Syphilis & Arsenic in Bob Dylan’s “Love and Theft”

In “LOVE & THEFT” (2001), a supposedly ‘gloriously upbeat affair’ according to one
review I read keen to dramatise journalistically the contrast with Time Out of Mind,
the narrator’s ‘heart is not weary, it's light and it's free’, which raises questions about
what Dylan must be on, have been on. He has covered the obnoxious Rolling
Stones’s obnoxious BROWN SUGAR in recent years. MISSISSIPPI was left off Time
Out of Mind. If Dylan was on such a high on this album, why is he, or his
poststructuralist disembodied spirit, ‘drownin' in the poison, got no future, got no
past’? Of course, it is metaphorical poison – just like the ideological Deluge-denying
high water of which Charles Darwin is a leading uniformitarian component, full of
‘dead men’s bones’; just like ‘that poison wine’ in MOONLIGHT?. Only
fundamentalists would think Mississippi is a place – just like they would think
HIGHLANDS is ‘about’ Scotland. In the opening song of “LOVE & THEFT”,
TWEEDLEDUM & TWEEDLEDEE, we get:

Brains in the pot, they're beginning to boil

They're dripping with garlic and olive oil.

The obnoxious presence of one Tweedle to the other could be a Dylan code-in-the-
lyrics tip-off to a(n) (ob)noxious substance. Arsine, a non-scientific name for arsenic
trioxide, is a colourless poisonous gas smelling slightly of garlic. ‘If you don’t believe
it just follow your nose’. ‘Your presence is obnoxious to me’.

MISSISSIPPI: ‘Only one thing I done wrong’. What was it? Dylan wants us to
wonder, even if the lyric is only one of many cribbed, ‘stolen’, from old folk and blues
songs. Missus Syphilis?

What is syphilis? A contagious venereal disease progressing from infection of the

genitals via the skin and mucous membrane to the bones, muscles, and brain.

Hmm. ‘Dead men’s bones’; ‘melts with flesh and bones’; ‘brains in the pot’; ‘no brains
no how’; ‘I'm gonna look at you 'til my eyes go blind’; ‘die before I turn senile’; ‘and I
still got their advice oozing out of my ears’. Like pus? Or pussy? Is the bubble that
could burst in the closing song a syphilitic pustule? Brain or groin?

But what connection between syphilis and arsenic? I don’t know, which is one
reason why I have kept this to myself for five years; I would only be inviting ridicule
as an A J Weberman-type figure; it can be so hard to reason with obsessive Dylan
fans. But arsphenamine is a drug formerly used in treatment of syphilis and parasitic
diseases. [ARSENIC + PHENYL + AMINE]. Arsine is arsenic trihydride, a colourless
poisonous gas smelling slightly of garlic.

I flicked through Confessions of a Yakuza today (4 March 2006), which I have not
read. I was looking for pertinent esoterica, beyond the documented cut-and-paste
stuff (e.g. by Derek Barker, thanks to others, in the 20 Years of Isis anthology), by
definition, to confirm some of my ideas about “LOVE & THEFT” and find any possible
‘code in the lyrics’ or stream-of-consciousness (or stream of senility in this album’s
case) corroboration. At one point the yakuza recounts contracting syphilis then
getting violently sick on the medication. Page 32:

… the swellings in my crotch went on getting bigger till they were as big as hens’ eggs. They were
incredibly painful; if I touched them by mistake, the pain just froze my brain.

Page 33:

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The Kawagoe doctor had told me to take some pills as soon as I got home. So I took them – but they
must have been arsenic: it was hardly ten minutes before my whole body felt like it was on fire. My
belly hurt as though it had molten lead in it: I just couldn’t stand it.

