We Are All Leonard Cohen's Baffled Kings
Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2008 4:56 am
a video-poem installation...with companion essay.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snvBT4vdoL8
Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' hurtles in from the back of the universe caked in primordial dust. An existential crisis cross-dressed in psalmic structure, it dwells in the Valley of Majestic Doubt and demolishes sanctimony without getting all sanctimonious about it. My kind of spiritual dirge!
The late great Paul Celan is a prescient force as he is always everywhere at once, and well before the rest of us. It's hard to think of a deeper, more commanding poet over the last fifty years. His far-flung resonations always astound me.
Kabbalah's broken vessel is an allegory for the Big Bang event. And who better than Cohen to take a brush and shovel to the shards? Here, it's a broken hallelujah. While 'If It Be Your Will' bemoans a broken hill. Both songs appear on the 1985 'Various Positions' CD. Lenny's clearly wrestling a heavy archetype: sifting the aftermath of Peniel's broken covenant.
The lumpiness of matter satisfies me as to the 'accidental fortuitousness' of the Big Bang. Surely at some higher realm it represented a crisis? Like shrapnel from a mothership, our universe appears to have fallen off somebody's mantelpiece. Kerplat!
Only to find its legs in the Celanian ether. And to set about doing what universes do...
The Hubble photos, almost disturbingly beautiful, forced upon us a fresh reckoning with God, though I shudder at that freighted name. There's a sentience speaking through an aesthetic. I don't think an aesthetic is possible WITHOUT a sentience. Impossible beauty will conjure an onlooker. Something is striving to form pinnacles of light from the vast preponderance of featureless dark matter. Why would the universe even attempt to overthrow entropy if it didn't know it was rendezvouing with an after-dinner Telos? That's where we come in, the shepherds of history, hunter-gatherers armed with killer binoculars. And until little green men turn up announcing a galactic confederacy, we must assume the burden belongs to us alone.
If there is a cautionary tale, it is to beware the motive force of dark energy, nihilism. Needless conflict, murderous intent, unnatural sex acts (within reason), selfishness of purpose and The Spice Girls --all are counter to the expansionary march of light.
I am haunted by Jung's notion that we are the eyes through which God sees. This makes us the necessary angels. All the more reason we must devise ways to stop fighting and play nice with the other children!
For those with an interest, here's another piece where I found Paul Celan looming ahead. So I relented and wove him in. It's in the Pushcart Prize queue for 2007.
http://www.noojournal.com/view.php?mode ... six&id=104
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snvBT4vdoL8
Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' hurtles in from the back of the universe caked in primordial dust. An existential crisis cross-dressed in psalmic structure, it dwells in the Valley of Majestic Doubt and demolishes sanctimony without getting all sanctimonious about it. My kind of spiritual dirge!
The late great Paul Celan is a prescient force as he is always everywhere at once, and well before the rest of us. It's hard to think of a deeper, more commanding poet over the last fifty years. His far-flung resonations always astound me.
Kabbalah's broken vessel is an allegory for the Big Bang event. And who better than Cohen to take a brush and shovel to the shards? Here, it's a broken hallelujah. While 'If It Be Your Will' bemoans a broken hill. Both songs appear on the 1985 'Various Positions' CD. Lenny's clearly wrestling a heavy archetype: sifting the aftermath of Peniel's broken covenant.
The lumpiness of matter satisfies me as to the 'accidental fortuitousness' of the Big Bang. Surely at some higher realm it represented a crisis? Like shrapnel from a mothership, our universe appears to have fallen off somebody's mantelpiece. Kerplat!
Only to find its legs in the Celanian ether. And to set about doing what universes do...
The Hubble photos, almost disturbingly beautiful, forced upon us a fresh reckoning with God, though I shudder at that freighted name. There's a sentience speaking through an aesthetic. I don't think an aesthetic is possible WITHOUT a sentience. Impossible beauty will conjure an onlooker. Something is striving to form pinnacles of light from the vast preponderance of featureless dark matter. Why would the universe even attempt to overthrow entropy if it didn't know it was rendezvouing with an after-dinner Telos? That's where we come in, the shepherds of history, hunter-gatherers armed with killer binoculars. And until little green men turn up announcing a galactic confederacy, we must assume the burden belongs to us alone.
If there is a cautionary tale, it is to beware the motive force of dark energy, nihilism. Needless conflict, murderous intent, unnatural sex acts (within reason), selfishness of purpose and The Spice Girls --all are counter to the expansionary march of light.
I am haunted by Jung's notion that we are the eyes through which God sees. This makes us the necessary angels. All the more reason we must devise ways to stop fighting and play nice with the other children!
For those with an interest, here's another piece where I found Paul Celan looming ahead. So I relented and wove him in. It's in the Pushcart Prize queue for 2007.
http://www.noojournal.com/view.php?mode ... six&id=104