Like a rolling stone, Bob Dylan returns next month to Kansas. For me, he never left.

The first time I heard a Bob Dylan song was at Washington Elementary School in Baxter Springs, where in the auditorium a young music teacher led our class in singing “Blowin’ in the Wind.” I couldn’t have been more than 7 or 8 at the time, but I remember thinking so hard about the words and what they meant that I slipped into a kind of reverie.

I say it was the first time I heard a Bob Dylan song, even though “Blowin’ in the Wind” had received enough airplay that it became part of the furniture of my childhood. The most commercially successful version of the song was by Peter, Paul and Mary, whose syrupy pop rendition robbed the song of its power but made it safe for general consumption in 1963. Sitting in a little chair in the auditorium of Washington school, singing the verses for myself, I discovered Dylan and the power of poetry to shape the world.

Memory is a slippery thing, and I hesitate to give more detail for fear of being wrong. I’m uncertain of the name of the teacher, or the year, but I believe it was one autumn between the assassination of JFK and when Apollo 1 burned on the launchpad in 1967. I loved music class, at least until the band instructor forced me to try the trumpet, because that’s what my older brother played. What I wanted was a guitar.

Our music teacher may not have understood she was leading us in a protest song. The song, if not its meaning, had been adopted as part of our national culture, just as another song she taught us had — Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.”

I’ve been thinking about Dylan lately because he’ll be coming to Kansas next month, for shows in Wichita and Topeka. But hardly a week has gone by in the past decade that I haven’t thought about Dylan in some way, listening to his music or reading about him or playing his songs on my guitar. The latter is an attempt to better understand the songs, in the same way reading aloud helps you understand literature. If there is one thing attempting to sing Dylan can teach you, besides the fact you’re no genius, it’s this: His breath and the song are one.

“Dylan had become a column of air,” the poet Allen Ginsberg said of watching Dylan perform, as quoted in the 2005 Martin Scorsese documentary “No Direction Home.”

“His total physical and mental focus was this single breath coming out of his body,” Ginsberg recalled. “He had found a way in public to be almost like a shaman, with all of his intelligence and consciousness focused on his breath.”

I’ve also been thinking about the intersection of culture and politics since Donald Trump had himself appointed chair of the Kennedy Center by a handpicked board of loyalists. In announcing the planned changes, Trump cited a “Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.”

But more on this later.

Now 83, Dylan is touring to promote his “Rough and Rowdy Ways” album, released five years ago. He’s been to Kansas a few times before, notably in 1976 and 2004. For a detailed take on his 2023 Kansas City show at the Midland Theater, check out Steve Paul’s review.

Dylan’s the subject of renewed cultural attention since the release last year of James Mangold’s “A Complete Unknown,” a somewhat fictional account of Dylan’s life from the time he came to New York in 1961 to when he went electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

The movie, starring Timothée Chalamet as Dylan, is based on “Dylan Goes Electric!” a 2015 book by music historian Elijah Wald. I read Wald’s book long before seeing the movie, and before that read his books on blues guitar cult hero Robert Johnson and Greenwich Village folksinger Dave Van Ronk. Wald is a source to trust.

“Dylan at Newport is remembered as a pioneering artist defying the rules and damn the consequences,” Wald writes in “Electric!” — and then goes on to demolish that simple take.

“In most tellings, Dylan represents youth and the future, and the people who booed (at Newport) were stuck in the dying past,” Wald writes. “But there is another version, in which the audience represents youth and hope, and Dylan was shutting himself off behind a wall of electric noise, locking himself in a citadel of wealth and power, abandoning idealism and hope and selling out to the star machine.”

Dylan remains an enigma, the unreliable narrator of his own story.

Born Robert Zimmerman in Minnesota, he invented himself as Bob Dylan, and has been reimagining himself since. Although famously known as a writer of protest songs, he distanced himself from politics; born into a Jewish family, he converted to evangelical Christianity in his late 30s; celebrated as the conscience of youth, he’s now firmly in his 80s.

While “A Complete Unknown” has gotten knocks for getting some things downright wrong (the songs Dylan played at Newport, for example), what the movie gets right is Dylan’s chameleon-like character and the corrosive effect his genius, or perhaps just his personality, had on those around him. His relationship with songwriter and activist Joan Baez, played by Monica Barbaro in the film, is difficult to watch because Dylan’s real relationship is with his work, not with her.

Dylan broke her heart, but as part of healing Baez forgave him decades later. Another contemporary, Joni Mitchell, considered Dylan a fake, and in a 2010 interview with the Los Angeles Times said, “Everything about Bob is a deception.”

Even Pete Seeger, the banjo-playing activist who was Dylan’s mentor, felt betrayed, not because Dylan had gone electric but because he disavowed politics. Perhaps hurt by Seeger’s disapproval, Dylan didn’t return to the Newport festival for 37 years.

Since plugging in the Fender Stratocaster at Newport in 1965, Dylan has become the most famous American performer since Elvis Presley. He’s won just about every award a musician could hope for. He has 10 Grammy awards, a Golden Globe, and an Oscar for best song.

