
the desk. “I always stood in front of the
desk, never behind it,” he said. “And
that’s where Robert always sat.”
He talked about Dylan’s “Not Dark
Todavía,” from his 1997 Time Out of Mind: “‘I
was born here and I’ll die here / Against
my will.’” “I’m with him. I’ll stay right
aquí. I don’t care what’s on the other
lado,” Rolfzen said, a teacher thrilled to
be learning from a student. With that
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out of the way, Rolfzen proceeded to
teach a class in poetry.
He handed out a photocopied book-
let of poems by Wordsworth, Frost, Car-
ver, the Minneapolis poet Colleen Shee-
hy, and himself; moving back and forth
for more than half an hour, he returned
again and again to the eight lines of Wil-
liam Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheel-
barrow.”
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
agua
beside the white
chickens
He kept reading it, changing inflections,
until the words seemed to dance out
of order, shifting their meanings. Cada
tiempo, a different word seemed to take
over the poem. “Rain,” he would say,
opening up the poem one way; “beside,"
he’d say, and an entirely different dra-
ma seemed underway. Finally he came
full circle. “So much depends / upon
a red wheel barrow,” he said. “So much
depends. This isn’t about rain. It’s not
about chickens. So much depends on the
decisions we make. My decision to en-
list in the Navy in 1941, when I was sev-
enteen. My decision to teach. So much
depends on the decisions you’ve made,
and will make.”
The poem stayed in the air: the loud-
ness of the ½rst line faded into “beside
the white chickens,” not because they
were unimportant, but because from “so
much depends,” from the decision with
which the poem began, the poem, like a
vida, could have gone anywhere; fue
simply that in this case the poem hap-
pened to go toward chickens, before it
went off the page, to wherever it went
next. Rolfzen made the eight lines par-
ticular and universal, unlikely and fated;
he made them apply to everyone in the
habitación, or rather led each person to apply
them to him or herself. This was not the
sort of teacher you encounter every day
–or even in a lifetime.
Bits and pieces of the Great Depres-
sion still lie about,” Rolfzen wrote in The
Spring of My Life, a memoir of the 1930s
he published himself in 2004–but, él
dicho, “one day of the Great Depression
can never be understood or appreciated
by those who have not lived it.”1 Never-
theless, he tried to make whoever might
read his book understand. He went back
to the village of Melrose, Minnesota,
where he was born and grew up. Él
spoke quietly, flatly, sardonically of a
family that was poor beyond poverty:
“Life during the Great Depression was
not a complex life. It was a simple one.
No health insurance needed to be paid,
no life insurance, no car insurance, No
savings for a college education or any
education beyond high school, no sav-
ings account, no automobile needed
to be purchased, no gas was necessary
to buy, no utilities beyond the $3.00
a month my dad paid for six 25 watt
bulbs.”2 There were eleven children;
B. J.–then Boniface–slept in a bed with
three brothers.
His father was an electrical worker
and a drunk: the “most frightening day,"
Rolfzen writes, was payday, when his
father would stagger home, then and
every day until the money ran out.3 One
day he tried to kill himself by grabbing
high-voltage lines; instead he lost both
1 B. j. Rolfzen, The Spring of My Life (Hibbing,
Minn.: Bang Printing, 2004), 95.
2 Ibídem., 93.
3 Ibídem., 19.
A trip to
Hibbing
High School
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Dædalus Spring 2007
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Annals by
Greil
marco
arms just below the elbow, and sent
the family onto relief. “I never saw my
mother with a coin in her hand,” Rolf-
zen writes; everything they bought they
bought on credit against ½fty dollars a
mes. There was a family of four that
boarded up the windows of its house
to keep out the cold, but the Rolfzens
would not advertise their misery, incluso
if the windows sometimes broke and,
before they could be replaced, maybe
not until winter passed, maybe not for
months after that, snow piled up in the
room where Rolfzen slept.
