I’ve just finished watching Todd Haynes’ “I’m Not There” while smoking an enormous Dominican cigar. Maybe not the typical July 4th celebration, but, really, what could be more appropriate? “I’m Not There” is Haynes’ idiosyncratic vision of the multi-dimensional Bob Dylan, and could another country than America have produced Dylan? After all, this is the country that ostensibly holds the ideal that we can be anything we choose to be, even if we choose to abandon selves and identities like snakes shedding their skins.

(Note: Todd Haynes’ 43 minute film biography of Karen Carpenter—starring Barbie dolls—still haunts me, years after first seeing it.)

If you’re not Dylan-obsessed, I invite you to keep reading. I will not dwell on the obscure details of Mr. D’s life and personae; that’s what Haynes has done. Suffice it to say, the movie is solely for the hard-core. If you don’t know who Albert Grossman is, or can’t recognize lyrics from the most surreal Basement Tapes tracks, you’ll be befuddled by this film.

(Note 2; seeing Cate Blanchett as mid-60’s Dylan with David Cross as Allen Ginsberg was, for me, worth the price of the rental alone.)

So why am I writing about it? Well, the concept is profoundly intriguing. Haynes portrays each of Dylan’s “selves” as a separate character, played by a different actor (and, in one case, and actress). Each of these personality facets has a whole different life—a different name, different backstory, different nature.

But I think this chameleonlike quality of Dylan isn’t his alone; to one degree or another, well all have it. My driver’s licenses all look like different people; one heavy, one thin; one with glasses, one without; one bearded, one clean-shaven; one friendly, one sullen. Hell, I could have worked for the CIA or Interpol, if not for my distaste for bullets and torture.

I didn’t do this on purpose. In fact, I remember (when I was several years younger) being envious of those people who seemed to have an inviolable sense of self; “he knows who he is” seemed to me to be about the finest compliment one could receive.

But now, I’m not so sure about that. Life is a slippery proposition. The world isn’t like it was when I was 17, or 27, or even 37. At least, it doesn’t appear that way to me, and that’s the whole point, isn’t it? I have a theory that life gets more serious as you get older—sure it can be fun, meaningful, adventurous, and so forth—but it’s serious. As Dylan would have it, “There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke. But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate.”

In other words, the only way to properly deal with something that’s always changing (life, or, if you prefer, LIFE), is to accept that we are always changing too. You can get Botox injected into your face, but not your mind. Sorry.

All of this leads me back to Buddhism, and one of the core teaching of the Buddha; no-self. See, no-self doesn’t mean you’re a nothing, or a nobody. Instead, it means your self is an ever-changing, never-stable stream, impossible to pin down or define. It isn’t that your mind experiences the process of change. Your mind IS a process of change.

This is a scary idea when you think about having nothing to hang on to. Where did I go? But, on the other hand, this idea also means you are capable of change; nothing about you is ‘chiseled in stone’. It’s more like a pattern in water. Change the flow, and the pattern will change.

This idea also helps us to understand that everyone, without exception, suffers from the false. We may feel like we’re the only ones who don’t know who we are, but NOBODY DOES. And those who think they do are wrong. In fact, carrying around this concrete image of self is an impediment to growth and real, direct perception of the world.

With his peerless instincts, Dylan apparently knew this on a deep level. That’s one reason why, quite apart from his music, he continues to fascinate us. He opened himself to change and self-transformation without reservation. Sometimes he arrived there long before the rest of society. That’s why people were befuddled by questions like “why does Bob have an electric guitar”, or “why is he playing country music?”, or “ you mean Bob Dylan is a Christian now?”.

Emerson, of course, famously said “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”. Dylan, just as famously, said “He not busy being born is busy dying”.

Perhaps most pointedly, Joni Mitchell said;

“Now old friends are acting strange; they shake their heads, they say I’ve changed. But something’s lost, and something’s gained, in living every day”.

I’ve heard that from my old friends. “Geez, Allan, you’re much more private and dark than you used to be”. Stick around, gang, because by 2009, I may be dancing around a maypole, and singing ABBA songs on streetcorners.

Hey, people change, right?