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55 Bootleg It’s a song called “Silver Mantis” that T Bone Burnett sings on an old bootleg Bob Dylan CD from a Rolling Thunder Revue concert down in Fort Worth, Texas, over thirty years ago. In the song, which tells the tale of a lowly servant a thousand years ago who saves the daughter of a Japanese warlord from a kidnapping, but who then is thrown into the dungeon because the warlord is jealous and enraged, Burnett makes a mistake, a minor one, simply transposing the name of the servant for the name of the princess (the rough equivalent of a Shakespearean actress saying “O Juliet, Juliet, wherefore art thou Juliet?”). And to the casual listener, or the uninitiated, or the drunk or lazy, the moment in the song might go completely unnoticed, no harm done either way, but to the devotee, the sentimental, or the lowly servants among us (who are always in danger of being thrown into dungeons by our own rough equivalents of warlords, jealous and enraged), it makes us love the song even more. I say maybe T Bone was a little drunk or a little lazy that day. Or maybe he was caught up in his own moment, maybe playing before the largest crowd of his life because Dylan had loved the song too and had asked him to join the revue (although even Dylan himself made mistakes, introducing the song with the wrong title and mispronouncing the name of the Japanese princess). Or maybe T Bone just knew somehow, like some silver mantis in his heart, what all artists know over time, that art is one endless mistake after another, that architects sometimes make intentional mistakes, turning the last piece of tile upside down in the floor of ten thousand tiles to show no pride before the face of the Lord, that the part of the song where the singer loses control is the heart’s true song, the essence of all that is holy in love, that lovers when they freely exchange their hearts 56 with the other exchange their names as well, that they know in the room they make of their love that each name is sacred and the same, that Romeo is Juliet and Juliet is Romeo, that the heart of a lowly servant can be the heart of a princess, that there’s no mistake about it, that love may be the greatest mistake of them all, the rough equivalent, the bootleg version of the perfect song of our lives. ...

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