Sick of Love

The new Victoria’s Secret catalog arrived today. I’m not at all clear who sold our name to them, though in this world and in this age it might have been my runner’s catalog which also displays undergarments and bras—though ostensibly from a different perspective and for different reasons. Nonetheless, we’ve been placed on the Victoria’s Secret list, and we periodically receive their catalog. And has been my practice over the past several years–years in which the Victoria’s Secret catalog was delivered to our home–I recycle it immediately. That is, I deposit it into our recycling bins after I have walked very sl-o-w-ly up the l-o-n-g driveway ogling the fancy bras and panties that are so revealingly and seductively displayed, and panted over the bodies which lay just underneath the lingerie. (I wonder why men’s undergarments are not called lingerie? Am I not getting Victor’s Secret?). I pant heavily, I protest, because the driveway is an uphill climb and the bodies displayed are half my age. But that is another story.

I have two young daughters and a wife who . . . well, she’ll have to answer for her decisions and desires herself. But our daughters are fifteen and ten, and I just don’t know that there is anything I want them ogling at in the Victoria’s Secret catalog. I don’t want them identifying these bodies with ideal female beauty; I don’t want them wishing for a body other their own; I don’t want them desiring to dress themselves at this moment of their lives for sexuality or sexual activity; or be identifying their gender with these seductions. I’m not sure I can seriously distinguish between Playboy and Victoria’s Secret, and I don’t subscribe to the former. The latter arrives willy-nilly.

And now I have learned that Bob Dylan had offered his image and his composition, “Love Sick” to an advertisement for Victoria’s Secret, renowned purveyor of ladies undergarments. Some, even many, see Dylan’s act as a betrayal, a pandering to the capitalist mentality to sell what is sellable for the highest price, a prostitution of a virtue forty years of creation and performance have developed. I wondered myself at Dylan’s decision. Since 1962, Bob Dylan has been central to my consciousness; not a day has gone by that I have not listened to Dylan either on vinyl or on compact disc, or in my mind. I have daily quoted Dylan in my intellectual and pedagogical meanderings; I have measured my life not in coffee spoons but in Dylan albums. He voiced my rage, articulated my confusions, spoke my hungers, defined my spiritual quests, expressed my bitternesses, cried my despairs, and prayed my hopes. Through my years, I have experienced epiphany at many a Bob Dylan concert. When I turned fifty I celebrated at a show at the Midway in St. Paul, Minnesota. The evening ended on the prayer, “Forever Young.” And now, I discover Dylan playing the soundtrack to my lusts, and again he has led me to thought.

Because somehow, I do not feel betrayed. No, I am not one who accepts whatever Dylan does without doubt, nor excuse what I consider lapses in his artistic creation, or blindly follow his directions. I mean, early on he warned, “don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters,” and I have heeded his cautions, though sometimes I have paid heavily for neglecting the latter. I lost interest in Dylan’s work during his Christian phase during the 1980s–from what I had heard from him I was not certain that I was much interested to learn what Dylan wanted to teach. And for a long time I’ve believed that a song from early in Dylan’s work defined his stance in the cultural landscapes:

You say you’re looking for someone never weak but always strong
To protect you and defend you whether you or right or wrong
Someone to open each and every door
But it ain’t me, Babe
No, no, no it ain’t me babe
It ain’t me you’re looking for, Babe.

I took him at his word, and he let me discover myself for myself. Not long after appeared “Like a Rolling Stone, “and it confirmed my quest: “When you got nothing you got nothing to lose. How does it feel to be on your own, with no direction home, like a complete unknown, Like a Rolling Stone?” By refusing my dependency, Dylan taught me independence.

And I learned from Dylan about the struggle. He engaged me politically, though he eschewed the role of leader. He wrote, in 1963 “Trail of troubles. Roads of battles/Paths of Victory/We shall walk.” Then, though he admitted the struggle would be arduous and seemingly hopeless and futile, he promised final victory, even redemption. The world was corrupt, we were corrupt, but when the ship came in, the promise would be fulfilled. I think I was defined by that promise–I listened for the sound of the tambourine. Ah, but times changed; there were so many deaths and so many defeats. Many gave up the struggle; many turned against it. But not Bob Dylan: he remained true to his commitments to the struggle. In the last album (Love and Theft), he declared, “The only thing, that I did wrong/Was to stay in Mississippi a day too long.” Later, in the same album, in “Honest with Me,” Dylan sings defiantly, “I’m not sorry for nothing I’ve done/I’m glad I fought, I only wish we’d won.” Despite his critics’ accusatory cries (reaching back at least to Newport, 1965) that he’d abandoned the struggle, here Dylan confirms his continuous engagement for freedom and social justice, and the pronominal movement from the singular to the plural acknowledges the community in and for which he fought. And I think that Dylan’s participation with Victoria’s Secret now remains part of that battle.

