ust a few weeks ago, I happened to see the first part of No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese's film (on Paramount Home Video) about the early career of Bob Dylan. Like any baby boomer, I had grown up with Dylan as a voice, icon, legend, from his early songs through the 1967 motorcycle crash, through his revival in the 1970s, through his persistence as a performer doing dozens of shows a year around the world—each one a little different.
As a born Minnesotan, I have regional pride in Dylan as a local boy who did good. (Just last month I was literally driving on Highway 61.) I've had the odd six-degrees-of-separation links to Dylan, working with a writer who had grown up with Dylan's kids. I even fancy that I was in downtown Minneapolis one frigid night in December 1973, right across the street from Sound 80, the studio where he was recording tracks for Blood on the Tracks—still my favorite Dylan album.
As far as I know, Dylan has never come close to doing overt sci-fi—unlike, say, musical figures like Jefferson Starship or Jimmy Webb. Nevertheless, in the spirit of sci-fi commentators of the past who, justifiably feeling marginalized by the mainstream press, adopted Huxley, Orwell, Anthony Burgess, John Hersey and Sinclair Lewis as sci-fi writers, I claim Bob Dylan for the field, too.
Flesh can never be replaced
We are bombarded every day with new and better means of digital communication. Viral advertising. Podcasting. E-biz. The jargon mutates weekly, daily, hourly. Just last week I learned that I could soon be receiving scenes from Lost on my new iPod. If I could only figure out how to use it.
The logical sci-fi conclusion is that soon we will all be digitally linked, completely netted, mutually podded, universally tele-conned, constantly blogged ... that human beings will never have to leave their conapts (to use a Philip K. Dick term) to experience the entire world and, more importantly, to have the rest of the world experience us.
So the theory goes.
Yesterday I saw a handwritten poster in a store window around the corner from my house. It promoted the appearance of Ray Bradbury at a local library two Sundays hence. I'm going to attend; I'll bet dozens of my neighbors will, too.
I pick up the entertainment section of my newspapers, and I see writers and poets on tour like ... well, like musicians. (For example, George R.R. Martin will soon be coming to a city near you to sign copies of his new novel, A Feast For Crows, from Bantam.)
Why bother? Why face traffic, bad weather, high gas prices, the possibility of uncomfortable chairs, when we have the books, the stories, the words, the music—in hard copy or online, in iPods or on DVDs? What is to be gained from sitting a room with a human being? Hearing him stumble over words? Watching him distracted by a hostess? Seeing the way he responds to a ridiculous question? Shaking his or her hand?
What is gained is contact that is manifestly not digital. What we require is an experience that is unique and cannot be reproduced.
It is why live theater has survived for hundreds of years.
Robert A. Heinlein wrote about this 25 years ahead of anybody else. In Expanded Universe, his collection of fiction and nonfiction, he cited Arthur C. Clarke's prediction that video telecons would eventually eliminate the need for face-to-face encounters—
—and gently disagreed with it. "With us monkey folk, there is no substitute for personal contact; we enjoy it and it fulfills a spiritual need."
Can't disagree with that.
But human voices—actual contact—analog presence—serves another science-fictional purpose.
They Sing to us.
Unacknowledged legislators
Like "poetry," "singing" is a word with richer meaning. In Samuel Delany's wonderful 1969 story, "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones," Singers are magical people blessed with the gift of deciding what is important, hip, happening ... what is to be talked about by people who talk about things. What is to be thought about things that are talked about.
For example, it is the Singers who—every month—determine the password for shady activities, a term like "Topaz" or "Cinnabar" to be whispered in dark alleys, shouted from rooftops or, perhaps, entered on Web sites. If a Singer attended your party, you were In. If you were seen in the company of a Singer, you were It.
To quote Delany, the rise of the Singers "was a spontaneous reaction to the mass media which blanket our lives." A means of dealing with "the alienation from first-hand experience."
Or personal contact for us monkey folk.
(Interesting sidebar: Delany is almost exactly Dylan's contemporary—they were born within a year of each other—and both were struggling folk singers in New York in the early 1960s. In Delany's autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water, he writes of an appearance at a small club in 1963, where—for several minutes, at least—his name was listed on the bill above a new young singer named Bob Dylan. Dylan didn't want to be second-billed—so he tore his name off the board.
(Just because you're a Singer doesn't mean you don't have an ego.)
There is no school or certificate that manufactures Singers. (Is there a school that explains the fame and Singer-like power of Paris Hilton?) The power comes from the Singer's ability to ... well, sing, like Bob Dylan. To use voice to comment on what is happening in a city, in a country, in the world—
And to shape our response to it. "The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind."
"How does it feel, to be on your own?"
"I'm on the pavement, thinking about the government."
In other words, Singers rule the world as effectively as presidents and scientists and business people. They exercise that wonderful secret power that lurks at the heart of every sci-fi story.
Ray Bradbury is a Singer. So is George R.R. Martin. So was Philip K. Dick. So is Samuel R. Delany (check out last month's Cassutt Files, "Apocalypse Here and Now"). So are the largely unknown poets and singers and writers traipsing from nightclubs to coffeehouses all over the world.
And so is Bob Dylan.
Michael Cassutt can't sing, so he writes for old-fashioned page and digital screens—short stories, articles, novels and scripts. His current projects include a miniseries for the SCI FI Channel.
