God: I am I am
TPP: Indeed. But what about your early years? We don’t often hear much about your childhood. What was it like to emerge from nothingness? Or did you precede nothingness, first creating the void and then all of the somethings that filled it up? Or, as some speculate, were you and the great nothingness one and the same? Did you, personally, go from nothing to everything?
God:
TPP: Perhaps too difficult to talk about. We’ll let that be. Nonetheless, you quite literally burst onto the scene, creating everything in 6 days. I don’t think it’s worth getting into your sense of time versus human constructions of time, but whether it was six of our days, or six of yours which might be billions of our solar years, it was a phenomenal debut in the truest sense. Bigger than Elvis’ first single, the Beatles first album, or Justin Bieber’s first YouTube video. More gravitas than Shakespeare’s first play, Henry V, Part II. More charisma than Julie Andrews’ screen debut in Mary Poppins. Scarier, in many ways, than Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which she wrote when she was just 19. Better received by the public than Gary Coleman’s turn as Arnold “What’chu talkin’ about, Willis” Jackson on Diff’rent Strokes. More disorienting, in many ways, than Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Some would even say more impressive than Orson Welles’ screen directing/acting debut, Citizen Kane, which he pulled off when he was almost inconceivably young, only 25 years old. But here you were, creating the entire universe and everything in it as your first known work of art. How did you handle that? Were you able to maintain a sense of normality, or, like so many young artists who receive so much fame and praise so quickly, did it damage your sense of self or impede how you related to others?
God:
TPP: The reason I ask is that, like so many young, successful artists, it was a long time before you put together a second major work. Is that because you were disappointed in the capstone of your debut, those humans whom you had created in your own image? It seems like everything else you made worked exactly the way you wanted it to, except these incredibly stupid-but-happy humans who malfunctioned almost immediately. Or did you intentionally design them to disobey you as a way of challenging audience perceptions of the artist and his intentions?
God:
TPP: There’s some conjecture that your reticence to talk about it suggests that Adam’s and Eve’s disobedience was actually part of your plan, the catalyst to a staggeringly complex Rube Goldberg machine that is still unfolding around us today and will continue to do so into the infinite future. And if so, that you have not actually produced countless works, nor even the several major works for which you are best known, but just the one major work, which is ongoing, much like John Cage’s piece “Organ²/ASLSP”, which will take 639 years to perform. And if this is the case, what do you say to critics who call you a one-hit-wonder?
God:
TPP: It raises interesting questions about how you relate to your fans. Bob Dylan is hardly the only artist to adopt a stance of indifference towards his own fans; actually, it’s a bit of a cliché at this point. But for a very long time now, he has also played this cat-and-mouse game with them, where he actively creates, or at least passively allows for the creation of, their expectations about who he is and what he stands for, and then like some tired old trickster, keeps defying those expectations by, say, converting religions, doing TV commercials for lingerie and Jeep SUVs, or blatantly plagiarizing his Nobel acceptance speech, before cattily chiding those very same fans for their wholly predictable sense of betrayal, claiming he was never who they thought he was, and that that’s on them for imagining and assuming who he was. Do you feel you have a similar relationship with your fans?
God:
TPP: Of course you go well beyond that, don’t you? If Dylan’s efforts to continually unsettle his fans’ expectations are somewhat dynamic, his borderline disdain for them is numbingly consistent. Yet you are not only continually challenging your fans’ expectations, but also, it would seem, frequently changing your expectations of them. So first you’re telling Adam and Eve to sit back and relax. Then you shovel tremendous burdens on them after their disobedience. As humanity grew from there, you offered minimal guidance, only to become so disgusted with how they turned out that you performed your first genocide, killing all save for Noah and his family, who piled onto what some have called the Animal Love Boat. Afterwards, there was a basic code of conduct, before you got really hands-on with Abraham, eventually giving him a staggering spate of rules, and along the way inventing the modern plot twist by ordering him to stab his son to death in your name (Psyche! Just kidding!). But that catalog of rules applied only to a tiny fraction of humanity, and the rest were more or less free to carry on as they had been, with minimal guidance. Thus, if Bob Dylan and others in his vein are firmly committed to the public-facing contrivance of being forever bored with and annoyed by their fans, you seem to have a searing love-hate relationship with them that borders on codependence. Are we humans really that charming/enraging, and if so, why did you make us this way, especially if it frustrates you so? Or are you simply fickle. Must the artist suffer?
God:
TPP: Some artists do think they must suffer. And some seem to take delight in occasionally making their audiences suffer. So let me ask you: Is it not real art unless both artist and audience are bouncing back and forth between ecstasy and horror? Does that explain 400 years of Israelite enslavement followed by a drawn out liberation, the open ingratitude of those former slaves, 40 years of wandering in the desert, and Moses’ ultimate penalty of being allowed to see but not enter the promised land, which you then ordered your people to seize through yet more genocides and the invention of ethnic cleansing? Would your art “work” without this constant dramatic tension?
