What Songs Evoke Memories of People for You?

[honestrosewater]

Another Queen:

Teo Torriate (Let Us Cling Together) - hypnagogue (some of it is Japanese, and some of what hypnagogue says is Japanese to me. And I remember hyp having fun with the haikus. It also has a rather haunting cadence, and I can see him listening to it when he gets into one of those special states he's so fond of.)

 

[Chi Meson]

"We are the champions" is the same song as "We will rock you" (alternative title). Aren't they?May I ask why you find that song remindful of yours truly?

This was what used to be called a "double A-side" single. They are two songs, but they are meant to be played one after the other.

 

[hypnagogue]

Visions of Johanna - hynagogue

I didn't catch this post til just now, and I'm not sure what your rationale for assigning this one to me was, but this is one of my favorites (not just by Dylan, but overall). Actually I did a PF search for "visions of johanna" and the only two results that came up were this thread and another one where I cite a certain lyric in the song as one of my favorites, but that was a full two weeks after this post. This is kind of eerie. Nice job though.

rose-- demo, anata-wa nihon-go ga daisuki desu ne?

 

[honestrosewater]

rose-- demo, anata-wa nihon-go ga daisuki desu ne?

It sounds good coming from Freddie.

(Big guess there.)

 

[hypnagogue]

It sounds good coming from Freddie.

(Big guess there.)

OK, that's a bit of Chinese to my ears (eyes). Or maybe Swahili.

 

[honestrosewater]

OK, that's a bit of Chinese to my ears (eyes). Or maybe Swahili.

You asked whether I thought Japanese was a nice or nice-sounding language, right? So I said that it sounds nice coming from Freddie (Mercury, the person who sings the song that reminds me of you).

You don't happen to speak Latin, do you?

 

[hypnagogue]

You asked whether I thought Japanese was a nice or nice-sounding language, right? So I said that it sounds nice coming from Freddie (Mercury, the person who sings the song that reminds me of you).

Ah, I see. I didn't make the Freddie connection (actually I didn't even make the connection that "Another Queen" meant another song by the band Queen-- my brain is sputtering along lately). But yeah, you basically got the translation of my question right.

You don't happen to speak Latin, do you?

I took two years or so of Latin in high school, but I'm pretty rusty by now.

 

[loseyourname]

I didn't catch this post til just now, and I'm not sure what your rationale for assigning this one to me was, but this is one of my favorites (not just by Dylan, but overall). Actually I did a PF search for "visions of johanna" and the only two results that came up were this thread and another one where I cite a certain lyric in the song as one of my favorites, but that was a full two weeks after this post. This is kind of eerie. Nice job though.

That's just how good I am.

As far as the rationale: It's all about altered states of consciousness taking place in New York. If that isn't you, what is? Plus, it's pretty heavily philosophical.

 

[hypnagogue]

It's all about altered states of consciousness

I wasn't aware of that really (though certain parts have resonances with that idea that I've picked up on in the past). I looked around on google though and there doesn't seem to be any authoritative interpretation or even much of a wide concensus. Where'd you get the idea that it's all about altered states?

 

[loseyourname]

I wasn't aware of that really (though certain parts have resonances with that idea that I've picked up on in the past). I looked around on google though and there doesn't seem to be any authoritative interpretation or even much of a wide concensus. Where'd you get the idea that it's all about altered states?

I'm not saying it's about drugs or anything, but the speaker of the lyrics is experiencing his world in a rather odd way. I can give you my full interpretation:

Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're tryin' to be so quiet?
This says to me that his senses are playing tricks on him. He's seeing and hearing things that aren't really there.
We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it
This gives the first hint that he really does not want to be where he is, both literally and figuratively, and isn't doing a very good job of pretending, either.
And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin' you to defy it
While I've always taken Louise to be a real person, she can also be seen as the embodiment of determinism. She is what seems to be fate, that which you don't believe you can change.
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there's nothing, really nothing to turn off
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind
It can be argued that the context in which this song first became meaningful to me is coloring my interpretation a bit, but I've always taken this to mean that Louise is his lover, and while he is there with her, he cannot get Johanna out of his head. Every time he is with Louise, his thoughts turn to Johanna.

In the empty lot where the ladies play blindman's bluff with the key chain
And the all-night girls they whisper of escapades out on the "D" train
We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight
Ask himself if it's him or them that's really insane
In addition to the night playing tricks, this is where I begin to get the sense that his experience is being altered, as he speaks of disjunct images and people wondering whether they're insane. I see at least two layers to this line. The obvious meaning is literal. You have two sets of people: girls that stay out all night, taking the subway trains to illicit encounters of one sort or another, and a security man that works the third shift. Both seem to be leading rather pointless existences and so cannot help but wonder whether they are off their rockers to be doing this. On a deeper level, though, their questioning of their own existence is not just a questioning of whether what they are doing is what they should be doing, but whether what they experience is even real or not. This will take some justification, which I hope comes below.
Louise, she's all right, she's just near
She's delicate and seems like the mirror
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Johanna's not here
The ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face
Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place
On the surface, this reinforces Louise's position as a natural default, but it does more than that. Given the overall tone of the song, I interpret this passage as saying that he is literally beginning to see Johanna every time he looks at Louise, and since he also sees himself, his self-image is being replaced by this pseudo-Johanna.

