No such thing as a free dove?

[Sue]

Two things (maybe three) - firstly, why would someone describe the sea as "blind", how are we to picture that? Easy to picture the sea as "deep" (which it often, though not always, is) and the deeper it is the more there is that we can't see - but then it is we who are blind. Perhaps some pun is intended (sea/not see)? Aha - but no, the title gives it away: "The Faith" and as we know, faith, like love, can be blind. So the sea must be faith - as in:

..The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

(from Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold)

Both sound desperately sad to me.

The second thing to mention, and it's not unconnected really, since he has this habit of taking old folky tunes and writing new words to them, is how much the title track of "Death of a Ladies Man" seems to owe to "We shall not be moved". I've just been listening to the "Rare Live" version of the latter and my first thought was: he makes it sound just like one of his own "bad guy" songs. Then I thought, it doesn't just sound like one of his own songs it sounds like one in particular. If you compare the melodies (such as they are) and the delivery of the lines, e.g. -

Yes, the spirit is upon us now
and we shall not be moved
The spirit is upon us now
and we shall not be moved

as against

He tried to make a final stand
beside the railway track
She said 'the art of longing's over
and it's never coming back'

- you may see what I mean. It's a trivial thing but helps me get a handle on the grinding monotony of the DOALM song, which I've sometimes found intriguing.

Third thing: "If it be thy will, if there is a choice.." has always seemed like a strange juxtaposition, even to contain a contradiction? I now get the idea that "freedom" (I have tried in my way to be free) has been about making difficult choices (difficult because there are always several views of the thing within us - so that the beggar leaning on his crutch and the woman in the darkened door are offering us two perfectly valid points of view and the problem becomes deciding which of these instincts to listen to).

So I was interested, when listening to "Anthem" again recently, to find that:

a) "the dove is never free" is ambiguous - does it mean free as in 'not captive', or free as in gratis? (bought, sold, bought again)

b) more to the point, if it does mean free as in "I have tried in my way to be free" then it is more like a statement that there really are no choices: they aren't there or they can't be made. No bad thing though, just so long as we know.

[david birkett]

Dear Sue -

I really enjoyed your comments and found them very thought-provoking. I'd never made the connection between Arnold's Sea of Faith and Cohen's 'blind sea', and I think it's a very good call.

The other meaning of 'free dove' (as in having no cost) had escaped me too.

Regarding:

If it be your will
If there is a choice
Let the rivers fill
Let the hills rejoice
Let your mercy spill
On all these burning hearts in hell
If it be your will
To make us well

One meaning may be that the singer is hoping that the controlling deity or force can and will choose to bestow redemptive mercy, and that all is not doomed inevitably to darkness and pain, (either becuase there is no deity or It isn't a very nice one).

As they used to say on exam papers, "discuss".

David

[Sue]

Hi David

Thanks for that. I think I do see "'If there is a choice" a bit clearer now. The words are so telescoped together that it sounded to me possibly to be questioning whether God had any say over what his policy might end up to be - which seemed a little mad. I can see now that it could be paraphrased as:

If you so wish
(assuming that you are still
thinking about it and haven't
already decided to the contrary)
then I suggest you...

and that makes decent sense to me. I suppose you are right in thinking the "Ifs" are only there because the controlling force is not necessarily merciful or kind. Perhaps "If there is a choice" could also be paraphrased as:

"and if I, Leonard, have any choice - or any say - in the matter"

Still not 100% clear whose/what choice he's talking about. Possibly because of where the line is placed - or the fact that it's there at all, because it doesn't really need to be. "If it be your will" implies a choice/decision is to be (or has been) made, so I suppose what is really niggling me is that the line appears at all. Knowing that he spends a very long time composing his songs makes it difficult to accept that any line would be left there which didn't add anything. I suppose what I am really trying to get at is what the line adds which wouldn't be there if you took it away. (???)

[tomsakic]

I always saw it like our choice, not G-od's, like that *we* don't have the choice but follow his will.

It's interesting, this Mathew Arnold connection. Regarding the fact that, according to the list of Leonard's book in his Montreal room (was it reprinted in Nadel or in Rawlins/Dorman?), there was Arnold's book of poetry on his shelf. I remembered that title particularly, because Arnold was very importnat at that time, in first half of 20th century, so I guess that his influence was still around, in late 40s, early 50s, when LC had the book. Arnold's ideas were about Culture and barbarism, and how poetry and poets are called to work against modern barbarian civilisation etc.