God:
TPP: Speaking of the suffering artist, you went from arguably subtle meditations on that topic to a very overt and didactic performance with Jesus. When you impregnated a human woman, leading her to bear a child that was also you, meaning you were your own father and son, only to have that child grow up and be killed in a horrific fashion, and we can debate whether Jesus was murdered, sacrificed, or assassinated (or perhaps all three), but regardless, in doing this were you also committing a little bit of suicide since he is you and you are him? And if so, do you feel that the likes of Cleopatra, Yukio Mishima, and Kurt Cobain, you know, the really melodramatic ones, have been ripping you off? Or do you see their final works as more homage?
God:
TPP: Indeed. It really is about the silence as much as it is the noise, the space between the notes and all that. So why, then, is The Bible so long? Upwards of three-quarters of a million words, depending on the translation. And is the relative brevity of the New Testament, and especially the Quran at only a tenth or so the length of the original, an effort to correct that, to do more with less? Or, is scaling down as you go an allegorical statement on the coming Apocalypse, a self-own riposte to “be fruitful and multiply?”
God:
TPP: A lot of artists don’t like to look back. Woody Allen and Adam Driver famously won’t watch their movies after having made them. But your works, overtly building on each other as they do, create an inter-textual relationship that seems to almost demand that we look back, even or perhaps especially as we focus on the future. That suggests layers of complexity. But do you worry that it also trivializes the work by saddling it with elements of melodrama, rendering it in some ways, soap operatic? If you’re never leaving any of it behind, can you really move forward as an artist?
God:
TPP: Looking forward, can we expect another testament? It was about six centuries, give or take, between the Bible and the life of Jesus/You, and then another roughly six centuries until the Quran came out. But about six-plus centuries after that, you’re great work was the Black Plague. A bit of a changeup there. Or not. And then another six centuries or so brought us the Book of Mormon, which, per our earlier discussion, saw you return to a more, shall we say, loquacious approach. Should we keep an eye out for something new in the 25th century? And if so, will its focus be literary like so much of your best known work or, a la the 14th century, more mixed media?
God:
TPP: So, the Holocaust. I know you don’t want to talk about it, but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask. Some of your toughest critics describe it as overly self-indulgent and unjustifiable. Your defenders insist that an artist should never have to explain their creative process or choices. And some observers note that if one pays close attention, it’s actually in line with a lot of your earlier work. All of this speaks to the widespread attention that a piece of such controversy can garner. Do you worry that all of this debate ends up obscuring the work, making it more difficult for the audience to appreciate or understand on its own terms? And if so, what role should professional critics play, if any? As interlocutors, do they obfuscate as much as they clarify? Might it be best to let the lay audience wallow endlessly in its own boredom, confusion, terror, and even indifference?
God:
TPP: Donald Trump is the most American person in the world, or so he would have us believe. The new Pope is American, as is Jennifer Lawrence. The United States is co-hosting the 2026 World Cup and 2028 Summer Olympics. Is it really your favorite nation? Is it more blessed than even the Holy Land?
God:
3QD: John Denver once sang, “Almost Heaven, West Virginia,” so to some people the answer is an emphatic Yes. Yet you subsequently had the place strip mined, brain drained, and economically gutted to a degree that some describe as Hellish. Could it be that Heaven and Hell are not material works of art, but conceptual ones in which you challenge the audience to become the artist by working with this planet you have given them? And if so, would my niece be eligible for 6 credits of studio work in her Art Institute of Chicago MFA program?
God:
TPP: Speaking of conceptual art unleashed upon the audience by the artist, where do you stand on AI? Of course it is, by definition, derivative, but by how many degrees? A machine absorbs information generated over centuries by countless human authors, all of them created by you. Then that same machine spits it back out in nominally revised form to school students who submit it as papers and exams, while some of the teachers themselves use AI to create feedback comments on those same assignments. And on the side, the machine generates bitchin’ pictures of Mahatma Gandhi playing wicked electric guitar with six fingers while George Washington and several Kardashians head bang and rock out. Does AI slam the door once and for all on the idea that any art, even yours, can be truly original? And is there any truth to the rumor that you submitted an anonymous amicus brief in the New York Times copyright lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI?
God:
TPP: Stillborn babies. Why?
God:
TPP: On that note, let me thank you for your time, however it may have passed for you. A pleasure as always.
God:
This discussion, which first appeared at 3QD, was edited for length and clarity. ThePublicProfessor.com is Akim Reinhardt’s personal website. God’s website is still under construction.