The emptiness of Visions of Johanna

Trev Gibb to Peter Stone Brown on Visions of Johanna, Christmas 2005

It’s a swapping around of perceived reality. The background becomes the foreground, the foreground becomes the background. But the background doesn’t really exist because the foreground isn’t there, but the writer creates the background without the foreground and so we imagine the foreground perfectly, even though she - Johanna - is never actually described... we know her, even though all Dylan does is to not describe her, he describes what could be, might be, would be, around her, if, and only if, she was there.. and so he describes her loss and how it affects the scene. Heat pipes coughing.... the loss, the emptiness is actually Johanna.