Adam ben Meyer wrote: All of us wounded here, all of us emboldened.
We are all wounded.
We are not all emboldened. We may all strive to be, but we are not. Many are capable of being emboldened, most in the world are not.
If the very miserable did not ignore their misery most of the time, the number of homeless mental health patients would be many times what it is. It would be hard to support one's self when consciously feeling core inner pain 24/7. Most are unaware that they have a core inner pain, yet they act it out daily. They are the most ignorant.
Many people in the world have a lot of misery in their lives because of ongoing terrible living conditions. Tragically, the best they can do is ignore their misery, John. But I don't see why any of us here have to 'ignore our misery'. We have the choice.
I don’t wish to interrupt the dancing or the misery, but it has been three weeks and five pages since the last prayer from BoM was introduced, and perhaps it’s time to introduce the next one. When we first embarked on this enterprise, we used to take turns introducing each new prayer, but for a long time now this task had fallen to me exclusively. I don’t mind doing that, however, I feel a little uncomfortable with always being the first one to introduce my thoughts on the prayers or my interpretations. So this time I’ll only quote the text, and leave the honor of the first thoughts to someone else. And here we go:
I.17
Did we come for nothing? We thought we were summoned, the aging head-waiters, the minor singers, the second-rate priests. But we couldn’t escape into these self-descriptions, nor lose ourselves in the atlas of coming and going. Our prayer is like gossip, our work like burning grass. The teacher is pushed over, the bird-watcher makes a noise, and the madman dares himself to be born into the question of who he is. Let the light catch the thread from which the man is hanging. Heal him inside the wind, wrap the wind around his broken ribs, you who know where Egypt was, and for whom he rehearses these sorrows, Our Lady of the Torah, who does not write history, but whose kind lips are the law of all activity. How strangely you prepare his soul. The heretic lies down beside the connoisseur of form, the creature of desire sits on a silver ring, the counterfeiter begs forgiveness from the better counterfeiter, the Angel of Darkness explains the difference between a palace and a cave – O bridge of silk, O single strand of spittle glistening, a hair of possibility, and nothing works, nothing works but You.
Last edited by DBCohen on Fri May 04, 2007 4:12 am, edited 1 time in total.
In a 1948 play by Christopher Fry called "The lady's not for burning" we have a man who has just returned from the war and he has returned with a lot of scars. He returns to a town where they are about to burn a woman at the stake because they are a little afraid of her power. He decides that since his life is pretty well over anyway that he might as well take responsibility for the crime that she is accused of to give her freedom.
They meet and chat a bit and then he says something to her that is to me strangely similar to the feeling of the text of this prayer.
Half this grotesque life I spend in a state of slow decomposition,
using the name of unconsidered God as a pedestal on which I stand and
bray that I'm best of beasts, until under some patient moon or other I
fall to pieces, like a cake of dung. Is there a slut would hold this in
her arms and put her lips against it?
Like a bird on the wire
Like a worm on a hook
Let the light catch the tread from which the man is hanging
O bridge of silk
O single strand of spittle glistening
a hair of possibility,
and nothing works, nothing works but You
crazy or just half crazy?
I am hanging in the balance
of the reality of man
like every sparrow falling
like every grain of sand
Bob Dylan
Is there any such thing as a calling? Many happy professionals who are also spiritual in some way feel that they are doing the one job they were meant to do. The unhappy professionals feel they are not, and I think many question or at least wonder if G-d’s will is manifest in them. And it’s difficult; there is always a struggle. Has your work begun?
But I think it also has a similar feel as the last prayer – the preparation of a man for a woman, and some kind of permanent wrongness. Maybe original sin? And then ending with an acknowledgement to the one Perfection, and I’m pointing out the obvious. Maybe what’s at least a little less obvious is that I’m getting a lot of metaphorically sexual images from this section.
Poor Leonard – do you think he really felt this inadequate?
So taken together in totality, it is a man’s impossible job to make himself better for a woman, women are better at faking their worth than men, and the only perfect thing is G-d. It is a love poem, of sorts.
Let the light catch the tread from which the man is hanging.
(This brought to mind a noose, and with the professional life still being assimilated, it lead to the thought of Ned Flanders. When Neddy quit being a pharmacist and opened the Leftorium, he took the necktie from his neck and threw it on the barbecue saying something like, “There goes the noose I wore for the last 11 years. Ahh, freedom.”)
Manna wrote:Neddy quit being a pharmacist and opened the Leftorium
That seems appropiate somehow for someone finding out about their true nature. I think there is something important about this left right business. I know that it fasinated Louis Pasteur and resulted in us learning that all of the proteins of higher animals are made up of only those amino acids that exist in the left-hand form and that likewise, our cells burn only the right-handed form of sugar, not the left-handed form that can be made in the test tube.
In somewhat the same way I think the preparation of the man for the woman has to do with the left and right shape of love. A bit like screwing in a lightbulb where one need to be turning one way and the other in a mirror image way.
