“Love isn’t finding a perfect person. It’s seeing an imperfect person perfectly.”
                                                                                                        - Sam Keen

Last night, as I fiddled with some computer stuff before retiring, I put on some Joan Baez songs for background music.  It’s something I frequently do, and I always enjoy a taste of sweet nostalgia listening to her.  I am especially drawn to my past whenever I listen to her rendition of Bob Dylan’s Love Minus Zero/No Limit. The somewhat enigmatic lyrics of one of the twentieth century’s great poets flow along her sweet soprano, wrap themselves into a cocoon of remembrance and reflection and take me back to a time that, despite its great upheavals, was my period of greatest emotional vulnerability and intellectual growth.

Vintage Baez is a soprano that sometimes borders on being almost too powerful and too piercing, with a hard edge that can not really be described as lyrical. But in LMZ/NL, she pulls back from the full power of her voice and takes just enough off its edge to render what I feel is one of the most beautiful recordings of all time.

One technique that Baez has used throughout her career is to retain the gender in which a song was originally written. While most artists alter the gender of a song to render it from the vantage point of their own sex, changing “he” to “she” and “her” to “him” as appropriate, I’m not aware of a single instance in which Baez ever employed this tack. If the song is written as a man singing to or about a woman, Baez has no problem putting herself into the male role and retaining the feminine object of the song. Had she attempted to change LMZ/NL to a woman singing about a male lover, the song simply would not have worked because of the very feminine nature of the poet’s object of affection.

As to the lyrics, Love Minus Zero/No Limit is one poem whose meaning I would love to have had the opportunity to debate with my high school English teachers. I think it could have taken my learning experience to an even higher level than did the poetry of Frost, Browning and others whose interpretations I enjoyed challenging when they were sometimes presented as absolutes. I count myself lucky to have had a couple of very good teachers who listened and even gave some level of credence to my questioning views.

When LMZ/NL appeared on Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home album in 1965, there were actually three, often over-lapping, movements going on in the U.S. – protests against the war in Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement and protests against what a large portion of the ‘60s children saw as the crass materialism that permeated our society. While Dylan is best known for his songs protesting the war and civil inequalities, on one level, at least, LMZ/NL presents a penetrating criticism of a materialistic, class-conscience society in which the mind-numbed masses seek to advance their own social standing by riding the coattails of those who are capable of expressing original thought –

People talk of situations,
Read books, repeat quotations,
Draw conclusions on the wall.

And he is particularly disdainful of the wealthy class when he writes

Bankers’ nieces seek perfection,
Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring.

The hallmark of great poetry is its resistance to dissection into absolutes. Instead, it retains a mercurial elusiveness that allows the reader to view it in his or her personal context and draw their own personal meaning from the poet’s words. By this measure, LMZ/NL belongs in the Poetry Hall of Fame.

The social criticism of LMZ/NL is readily apparent, but the precise meanings of some of the criticism leave a lot to the listener’s imagination. The best interpretations are those that derive from the listener’s own consciousness.

In addition to the social criticism contained in Dylan’s masterpiece, the song can be viewed on at least two other levels. The first, and sometimes most enjoyable, is simple immersion into a beautiful work of art, both musically and lyrically, especially when performed by someone like Joan Baez. (I appreciate Dylan’s own rendition of the song, but, in my not so humble opinion, his is not particularly a thing of beauty.) No deep thinking, no rapt attention required; just sit back and let the music flow.

But the primary level at which LMZ/NL must be considered is its story of love, from its very title onward.

Several people have attempted to interpret LMZ/NL as a mathematical equation: (Love – 0) divided by (No Limit). An interesting approach, but one which breaks down when one considers that, mathematically, No Limit pretty much equates to infinity, and the result of trying to divide by infinity is something that is undefined. Or, if one attacks the equation as a series in which the denominator is not actually infinity but a series of numbers that grows infinitely large, then the result of the division is something that gets closer and closer to zero. Not my idea of the poet’s message.

My personal preference is to consider that Love Minus Zero is unconditional love; love with nothing withheld. Such love, indeed, has No Limit.

Past the title, the reader or listener then has to consider just what or who is the Love about which the poet is speaking. Is she some illusionary, perfect being that lives only in his imagination, some real person who is the subject of his unrequited love or a real love whose flaws and shortcomings are so insignificant as to not matter when compared with her ability to see through the materialistic trappings of the world around her and understand what is real and true?

Finally, the song ends with some of its most vivid and, at the same time, most vexing lines –

The wind howls like a hammer,
The night blows cold and rainy,
My love she’s like some raven
At my window with a broken wing.

At this point, is the listener meant to invoke visions of Edgar Allen Poe’s raven, but with the roles reversed? Does the broken wing mean that, despite all of the perfection ascribed to his Love in the preceding verses, the poet actually realizes she is not completely perfect? Or, is the poet alone and cold, imagining something outside his window that he cannot hope to hold?

Almost half a century later, I’m still pondering this one.

View the lyrics of Love Minus Zero/No Limit here.

Listen to Love Minus Zero/No Limit