[koan]

Sue,

did anyone get back to you about "the dove is never free... it is bought, sold and bought again"

I always thought of the dove representing freedom (as in not captive) but it is an interesting play on words then to talk about bought and sold. But really the dove usually represents peace more than freedom. I think a personal sense of peace, is freedom, and it never lasts long, there is no cathartic enlightenment and then everything is done. All peace and freedom inevitably becomes captive to some restraint, and the awareness and acceptance that finding peace and freedom is a never ending process is in itself liberating. Further, the dove is an overused metaphore, i think hes saying there is no mythical dove flying into the heavens, the ideal is bunk, we're stuck down here and thats where enlightenment or transcendent experience is happening, and what could be more mundane and banal than the image of the holy dove being bought and sold over and over. he's dragging this Christian image of transendence back to earth. The whole song is about for lack of a better word a spiritual experience or at least a spiritual longing, this part of the song to me shows that that happens while being stuck right here in our frail bodies. Thats my take.

[~greg]

Thank you, Sue!
and every one who contributed to this thread!

I very much appreciate this kind of thread.
And this one in particular.

Two things (maybe three) ...

By "things" Sue obviously meant the number of Leonard Cohen songs
she mentioned in her post.

It was five, Sue. Not two. Not three.
"The Faith", "Death Of A Ladies' Man", "If It Be Thy Will",
"Anthem", and "Bird On A Wire".

Obviously Sue's forte isn't arithmetic.
Which bodes badly for the possibilities of us communicating,
because I always approach everything from the arithmetic point of view.


Again.
It was five. Five songs. A stingy baker's half-dozen.
And sue signed up to be the duck to lead these five hapless ducklings
out of whatever Egypt they happened to be in, across the Autobahn
of this forum, and on to duck-Mecca, -- the blind pond of faith at
the end of the all out-there, where all great white duck hunters have
lost their lucky charm.

And Sue lost count along the way! And so now Leonard Cohen has 3,
maybe 2 less ducklings to take to market! On top of all the other
problems he's been having lately.

Then again, on the other hand, Sue's post send me, for one,
off scampering on two, maybe three hundred tangents.
So I think maybe in the end everything does balance out,
like my guru mumbled it might, just before he wobbled
off his cane and tumbled down the mountain.

In any case I won't mention this again.
And just to show there's no hurt feelings on my part,
I promise to tell Sue everything there is to tell about my avatar,
(--whether it's just an ordinary archaeopteryx,
or something much scarier) -- provided Sue tells me first
what in tarnation nation hers is supposed to be!!! Protoplasm?

Speaking of which, being protoplasm myself, if I do say so myself,
and therefore liable to respond when poked, here, now,
finally is my perfectly paltry response,
to Sue's pluperfectly pulchritudinous post: ...

~


1)


That "the sea so deep and blind" in LC's "The Faith"
includes, if it isn't actually is, "the sea of faith"
in MA's "Dover Beach", is a very useful discovery.
Thank you so very very much for this, Sue!

It'd be nice too if Tom could identify better that list he mentioned.
But I don't think that's really necessary any more in order to see that a connection
does exist between "The Faith" and "Dover Beach".

In fact I've become completely convinced that "The Faith"
is a revision of "Dover Beach".

The very first lines -
"The sea so deep and blind", --"The Faith",
and
"The sea is calm to-night", -- "Dover Beach",

-- are almost sufficient proof by themselves that a connection
between "The Faith" and "Dover Beach" is intended.

And "Dover Beach" very much needed revising. It was written in 1851,
(first published in 1867,) --in the hayday of the mechanistic world view,
and its whole 2nd stanza is devoted to the common notion back then
that religions were retreating, like psychotic cockroaches,
from the advancing lights of science ...

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
{...}
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
(-"Dover Beach")

Religion was a melancholy babe back then,
emitting only the occasional roar in its retreat,
and there was no reason whatsoever to suspect
that its retreat wouldn't continue to oblivion.

But times have changed, and we know now that it didn't happen that way.
And that, in fact, the tide may be turning! Hence the need to revise
"Dover Beach". Essentially by ripping out its old fashioned notion
about religion withdrawing, and replacing its probably nationalistic
"ignorant armies" with, of all things, smart new religious armies!

Which is exactly what "The Faith" does.
It's what its title means!
Because the song has nothing whatever to do with Leonard Cohen's
own faith. There's no talking to G-d, or about G-d, in it,
which he has never been too shy to do, when that's what he wanted to do.

Instead there are those three religions explicitly mentioned: - the cross, the star,
and the minaret. Which, as far as I know, is the first time Leonard's ever done that,
-explicitly like that.

We've all been very much enlightened in recent years about the role
religion plays in other people's lives (-as they have insisted we be
- the very definition of "obnoxiously".) Certainly in comparison
to Arnold's understanding of it.

And in that sense "Dover Beach" appropriately took place by a calm sea,
at night, in the moon light.

Whereas "The Faith" has to take place in this blazing new "sun".
With "wild regret".

~~

The opening lines of "The Faith" echo not only the opening
lines of "Dover Beach", but also its closing lines:

(note: "darkling" isn't just a cute way to say "in the dark".
It connotes also: "vaguely threatening or menacing".
(- I looked it up.))

