Highway 61 Reconsidered

“How many roads must a man walk down, before you can call him a man?” croaks Bob Dylan, certified singer, songwriter, voice of a generation, and all-around-wiseass. The man has been making a living for the last four decades hiding behind crazy riddles and a voice that could clog sinuses, so it’s about time someone wiped that smug cigarette-puffing smirk off his face. How, you ask? By dissecting one of his most famous brainteasers. No doubt it would put the old hippie back in his place.

I thought we could tackle this English major style. If we deconstruct the sentence, we realize that the “man” represents the archetypal hero found in many examples of classical literature, much like Homer’s Odysseus or Dante’s Dante. The question is a metaphor for the “hero’s journey” as described by Joseph Campbell in his seminal book “The Hero With A Thousand Faces.” The so-called hero’s journey always culminates in the “supreme ordeal”, which forever changes the hero and makes him stronger. In this case, it would seem to make him a man. We can surmise that the ascent to manhood could be completed either through society’s recognition that the person has demonstrated enough courage, testicular fortitude and other masculine traits to earn that elusive title, or through a sex-change operation. The journey itself consists of several different phases, each of which presents a different challenge to our protagonist, the singularly named “man.” Further analysis of the question requires a specific definition for that nebulous term, “roads.” Where are these roads? What makes them so special that they could be involved in one’s transformation from a relatively callow child to a full-fledged adult male? Are these the roads that diverged in a yellow wood? Did he take the road less traveled by and has it made any difference? A question that spawned a dozen other questions, like the hydra of Greek legend, and I’m definitely no Hercules, so let’s take a different perspective on the matter.

If we look at this question through the lens of a women’s studies major, we can conclude that Bob Dylan is a sexist dinosaur, an anachronistic relic of a male-dominated literary, artistic, and musical culture that sought to undermine and oppress the “feminine mystique,” because the question that he asks is yet another example of gender discrimination, by only inquiring about the amount of roads that a man must walk down, as if implying that womyn are intellectually and biologically ill-equipped to walk roads at the same rate as a man of comparable build and size. The question reifies age-old notions that say it’s okay for men to gallivant around unknown and dangerous roads to their heart’s content, while women are relegated to a “Cult of Domesticity”-type supporting role, chained by entrenched gender roles to the kitchen and the broom. Before we can even begin to answer the question, it has become necessary to update it to eliminate all traces of the inherent patriarchal bias in the English language. It should go, “How many roads must a humyn walk down, before you can call him/her a humyn in the context of a degendered linguistic framework as described by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?” Then, and only then, can we initiate true intellectual discourse.

But I realize abstract philosophical analysis might not be everyone’s raison d'etre. Fortunately, we can also approach this riddle as a mathematical quandary. Let y -x2 + bx represent the function that will give us the number of roads that a man must walk down. Let “x” represent the x-coordinate of the point on the Cartesian plane at which this hypothetical man is allowed to be defined as such, i.e., his age. Naturally we use the equation for a parabola since we assume that “y”, the number of roads that a man must walk down increases as the value of the x-coordinate increases along the x axis, culminating in the vertex “x”, or that age at which the boy enters official manhood, after which point, “y” will decrease as “x” increases because the man will become geriatric and thus lose road-walking ability proportional to the amount of arthritis medication he will need to take. We should use the formula “x -(b/2a)” to find the vertex. We solve for x and plug that value into the function, and end up with an answer…that still has a variable in it, much to our dismay. What to do now?

Luckily, the best mathologists in the country have suggested that the unknown “b” in the function may represent “Bob Dylan’s way of screwing with our minds, kinda like the way he asked us all ‘how does it feeeeeeeeel?’ in Like a Rolling Stone, or like the way Self Portrait sucked ass.” Other prominent scholars posit that “b” is actually the answer that, Dylan hints, is “blowin’ in the wind,” which requires a whole other field of multivariable calculus devoted to determining the instantaneous velocity of the average wind at a certain point of a man’s road-walking life, taking into account regional topography and ocean currents coming off the Gulf of Mexico.

But it seems that despite our best efforts this question will go unanswered. Much like Kepler’s Conjecture or “How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?” it’s destined to remain one of the mysteries of life.

­­­­­­­­­­

Commentary: Essay for my application to the University of Chicago. Renowned for its so-called quirky and original essay prompts, I was rather stumped at the relative expanse of freedom and potential; it froze me for a while. All of a sudden a Dylan song showed up on my playlist. I think my goal here was to be as insane as possible while still retaining a degree of coherence. I wrote a rough draft in a couple of hours, polished it up, sent it in, and here I am now. It stands well on its own though; I feel it's a lot like Subterranean Homesick Blues in terms of pace and energy.