incantation

His voice, like a conjurer’s incantation, stirs the embers of rage, mustering both a conviction and devotion that consumes both logic and restraint.

Neuroscientists have charted the mind’s incantation of words that lights up the temporal lobe, the frontal lobe, ridges in the cerebral cortex, triggering impulses that transform squiggles of ink into letters, letters to words, words to sentences and meaning and comprehension and empathy.

Part 1, “Acknowledgment,” features a plodding incantation, first set by Jimmy Garrison’s bass, then played by the saxophone, then intoned in Coltrane’s husky voice: “A love supreme. A love supreme.”

Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Kaddish” rings with melancholic truth as a mourning for the maternal religion from which he felt alienated by the Israeli state's abandonment of its principles as much as an incantation of Yisgadal for his mother.

The result, though it highlights Marshall’s distinctive phrasing and her subtle sense of irony, feels something like an incantation — a shrewd live offering at a moment when Dylan himself couldn’t seem less interested in rehashing his past glories.