Some thoughts on "Highlands"

“Highlands” is a Bob Dylan song that takes place on Easter. There is plenty of evidence of Easter in the song’s setting. Physically, the song is not set in the Highlands as one might expect, but rather in Boston. Boston has a tradition, historically, of being a heavily Catholic town, lending the necessary religiosity. Dylan wanders into a restaurant and deduces it must be a holiday because “there’s no one around.” He sees people in the park wearing “bright colored clothes,” a bit reminiscent of the beginning of Spring and the pastels associated with Easter. The big piece of evidence, though, is that the waitress expects Dylan to order hard-boiled eggs.

In this context, the Highlands seem not to be the Scottish highlands that Robert Burns wrote of (and that Dylan steals from in the chorus), but rather a metaphorical highlands of the soul; one that is far away from the secular world. Potentially, this could even be read as heaven – especially given the line “big white clouds like chariots that swing down low – although I think that reading limits the song’s potential. As Dylan sings, “my heart’s in the Highlands, and that’s good enough for now.” If one reads it strictly as heaven, then the song is about death. Dylan is still alive, though. If the Highlands were heaven and he needed to get their, he could accept death. Death certainly is one aspect of the song, but it doesn’t seem to be the most important aspect.

The song seems focused instead on contemporary society’s focus on image and how that leads us toward vanity and away from the Highlands. In this context, the Highlands can be described as a mindset, a moral high road which will help lead one on a path through life which will help them reach a potentially more concrete Highlands in the afterlife. Certainly, this is not a new theme for Dylan, but he does a great job of expressing it here nonetheless. The most central summation of this theme comes in a conversation the narrator has with a waitress. She asks him to draw her, and the artist doesn’t want to. After trying to dodge the issue for several verses, he finally draws her on a napkin. She is horrified by the drawings ugliness, and he tells her that it looks just like her. What happened is, he drew her insides rather than her outside, and what he found there disturbed him. He didn’t want to have to draw her because he knew that she wouldn’t be able to face the truth of herself.

There are other intimations of image and wealth as well. The idea of image is alluded to with the line “wouldn’t know the difference between a real blonde and a fake.” Part of that is that there are so many people with false hair colors that it has gotten difficult to remember whose is real. The other important part of this line is that blonde is often seen as the ideal hair color. People are trying to make themselves match the ideal in their heads, and companies, looking to profit off of this, are making hair dyes so realistic that they cannot be detected. Similarly, those most interested in image get their hair recolored so often, again fueling the capitalist cycle of the whole thing, that one can also not tell they have dye in by examining their roots. Dylan at one point suggests that if he had a conscience he could “sell it to the pawn shop,” showing that everything has a price and that the moral high ground that has been represented for so long as the conscience has been traded away in exchange for more wealth.

Elsewhere, life is described as the “same old rat race, life in the same old cage.” The idea there is that the “rat race,” the rushed pace of always trying to better ones self, often financially or in terms of image, actually imprisons people. It makes them a slave to their image or to their bank account, a slave to their own base desires. Stuck in this cage, people feel unable to life freely. Later, the narrator “feels like a prisoner in a world of mystery,” furthering that sense of claustrophobia brought on by the contemporary, post-industrial age. Looking around at what has happened to the world saddens the narrator to the point where he has lost his conscience. He feels that he has lost it because he is no longer angry at the world. As he claims, “If I had a conscience, well I just might blow my top.”

This all sounds pretty hopeless, but the song is not without the potential for change. There are two possibilities for a return to grace that Dylan implies in the song. Early on, Dylan says “I wish someone’d come and push back the clock for me.” As with much of Dylan’s work, most notably the liner notes for World Gone Wrong, this calls for a return to a simpler time that has faded away. Judging from the World Gone Wrong notes, this seems to be a return to an agrarian society, one of the pre-industrial age. Of course, this change seems improbable at best and errs on the side of impossibility in truth. The other possibility seems to be the youth. Dylan describes “the young men with the young women lookin’ so good” and claims he’d “trade places with any of them in a minute if [he] could.” There are many readings to these lines. Dylan could want to erase all of the mistakes he has made in his life. He may just want a chance to do different things or to have the vitality to go out there and change the world. From the song’s overall tone, though, one would imagine that he’d want to be young again for reasons that reach deeper than “drinkin’ and dancin’ [and] wearing bright colored clothes.” I think Dylan may see some hope in the coming generations. Of course, youth turns into old age, and soon the young generation will turn into the old.

The young becoming old and being replaced by new young brings us back, in some ways, to the idea of resurrection, which is what Easter is all about. The spirit of a strong moral structure (though not necessarily a traditional moral structure) being reborn within America’s vibrant youth.