The sea so deep and blind
The sun, the wild regret
The club, the wheel, the mind
O love, aren't you tired yet? (--"The Faith")

~~~---------------------~~~

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
{...}
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night. (-"Dover Beach")
---

The word "blind" in the beginning of "The Faith" echoes each of:
"darkling", "confused", "ignorant" and "night", at the end of "Dover Beach".
(figuratively speaking, of course.)

"Wild" echoes the cumulative effect of "swept", "confused", "alarms", and "struggle".

"Regret" echoes "flight".

~~~

"The club, the wheel, the mind" echoes "ignorant armies clash".

That is, "the club", besides being a "minaret", is also a weapon
(or clique, or faction -- which are weapons)

"The wheel", besides being the "star" (of David), is also a
chariot wheel. Or, in any case, it's the icon par-excellence
of mechanization and violence. ( Although there is no
suggestion that it's a swastika. Except perhaps in so far
as the sun is mentioned, and the swastika was a symbol
of the sun...but this goes nowhere.)

(To complete the parallel, if necessary: "mind" echoes
the "cross", via Cohen's own "Suzanne". Or I can think of
more convincing reasons why the "mind" would correlate
with "cross". But in any case "mind" is certainly a weapon of war,
and is certainly meant to be seen as such in this song.
It is in fact the one sine-qua-non weapon of war. )

But "wheel" is also Dharma, --the Buddhist's "wheel of the law".
And Tibetan prayer wheels are hollow metal cylinders mounted on rods (clubs).
And in view of Cohen's familiarity with the Tibetan book of the dead,
I don't think there's any doubt that he had this in mind when he wrote
"The club, the wheel, the mind", --on the same pattern as his
deuteronomic: "There's a Law, there's an Arm, there's a Hand."

Nevertheless in the context of "The Faith" "the club, the wheel, the mind"
is the second set of four such sets of word triplets, which are these:
sea, sun, regret
club, wheel, mind
blood, soil, faith
cross, star, minaret

And it is the last of these that's the key, and that must color every connotation
of every word in the song. Because it's the only one of these word-triplets
that consists entirely of concrete nouns. All the others consist of two
concrete nouns, plus one abstract noun, and they are therefore "mondos" or "koans":

mondo n., pl. -dos. Zen
a question to a student for which an immediate answer is demanded,
the spontaneity of which is often illuminating.
Cf. koan

koan n., pl. -ans, -an. Zen
a nonsensical or paradoxical question to a student for which an answer is demanded,
the stress of meditation on the question often being illuminating.
Cf. mondo

I said that the first lines of "The Faith" echo the last lines of "Dover Beach",
and so I should probably tell more about the "stress of meditation"
that made me say so.

"The sea so deep and blind" is like a blinded cornered animal
(-cornered by shores, -cornered by unwanted "western influences")
-- thrashing out wildly in acts of violence. What kind of violence?
Violence like "the sun" --- like an explosion - a terrorist act.
And "wild regret", - which is to say, panic and lamentation,
- is always the immediate and inseparable consequence
for the victims of such acts. Thus
"The sea so deep and blind,
The sun, the wild regret"
is an exceedingly compact echo, and updating, of Arnold's :
"Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night."

Or whatever.


In any case I do not think that these riddles in "The Faith" are nonsense.
They are gestures, of some kind, from the concrete, to the abstract,
- although if they point to something specific, I don't know what it is,
and I certainly don't know how to put it in clearer words.

I do "have a clue", or two.
But I don't have closure.

For example,
"The sea so deep and blind
The sun, the wild regret"
echoes also: --
"...and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light." (Genesis I; 2-3)

Also, "Dover Beach" mentions Sophocles.
and Sophocles wrote "Oedipus Tyrannus" (or "Rex").
And blindness was a key element of that play.


But I'm tired of this,
and I'm going to change the subject, if ever so slightly.

~~~
Turning now to sex...


"The Faith" differs from "Dover Beach" about religion.

On the other hand Arnold's use of the girl in "Dover Beach"
is carried over essentially unchanged by Cohen in "The Faith".

A possible difference is that in "Dover Beach" Arnold
is doing all the thinking and talking, before concluding
that salvation for him is she (and, chivalrously, he for her;
-- tea-(and-oranges)-for-two---like ) ---which he expresses
by the formula: "Ah, love, let us be true to one another!"

Whereas in "The Faith", while it seems that Cohen is saying everything
in his own words, it isn't clear where the content is coming from.
And the timbre of the poem may change radically depending on where
we think it is coming from.

The content could be the things that are needling Cohen own mind
--the things called "citta" in Buddhism, meaning "the contents
of ordinary consciousness" -- a word which could be related
to "chit-chat", I don't know, but it's definitely a goal to be rid of it.
If so, --then "The Faith" is about Cohen's insomnia.
And the line "O love, aren't you tired yet?" could be Cohen
talking to himself, --rather like Gollum in The Hobbit calling himself
"my precious" when talking to himself. But more likely it's Cohen
talking to the girl, trying to encourage her to come to bed,
in order to help him "turn off his mind and float down stream"
and get to sleep.

Or else the content could be the contents of the girl's mind.
Or my mind. Or everybody's mind. The ultimate source in any case
being the news, - current events, -all the things Arnold meant by
"confused alarms", and that I call "noise".

And Cohen's idea of salvation (from this noise) is exactly the same as
Arnold's was. They just put it differently: "O love, aren't you tired yet?",
vs " Ah, love, let us be true to one another".

"O love, aren't you tired yet?" - can be explicated as either:
"O love, come to bed, and help me put aside all these depressing thoughts of mine."
or as:
"O love, put aside all those depressing thoughts of yours, and come to bed!"

