Anonymous wrote:
Coughing heatpipes? Whoever started that thread is either putting
people on or is . . . not well educated. VoJ, like a lot of Dylan's
best songs, is P O E T R Y. Poetry has its own rules and maybe even
no rules. But it isn't literal--if it were, it would be called
'editorail' or 'journalism'. As for VoJ--it's a song about a man in a
room (a cheap room, thus coughing heatpipes) who is in the arms of a
woman he doesn't love, but is in any event 'average'. This is
Louise--a name perfectly chosen for its lack of exoticness, the name
of a Denny's waitress in Talahasee. While with Louise, the 'narrator'
is thinking about someone far better than Louise--this is Johanna.
You can take this further if you like--for many men, the wh*re/madonna
complex is well known. We men like to marry 'madonnas', perfect
women, but we also need w*ores, dirty women. Once a madonna gives us
sex, she becomes a wh*re. This is an old problem/idea--see Freud,
Jung, etc etc. Is Dylan addressing this? Who knows. Some say
Johanna is Hebrew for apocalypse--actually, something like Gehona is
Hebrew for 'afterlife'. Between Dylan's enthusiasm for the Bible and
religion, and his friendship with Joan Baez
(the song is NOT about JB), he may have known about the
Johanna=apocalypse, Gehona=afterlife stuff. So is Dylan imagining the
perfect afterlife, heaven, while in bed in a tawdry affair (Louise).
I tend to think so but who knows. It is poetry, and with Dylan it is
often bordering on the stream of conscious and is almost always
surreal. There's lots of imagery in the song around aging and death
and time (the highway blues, the jelly-faced women=very old
women/wrinkling, loose skin, I can't find my knees=senility, I can't
stand up, I've lost my legs in the sense boxers have it happen to
them, and the aged....inside the museums infinity goes up on
trial--speaks for itself but to put it in plain English--how long can
we preserve things for, and what is forever or infinity anyway? Will
the Mona Lisa exist in the year 4,115? Will any human being?...
skeleton key, jewels and binoculars = jewelry and thick strong glasses
that the aged wear (both the jewelry and 'binoculars'/thick glasses),
etc. So even tho the narrator (likely dylan himself) is in bed with a
'all right' girl who is 'near', he cannot find peace--the night plays
tricks with him, and he contemplates something that is s
imultaneously a perfect woman (Johanna) and that may also be
heaven/the afterlife. Everything earthly dies and fades away, and
Louise aint bad, but these Visions of Johanna kept me up past dawn.
Very interesting thread.
This is a response to the post seen at:
http://www.jlaforums.com/viewtopic.php?p=675460797#675460797
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