"it was the shape, the shape of our love twisted me"
Oops… That was my typo again; should be “thread”, of course (I’ll correct it). But I guess that’s not the reason why this prayer failed so far to elicit enthusiastic participation. Is it because most of what he speaks about here is already familiar from earlier prayers? There is a certain feeling of repetition, but there is also some new imagery. I wonder if Simon can find some Zen allusions here in “sits on a silver ring”, “bridge of silk” etc. Does it ring any bells? Just a thought.
Indeed, it feels like we already heard it [:-)], I mean all the imagery is already introduced earlier, and also it's hard to decipher what's on speaker's mind than that it's very hermetically said. Both "second-rate priest" and the "minor singer" were Cohen's own self-description earlier, and outside this book (first, that he wanted to be a minor poet, second referring to "kohen"). Most of imagery is - as we already know from previous 16 prayers - of dark, religious, surrealistic kind; we have "the man hanging from a thread", "healing inside the wind", what's all meaning exactly what it does say (I know I wrote this earlier.) "Our prayer is like gossip" is interesting, as it can refer to exactly these prayers in the Book (not psalms, we learned, but "prayers"), and also to the failing of the religion in the contemporary world. Also, "teacher is pushed over" (the edge?), what is the same - teachers are not asked for anymore (although this book, as early bird on new age, and current cult of Johnny Cash, Dylan or LC himself - experienced, old poets - in popular music shows, people are starting to ask for teachers, exactly because we live in uncertain times which is tuned to "the strict September drum" and the prayer is like gossip). On the other hand, it's also zen, "teacher is pushed over" because he anyhow has to walk behind you, and give you what you do not need, otherwise he's not a good and succesfull teacher. There are also Judaic references in it, what's Doron's part; the "you" to whom he speaks again "know were Egypt was", what's important as it's referring to Jewish exile in Egypt, and there's "Lady of the Torah", for whom I don't believe actually exists, but I guess it's LC's merging of religion (Torah) and L/lady. I like it, we had our lady of the harbour, our lady of the solitude, and lady of the Torah. The end goes to even higher level of BoM's tipycal poetical and spiritual ecstasy, even trance, which is beyond rational explication: "how strangely you prepare his soul", and then turns to another of BoM's spiritual catalogue of contradictions and unifications of opposites, or "coniunctio spirituum", Kabbalistic drawing known from Death of a Lady's Man and New Skin for the Old Ceremony covers, in couples like heretic + connoisseur of form, Angel of Darkness explaining difference between a palace and a cave, "counterfeiter begs forgiveness from the better counterfeiter". Both last images are interesting and important as they show clash of contradictions. Does the difference between palace and a cane needs to be explained? Or is there difference at all? It doesn't need to be in the terms of this book's worldview. Counterfeiters are totally different story, and is he a counterfeiter? ("The world was being hoaxed by a disciplined melancholy. All the sketches made a virtue of longing. All that was necessary to be loved widely was to publish one's anxieties. The whole enterprise of art was a calculated display of suffering." FG, II, 15) The end itself is pretty untransparent, in its apostrophe, (O) "bridge of silk" (?), "(O) single strand of spittle glistening" (??). Only I can say it's all something very tiny. That thread on which the man is hanging, that connection to the divine You and Lady of the Torah, that instance which is the only path, which only works, is very fragile and thin, it's a bridge made of silk, it's a single strand, it's a hair - even a hair which is only of possibility.
For images and 'matters' that have already gone before, yours certainly is a refreshing examination of it all. I enjoyed ~ very much ~ reading your voice on all of this. I'm glad to see you come into this thread with all of these very interesting delineations. Our Lady of the Torah ~ yes, so quite similar to the other 'our lady' references. Thanks for taking the time to give your perspective. This was great .
~ Lizzy
"Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken." ~ Oscar Wilde
Nice go, Tom. You covered many points admiringly well.
Could the “aging head-waiters” also refer to himself and his habit to dress impeccably…?
As for the “Lady of the Torah”, let me remind you of the story from the Book of Splendor (Zohar), which I’ve mentioned twice before, in which the Torah is compared with a lady hidden in a tower and revealing herself only to those who love her. I’ve mentioned it in the context of I.3 (p. 5 on that thread), and earlier in the discussion of “Sahara”, the figure from BoL (viewtopic.php?t=7755). It is interesting what he says here that she doesn’t write history, but governs the law of all activity; he seems to suggest that the law of the Torah is eternal and unchanging through history. It is always relevant to the unchanging nature and destiny of human beings.
As for the “Angel of Darkness”, it takes me back to our discussion of I.8, and the falling figure that reminded me of Lucifer. This could be another allusion to the same figure. As for the cave, we will come to it again in I.25.
