#58: "Not Dark Yet" - Bob Dylan

The encroaching darkness is something I know a lot about. Suicide attempts, near-death from a rare disease, mental health issues, etc. But I found a light through a song like this. It took a while.

It wasn’t until I broke up with my fiancée that I started to understand Bob Dylan. Granted, my father owned a record or two of his and I vividly recall hearing “Like a Rolling Stone” as a child, instantly loving it. But it took a while to catch up to his talent. Not every artist is a result of love at first listen.

Much like Tom Waits, I think my mother’s opinion of Dylan’s vocals influenced me for a bit. I mostly just agreed and said, “yeah, he’s not much of a singer.” Then something weird happened, I began to fall head over heels with the music of Tom Waits and Bob Dylan almost as an act of rebellion against my mom’s declaration. It no longer mattered. I read the words. I knew the heavy feelings as conflicting as they could often be. I’m a survivor of an attempted suicide. Where would I be without a song like “Not Dark Yet.”

“Who cares if they’re not great singers, they are incredible songwriters!” As usual, it was a ballad by each that got me hooked. I heard “Time” by Tom Waits and started crying. Then I saw the movie Wonder Boys and heard a melancholic Bob Dylan song about halfway through that made me light up and take notice. I tracked down that soundtrack. Of course, I knew that voice as the song played in the film but it sounded more weary, beaten, yet soulful.

In that particular film, one of my favorites, especially when it comes to portrayals of writing, it’s initially used as a contrast to the positive energy that have infected a giddy Tobey Maguire and Robert Downey, Jr. Once they close the door, we’re left with our main character played by Michael Douglas realizing that it’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there. He smokes a joint on the porch, makes a phone call to profess his love to a married woman and begins to realize that he wants to be with her more than anything else.

Suffice to say, there are dozens of remarkable Bob Dylan songs that have existed long before “Not Dark Yet.” About a year or so later after seeing Wonder Boys, I became obsessed with Blood on the Tracks. I love ballads, breakup records and the vulnerable exploration of what it means to lose someone. I almost lost myself to a rare disease but that wouldn’t be the first time I’d encounter death (or loss). I can’t begin to describe what it felt like to lose my father and then several months later, break up with my fiancée. Granted, those shocks to the system lead to some of my best songs (“What I Couldn’t Be” and “Purple Heart”) but I also attribute those recordings to discovering the work of Jeff Tweedy too.

There is another weird reason why I suddenly listened to as much Bob Dylan as possible around the time of discovering this song. In between breaking up with someone and then us getting back together, I met someone new at the Dyer Post Office while standing in line. She had a bubble envelope that was unsealed and I could see what she was mailing. It was a Bob Dylan CD called Love & Theft. I did something I never did: I got her attention since we were both waiting in a long line and said, “That CD is good but it’s no Blood on the Tracks.” Somehow she ended up giving me her phone number simply because I was a complete music nerd.

There’s more to that story down the road. The kicker was I hadn’t listened to Love & Theft yet so essentially I was lying. I mainly just wanted to talk music with a lovely woman who seemed close to my age and that’s what we did for ten minutes or so. Turns out Blood on the Tracks was better (duh). I also hoped she would agree which she did. Strangely enough, what brought me and my ex-fiancée together was a mutual love of Jeff Buckley too.

As much as I don’t like the movie High Fidelity, I do agree with the sentiment of, “books, music, films, these things are important,” when it comes to how I connect with anyone, whether they become a partner or a friend. When people get together in meetings or parties, my lips are often sealed until something related to pop culture comes up.

Of course, since a new connection had formed as a result of me talking about Bob Dylan and that we’d eventually be having phone conversations, I had to rush to the Dyer/Schererville library where I worked and check out every CD that we had in the system by Bob Dylan. One of them was Time Out Of Mind. It was that record that made me understand, respect, appreciate Bob Dylan. Then I went back, listened to so much more. My eyes, my ears were open.

Honestly, I didn’t think listening to Bob Dylan would make me cry but I’d say three songs on Time Out Of Mind did just that and still do. I realized that I had been a fool for not openly calling him a genius. “Not Dark Yet,” especially seemed to capture a state of depression that I’ve known very well on and off since I was about 13 years old. There have been close to a dozen times where I thought of dying and this song knew exactly what that felt like. The darkness isn’t going anywhere. It’s waiting for me. It’s waiting for all of us.

The thing about "Not Dark Yet" is that it couldn't have come from someone other than Bob Dylan in his late 50's. It's not the sort of song that would have been convincing if he'd written it during the 1965 string-of-perfection, not the sort of thing that sounds right if it's sung in a young person's voice. (There are quite a few covers that prove that eloquently, because they sound downright phony, although Dave Gahan from Depeche Mode did a nice one in 2021, when he was older than Dylan was when he wrote it by then.) A line like, "I've still got the scars that the sun didn't heal" is posturing, yeah, but when Bob Dylan, years after most people had written him off as irrelevant, postures that way, it taps into a person's urge to believe it. The whole point is that you know who Bob Dylan is, you remember him when he was young, even if only from Don’t Look Back and No Direction Home. You’re aware of the heavily-mythologized genius he carried in his youth, and you’re hearing him sing now from a very different place.

