Standing In The Doorway

The stately opening bars of the intro to "Standing In The Doorway"and the soft leslie organ in the background suggest the starst winkling in the summer night of the first stanza:

I'm walking through the summer nights
Jukebox playing low
Yesterday everything was going too fast
Today, it's moving too slow
I got no place left to turnI got nothing left to burn

Dylan's craggy voice captures the narrator's feeling of ultimate resignation. He's burned all his bridges and has nothing left and nowhere to go. The next lines reveal the reason; a failed relationship with his lover:

Don't know if I saw you, if I would kiss you or kill you
It probably wouldn't matter to you anyhow
You left me standing in the doorway, crying
I got nothing to go back to now

The light in this place is so bad
Making me sick in the head
All the laughter is just making me sad
The stars have turned cherry red

Cut off from the light of love and salvation, the narrator has become alienated from his own emotions. His lover has left him, but she is back. The pain she caused him, however, is so deep, and his trust has been so badly abused, that he doesn't know if he wants her. He's damned if he accepts her, and damned if he doesn't. The stars turn red with the flame of the burning anguish in his soul ashe tries to cure his spirit with music, which usually can charm the savage beast of torn feelings – but his ironic reference to his "gay guitar" reveals that it will not work its usual healing magic this time, and the "cheap cigar" he smokes is a sad phallic image of the fires of physical love gone shriveled and cold. All he can do is to address the ghost of his love, a Sweet Melinda, a goddess of gloom who took his voice and left him howling at the emotionless,impassive midnight moon.

I'm strumming on my gay guitar
Smoking a cheap cigar
The ghost of our old love has not gone away
Don't look like it will anytime soon
You left me standing in the doorway crying
Under the midnight moon

One of the major symptoms of depression is a withdrawal into oneself, an inability to articulate one's anguish; and so it is with Dylan's narrator: "There are things I could say but I don't."The "midnight train" he's been riding hearkens back to "Idiot Wind"and its "Down the highway, down the tracks, down the road to ecstasy, I followed you beneath the stars, hounded by your memory and all your ragin' glory," but now that train is heading toward the song's final line, the "blues wrapped around my head," the image ofthe midnight train in blues lyrics so commonly representing the journey toward sadness or death. The narrator is even touched by paranoia – "Maybe they'll get me and maybe they won't" – but hequickly turns his attention back to his own situation, knowing that "the mercy of God must be near;" this is the first intimationin the lyric that he may be contemplating suicide. He has "icewater" in his veins, because he's alienated from his own feelings,so that he is capable of destroying himself. He damns himself for those feelings, calling himself "a fool" for suffering. Yet something, some instinct for survival, still holds him back from such a terribly final action. Something in him still wants to take the chance and simply go back to his lover, yet he knows that would violate what self-respect he still possesses; it would be "crazy,"it would "go up against every rule."

Maybe they'll get me and maybe they won't
But not tonight and it won't be here
There are things I could say but I don't
I know the mercy of God must be near
I've been riding the midnight train
Got ice water in my veins
I would be crazy if I took you back
It would go up against every rule
You left me standing in the doorway, crying
Suffering like a fool


Taken advantage of by the lover who now wants to come back, Dylan's narrator is burned once, twice shy. A part of him wants her, yet he knows it'll be his doom whether he returns to her or refuses her. His consciousness trapped in the paradox, he now turns to thoughts of suicide. He talks to himself: "Buddy, you'll roll no more." He wonders for whom the church bells toll, he knows he can't win, but his heart won't give in to the overwhelming desire to end the game by ending his life. He refuses to withdraw into solitude, trying to meet new people – "last night I danced with a stranger" – but this just reminds him of his feelings for his lover. In the end, the narrator is left standing in the darkness at the break of noon,knowing that there is no sense in trying, no sense in crying, no sense in any course of action at all:

When the last rays of daylight go down
Buddy, you'll roll no more
I can hear the church bells ringing in the yard
I wonder who they're ringing for
I know I can't win
But my heart just won't give in
Last night I danced with a stranger
But she just reminded me you were the one
You left me standing in the doorway crying
In the dark land of the sun

The image of the opposition between darkness and light is one that Dylan has used in other songs, where it seems to represent the failure of consciousness to comprehend the paradoxes and antinomies of existence. For example, in "Gates of Eden" the cowboy angel rides in the face of the twisted truth of war and peace – "With his candle lit into the sun / Though its glow is waxed in black / All except when `'neath the trees of Eden;" in "Ain't No Man Righteous," "In a city of darkness, there's no need of the sun;"in "Only A Pawn In Their Game," "the shadowy sun sets on the one that fired the gun." So, too, here in "Standing In The Doorway,"the "dark land of the sun" represents the emotional paradox in which Dylan's protagonist is trapped; he hates himself for still wanting the lover who drove the corkscrew into his heart, but he also hates himself for turning her away. He finally takes the only way out,the way of the blues, living life one day at a time, trusting in some power outside himself to bring him a healing touch that would make sense of it all, seeing "nothing to be gained by any explanation:"

I'll eat when I'm hungry,
drink when I'm dry
And live my life on the square
And even if the flesh falls off of my face
I know someone will be there to care
It always means so much
Even the softest touch
I see nothing to be gained by any explanationT
here are no words that need to be said
You left me standing in the doorway crying
Blues wrapped around my head

And now I tag Pam/She to write up "In The Summertime" :-)



Howard