Bob Dylan, *Time Out of Mind*.

While listening to Robert Zimmermanʼs (aka Bob Dylan) albums and reading a biography on his works and mind, I encountered this in the book:

Even a few years after its release, when asked about the essence of the album, Dylan still seemed miffed about the critics who prophesied with their distant pens: “People say the record deals with mortality – my mortality for some reason! [laughs] Well, it doesn’t deal with my mortality. It maybe just deals with mortality in general. It’s one thing that we all have in common, isn’t it? But I didn’t see any one critic say: ‘It deals with my mortality’ – you know, his own. As if he’s immune in some kind of way – like whoever’s writing about the record has got eternal life and the singer doesn’t. I found this condescending attitude toward that record revealed in the press quite frequently, but, you know, nothing you can do about that.” ~Scott Marshall, Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life, WND Books.

Well, Bob did not deal with death and the darkness of life in Blonde on Blonde or Highway 61. This album Time Out of Mind (1997) showed the mind of a dying mind. There is nothing preposterous about it. You write what you feel. Sometimes authors and poets and artists want their creations to stand apart from them, to be studied by themselves. That can be done, but you cannot fool people all the time, Bob. You listen to Time Out of Mind for what it is: a powerful album made by a dying mind. And from that, you can relate those ideas with yours when youʼre old, but you wonʼt listen to Ariana Grande or Selena Gomez singing about darkness and life as dying —yet. Artists cannot be seen as humans, but as philosophers, Bob seems to tell us. That is not true, Bob. If you want to be a philosopher, you have to study and subject your thoughts to the most deep scrutiny. Bob, you embraced the Bible and Jesus the Christ as the truth. Thatʼs your way, Bob. Not everybody thinks that makes any sense at all. Specially, when you have at your disposal Aristotle, Spinoza, Darwin, Santayana, or Jesus: Neither God nor Man, by Earl Doherty. Time Out of Mind is about your way of seeing life, Bob. Accept your mind, pal. Be a true artist. 

 The picture of a young Bob Dylan does not make sense,

as this song is composed by an old man talking

of death and darkness. An error? No.