Henning wrote:
>I miss [Leonard Cohen's] sexual references though
I know, but weighing a half-hard manhood in his hand and crudely likening it to the neck of a swan? That was something we didn't really need to know, Henning. His songs are also often permeated with crudities, but thankfully a lot less blatantly so than in his literature. The song I had mentioned earlier - the one with the swan - is very D H Lawrence-ish, of course. You are probably familiar with the famous scene in 'Women in Love', in which Alan Bates gives picnic guests a short monologue on 'the vulgar way' to eat a fig:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wgWEhCrnoI
There is something rather Cohen-ish about that little film clip. I must admit I was shocked when I first heard 'The Traitor'. Immediately after the swan opens the first verse we are introduced to the suntanned woman's genitalia - for 'the rose of high romance' could be nothing else. There it is, petals opening wide and 'yearning' him through the summer. It is a song about carnal desire, a man with a fixation for, an obsession with, a woman's most private territory. I repeat: I was shocked! I knew what he was singing about. I knew exactly what he was bloody-well singing about. The rose he sickened with a scarlet fever was obviously labia, red and sore from his constant and insatiable pounding. She said AT LAST(!) he was her finest lover - in other words the woman had to make him stop because she'd had more than enough. If she died, he would be to blame, she said. He tells us that he was like a madman ('I kissed her lips as though I thirsted still'), that he lingered on her thighs for a fatal moment. The driving force was lust and not love ('my falsity it stung me like a hornet') and that he possessed no willpower to remove himself before his crisis: 'the poison sank and it paralysed my will' - he tells us. He goes on to say that he could not move, that he felt 'deserted from above' - that he was now 'listed with the enemies of love'. Of course God had left him! Because whoremongery has nothing to do with God. On the contrary, he had obeyed the Devil's commands, and it was only natural and deserved that people afterwards called him 'traitor' to his face.