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 lotta gall to be so useless and all
Muttering small talk at the wall while I'm in the hall
Again, it's possible that this was not Dylan's intent, but I take this as being a third-person reference to himself. If the image of Johanna has replaced his own self-image, then that self-image has been displaced into a semi-psychotic episode. I don't think that he is encountering a real person here. The "little boy lost" is his doppelganger, glorifying the situation that the speaker is in and allowing him to be contemptful of himself without being overtly contemptful of himself.
How can I explain?
Oh, it's so hard to get on
And these visions of Johanna, they kept me up past the dawn
Of course, sleep deprivation doesn't exactly help when you're already experiencing the world a wee bit strangely.

Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
Hear the one with the mustache say, "Jeeze
I can't find my knees"
Oh, jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule
But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel
There are again two ways of taking this. If we take it literally, he is simply walking through a museum and musing about some rather odd paintings, and the Mona Lisa. Given his sleep deprivation and the dreamlike way this is narrated, however, I question whether or not this is really occurring at all. Though I do think he probably is in a literal museum, the artwork is obviously not actually engaging in the actions he describes.

The peddler now speaks to the countess who's pretending to care for him
Sayin', "Name me someone that's not a parasite and I'll go out and say a prayer for him"
But like Louise always says
"Ya can't look at much, can you man?"
This is what leads me to believe that he is actually in a real museum, but also that he is losing it, as he is beginning to share his delusions with Louise, confusing her in the process. Irony creeps in here, however, as it is only through the sharing of his delusion that he begins to be honest with her at all.
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 ev'rything's been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
The city seems to have merged with the world of "Desolation Row" here.
While my conscience explodes
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain
And yet again, I see two ways of taking this. On the one hand, the visions of Johanna are all that remain of Johanna. She is gone and will almost certainly remain gone. On the other hand, the visions may very well have taken over the whole of his phenomenological world at this point.


In a way, this song can be misleading with regard to why I chose it for you. I don't see you as longing for a woman you cannot have while trolling through the city with one you don't really want. I can, however, see you trolling through the city while experimenting with different modes of perception and beginning to have strange visions and maybe even driving yourself insane.

I'll freely admit that I might be reading a little too much into the lyrics (is that even possible with Dylan, though?), due in part to my own identification with the song. It first became meaningful to me after a girl named Jenny broke up with me. (Ironically, her name is derived from "Giovanna," the Italian form of "Johanna.") I trolled around my own city with another girl shortly afterward for a few months or so, but could not get the image of Jenny out of my mind. The whole experience resulted in quite a few parallels, including me displacing my own personality into the third person to scrutinize it and even having what seemed to be hallucinations in which I literally saw Jenny in places where she could not possibly have been (she's going to film school in New York and is not anywhere near me geographically). The ordeal, combined with other developmental processes, has, in quite a real and noticeable way, changed the quality of my everyday experiences. The functioning of my sense is the same, but those aspects to our experience which are non-sensory, the theoretico-culturo-self-imago way in which we interpret the sense data, are far different than what they used to be. Maybe you could say I just see a little too much of myself in this song, and it's possible I chose it because I see a little of myself in you as well.

 

[hypnagogue]

Thanks for that. I really like your analysis regarding the narrator's displacement of his self-image onto Louise, where he sees Johanna in her and thus in himself, all the while feeling alienated from himself as well. It makes the relevant lyrics deep and cogent in a way I hadn't experienced them before; they now seem exceedingly elegant and brilliant. It's an especially interesting way to regard the "little boy lost" lyrics, which always seemed a bit odd and abstruse to me. But it does seem to follow from the previous lyric that he'd be looking at himself from the third person, e.g. as in a mirror, and that this dissociated self-image that is "lost" for him would be haunting him with memories of his farewell kiss to Johanna and generally bothering him about it in a persistently negative, internal-speech mental chatting kind of way ("muttering [serious, useless, miserable] small talk in the wall [that separates the narrator from his self-image?] while I'm in the hall"). I also hadn't made the plausible connection with Desolation Row (to this I'd also add the shared imagery of rain).

Some interesting tidbits I picked up while looking for other analyses of "Visions of Johanna"-- some postulate that rain is a symbol for amphetamines or heroin. It's plausible that rain is supposed to represent some sort of drug, insofar as Louise holds the handful of rain and at the end of the song, the narrator is completely immersed in his visions of Johanna while "harmonicas play the skeleton keys in the rain."