~~~

I want to dwell a little longer on that last reading, because I think
it can be badly misconstrued.


The Wikipedia article about "Dover Beach" -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dover_Beach
mentions a satirical counter-poem, "Dover Bitch", by Anthony Hecht
http://plagiarist.com/poetry/2409
"where the subject of Arnold's adoration resists the notion of being used
as a 'cosmic last resort'."

That Wikipedia article says: "Such a critique is non-sensical, however,
since the speaker in 'Dover Beach' is of unknown gender,
and a common practice among Victorian poets was to write
dramatic monologues from the perspective of someone else
(e.g., Browning's 'Fra Lippo Lippi'). "

-Which tells us that the writer of that article may have taken a course
in Victorian poetry. Which is certainly good to know.
But nonsense as a critique of Hecht's "critique".

The speaker of "Dover Beach" is, strictly speaking, of indeterminate gender,
and Hetch was making an extra-textual assumption in assuming that it was
Arnold himself, speaking to a girl. But that assumption is more than reasonable.
It is in fact more than reasonable that Arnold was speaking for himself,
to Frances Lucy, his wife, and that he wrote "Dover Beach" on the last night
of their honeymoon, in Dover.
- http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/arnold/touche2.html


In any case gender is completely irrelevant to Hecht's point.
The relevant lines in "Dover Beach" were:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world,
{...}
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain

Hecht put his critique in the mouth of whomever it was Arnold
(-presumably) was addressing by "Ah, love",
- which Hetch (-reasonably) assumed was a girl:

To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As sort of a mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl,
(- "Dover Bitch")

Which is a very sharp critique that is not at all dulled if we swap genders.
It is in fact a fact that very often even the most unlikely of candidates
(in the eyes of everybody else) - of either gender - finds themselves
the object of fanaticism, --- being regarded by somebody of the opposite
gender (-or whatever) -as their one and only possible true savior.
Which is always annoying to us, in part because we know that we can
never live up to their expectations, and that sooner or later we will
disappoint them, and that they will then, in all probability, kill us,
because of their disappointment. We have all been there, on both
sides of this law, and sometimes on both sides at once.


Note that the speaker of "The Faith" is, likewise, of indeterminate gender.

But also that Arnold's critique of "Dover Beach" applies a-fortiori
to "The Faith", ---- if we interpret: "Oh love, aren't you tired yet?"
as meaning:
"O shut up, O love! And stop your stupid blabbering
about these idiotic depressing news-items, and come to bed!"

Because then Cohen would not only be trying to use the girl
for his own salvation (or gratification) --- but using her like
"an object", as they say, -- in trying to suppress
(--and suppress very insistently! -- eight times he tells her to get to bed!)
- all her non-Cohen related interests.

Maybe not quite as bad as Kinky Friedman's ode to uppity women:
"Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed".
But only because it's not quite so clear!

"Really tough on a girl" --indeed!

Consider in particular these two lines from "The Faith"

These words you can't forget
Your vow, your holy place

Even if we don't have, or claim not to have, the slightest
idea what Cohen is talking about, we still can't fail to get it
that Cohen's attitude about "these words", "your vow", and
"your holy place", is that they aren't worth "the blood",
and "graves". And it's my guess that Cohen's attitude
about them is a lot more negative than that. But in any case,
by characterizing them as "your" vow, "your" holy place,
- he has separated himself from whomever or whatever
it is he is addressing, and has judged and condemned
that person (or persons, or personified thing or things.)
Indeed this is inescapable. If the things he mentions
are in fact responsible for "so many graves",
and if they are "your" things,
then it is you who is (or are) responsible!

But I don't know.

I'm just fascinated by the distance Cohen puts between himself
and the surface content of this song,- because he does it so subtly.

~~

I got that same feeling from "Suzanne" when I first heard it.

"She feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China."
- was not sarcasm, exactly. Not patronizing, exactly.

