Visions Of Johanna

[chester]

Okay, I will try to break it down then....

Originally Posted by LissaMarie

Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're tryin' to be so quiet ?
We sit here stranded, though we're all doin our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handfull of rain, tempting you to defy it
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there's nothing really nothing to turn of
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind.

Having sex to country music makes you think of some other woman.


In the empty lot where the ladies play blindman's bluff with the key chain
And the all-night girls they whisper of escapades out on the D-train
We can hear the night watcman click his flashlight
Ask himself if it's him or them that's really insane
Louise she's all right she's just near
She's delicate and seems like the mirror
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Johanna's not here
The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face
Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place.

And it makes you a bit crazy too.


Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously
He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously
And when bringing her name up
He speaks of a farewell kiss to me
He's sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all
Muttering small talk at the wall while I'm in the hall
Oh, how can I explain ?
It's so hard to get on
And these visions of Johanna they kept me up past the dawn.

No, make that REALLY crazy.


Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
Hear the one with the mustache say, "Jeeze
I can't find my knees"
Oh, jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule
But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel.

Women with mustaches don't have any knees.


The peddler now speaks to the countess who's pretending to care for him
Saying, "Name me someone that's not a parasite and I'll go out and say a prayer for him"
But like Louise always says
"Ya can't look at much, can ya man "

*shrugs*

As she, herself prepares for him
And Madonna, she still has not showed
We see this empty cage now corrode
Where her cape of the stage once had flowed
The fiddler, he now steps to the road
He writes ev'rything's been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain.

Madonna sucks

That's all I got.

[0rchestra-of-0z]

Originally Posted by LissaMarie

Also, here's a link to the Wiki page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visions_of_Johanna

The line I found to be most intriguing is this:

"He later comments 'In VoJ Dylan is stranded between extremes - total freedom and abject slavery.'

Others have subjected the words to poetic 'close reading' and have found in it a wealth of allusion, for example, to William Blake; thus Thakkar [2] says 'My claims will be these: Louise represents the earthly, the prosaic, the finite; and Johanna represents the pure, the poetic, the infinite'."

Sounds like a description of the two sides at play (light/dark, etc.) Great find!

[LissaMarie]

You're the one with the great find, Orchestra! I am so curious to know what Carlton meant when he referenced this song and I find it predictably maddening that he picked a song that's meaning is unknown and the writer has never disclosed. Go figure!

And kudos to you for trying, Chester. Hee hee!