In 2016, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the most persuasive evidence that his songs are indeed poetry. He won for “having created new poetic expressions in the American song tradition,” according to the Swedish Academy. “Dylan’s songs are rooted in the rich tradition of American folk music and are influenced by the poets of modernism and the beatnik movement. Early on, Dylan’s lyrics incorporated social struggles and political protest. Love and religion are other important themes in his songs.” His work offers “surprising, sometimes surreal imagery.”

This imagery is in the sad forests and dead oceans and the other nightmares of “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” released in 1963. Also “Gates of Eden,” from 1965: “Of war and peace the truth just twists / Its curfew gull just glides.”

To listen to Dylan, really listen, is to read deeply.

In 1997, Dylan was honored at the Kennedy Center for a lifetime of achievement. As is the tradition at such events, Dylan watched as other artists performed a selection of his work. Among them was Bruce Springsteen, who sang “The Times They Are A-Changing.”

The song, Springsteen said, was written during a time when people’s yearning for a just society was exploding. “Bob Dylan had the courage to stand in that fire,” Springsteen said, “and he caught the sound of that explosion. This song remains as a beautiful call to arms.”

Other artists honored by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., include Led Zeppelin, Merle Haggard, the Eagles, Johnny Cash, U2, Ray Charles, Reba McEntire, and Earth, Wind & Fire. At least those are the ones I can remember. I attempted to find a comprehensive list on the Kennedy Center website, but it has been down since Trump purged the board Feb. 12.

“The goal of the Kennedy Center has been to live up to our namesake, serving as a beacon for the world and ensuring our work reflects America,” the ousted center president, Deborah F. Rutter, said in a statement reported by The New York Times. “From the art on our stages to the students we have impacted in classrooms across America, everything we have done at the Kennedy Center has been about uplifting the human spirit in service of strengthening the culture of our great nation.”

If ever there was a persuasive argument for the power of bipartisanship, it is the record of the Kennedy Center in recognizing achievement across the cultural spectrum. That record is now in jeopardy. It is difficult to imagine the Kennedy Center fulfilling its mission now that its board has been packed with political loyalists. Its board members are now all Trump appointees and include his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and longtime aide Dan Scavino.

Trump, at 78, is nearly as old as Dylan.

They are near-contemporaries, and during their careers have appealed to a roughly similar audience, the American working class. Both have been voices for change, although one advocated for the advancement of poor people and minorities while the other has demonized them.

Dylan is the personification of breath.

Trump, the stifling authoritarian impulse.

The “golden age” of culture Trump promises has already failed from an injection of toxic ideology. The same would be true if the board were composed only of Biden appointees. In a free society, a political agenda is incompatible with a public mission to promote the arts.

Otherwise, it’s all just propaganda.

Among the reasons Dylan has endured as an artist is the very thing that most frustrates his critics: his ability to redefine himself. In talking about Dylan, there’s not just one artist, but a multitude. He has always been busy being born. There’s the Dylan of Greenwich Village, the Dylan of Newport ’65, the Dylan of “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.”

And the Dylan of today.

What Dylan has captured, like Walt Whitman, is the American yearning for freedom. The freedom to create, the freedom from the past, the freedom of the eternally open road.

I can feel it when I play his songs, an acoustic guitar in my hands and a harmonica on a brace around my neck, and sometimes the words and music come together in a way that feels like pure breath.

The Dylan song I never play is “Blowin’ in the Wind” because it reminds me of all the friends from Washington Elementary who are no longer around. I have not been close to any of them since leaving Baxter Springs, these many decades since, and have never gone to a school reunion, but their deaths haunt as if questions on the wind.

I won’t be seeing Dylan in concert next month because frankly the price of a ticket is out of my budget. I don’t believe many of his younger fans will be able to afford to see him, either. Tickets went on sale Feb. 7 at $65 for the Topeka show, according to the Topeka Capital-Journal. They now start at $114 from online vendors and range into the thousands for premium seats. While I hate missing the chance to see in person the artist who first made me realize that songs were poetry, I take solace in the fact that we will always have Dylan’s work, just as we have Whitman’s.

And the work is enough.

“For Dylan, it is the art of the song that matters,” writes Richard F. Thomas in his 2017 book on Dylan. “Song has powerful effects, especially when it responds to human conflict, to perceived injustice, to oppression. It is through song that we give depth to the sentiments for which mere speech is at times of crisis insufficient.”

Dylan remains a shamanic figure in American culture, a musical messiah uncomfortable with his followers, a performer who sometimes hates his symbiotic relationship with his audience. Don’t trust what Dylan says, trust what he has written. When mere speech is insufficient, turn to “All Along the Watchtower.” The conversion between the Joker and the Thief is as compelling today as when it was released in 1967.

The golden age of American culture? We don’t need a president to decree it. It has always been there for us, in folk and blues and gospel, in country and pop and rap. You just have to read deeply enough to find it.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.