When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, there was a bit of an outcry among the high art set. A folksy American singer-songwriter winning the world’s grandest literary award? I loved it. What is the point of literature but to write things that change the world, or at least change the perception of the world, for people who read it, listen to it, experience it. Literature is not a grand and weighty book. It is an experience. The words are just the bridge from here to there.

In their decision, the Nobel committee said that Dylan had "created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.

This piece is one that came a few years after the Nobel, showing that Bob Dylan’s capacity for new poetic expressions remains alive even as he moves into his 80s. “I've Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” is a song on his 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways.

I encourage you to listen to the song. It’s set to a lovely backing track that’s closely based on a piece of music by Jacques Offenbach Belle nuit, ô nuit d'amour, which was composed in 1881, and which is plays a key role in the Oscar-winning 1997 Italian film about the holocaust, Life Is Beautiful.

Great art does that. It crosses time and space and finds new listeners, new disciples, who will take it and shape it and carry on its lifeforce for generations to come.

That’s the song. The lyric, well, I just really like it too.

I’m not sure who the “you” is in the refrain, the “you” that Bob Dylan, or the narrator, has decided to give himself to. A lover? A god? The earth, or the universe?

I’m not sure, but that act of “giving myself” — of giving ourselves — isn’t that what all art and all creativity ultimately is? An act that is at once about the giver and the receiver. A giving of oneself to somebody or something else, even if the giver never gets to see who the receiver is.

You can read the lyrics of the song here

You can listen to the song on YouTube here

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Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://onsound.eu/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com