There are also some interesting interpretations of who/what Johanna is supposed to be here. Possible candidates include
1. Johanna van Gogh:

The only Johanna I see is in the song Bob Dylan wrote for
Johanna Gezina van Gogh (Bonger), sister-in-law of
Vincent van Gogh who moved Dylan greatly by her single-
handed transformation of the reputation of an obscure
suicide into that of a major artist...

[For those readers brand new to Dylan and unfamiliar with
the song, the visions of Johanna are the paintings of
Johanna's brother-in-law, the literal visions which her
brother-in-law had, the visions which kept Mr Dylan up past
the dawn, and -- perhaps most importantly -- her vision of
what his art could be to a wider public.]

2. Joan Baez;
3. "Gehenna":

It is much more interesting to hear in the name the echo of the name
"Gehenna," meaning Hell, Prison, Torture. In fact, no matter how often I
hear the song, and no matter how often I read the printed lyrics as
"Johanna," what I *hear* is still "Gehenna."

This one makes some sense since it ties into the altered states interpretation of the song and jives with the negativity-- basically, Gehenna as a bad trip, perhaps even something inescapable like your notion of Johanna as fate or determinism. Although on the other hand, it seems like the narrator is really pining for Johanna, so I don't know how far that can go.

A completely polar opposite interpretation of Johanna as Gehenna is:

>Oh yeah, there's also the Yaweh connection. The Hebrew word for God, which
>is the original root for Johanna/Johannes/John etc., further proving my
>point.

Not precisly true. According to my handy Lexicon of Biblical Hebrew, John
is from the Hebrew Johanan and Jehohanan, the Jeh- is the name of God, the
-hanan is the Hebrew for Mercy, thus the biblical name means something like
"Yahweh is Gracious" or "Yahweh is a Gracious Giver." I realize this is
your name annd you probably know what it means, but as long as I'm dishing
up info you alread know, I might as well go for it.

Whether Dylan is clued into the meaning behind the name Johanna is doubtful,
but he might be. I think what you have been hacking at is not "who" Johanna
is, but "what" she is.

from http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9608e&L=hwy61-l&P=15563

Synthesizing those last two views a bit, it could be that Johanna is meant to be both "heaven" and "hell" or have aspects of both, which would also find resonance with the drug/altered state view. Maybe Johanna is supposed to encompass both the dizzying heights and the frightful depths of altered/psychoactive states. That might be reading too much into it, but there does seem to be some fit there.

My favorite lyric from this song is "Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial / Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while / But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues / You can tell by the way she smiles." I've always interpretted it this way:

Infinity refers to ecstatic, heavenly, blissful, profound etc. states and visions, where the works of the great artists (who presumably experience such things) stand as representations or productions of these states and visions (Van Gogh would make a lot sense here). The trial of these sublime states/works must mean analysis and critique of art; for me it creates an image of someone viewing works in a museum, analyzing them in a cool and detached manner to judge their merit-- is this good or not, is this valuable or not? There's a kind of irony and sense of detachment or estrangement here for the viewer/critic of the artwork-- here we have on the one hand an ambassador for the heavenly, the infinite, the pinaccle of human experience, and on the other, the viewer who stands back and has to deliberate over the value of this! The very act of putting infinity up on trial seems almost blashphemous and conveys the extent to which art is limited in truly conveying subjective experience, and the extent to which the judge(s) of the artwork in the museum are alienated from or cannot relate to the visionary experience.

"Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while." A kind of resigned sense that even the highest and most sublime states of consciousness can lose their luster after some time; even heaven can become boring or uninteresting or at least not be what it used to be. Even salvation loses its essential sacredness if one dwells within it for too long, as one can become detached from the feeling in itself and instead tend to view it from a detached or analytical perspective and in the process lose contact with its quintessence.

"But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues, you can tell by the way she smiles." Mona Lisa, as a famous representation for the mystique and beauty of art as a whole who is frozen in time as a permenant museum fixture, is a kind of figure forever stuck in infinity, dwelling there forever. And this is indeed what 'salvation' is like for her-- it has worn thin on her, and she has a melancholy desire to be done with it, to leave the 'museums' and escape a heaven that is no longer so heavenly.

This way of looking at these lyrics fits in with the earlier idea that Johanna is both Gehenna and Jehova, both heaven and hell and the way one can transition into the other, just as in certain altered states.

Other miscellaneous notes: "See the primitive wallflower freeze"-- I wonder if this had any role in the naming of Dylan's son's band, the Wallflowers. I also wonder if the album title, "Blonde on Blonde," might refer to the superposition of Johanna upon Louise that the narrator experiences in this song.

The functioning of my sense is the same, but those aspects to our experience which are non-sensory, the theoretico-culturo-self-imago way in which we interpret the sense data, are far different than what they used to be.

Could you expand on this a bit?

Maybe you could say I just see a little too much of myself in this song,

I don't know if I see any of myself in this song per se-- maybe I do on a more subconscious level-- but it was a pretty important and meaningful song for me at one point as well.

and it's possible I chose it because I see a little of myself in you as well.

The feeling is mutual.