Cohen was reporting on Suzanne's prideful delight in the origin
of her tea and oranges. Curiously, if it had actually been oranges,
from China, it might have been different. Even a Florida orange
back then was a rarity and a much appreciated gift around
Christmas time. But Constant-Comment - a commercial
product - wasn't likely to impress an older "gentleman caller".
His reaction was more along the lines of:

She had
A heart--how shall I say?--too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed
(-Browning, "My Last Duchess")

And that attitude colors the whole of "Suzanne".

It was Suzanne who did all the talking about Jesus.
(-Cohen is Jewish, and very unlikely to have been
on the same wave-length with her about this. )
He even reports what she said about Jesus incorrectly.
He indirectly quoted her as saying:
"For he's touched your perfect body with his mind."
- which most obviously should have been:
"For I've touched his tortured body with my mind",
--because it's that - for a great many people,
- that's at the heart of Christianity
(See eg Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ".)


But I digress. And stretch.
And my head just fell off, and I have to pause
until I find it.

~~~
Ok.


No two people are ever on the same wavelength for more than
"something like a second". The rest of the time they may like each other,
or tolerate each other, or ignore each other.

Cohen may have felt moments of delight witnessing
Suzanne's childish enthusiasms.

But really their steps could never have rhymed for more than
a couplet or two. It takes months of drill to get a good cadence
going, and he, and that Suzanne, didn't have months together.

However let me get to my point.

There was a distance between Cohen and Suzanne in "Suzanne",
the main cause of it being simply the age difference (-- as is
perhaps best expressed by three lines from the movie: "Save the Tiger";
--(Jack Lemmon) Harry > How old are you?
--(hippy girl) Myra > Twenty
--Harry > Nobody's twenty.)

And that same distance may seem to exist, at first, in "The Faith".
But I don't think it does. I think it's something else in "The Faith".

Cohen is certainly very familiar with the oldest story ever told
- the story of Gilgamesh.

And when the great friends Gilgamesh and Enkidu go forth
to kill the monster Humbaba, guardian of the Cedar Forest,
Enkidu is fearful at first, and Gilgamesh has to inspire him.

But when they get to the forest, it's Gilgamesh who looses
all his courage, and it's Enkidu who has to do the re-inspiring.

Then Enkidu looses sprit again, and Gilgamesh has to
re-encourage him. And so on.

These alternating episodes become very funny after awhile,
almost slap-stick.

"Gilgamesh" is a beautiful characterization of true friendship.

And it's the same situation, I think, in "The Faith".

We see the girl fretting over the news.
And, -- but not because he's older and has seen it all before
- but simply because it's his turn to be the rock in the relationship
- Cohen sings to her, in effect, a lullaby: "It'll be aright. Come to bed."

Actually, the words he uses are:

... still the sun must set
And time itself unwind".

which is almost literally the Solomonaic "Gam zeh ya'avor"
-- "This too shall pass".


In summary, it's my feeling that the narrative situation in
"The Faith" is not Cohen being sarcastic to a bimbo,
--acting superior, -- seen-it-all, -- insulting her naive
concerns (making "The Faith" = "shut off the damn tv and come to bed")

-- nor is it the same situation as in "Suzanne",
where Cohen took delight, -- not in the things
Suzanne took delighted in, --but in the fact of her taking
delight in them, -- in the same way that we all react
to any happy child, ...(in "The Faith" this would be
Cohen not himself being worried about the things
the girl is worried about, but worried about the
fact that she's worried about them, - worried
about her mental health, --patronizingly, - in the
way we all worry about kids who are worried about
the dark and things in the closet and under the bed
at night, and I keep a bear-trap under mine so
this never worries me. )


Instead I think "The Faith" is a glimpse into a truly mutual
friendship, where they take turns supporting and comforting each other.

Because it isn't one or the other doing all the comforting!
Look again - there's no gender specified anywhere in the song.
And moreover they sing it as a complete duet
- both Anjani and Leonard sing every single word, together
- their steps in perfect rhyme.


Altogether "The Faith" is a great advance over "Dover Beach".




~greg

----------------------------------------------
ps:

The rhyme scheme and line-repetition scheme in "The Faith"
are complicated.

One problem is that there are 24 lines in the song.
And 24 = 24*1 = 12*2 = 8*3 = 6*4 = 4*6 = 3*8 = 2*12 = 1*24.

It's therefore not unreasonable to divide the song up into any one of
twenty-four individual lines, twelve couplets, eight tercets, six quatrains,
four sextets, three octets, two dozen-lined stanzas,
or one number-of-hours-in-a-day lined stanza.

(It is printed that last way in a number of places,
eg: http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/dearheather.html#faith )


For some reason, though, the copy on my computer
that I'd been using divides it up into quatrains,
with a consequence that I wasted a lot of time
trying to see the song as some kind of quatrain-based form
- a "pantoum" in particular.

This page:
http://thewordshop.tripod.com/forms.html
is about poetry forms.

And this link from it:
http://members.aol.com/lucyhardng/point ... htm#forms5
is about pantoums.

As quatrains, "The Faith" is certainly a complicated interlocking form,
like a pantoum. And almost everything that article says about pantoums
seems to apply equally to "The Faith", except for the slight differences
in structure.


Of course everybody who's heard the song knows that it's in sextets.
(But such people don't count.)


It is four sextets.

And each sextets is a couplet + a quatrain
The scheme can be written like this:

Code: Select all

    sextets
couples   quatrains

A  q1    A' Q  A' Q
B  q2    b  Q  B  Q
c  q3    C  Q  C  Q
A  q4    A" Q  A" Q

where the lines labeled by the same letter all rhyme,
and primes and numbers are used to distinguish
different lines on the same rhyme.
(Capitals vs small letters redundantly distinguish lines
that are repeated somewhere (most of them), from those
that aren't repeated anywhere (just 'b' and 'c' and
'q1','q2','q3', and 'q4'.))

All those quatrains (except the second - b Q B Q - which is
a slight variation ) consist of a statement followed a question
followed by the same statement repeated, followed by the same
question repeated.

This is a very meaningfull and dramatic use of repetition.

Take the first case:
A1 = "The club, the wheel, the mind";
Q = "O love, aren't you tired yet?"

When we first encounter this we don't see any connection
between A1 and Q. We take A1 and Q simply as two lines
in a song that individually, impressionistically, add to the total
impression of the song, but that don't interact critically with
each other. However, the repetition forces us to try to
see them as interacting in some way. Q then becomes
a rhetorical question, at least in its 2nd repetition,
- some kind of comment on A1. The nature of the
comment in this first case isn't obvious, but it
becomes more obvious in the next two stanzas:

B="The blood, the soil, the faith";
Q="O love, aren’t you tired yet?"


C="So many graves to fill";
Q="O love, aren’t you tired yet?"


After that, no matter how we decide to interpret "The club, the wheel, the mind",
-we have to interpret it negatively,.

(It is all in our hands, by the way.
"You never ask a poet what he means,
you tell him!" (-"A Poet's Guide to Poetry" - Mary Kinzie))


~~~
The division of the song into couplets
(two columns, odd numbered vs even numbered lines)
reveals more about the structure:

Code: Select all

       couplets 
odd-lines    even-lines 

   A             q1 
   A'            Q 
   A'            Q 

   B             q2 
   b             Q 
   B             Q 

   c             q3 
   C             Q 
   C             Q 

   A             q4 
   A"            Q 
   A"            Q

Both the odd numbered lines and the even numbered lines
group naturally in sets of three, which I'll call the odd-threesomes
and the even-threesomes.

All even numbered lines are on the same rhyme, 'q'.

All even-threesomes have the same repetition pattern: q Q Q,

Every even-threesome opens with a different "q-line",
which doesn't occur anywhere else in the song,
followed by two instances of the most often repeated line
Q = "O Love, aren't you tired yet?"

All three lines in each odd-threesome also rhyme,
but it's a different rhyme in each odd-threesome.
And these rhymes make an very interesting pattern:

a) blind mind mind
b) faith place faith
c) hill fill fill
a) blind unwind unwind.

The distribution over the vowel-chart
of the rhyming vowels from these words,
has an effect that you can readily hear if you
say them out loud in that order.

The first vowel (as in "blind") is a diphthong which covers the whole
range. But it starts "low".

(Equivalently, "open", as in the figure below.
The vertical axis of vowel-charts refers both to the openness of the jaw,
and to the frequency of the first formant. An opened jaw
corresponds to a low F1 frequency.
A closed jaw corresponds to a high F1 frequency.
We can hear the pitch of the formant if we pay attention to it.
But, almost literally, what we normally do 'hear' when we hear
people speak is the position of their tongue and the openness
of their mouth, --which is what makes listening to speech and
song such an erotic experience.)

The next rhyme ("faith") is higher,
and the third rhyme ("hill") is highest.

(The drone-rhyme "q" (as in "yet") of all the
even-numbered lines lies between "blind" and "faith".)


The net effect of these odd numbered line rhymes,
it seems to me, is to make them quite analogous to
the I-IV-V-I, or "authentic cadence", of elementary music theory.
And this is quite independent of the actual chord structure of the song.

In fact these odd numbered lines, which are more complicated than the
even numbered lines in terms of both rhyme and repetition,
and which have this cadence-like aspect about their vowels,
are all sung in essentially only in the tonic chord!
The even numbered lines on the other hand, which are very simple
in terms of rhyme and repetition, are the ones that get all the more
complicated chord changes. It's almost like a principle of conservation
of energy or complexity. When the energy is in the words,
it's not in the music. When it's in the music, it's not in the words.
Which is a really idiotic thing to say, but I like saying things
like that sometimes.

