I don't like t be stuck in print

starin out at cavity minds

who gobble chocolate candy bars

quite content an satisfied

their day complete

at seeing what I eat for breakfast

the kinds of clothes I like t wear

an the hobbies that I like t do

All you cavity minds, they've tried to stick Bob Dylan again, not with bunny ears but with a camera. Don't Look Back, a documentary of his 1965 tour of England, shows that Dylan eats cigarettes for breakfast, wears black, and confuses people in his spare time. The slow-motion press stalks him with sentences and paragraphs, the unexamined grammar of timid minds: "Would you say that you care about people? Are you protesting against certain things? How do you see the art of the folksinger in contemporary society?" Dylan retreats as his words advance: "How can I answer that question if you have the nerve to ask it...What does that mean?...What do those words mean?"

There is as much paradox as music. Dylan is arrogant and charming, protected and protective, petty and detached, eloquent and inarticulate. He stands once removed from what he is because he can escape into the black hall and white light of the concert, into his songs where he can't be found out. "It's gonna happen fast," Dylan tells a Time reporter before a concert. "It's gonna happen fast and you're not gonna get it all. When it's over, I won't be able to talk about it. I got nothing to say about these things."

While the rest of us talk of situations and draw conclusions on the wall, he holds tight to his mystery, J. D. Salinger with a guitar. Presumably one could invade Salinger's blockhouse and say hello. One is not so sure about Dylan. Last spring he disappeared into his own motorpsychic nightmare, shocked by an overdose of drugs. Albert Grossman, his oxymoronic manager, convinced the mass media that the disaster was a Triumph on the New Jersey Pike. Dylan took cover in Woodstock, New York. One of Dylan's former producers says that a new album is forthcoming. It is supposed to be "different."

Until we know if Dylan is alive and well in a Columbia recording studio, we can only look back through seven albums (The Greatest Hits of ... doesn't count) which took him from the corduroy Huck Finn of "Bob Dylan" to the out-of-focus kaleidoscope poet of "Blonde on Blonde." In the liner notes to that first album Nat Hentoff blessed him as one of "the precipitously emergent singers of folk songs in the continuing renascence of that self-assertive tradition." Self-deceptive would be more accurate. Dylan was just another work shirt and guitar buried under hyperbolic interpretation of stock songs ("House of the Rising Sun," "Freight Train Blues"). The words had him then, ballooned his voice with folksy groans and rips, all upbeat enthusiasm and innocence. The Folksinger.

The next time out, freewheelin, he was distant, almost outside his songs. The voice had a sense of space. Cutting through the glut of conventional folk polemics and references was a tense fore-shadowing, a promising attraction to new images: "a highway of diamonds with nobody on it," "a white ladder all covered with water."

That attraction didn't take hold in The Times They are A-Changin'. Dylan's songs hadn't broken out of the coal mines ("Hollis Brown"), the transatlantic love ("Boots of Spanish Leather"), the simple, indignant protests (Medgar Evers's death). Although there was a diamond highway with nobody on it, he held to the crowded folk road, the old-style rambling around. On the back of the album, however, in "11 Outlined Epitaphs" he announced the passing of that earlier Bob Dylan. Guthrie was dead. Dylan was free, "without ghosts/by my side/ t betray my childishness/ t leadeth me down false trails/ an maketh me drink from muddy waters." Away from Muddy Waters into the wind! "A word, a tune, a story, a line/ keys in the wind t unlock my mind/ an t grant my closet thoughts back yard air."

The wind, Dylan called it, some outside transcentental force which operated on him. He posed as Emerson, struggling self-consciously with an aesthetic. All songs led back t some primeval sea of thought and art. "I have built an rebuilt/ upon what is waitin/for the sand on the beaches/carves many castles." But he was wrong. Looking outwards, he spun inwards, so far, far inside. He brought it all back home to himself, back into the smoke rings of his mind. The wind? The sea? Call it the unconscious. "I'm ready for to fade into my own parade." A pipeline laid deep to private magic swirling ships, subterranean homesick blues, dreams. to 115, Desolation Row, flickering vision lights of Johanna, Memphis mobile mind traps and all those psychic lowlands where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes.