"The audience was great because they were very quiet, although I think 90% of them were quiet because they couldn't figure out what they were seeing."

"Basically, 2,700 people are sitting in one place pretending what they are watching is normal, when it is anything but. It's hard to explain, and if you are only listening to the concert audio you're not going to get it—it's entirely a live manifestation.... [T]his is Dylan in the Bardo. The shows have gotten much more tenuous and ethereal and for the first time I realized that this is a very old person on stage.... [H]e is very much a part of our collective consciousness (much of which he legitimately created), so it is hard to know where this artist ends and reality begins. Only by radically destroying what he has created does Dylan exist in the moment: It's now or never, more than ever.... For me, going to see Dylan has always been like consulting the oracle. The set lists always seemed designed to tell you something about where you are in your life at the moment....  Ending the show with 'It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry' was brilliant, because it's not remotely a show-ender, like 'Watchtower' or 'Like a Rolling Stone.' I got the sense that Bob was aware he might be winding down.... 'I came to tell everybody, but I could not get across.'... When I left the theater at 10pm there was a vast caravan of trucks pulling the giant floats and deflated balloons for the Macy's Thanksgiving day parade.... Don't say I didn't warn you, when your train gets lost."

Writes Raymond Foye in "Bob Dylan In The Bardo" (in The Brooklyn Rail).

I assume the essay title is a play on the George Saunders title "Lincoln in the Bardo":

The novel takes place during and after the death of Abraham Lincoln's son William "Willie" Wallace Lincoln and deals with the president's grief at his loss. The bulk of the novel, which takes place over the course of a single evening, is set in the bardo...

Bardo:

In some schools of Buddhism, bardo... is an intermediate, transitional, or liminal state between death and rebirth.... [W]hen one's consciousness is not connected with a physical body, one experiences a variety of phenomena... from, just after death, the clearest experiences of reality of which one is spiritually capable, and then proceeding to terrifying hallucinations that arise from the impulses of one's previous unskillful actions.... [T]he bardo offers a state of great opportunity for liberation, since transcendental insight may arise with the direct experience of reality... [but] it can become a place of danger as the karmically created hallucinations can impel one into a less than desirable rebirth.