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The Dylan of the sad, shadowy Time Out of Mind is a man on the move--seeking, searching, existentially never finding, like some tragic traveler in a Beckett play. "I'm walking through streets that are dead" are the first words of the quiet, portentous opening song, Love Sick; "Gonna walk down that dirt road till someone lets me ride," he rasps again on the front-porch stomper Dirt Road Blues. The clocks are melting, the ants are crawling, and time, the lack of it, is a constant concern. "I hear the clock tick," Dylan sings on the opening track, and on the final one, the 16-minute talking-blues epic Highlands, he confesses, "I wish someone would come and push back the clock for me."
Again and again, he sings of reconciling with some lost love, but with an anguished ambivalence. "Don't know if I saw you if I would kiss you or kill you," he sings on the wistful Standing in the Doorway. And again and again, he hints at writer's block and creative barrenness, subtly linking it to his lost love. "I'm strolling through the lonely graveyard of my mind," he laments on Can't Wait; "You took a part of me that I really miss," he sings on Million Miles.
As listeners, we still miss the freewheelin' social commentary of A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall; we long for the wild poetry of Like a Rolling Stone. But the old Dylan is gone; we have only the older Dylan, plotted by cartographers onto the cultural map. On Sept. 27 he will perform for Pope John Paul II at the World Eucharistic Congress in Bologna; on Dec. 7 he will be a Kennedy Center honoree for lifetime achievement in the arts. When, earlier this year, he suffered, and recovered from, a potentially fatal infection of the lining of his heart, we began to miss him in advance. Time Out of Mind's best songs--like the nakedly yearning Make You Feel My Love--remind us why. Dylan has found purpose in his inner battle to reignite his imagination. Turning the quest for inspiration itself into relevant rock--that is alchemic magic.