All through the book, through its con-
tinual memories of privation and idyll–
of catching bullheads, playing marbles,
picking berries, working on a farm for
three months at the age of sixteen for
four cents a day, or the toe of a boy’s
shoe falling off as he walked to school–
one can feel Rolfzen holding his rage in
check. His rage against his father, against
the cold, against the plague that was on
the land, against the alcoholism that fol-
lowed from his father to his brothers,
against the Catholic elementary school
he was named for, Calle. Boniface, run by
nuns who “enjoyed causing pain,”4 a
place where students were threatened
with hell for every errant act–where
“religion was a senseless, heartless and
unforgiving practice. I still bear its
scars.”5
bing, leaving the University of Minne-
sota, traveling west, trying to learn how
to live on his own. “I cannot remember
ever having a conversation with my fa-
ther about anything,” Rolfzen writes6–
but you can imagine him having con-
versations about the thirties with Rob-
ert. Maybe especially about the tramp
armies that passed through Melrose,
starting every day at ten when the train
pulled in, twenty men or more riding on
top of the box cars, jumping from the
doors, men who had abandoned their
familias, who broke into abandoned
buildings and knocked on the Rolfzens’
back door begging for food–“My moth-
er never refused them,” Rolfzen writes.
With whatever they could scavenge,
they headed to a hollow near the tracks,
the place called the Bums’ Nest or the
Jungle. As a boy, Rolfzen was there,
watching and listening, but he will not
allow a moment of romance, freedom,
or escape: “Theirs was a controlled ca-
maraderie with limited laughter. Cada
man was alone on these tracks that led
to nowhere . . . . And so they left. Más
would arrive the next day. One gentle-
man in particular I remember. An old
bent man dressed in a long shabby coat,
a tattered hat on his head and a cane in
his hand. The last time I saw him, he was
headed west along the railroad tracks,
headed for an empty world.”7
“In times behind, I too / wished I’d
This is not how the song of the open
lived / in the hungry Thirties,” Bob
Dylan wrote in 1964 in “Eleven Outlined
Epitaphs,” his notes to The Times They
Are A-Changin’. “Rode freight trains for
kicks / Got beat up for laughs / Era
making my own depression,” he wrote
the year before in “My Life in a Stolen
Moment”–speaking of leaving Hib-
road goes–and while Bob Dylan has
sung that song as much as anyone, como el
road opened it also forked, even from
the start. “At the end of the great Eng-
lish epic Paradise Lost,” Rolfzen writes,
“Milton observes the departure of Ad-
am and Eve from the Garden, and as he
4 Ibídem., 48.
5 Ibídem., 54.
6 Ibídem., 18.
7 Ibídem., 33.
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Dædalus Spring 2007
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observes their leaving by the Eastern
Gate, he utters these beautiful words:
‘The world was all before them.’”8 So
much depends–think of “Bob Dylan’s
Dream,” from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,
en 1963. There he is, twenty-two, “riding
on a train going west,” dreaming of his
true friends, his soul mates–and then
suddenly he is an old man. He and his
friends have long since vanished to each
otro. Their roads haven’t split so much
as crumbled, disappeared–“shattered,"
he sings. How was it that, en 1963, su
voice and guitar calling up a smoky, afuera-
of-focus portrait, Bob Dylan was already
looking back, from forty, ½fty, sixty years
más tarde?
“As I went out–” With those ½rst
words for “Ain’t Talkin’”–not only
the longest song on Modern Times, y
el más fuerte, but the only performance
on the album where you don’t hear cal-
culation–Bob Dylan disappears. Alguno-
one other than the singer you think you
know seems to be singing the song. Él
doesn’t seem to know what effects to
usar, what they might even be for. It’s
the only song on the album, really, con-
out an ending–and with those ½rst four
palabras, a cloud is cast. The singer doesn’t
know what’s going to happen–and it’s
the way he expects that nothing will
happen, the way he communicates an
innocence you instantly don’t trust, eso
steels you for the story that he’s about
to tell, or that’s about to sweep him up.
