The Ballad of Bob Dylan and the Pope
· The Atlantic
At first, the image appears to be some kind of intergalactic photo op, something out of Star Wars. A figure hooded in black, his craggy face partly in shadow, greets a serene-looking man in a white robe. Think Emperor Palpatine shaking hands with Obi-Wan Kenobi, perhaps brokering a cease-fire in the Clone Wars. Closer inspection yields a picture that is no less weird: Bob Dylan is hanging with the pope.
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What they actually spoke about during their meeting yesterday at the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace, we may never know. But the questions only begin there! Why is Dylan’s head covered by a hood? Why, in some photos, does he have gloves and an umbrella? Why does he seem to have abandoned tying his polka-dotted tie mid-flip? And: Is the pope a fan? (Actually, that last one might have an answer—in a recent book about disarmament, the pope quoted Dylan’s 1963 deep cut “Go Away You Bomb”; “I want that Bomb—I want it settin in my mouth like a cigar,” goes one line. This is unfiltered Dylan that only a true fan could love.)
The most famous American musician of the past half century visits the leader of the Catholic Church. The strangeness, if not the Sith hood, makes you laugh. But these two make some sense together, if not as obvious friends then at least, each in their own way, as spiritually ambitious people. Also, they are both midwestern Bobs. Robert Zimmerman, born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941, meet Robert Francis Prevost, born in Chicago in 1955. They share the common matter-of-factness of people who grew up on the flat plains, who were born in the middle. There is no frenetic city energy to them. They even have similarly enigmatic smiles—lips tight in a straight line, not giving away too much. Their gifts to each other were pretty unfussy, too. Dylan handed the pope a copy of his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, and the pope gave Dylan—of course—a rosary.
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From their middle-class, conventional Middle American upbringings, they both embarked on wild transformations. Dylan used traditional American music to mold himself into a troubadour from nowhere. He abandoned his given name, invented a mythology around his origins, and still resists definition. Prevost had a different kind of reinvention. He joined an ancient religious order, submitted himself to its disciplines, and ultimately assumed an identity set by its history, losing his name to become the pope.
Two midwestern-American boys, avatars of self-transformation, now aged but still happily wearing costumes. But there’s more: In a moment when so many people are worried about how artificial intelligence is flattening human expression, could there be anything more affirming of human uniqueness than the life and work of Dylan and the pope?
Even Dylan’s idiosyncratic outfit was the product of ingenuity that a computer couldn’t dream of matching, if computers could dream. The workwear designer Gauthier Borsarello instantly spotted that the jacket was his own creation. “The good thing about designing everything (even the puller of your zipper) from scratch is recognizing your own design without a doubt,” Borsarello wrote on Instagram.
The pope, meanwhile, has become one of the most eloquent defenders of human creativity in the face of technological advance. His encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, published this year, articulated beautifully why human limitations and our efforts to overcome them make us special and give our lives meaning. “Authentic culture and art” preserve a “spark,” he wrote; they allow people to take in the experiences of others, all the vulnerability and pain, and reflect them back in ways that elevate, resulting in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Picasso’s Guernica. (And why not “Subterranean Homesick Blues”?—though the pope sadly didn’t put this on his list of faves.)
And then there’s Dylan. Perhaps no other artist has reveled for so long in mixing and matching as much as he does, ingesting enormous quantities of cultural material, breaking them into pieces, and recombining them into something new. That’s been his whole schtick, from the beginning. In a way it anticipates what AI has supercharged, but he does it as only a human can, informed by a lifetime of listening, reading, performing, and inhabiting the American cultural imagination.
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Take “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” from 1962. In it, he riffs on the question-and-answer structure from a traditional English-Scottish border ballad called “Lord Randall” (“Oh where ha’e ye been, Lord Randall, my son? O where ha’e ye been, my handsome young man?”). But Dylan infuses the form with surreal, apocalyptic imagery related to the Cold War and the anxiety of annihilation: “And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son? And what did you hear, my darling young one? I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin’. Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world.” Only the synapses of his weird brain could produce this. In his 2001 album, Love and Theft (an aptly titled middle finger to anyone who has a problem with this method), he lifts whole sentences from Confessions of a Yakuza, the memoir of a Japanese gangster.
I’d like to think this is the question Dylan and the pope, sitting next to bookcases full of Catholic exegesis, discussed: What makes humans worth preserving? The photo of them is indelible because it’s sort of the answer. They’re dressed in black and in white, the whole spectrum of good to evil. One’s an artist and the other’s a priest, each aspiring to prophecy. They’re both accessing something larger than themselves, even though when you look at them, they’re small, old men, nearer to the end of their existences than to the beginning—the pope battling cancer, and Dylan in his mid-80s. The spark, however, persists.