Time, Truth, and Tempest: A Titanic Playlist, Part 2
<<<Back to page 1
Dylan introduces characters who are not part of the actual Titanic story, or who are placeholders for people who were. “Wellington” is one. “Calvin, Blake, and Wilson,” who “gambled in the dark” are evocative name choices for Dylan’s invented passenger list. As one blogger puts it, they “carry enough surplus meaning to keep Dylan exegetes theorizing into the foreseeable future.” Invoking Protestant theologian John Calvin, with his association with the theological doctrine of predestination, and putting him a game of chance is a wink to the audience acknowledging this theme of time, possibility, and destiny. (Making “Blake” William Blake and “Wilson” E. O. Wilson goes still further.)
Screencap from ‘A Night to Remember’ (1958)
Dylan’s “watchman” presents either a human figure or a stand-in for God in at least two possible meanings. As with the Carter Family version, perhaps, the watchman may be a real person in the story. His role in Dylan’s song, however, is less as a character in the tragedy who fails to see the iceberg. Instead, he is a dreamer before whom the story unfolds. As a divine figure, “watchman” itself presents a double meaning. On the one hand, it evokes the notion of God as witness to the pageant of human acts: heroic, villainous, absurd, loving, and otherwise. On the other hand, it evokes the deistic conception of God as “Divine Watchmaker” who sets the universe in motion, and does not intervene as fate unfolds.
“The Ancient of Days setting a Compass to the Earth” by William Blake (source: Wikipedia)
“The watchman he lay dreaming
As the ballroom dancers twirled
He dreamed the Titanic was sinking
Into the underworld.”
“Tempest” repeatedly puts fate’s irreversibility before us. It appears in verse 6 (above) and verse 16. The tearing of the veil alludes to the moment of Christ’s death–see Matthew 27:51):
“The veil was torn asunder
‘Tween the hours of twelve and one
No change, no sudden wonder
Could undo what had been done.”
It returns in 38:
“The watchman he lay dreaming
The damage had been done
He dreamed the Titanic was sinking
And he tried to tell someone.”
It concludes with verse 45:
“The watchman he lay dreaming
Of all the things that can be
He dreamed the Titanic was sinking
Into the deep blue sea.”
“Tempest” may take you in other directions. The gist of it for me, however, is to overlay a variety of human characters, with their virtues and their failings, with a central aspect of tragedy. Something that could have happened otherwise didn’t, and with devastating results. And the clock cannot be turned back. While Dylan’s line in “Desolation Row” that the “Titanic sails at dawn” deploys the ship as a minor symbol, “Tempest” explores that symbol to some of its greatest depths. With the passage of time, the song is less about the real ship than the symbol.
“April the 14th: Part 1” & “Ruination Day: Part 2” by Gillian Welch
Time is also revelatory for Gillian Welch. Like Dylan’s song, Welch’s musical explorations of the Titanic disaster also take their bearings from an early 20th century predecessor. In this case, it’s Blind Willie Johnson’s (or Lightnin’ Washington’s), “God Moves on the Water.” From that start, however, the Titanic disaster takes on a more metaphorical dimension in this two song suite. (“I Want to Sing That Rock and Roll” and “Elvis Presley Blues” appear between the two Titanic songs.) Welch links up the Titanic disaster with other catastrophes, personal, political, and social. The three main players are the Titanic in 1912, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, and the Black Sunday dust storm of 1935.
Fully unpacking what goes on in these songs involves tapping into the overall course of the Time (The Revelator) album. We hope to get to that before too long. In the meantime, you can read here for more of Welch’s thoughts on these songs.