“The thread from which the man is hanging” may refer to a story LC could have been aware of. It is by the great early twentieth-century Japanese writer of short stories, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, whose many stories were translated into English. This specific story is called “A Spider’s Thread”, and like many of Akutagawa’s stories, it is a reworking of an older Buddhist story. In it, Buddha is trying to rescue a sinner from the depth of hell, because although a notorious criminal, he once refrained from killing a spider. Buddha lowers a spider’s thread from Heaven into Hell, and the sinner starts climbing it, and it seems he is going to make it, but at a certain point he notices that other sinners are climbing after him. Afraid that it will break, he shouts at them to get off his thread, which immediately breaks above him and he falls back down, punished for his egoism. “Life hang by a thread”, if ever there was one. The next sentence may also refer to this story (and also the last sentence of the prayer), although the hanging and the broken ribs also brings to mind the Crucifixion, naturally. And, I probably don’t need to remind you of the reference to “Master Song” and “His body is a golden string/ that your body is hanging from”; actually, there it’s a “string” rather than a “thread”, but still it comes to mind.
“The thread from which the man is hanging” may refer to a story LC could have been aware of.
Your explanation of this sure makes it sound likely, Doron. Such an interesting lesson is contained in that allegory... or maybe I should say that in the reverse, such an interesting allegory for that lesson. It sounds like the kind of story that would make an impact on Leonard for referencing later. I agree that "string" and "thread" are close enough as to be interchangeable for these purposes.
It's great to see this discussion picking up, again. Thanks, Manna.
~ Lizzy
"Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken." ~ Oscar Wilde
"Aging head-waiters" did brought Leonard's look from 80s to mind;-)
As for the threads, and even more strings, that's connected with puppets (and we have new song/poem Puppets), and I guess it's exactly what he means, that history is out of our control, and even Lady of the Torah's control (and we discussed this fatalism when we were on first prayers).
Now, exactly this piece was discussed by Stephen Scobie in his 1993 opening speech at Red Deer Conference: http://www.canadianpoetry.ca/cpjrn/vol33/scobie.htm, "The Counterfeiter Begs Forgiveness: Leonard Cohen and Leonard Cohen".
Stephen Scobie wrote:Book of Mercy, strangely, achieves the same end through entirely opposite means. In contrast to the multiple voices and tones of Death of a Lady's Man, Book of Mercy is obsessively singular in voice, and entirely consistent in tone. But it is, precisely, a book of prayer: it may present a unified authorial position, but that is, by definition, a position from which any sense of self-centredness has been emptied out. In prayer, the speaker steps aside from himself; he defers himself, endlessly, to the Other. The Other here is the divinity, the godhead, the teacher, the addressee. But the paradox persists: God may be an image of the source (creation, Genesis), but in prayer God is silent; He is the one spoken to, not the originator of speech. Each partner in this transaction, the man praying and the God prayed to, defers to the other, and neither of them is originary. Again, at the source there is only a supplement.
Take as an example of this stance section 17 of Book of Mercy:
Did we come for nothing? We thought we were summoned, the aging head-waiters, the minor singers, the second-rate priests. But we couldn't escape into these self-descriptions, nor lose ourselves in the atlas of coming and going. Our prayer is like gossip, our work like burning grass. The teacher is pushed over, the bird-watcher makes a noise, and the madman dares himself to be born into the question of who he is. Let the light catch the thread from which the man is hanging. Heal him inside the wind, wrap the wind around his broken ribs, you who know where Egypt was, and for whom he rehearses these sorrows, Our Lady of the Torah, who does not write history, but whose kind lips are the law of all activity. How strangely you prepare his soul. The heretic lies down beside the connoisseur of form, the creature of desire sits on a silver ring, the counterfeiter begs forgiveness from the better counterfeiter, the Angel of Darkness explains the difference between a palace and a cave — O bridge of silk, O single strand of spittle glistening, a hair of possibility, and nothing works, nothing works but You.
All possible identities are posited only to be discarded: "minor singers," "second-rate priests" (the name Cohen, remember, means "priest"). Identity is something that only the madman dares. Identity is false, is faked: and when the counterfeiter begs forgiveness, it is not from the originator of any genuine currency, but rather from "the better counterfeiter," the more skilled artificer of deception. What is left is the address to "a hair of possibility" (recalling the definition of a saint, in Beautiful Losers, as "someone who has achieved a remote human possibility" [95]). And if "nothing works," then perhaps that phrase can be taken positively: it is only nothing, only vacancy, which does work. Or: "nothing works but You" — and that "You" is pure address, an emptying of the pronoun, nothing but the attitude and verbal gesture of prayer. Prayer itself is not a stable, achieved position, but rather something ephemeral, transitory: "Our prayer is like gossip, our work like burning grass."
The authorial stance of Book of Mercy, then, is fully as paradoxical as that of Death of a Lady's Man. Cohen presents images of beauty and humility; the language is fuller, richer, more assured than in either of the previous two books. But none of this restores "the poet" to the authority or dignity so confidently attributed to him in, say, The Spice-Box of Earth. The poet here is set aside; he is simply the vessel of prayer.
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