Close Reading Dylan’s “Simple Twist of Fate”

My favorite listening experience over the last couple weeks has been Jerry Garcia’s performance of Dylan’s “Simple Twist of Fate” from a 1980 concert at the Capital Theater in Port Chester, New York. It’s one of Dylan’s greatest songs, and Jerry’s solos are majestic and searching. But what I want to dig into here is the lyrics, specifically the last verse. “Simple Twist” is essentially a film noir tale, with waterfront docks and cheap hotels with the neon burning bright and a fleeting encounter with a woman, maybe a prostitute. All of its verses tell this story, except the last, which steps back from the story to reflect on things in a first person voice, moving from ‘he’ to ‘I.’ It’s almost as if this verse existed independent of this particular song but Dylan decided to add it onto the end.

I’ve read nearly every published interview with Dylan, and one thing he absolutely will not do is talk about the meaning of a song. This is not an unusual stance for songwriters and poets, but given that more people have spent more time trying to figure out the meanings of his songs as opposed to those of any others, it’s noteworthy. This doesn’t mean there aren’t meanings to be extracted, but that meaning isn’t the reason for a song’s being, nor could meanings that emerge for the listener ever be singular.

Consider “Blind Willie McTell,” a consensus masterpiece. It’s clearly “about” slavery and its legacy in the American South. But what does it mean? It means whatever your emotions and mental processes are saying to you when you listen. Even Dylan himself tells us he doesn’t know what it means, saying at the end of each verse that he only knows “one thing, that no one sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.” The only fact that emerges is an emotional and aesthetic conviction.

So with that said, let me close read the final verse to tell you not what it means to me but rather the associations that arise for me when I hear this verse. For me, every line speaks of paganism, or pre- or non-Christian spirituality, themes that don’t have a direct connection to the noir tale, but bespeak a sort of tragedy that seems resonant with the rest of the song, representing a missed or lost opportunity. Let’s take it line by line.

People tell me it’s a sin

Well, right here we introduce a concept that is very Christian, that we should experience guilt over things that are naturally arising in life. A pagan might be mystified by the notion.

To know and feel too much within

In Christianity there is a strong suspicion of the inner life, since it’s hard to regulate. Thus people are told that that is where the devil lives, so beware of listening to intuition. Love, then, is beyond the boundaries of right and wrong or the sanction of authorities. It was Emerson, in his break from Christianity who declared, “ I shall trust what is deep is holy.”

I still believe she was my twin

At this point I always think of the archetypal pairing of the female and male principles, the anima and the animus. Each is in the other, as we see in the pairing of yin and yang.

But I lost the ring

In Christianity and in the West in general we are oriented toward the telos, seeing time as an arrow pointing toward something, seeing existence as having a purpose aimed at some end or goal. In the East and among indigenous cultures time and existence are cyclical. In this line, the narrator has been banished from the natural order of things.

She was born in spring

Spring of course is the time of fertility and fecundity and rebirth. The rites of spring, and so on. The female being spoken of represents recurring abundance, which arises of its own accord. 

But I was born too late

And here is the tragedy of it. The narrator is adrift in a world closed to the natural sources of power and beauty. 

Blame it on a simple twist of fate

Yes, it boils down to fate, the great organizing principle of the Greeks and Romans. There is nothing the narrator could have done to make things turn out better. Elsewhere on Blood on the Tracks, the album on which “Simple Twist” appears, Dylan restates the theme more directly. In the epic cut “Idiot Wind,” he says, “It was gravity which pulled us down and destiny which broke us apart.” 

So there it is. I can’t hear this song and not think these thoughts. All of Dylan’s work is evocative in this manner. Meaning isn’t the purpose of either the writing or the hearing of it. The purpose is to enter into worlds where unanticipated and undreamed of associations and visions and ideas can materialize. The lyrics are a catalyst. But maybe Bob did mean it just the way I said it. That would be something.