Everybody seems to work hard to avoid the explanation of “Double E”. In every analysis of the song I came across the author spends quite a long time guessing what this or that metaphor might really mean but, for reasons unknown to me, goes over the “Double E” as if in fact it wasn’t in the lyrics. Other example of “Double E” in connection with railroads is Warren Zevon’s “Poor Poor Pitiful Me”: I laid my head on the railroad track/waiting for the Double E. Another Double E train is mentioned in “The Liar’s Club: A Memoir” by Mary Karr where one character says that he took a Double E train from Memphis to New Orleans. Furry Lewis’s Jelly Roll you mention seems to me to be another story – the Double E there definitely means something different from Dylan’s (and Zevon’s, for that matter) meaning. But I may be wrong, I am not an American, even not a native English speaker.

The fact that meaning of so frequently used term is not known to everybody in the US puzzles me. Thank you.

Dan

hogwash. it’s one of the strongest songs on the album

Thanks!!

I’m sorry but you have got a typo in this paragraph: “Edie was a

wild child with a penchant…”

John the Baptist was just a few months older than Jesus, (they were cousins) therefore there is no way for him to have baptised”baby Jesus”. Instead,he baptised Jesus in the Jordan River and they were both adult men.

They load ok for me. ?

Hmm is anyone else experiencing problems with the images on this blog loading?
I’m trying to determine if its a problem on my end or if it’s the blog.
Any feed-back would be greatly appreciated.

Great food for thought, the whole point of creating this site.

I don’t think Gates of Eden has a conventional moral message at all.  Dylan never lived by conventional morals.  Just because Dylan used Biblical motifs throughout his songwriting doesn’t mean it was to convey a conventional moral message,. I think there is plenty of evidence to conclude that Dylan’s spirituality was not the “believe and obey” authority, clearly defined good and bad, reward and punishment, fear and guilt kind of fundamentalist type of religiosity, but instead it was an individualistic, humanitarian, mystical direct experience of God kind of spirituality.  He would certainly use themes from the Judeo-Christian tradition, but always interpreted mystically ,just as Joseph Campbell did.

To me, Gates of Eden is the state of being for souls who no longer believe or perceive in an artificial separation between humans, nature, and God.  Everything that is outside of the Gates of Eden is for those whose spirituality has not yet developed enough to know that every being, every bit of matter organic and non-organic, the entire universe, altogether collectively is what God is.