What is certainly true is that this song is very complicated
and tightly crafted.
And yet the net effect is not in the least bit heavy.
On the contrary, it's mesmerizing.

There's a very delicate balance in every aspect of this song.
And I think the cadence-like sequence in the vowels of the
odd numbered lines may make a small subliminal contribution
to its overall impression of just-rightness; - a kind of slow winding
up, followed by a quicker winding down, - and that this may be
echoed, verbally, in the penultimate line: "And time itself unwind".

The following figure is the simplest thing I could come up with
to show what's going on. It's a very flawed presentation, and
I've already though up ways to make it better,
but I've already put way too much time into all this ...

[Joe Way]

Hi Greg and all-

First order of business-is "Sue" the same "Sue" who we used to speak with at the Newsgroup? I hope so as she has great insights and if she isn't-well welcome anyway-because she has great insights.

Second order of business-Greg, I just have to say how much I enjoy your posts. They are full of information, entertaining, very funny, and always, always, make me look at something differently than I did before.

I, too, love these discussions-though, I've been told on a few occasions that they risk ruining a perfectly good song through over-analysis-whatever that is.

Now, I must confess that I was completely unaware of the poem, "Dover Beach"- a sad thing to admit for an English Major who has prided himself on continuing scholarly pursuits in my post-graduate years. I'll blame it on going from the course-"Romantic Poetry" directly to "Post-Victorian and Edwardian Literature." In leaping from Keats and Byron to Thomas Hardy and A. E. Houseman, I've apparently skipped a few good poets.

And speaking of poetry, I wanted to mention that I recently resurrected a copy of the plot outlines of 101 of the world's greatest poems as published by National Lampoon a while back.

In the hopes that I won't ruin any good songs (or poems), I plan to sprinkle in several-why let's start right now:

1. A poet looks at a nightingale and thinks about death.
2. A poet looks at a dead groundhog and thinks about death.
3. A poet looks at a toad caught in a lawnmower and thinks about death.

Our poet, dear old LC, probably has thought about death poetically for many years. Let me go back to several lines from several songs (I'm being intentionally vague numerically as something might strike me later and throw off my math).

When I first heard, "The Faith" I was taken back to his lines from "The Guests."

"One by one the guests arrive, the guests are coming through
The open-hearted many the broken hearted few.
And no one knows where the night is going
And no one knows why the wine is flowing
Oh love, I need you, I need you, now."

And then the lines that talk about the "host" presumably-tossing the guests "beyond the garden wall." This is an action that is not particularly hospitable. Though we really don't know what lies beyond the garden wall.

Then, in "Coming Back to You"- dear Leonard addresses this vague entity-

"Because you are a shining light, there are many that you see."

I think it's time for a couple of more plot summaries:

12. A poet watches his wife pick blueberries and thinks about sex.
28. Adam and Eve lose Paradise and from that moment on think about sex and death.
32. A little horse stops by woods on a snowy evening and the driver thinks about death.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but Leonard addresses these vague entities calling them "Love" and "shining light" and the un-named "Host" and he might be referring to whatever notion that he has of a creator, or directing force, deity, or whatever the hell our pea-brained skulls try to use to explain so many of the mysterys that surround us.

The "Holy Dove" is of course, a reference to the Holy Spirit and the third person in the "trinity". The "Father"-an obvious attempt by humans to explain the director role of the deity. Then, in Christianity, Christ becomes the Human face-the brother and son, yet fully part of the deity. The third part of the trinity is the most mysterious and probably the most difficult to describe. St. Patrick held up the shamrock and for those going to Dublin, perhaps it is best described by him in that fashion. I think it best describes the mystery of it all.

And now, I do think that he was writing with a reference to Arnold's poem. Your theory of the trend (at that time) to bow toward the scientific, is very reasonable. And now, it is just the opposite-we have leaders throwing faith in our faces. I think it is particularly striking that when I looked up the reference to the poem in Wikipedia that you provided, I was also directed toward "German higher criticism"-this is specifically the type of group that our good Pope Benedict was addressing when he made the awful faux pas that's cost some Nun her life already and will probably cause many more deaths over time. I'm not defending the Pope-as one of the Priest's that I used to hang around was not a big fan, but it clearly evokes how religion (read Faith) colors our world.

Time for some more plot summaries:

41. Lord Alfred Tennyson thinks about John Milton.
42. Robert Lowell thinks about Elizabeth Bishop.
50. Milton remembers Virgil.
33. A poet spies a white spider holding up a white moth on a white flower (heal-all) and thinks about something or other that English teachers have to explain to their students. (I stuck this one in because it is clearly different).