If "Not Dark Yet" had been the only great song Dylan had written, it wouldn't be a great song, in other words. It sounds best within the full context of the man's career, but within that context—of finding something new to say, and a new way to say it, when you're firmly in the used-to-be portion of life—"Not Dark Yet" is perfect - Dan Solomon

It’s hard not to think about the times when I felt like my mind was lost too like the man singing this song. I felt like giving up. Granted, I have not reached the age of Dylan when he wrote this transcendent work of art. But there are still moments of extreme disillusion with how things are in the world. Life isn’t terrible now, but there were definitely occasions where I felt like swallowing a bottle of pills would be the relief and the release I craved. Maybe an ending would bring an end to the pain. The sun couldn’t heal me but somehow the arts made me realize that you do have to hold on, if only to experience a moment of shared clarity with another artist, another person.

“Not Dark Yet” is a staggeringly beautiful song, both poignant and disturbing because we recognize the narrator in ourselves – he is us, his death is our death. Nevertheless, any apparent simplicity is misleading. It’s as much about spiritual death as physical, and hints at the possibility of salvation. I’ve always believed in the possibility of something better but never a definitive answer as to what that could be. The entire song is a prolonged presentation of a troubled mind in conflict with itself. A body too tired to fight and that desire for resignation getting stronger.

If you want to know the precise instance that I became a Bob Dylan fan it was the delivery of the line, “Feels like my soul has turned into steel.” Every line is heartbreaking and perfect but once the chords shift and he delivers that phrase the way he does, I begin to understand more why he is so beloved. It did take a song I could relate to strongly to make me come around. I think we look to the arts to find ourselves. The way he doesn’t sing but speaks the word “steel,” to where he almost dips downward. He doesn’t care if it’s on key with the chord being strummed. He was almost talking directly to us.

Perhaps he’s too tired to stay on key. We should focus on the emotion on display instead of being concerned about accuracy. I’d say my love around the year 2001 of Bob Dylan was probably close to the time that I began to openly love and embrace imperfection/mistakes in the arts. As long as I can feel something or sensed the sadness being conveyed, staying on key no longer mattered to me. Greg Dulli, Tom Waits, Bob Dylan didn’t care. They still had to sing their songs because they craved catharsis.

I know he’s been doing this all along for decades before this song. He’s been consistently revered over time for a reason. I guess it just took the right song at the right time to turn me into a fan. I’m not even a die-hard fan of his to this day but I can’t deny the power that his music has had especially after going through my own prolonged period of darkness.

Even just the pitch and tone of his vocals have evolved or were altered throughout many records. The way he sounds on Highway 61 Revisited is vastly different from either Nashville Skyline or Desire. Maybe he wasn’t born to sing in the traditional sense of what makes a singer, a great singer. I do however think he was a born writer, a poet, a rebel and most vividly of all, an enigma. Of course filmmaker Todd Haynes captured these contradictions and personality shifts in his experimental biopic, I’m Not There. Electric Dylan was different from a world weary exhausted Dylan that won accolades years later for Time Out of Mind.

Imagine being in a place where kindness and vulnerability from someone you love doesn’t even matter. That recognition has shut down. You’re lying in bed and even someone bringing you food or their time isn’t acknowledged. That’s true blue depression - the inability to feel connected or want to make the effort to even try. Dylan’s “Not Dark Yet” captures that state so perfectly. You want to get out of bed, you want to see friends or a partner, but you can’t. It’s not possible. Grief, mental illness, a pandemic… it’s too dark to make an effort.

She wrote me a letter and she wrote it so kind 
She put down in writing what was in her mind 
I just don’t see why I should even care 
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there

My fiancée was often very kind to me but I couldn’t see it, I couldn’t feel it. The depression of losing my father overrode any thoughtful gestures. Letters meant nothing. I got lost in playing songs in the basement rather than socializing. We often had dinners where we barely spoke. I couldn’t tell her then that everywhere seemed as if it was cloaked in darkness. There was no getting out of that, hard as I might try and hard as she tried too. Honestly, I couldn’t connect to anyone after awhile, even the girl I met at the post office. I wrote a song about beginning to fall in love again as a result of meeting her but that’s false too. It was misplaced affection and a desire to feel desire that never fully blossomed. My soul turned into steel.

“Sometimes my burden seems more than I can bear.” And what’s the use in looking for hope in someone else’s eyes at this precise point in time. Death will render all achievements meaningless in the end, it’s time to close the book, hang my hat and sink slowly into the void. Unless of course, I have awareness of the darkness and come to terms with it. Almost form a comfort zone out of the fact that it’s there, waiting. Instead of fearing it. Who knows when my time will come? Who knows when Bob Dylan’s time will too?

Time is running away. The point is that death is not yet here; there’s still time for more mistakes, more love, more art, more terror and more consolation. I keep realizing how there are too many movies to watch, too many songs to hear, too many podcasts to listen to and too many books to read. It often makes me think of shutting down because there’s not enough to experience everything that I want to. But look at all the extraordinary gifts that life has bestowed upon us.

We have a song like “Not Dark Yet,” to remind us that it does often feel like the end is near but focus on the word ‘yet.’ We still have time to reconnect, to create, to feel, to hold someone close and to celebrate time spent alone too. Follow the river, get to the sea. Deep down we know how to swim through changing tides even when the waters are rough. Let a song like “Not Dark Yet” remind you that even if you’re lost or suicidal, someone out there understands. Many songwriters do. It’s often why they write. There’s still a guiding light if you’re willing to look for it. Music, and the arts in general, have always been a welcoming light that can help lift a lonely heart.