[Buddha-l] Re: Greetings from Oviedo

[Richard Hayes]

On Wed, 28 Sep 2005 15:21:00 -0700
  Timothy Smith <smith at wheelwrightassoc.com> wrote:
> Richard wrote:

> I'm fascinated too by the diversity of responses to 
>Dylan's opus.  Perhaps I am a fool, but when I, at 57 
>remember "Bob Dylan's Dream" from

When Dylan was reminding Americans of how they had failed 
to live up to the dreams of some of the founders of the 
country, he was unsurpassed as a lyricist. No one could 
dispute that. Unfortunately, he eventually forgot all 
about drawing our attention to the tragedy of post-war 
(and here I mean the American Revolution) America and 
wandered into a kind of solepsistic logorrhea that failed 
entirely to speak to the conditions of the world. Did that 
do harm? Who knows how to answer a question like that? Do 
fools do harm? Yes. Look at the hideous monstrosity 
America has become through its collective foolishness. I 
think the American empire serves as evidence for my claim 
that folly is dangerous. When Dylan was, like a Hebrew 
prophet, reminding people that they had failed to live up 
to their promise to the world, he was countering the arm. 
Later, he apparently became part of the folly. And now 
he's just a boring old man who can hardly string together 
enough words to make a banal observation. So I think his 
present state is itself an eloquent testimony to an 
adulthood devoted to spouting such gibberish as

You look so pretty in it
Honey, can I jump on it sometime
I just want to see if
it's really the expensive kind
It balances on your head
just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine
Your brqnd new leopardskin pllbox hat.


My experience in this world had tended to confirm the 
Buddha's observation that there is quite a bit of harm in 
various kinds of wrong speech, even in the seemingly 
harmless forms of speech as being frivolous and silly.

Yours in the avoidance of idle chatter,
Richard