Was Dylan cribbing biographical parallels with the yakuza? Or just contriving them
out of senile-old-songster page-flicking idle boredom? It’s not like Mr Dylan looks
very well in recent years, is it? Will he ‘die before’ he turns ‘senile’? He is standing
‘beside God’s river’ while his ‘soul is beginning to shake’. He’d ‘cross that river just to
be where you are’. When I showed my brother the album, he said, ‘He looks like a
right sleaze bag’.

In MISSISSIPPI, ‘you can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way’; in
SUGAR BABY, ‘you can’t come back, can’t turn back’. ‘Code in the lyrics’ – a term
Dylan used in 1978 of the Raeben influence on the Blood on the Tracks ‘painting’.
What awaits: Sheol? What was stolen from him in the coarse of lovemaking? Love
and Theft. And theft in love. It will be dark soon. It’s not just about cut-and-paste,
you know – or I guess you don’t.
Well, the emptiness is endless, cold as the clay
You can always come back, but you can't come back all the way
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long

‘Skies are gray’ in the preceding album, Time Out of Mind, like the ‘shadowy world’ of
Sheol in JOKERMAN back in ’83. Baptism ‘with fire so you can sin no more’?
Dylan’s blessing has been curtailed through disobedience. Disobedience to his
Maker.

You think I’m an asshole? The chemical symbol for arsenic is As. But as is also a
Roman copper coin, assarion in Greek. Ten asses make a denarius, the coin used
to trick Jesus in the question about the payment of tribute money (Mk 12:15) – for
what that is worth. It is just that I wonder if ‘mule in the stall’ could be an allusion to
the incident where Jesus overturns the stalls of the money changers in the temple.
Not that this seems required; there is no need to find biblical texts all the time. I
would always want to find a validating context for doing so. The word ‘dime’ appears
on the album; it is a ten-cent coin (to remind non-American readers). Mule can be a
numismatic term meaning a defective coin with two heads sides or tails sides.
Where does Mr Goldsmith come into all this? Does he, the ‘back-stabbing phoney’,
represent Jewish capitulators to the Romans or some other foreign power? Or should
I say ‘imperial empire’?

What is arsenic? Arsenic trioxide, a highly poisonous white powdery substance used
in weed-killers, rat poison, etc. The secondary meaning is chemical:

a semi-metallic element existing as a brittle steel-grey solid and in several other allotropic forms.
Arsenic occurs naturally as an element and in various minerals, including the sulphides orpiment and
realgar, which were formerly used as dyes and pigments. In its elemental form it has a few specialized
uses, but several of its compounds, which like the element are highly poisonous, are widely used as
herbicides, pesticides, etc.

‘Under tobacco leaves’? The leaves, in another song, turn crimson? From kermes,
the fourth dictionary definition of which is a bright red hydrous trisulphide of antimony.
Antimony?

is a semi-metallic element existing as a brittle silvery-white metal and in several non-metallic forms. The
naturally-occurring sulphide was used as a cosmetic in ancient times, and was employed in alchemy.
Antimony is widely used in alloys, especially with lead, where it increases hardness, and it was a
component of the metal used for making printing-type where molten metal was used.

Paul Kirkman February 2006 2

Metals and metal objects crop up on “LOVE & THEFT” plenty of times: gold, silver,
knives, swords etc. Something alchemical is going on in the album – in more senses
than one. But let’s just keep it simple.

I'm singin' love's praises with sugar-coated rhyme

To sweeten the poison? Sugar Baby? -

You been rolling your eyes - you been teasing me;

Love is pleasing, love is teasing, love's not an evil thing

Except when you get a sexually-transmitted disease. But Dylan is only inhabiting the
role of a narrator – poststructurally. So there is no need for Jeff Rosen to sue me.
“LOVE & THEFT” is as biographical as Blood on the Tracks is – or isn’t: have it
Dylan’s way.

As indicated above, I wrote this article in 2006; as I get back into the train of thought
it may be edited multiple times at any time.

Copyright 2010 Paul Kirkman. All rights reserved

Paul Kirkman February 2006 3