8/8/2019 Benjamin's 115th Dream
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Epoch: The University of California Journal for the Study of
Religion159
his dream he had attempted to wrest the meaning of America
as
pure potentiality from those who would fix it in space and
time.
I think Ill call it America
I said as we hit land
I took a deep breathI fell down, I could not stand
Captain Arab he started
Writing up some deedsHe said, Lets set up fort
And start buying the place with beads
Just then this cop comes downCrazy as a loon
He throw us all in jail
For carryin harpoons.
Dylans 115th Dream, in all its Rimbauvian and hallucinatory
grandeur, broaches the fundamental question with which the
historical materialist must wrestle: how to bring the it of
the
past back home to the present? How to re-present the pastwithout
denying the claims that it made on its own future?
Well the last I heard of Arab he was stuck on the side of a
whale
That was married to the deputy sheriff of the jail,
But the funniest thing was - as I was leavin the bay -
I saw three ships sailing and they were all headed my way.So I
asked the Captain what his name was and how come he
didnt drive a truck?
He said his name was Columbus and I just said Good luck...
Dylans absurd endingthe moment when he wakes up
suggests that the past and the present are always engaged in
a
dialectal play. Absence and presence. Two things, switching.
Butin that switching there is a fleeting glimpse of what can
never
come to pass. One might call it a white doe, dialectical
intoxication, that dangerous Derridean supplement, or even
Modern: Walter Benjamins 115thDream 160
the future. Or as Melville wrote one year before the sinking
of
the Ann Alexander, You must have plenty of sea-room to tellthe
Truth in; especially, when it seems to have an aspect of
newness, as America did in 1492, though it was then just as
old,and perhaps older than Asia, only those sagacious
philosophers,
the common sailors, had never seen it before; swearing it was
allwater and moonshine there.
79
79 Melville, Hawthorne and His Mosses, 525.
