B.07.F03.03.01 — Mostly loose leaves. Lyric fragments, religious and philosophical musings, lists of paint and art supplies he wants to buy; a couple of piquant non sequiturs that would have (sorry again) been perfect to include here but which, for unspecified reasons, you were denied permission to quote. The more time you spend in the Archive the more you find yourself overcome by the intensity of Dylan’s work ethic, the pathology of his drive. Scraps of paper bags, the backs of receipts, both sides of a business card, the insides of used matchbooks, hotel stationery from Miami and Sydney, from Skopje and Tokyo.
It’s tempting to call this graphomania, but you don’t think he suffers from a compulsion to write per se. It’s more that his mind never stops racing. He’s always thinking, riffing a mile a minute about girls and the fates of nations and chord progressions and what it is God put us here for (though in his hand it is nearly always written “G-d,” the Jewish way) and a better rhyme for the line and whatever he sees out the window and some old blues song and a tall tale sprung out of a daydream and he’s writing it all down not because he thinks he’s gonna use it—though he might, that’s why he’s saving it—but because it has to go somewhere. He has to get it out of his head. And so he is always, always writing, the gaunt letters straining ahead like hard-driven horses, the ideas pouring forth one on top of the next, good ones and bad ones, brilliance and bullshit, not that he’d know the difference, at least not right now, and sometimes the pages bear trace logics of association or sequence but mostly, you think, they’re random. This and that and that and that and this. The painstaking editing and revision will happen (eleven drafts of “Jokerman,” forty of “Dignity,” twenty pages of potential lyrics for “Like a Rolling Stone”), but for now it’s all he can do to bottle the lightning as it strikes. How does it feel? To you, it feels like the inexhaustibility of being Bob Dylan in any given minute must be exhausting. Now imagine doing it all day every day for eighty-three years. Imagine you’re doing it right now.