semantics can drive you crazy

 

----------------  [excerpt from Bob Dylan's Chronicles - Simon & Schuster, 2004] ---------------------------- Anyway, France had now brought themselves into the atomic age and there were movements springing up to ban the bombs, French, American, Russian and otherwise, but this movement also had its detractors.  

Reputable psychiatrists were saying that some of these people who claimed to be so against nuclear testing are secular last judgment types--that if nuclear bombs are banned, it would deprive them of their highly comforting sense of doom.  

My friends and I couldn't believe this stuff.  

There'd be articles about things like new modern-day phobias, all with fancy Latin names, like fear of flowers, fear of the dark, of height, fear of crossing bridges, of snakes, fear of getting old, fear of clouds.  Just any old thing could be frightening.

My big fear was that my guitar would go out of tune.  

Women were speaking out in the news, too, challenging the status quo.  Some were complaining that they were told that they needed and deserved equal rights.  Then when they got them, they were accused of becoming too much like men.  Some women wanted to be called "a woman" when they reached twenty-one.  Some sales girls, or women, didn't want to be referred to as "salesladies."  

In churches, too, things were shaking up.  Some white ministers didn't want to be labeled "the Reverend."  They wanted to be called just plain "Reverend."

        Semantics and labels could drive you crazy.  The inside story on a man was that if he wanted to be successful, he must become a rugged individualist, but then he should make some adjustments.  After that, he needed to conform.  You could go from being a rugged individualist to a conformist in the blink of an eye.  

        We thought this stuff was idiotic.  Reality was not so simple and everybody had their own take on it.  Jean Genet's play The Balcony was being performed in the Village and it portrayed the world as a mammoth cathouse where chaos rules the universe, where man is alone and abandoned in a meaningless cosmos.  

The play had a strong sense of focus, and from what I'd seen about the Civil War period, it could have been written one hundred years ago.  

The songs I'd write would be like that, too.  They wouldn't conform to modern ideas.  I hadn't begun yet writing streams of songs as I would, but Len was, and everything around us looked absurd--there was a certain consciousness of madness at work.  

Even the photos of Jackie Kennedy going in and out of revolving doors at the Carlyle Hotel uptown, carrying shopping bags of clothes, looked disturbing.  

Nearby at the Biltmore, the Cuban Revolutionary Council was meeting.

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