Climbing is Hard to Give up
November 2016. Leonard Cohen died this past week. Along with a great many people I listened to his music and as many interviews as I could digest in a number of sittings. During a couple of the interviews, one with Jian Gomeschi on CBC radio, April 2009, and another with David Remnick from the New Yorker, September 2016, Cohen made a few references that took me back to my October post.
David Remnick mentioned Cohen’s proclivity to draw upon scripture, especially the Psalms. Noted that Dylan had said Cohen’s tunes were like prayers. Asked if there was a spiritual purpose or heft in his songwriting. Cohen responded: I don’t like to be identified with Jewish thought. In my own mind I know I’m deeply conditioned by…one of the great themes in Cabalistic thought is the idea that the thrust of Jewish activity is the repair of God. God in creating the world…well…the creation is a catastrophe. There are pieces of him or her or it everywhere.
Remnick: Do your performances these last years have a spiritual dimension that’s self-conscious? Cohen: It’s not self-conscious. I only know that if I write enough verses and keep discarding the slogans…even the hip ones…even the subtle ones…something will emerge that represents.
Cohen defined slogans (see October post for ‘cliche’) as ‘what is right, what is the good position; it’s something that goes beyond what is called political correctness; it’s a kind of tyranny of a posture, a tyranny of what the right thing should be’. His response was to work hard at knowing his thoughts and feelings. He was most emphatic: ‘I have to write the verse and then see if it’s a slogan or not. I can’t toss it until I’ve worked with it and seen what it really is. I write and discard until I get to something that doesn’t sound like a slogan. It’s not something that’s easy.’
I’m curious about his use of the term catastrophe, here in reference to God’s creation, a disaster in need of repair. In my October post I categorize it as a means of cutting through cliche to reality. Taken from the Greek, it means down or over-turning. A reversal of what is expected. As a literary device the final action that completes the unraveling of a plot. Odd to think of creation as an unraveling of plot. The two ideas seem oxymoronic. But then again, think of Francis Bacon, John Cage and the Beats. The Dadaists. For them, the imperative in creative work is disruption. For Cohen, the discarding of slogans.
I wonder though. Why the idea that after all the shock and awe of the creative act, creation (or god) is still in need of repair, bits of him/her/it scattered everywhere? Perhaps if Cohen and the Cabalists had used the word organize rather than repair…tidying up, rearranging. As in picking up the cans of paint, cleaning up the edges or editing for grammar. Perhaps if I weren’t so attached to the noun being a static or fixed thing that rested on the seventh day and ever after.
At any rate, all this suggests that the activity the Jews are called to and the rest of us just do amounts to a kind of Sisyphean two-step. First we commit a kind of violence involving a lot of words beginning with d: dissolve, discard, distort, disassemble, disturb and disrupt. Then we move to the r-words: recycle, rearrange, reinvigorate, recreate, renew, reverse and repair. Or as Leonard says… first we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin. And then… inevitably we cycle back to ‘ in the beginning’.
My dream is of walking into a room filled with people all sitting on chairs. I grab an empty one and place it underneath a small door in the ceiling. Climbing onto the chair, I jump, grab hold and hoist myself up and through. Home at last.
I’m conflicted though. Caught featuring rather than cutting through the veil of cliche. There centre stage, my character is ascending the stairway to heaven. What was I dreaming? But if dreaming, perhaps I’m okay. Symbols aren’t cliches, are they? Or if they are, maybe they’re supposed to be. What would Leonard say? To play it safe, I’m ambivalent. The woman might be ascending but there is a case to be made for the opposite view. One look at her feet, so very unstable on those rungs, and you sense the possibility of movement away from apparent enlightenment. Indeed, this might be the very moment before the fall.