I have heard the story that early in his career Dylan was asked what product he would ever consider letting his songs advertise, to which he responded ‘ladies intimate apparel,’ or something like that phrasing. Perhaps negotiating with Victoria’s Secret, Dylan was fulfilling an early fantasy. (“I spoke like a child,” he states in “Love Sick.”) All the better that in the fulfillment no one need be hurt, though, perhaps, one would argue, there is a violence in the sexual display of women in the sometimes lubricious images. But, I consider, Victoria’s Secret represents my desire, sometimes gives it tangible form; I do not think it creates desire. Maybe the images in Victoria’s Secret direct desire, and in this manner perpetuate oppression and abuse. Perhaps, I am disturbed to have had my desire discovered so easily, but I am intrigued by, no, I am attracted to the images. It is, I explain, a secret pleasure in which I indulge when I look at the catalog; I know where I am. As a teacher, I would offer such reflective moments rather than censor the environment. I am a teacher: it is my life that works to mitigate the sources and effects of oppression and abuse.

Nor could Dylan’s greed answer to the question ‘why?’ I don’t know much about Dylan’s finances, indeed, I don’t know much about finances at all, but I cannot believe that Dylan is desperate for cash. Nor, as I have said, am I a purchaser of the products of the Victoria’s Secret catalog which might excuse their use of Dylan for their marketing strategy; I don’t wear their clothes, nor does anyone I know or think I know. Sigh! And, as I have said, I don’t want my children looking into the catalog, though I look myself pruriently within. No, I do not feel perfidy at Dylan’s move; indeed, I almost think that I understand. There is something in this relationships that I might discuss with my daughters.

In “Love Sick,” Dylan sings of a crushing weariness provoked not only (indeed, if at all!) by a rejection by his lover, but by the self-doubts and insecurities which love inherently provokes. Whether actually betrayed or anticipating the inevitability of a betrayal, Dylan speaks in both accusation and reflection. “Could you ever be true?/I think of you and I wonder.” Yet, as miserable as he is, as tormented as he remains at his condition, he is anguished by his desire for her. “Just don’t know what to do/I’d give anything just to be with you.” This sentiment reminds me of the closing couplet of Michael Drayton's (1563-1631) sonnet, “Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part," in which the poet’s aggressive acceptance of the relationship’s end is vitiated by his suggestion that at a word of reconciliation from his lover, the poet would instantly resume the affair. Indeed, though there is suggestion of separation in “Love Sick”–“I’m trying to forget you”— there is also a hint of a tortured continuance, “I’m walking,/Through streets that are dead. Walking, with you in my head.” This is a love so all-consuming, so overwhelming, so tormenting, that it tortures: “This kind of love, I’m sick of it.” As has been pointed out, ‘sick of love’ here could easily refer to ‘sick with love’ as well as sick of being in love, or sick of the state of love itself. In each case, love is a pernicious malady from which the suffering is profound. Indeed, so consumed is Dylan by his love that everything about him becomes measured by the unrequitable longing for the loved one. The world itself loses substance:

I see, I see lovers in the meadow
I see, I see silhouettes in the window
I watch them ‘til they’re gone
And they leave me
hangin’ on to a shadow

There is no energy and no hope.

Indeed, I think “Love Sick” is a fitting and ironic comment to the Victoria’s Secret catalog. That catalog depicts images to be desired, but which are forever beyond our reach. Indeed, that perfect beauty probably doesn’t exist at all—it is all illusion and ephemera. Fantasy! In the catalog, imperfections have all been disappeared, airbrushed away, and unblemished images of beauty are all that remain. ‘I’d give anything to be with you . . . Could you ever be true? I think of you and wonder.” I scream, “I, too, desire all the beautiful things so beautifully and seductively displayed. I want!” The catalog promises fulfillment , but contains only image. It makes you sick; it feeds your illness.

This condition oppresses and frustrates Dylan, but at whom can he direct his rage? Certainly not the loved one with whom he would forever be. How much more suffering can he inflict on himself? And there is little hint—I cannot think of one instance in all of Dylan, that suicide is ever an answer to anything. (“I see that silver linin’/That was hangin’ I the sky,” he sings in ‘Paths of Victory”). Ah, but the world outside, beyond the catalog, outside of that catalog, even all of the real bodies which live out here, now there might be an outlet for his bitterness. And so the advertisement itself becomes the statement of Dylan’s revenge. “Sometimes, the silence can be like thunder/Sometimes I want to take to the road of plunder.” Here there is a violence, but Dylan’s plundered road is one of performance and not pilfery. It is where we pay to hear him play. It is where he enacts his desire. And I have been at those shows and been relieved.

In Dylan’s Victoria’s Secret advertisement, I hear a weltschmerz ( a concept I would have my children know), and I hear a strength (also, a concept which I would have my children know). There is in the Victoria’s Secret advertisement this experience of conflicted emotions: the promise of fantasy and the anger at illusion, the innocence of desire and the sickness of lust, the hope of love and the reality of its end, the prospect of happiness and the weariness of loss. What is expressed in Dylan’s expression is the conflict at the core of desire which I think I want our daughters and sons to understand. I think of another Dylan song, "Silvio," and the lines,

I can tell you fancy,I can tell you plain
You give something up for everything you gain
Since every pleasure's got an edge of pain
Pay for your ticket and don't complain

That too, I think, could be the soundtrack of the recent Dylan Victoria’s Secret catalog. I know what lies behind those images, and I am angry at them and at myself. I’m sick of love. I am wearied. I want to take to the road and plunder. I’d give anything just to be with you.