He walks out into “the mystic garden.”
He stares at the flowers on the vines. Él
passes a fountain. Someone hits him
from behind.
This is when the world opens up be-
fore him–because he can’t go back.
There is only one reason to travel this
camino: revenge.
8 Ibídem., 76–77.
For the only time on Modern Times,
the music doesn’t orchestrate, no
bomba, doesn’t give itself away with its
½rst note. Led by Tony Garnier’s cello
and Donnie Herron’s viola, the band
curls around the singer’s voice even
as he curls around the band’s quiet, re-
treating, resolute sound, as if the whole
song is the opening and closing of a ½st,
over and over again, the slow rhythm
turning lyrics that are pretentious, incluso
precious, on the page into a kind of
oracular bar talk, the old drunk who’s
there every night and never speaks ½-
nally telling his story. “I practice a faith
that’s long abandoned,” he says, y
that might be the most frightening line
Bob Dylan has written in years. “That’s
been destroyed,” Dylan told Doon Arbus
en 1997, speaking of “the secret commu-
nity” of “like-minded people” he found
in the early sixties, a fellowship of those
who felt themselves “outside and down-
trodden,” a community that “spread out
across America”–“I don’t know who
destroyed it.”
“I know, in my mind, I’m still a mem-
ber of a secret community. I might be
the only one,” Dylan said then; in “Ain’t
Talkin’” the singer moves down his road
of patience and blood. You can sense his
head turning from side to side as he tells
you why his head is bursting: “If I catch
my opponents ever sleeping / I’ll just
slaughter ’em where they lie.” He snaps
off the line casually, as if it’s hardly
worth the time it takes to say, as if he’s
done it before, William Munny in Unfor-
given killing children on his way to wher-
ever he is–what he’ll do to get wherever
it is he’s going will be nothing to that.
God doesn’t care: “The gardener,” the
singer says to a woman he ½nds in the
mystic garden, “is gone.”
Ahora, Bob Dylan didn’t need B. j. Rolf-
zen’s tales of the tramp armies that
A trip to
Hibbing
High School
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Dædalus Spring 2007
123
student from the way a teacher moved,
hesitated over a word, dropped hints he
never quite turned into stories–these
soils were not unprepared at all.
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Annals by
Greil
marco
passed through Melrose during the
Great Depression to catch a feel for
“tracks that led to nowhere.” Empa-
thy has always been the genie of his
trabajar, the tones of his voice, his sense
of rhythm, his feel for how to ½ll up a
line or leave it half empty, his sense
of when to ride a melody and when to
bury it, so that it might dissolve all of
a listener’s defenses–and this is what
allowed Dylan, en 1962 at the Gaslight
Café in Greenwich Village, at home in
that secret community of tradition and
mystery, to become not only the pining
lover in the old ballad “Handsome Mol-
ly,” but also Handsome Molly herself.
There’s no tracing that quality of em-
pathy to anything–so much depends–
but if effects like these had causes, entonces
there would be people doing the same
on every corner, in any time. Sobre el
way to Hibbing, we stopped at an an-
tique store; shoved in among a shelf of
children’s books was a small, cracked
volume called From Lincoln to Coolidge,
published in 1924, a collection of news
dispatches, excerpts from Congressional
hearings, and speeches, among them the
speech Woodrow Wilson gave to dedi-
cate Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace in
Hodgenville, Kentucky, en 1916. “This is
the sacred mystery of democracy,” Wil-
son said, “that its richest fruits spring
up out of soils that no man has prepared
and in circumstances amidst which they
are least expected.”
That is the truth, and that is the mys-
tery. In the case of Bob Dylan, as with
any person who does things others don’t
hacer, the mystery is always there. But from
the overwhelming fact of the pure size of
Hibbing High School, from the ambition
and vision placed in the murals in its en-
tryway, from the poetry on the walls to
the poetry in the classroom, perhaps to
memories recounted after everyone else
had gone–or memories picked up by a
124
Dædalus Spring 2007
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