I was going to quit now, but I remembered that I really didn't say what I wanted to say. It brings back a line that I read criticizing the movie that Franco Zefferlli made about Christ-"He forgot to resurrect him!"

Anyway, this sea so deep and blind, and unknowable and no one has any intrinsic knowledge about what it's all about, and here you have all these millions and millions of people passin' through. There is no doubt that tremendous cruelty goes on, but at the same time one has to recognize that the human heart has this amazing capacity for love and compassion. As I heard an dog trainer say one time, in a different context-"There aren't any Gandhi's in the dog kingdom."

How do we make any sense of this? Leonard has been pretty generous to organized religion in interviews. He speaks of the comforting role that religion has played in an interview that John MacKenna conducted awhile ago-I wish that I had a transcript of it. He says that he would never ridicule organized religion. Yet, in my own way, as a practising Catholic, I can understand the danger and the terrible wrong-headedness that has lead to slaughter and unbelievable suffering.

Time for a few last plot summaries:

30. A poet leaves an astronomy lessons and looks up at the stars to think about eternity.
18. A knight meets La Belle Dame Sans Merci and thinks about sex and death.
34. A buzz saw cuts off a young boy's hand, causing the poet to think about Shakespeare and death.

One last thing, Greg, about your great post-I loved the aural analysis. Leonard has a great ear and I was just thinking about how great the sound of the words are in "Half the Perfect World." Plus, it had the added bonus of my looking up the words in the "Blue Alert" booklet and was treated again to the sight of Anjani holding a cup of coffee in her knickers.

Listen to the great sonics here:

"The Candles burned
The moon went down
The polished hill
The milky town
Transparent, weightless, luminous
Uncovering the two of us
On that fundamental ground
Where loves unwilled, unleashed
Unbound-
And half the perfect world is found."

Pretty nice stuff and brings us back to the sex part-Leonard likes that probably better than death, I guess.

Last plot summaries:

99. Matthew Arnold remembers Shakespeare.
101. Matthew Arnold looks at a nightingale and thinks about death.

All the best,

Joe

P. S. to Tom-as a professor reminded me one time about using the books in a poet's library. They may be there, but there is no guarantee that the poet read them. I have a lot of books-some have not been read, but maybe that's just me.

[Young dr. Freud]

Dear Joe,

Not a Catholic. But that Nun was killed by dark and hateful hearts whose agenda is world domination....not because the Pope quoted an obscure text regarding the questionable antics of Islamacists. That was just the excuse.

YdF


P.S. In "Jesus of Nazareth" Franco Zefferili did "resurect" Christ. Even with a star-studded cast, it's a very good presentation of the life of Jesus.

[Tchocolatl]

How much for the dove?

And what if she is free after having lived in captivity thanks to some very enlighten human beings?

Did you know that the beautiful doves they use at events to make pretty angelic effects will die after having been cut loose because they don't know how to live otherwise than in captivity?

This is what we are doing with the dove - that looks very good. But don't look at it too closely.

Now harrass some quiet people until they turned into raging bulls, until there is no other issue than to kill the 'beasts' you turned them into - and say, of course, that it is their fault.

Don't try to find peacefull solutions to problems, anyway.

Yell like a pig that peacemakers are cowards, because - of course - real cowards which don't have the courage to fight for peace - or for anything at all, will stand on the ground of people they are most afraid of, the violent ones.

A few people are too much blood/power thirsty, and they find some fools to spread blood for them. I don't believe that God has something to do with this, and there is peaceful people in every religion - as well as hateful unfortunatley. It is not a religion problem at all. Religion is an excuse, like another one. I think like a police inspector : I look in the direction where the crime profits. I don't believe in the boogyman they show on the media, sorry.

To think a little further than : 'they hit, so we have to hit them more than they do' to solve actual problems require a certain amount of inner peace to begin with, a little space of calm and a lot of courage.

Maybe some of 'them' are violent and maybe some of 'them' are raging and of course some of 'them' are dangerous, but do we have to act like what 'we' are saying is not OK? Strange if we do. That has a name : lie.

And of course I don't fall for the 'you are irrealistic' argumentation, because that just means the person gave up the idea of peace and don't want peace to be a reality.

And I don't fall for the argumentation 'how could you be for peace 'Tchocolatl when you are such a naughty girl' because peace in the world has nothing to do with being 'a nice person', a perfect being - or with not being agressive. It has to do with using and/or creating non-violent solutions to solve problems. This is realistic and this is not asking too much to anybody.

[~greg]

Dear Joe,

Thank you for saying that I make you see things differently.
That made me happy.

But then it made me wonder.

And I wondered. And I wondered.
About you. About me.
Too much.

And therefore I have decided to cut short my response to you, for now,
and maybe pick it up again some other day.
Because I really want to get on now, or very soon, with my original
intention to respond to the whole of Sue's post and to the other
responses to it. So I'll just say a few more things to you now, Joe.

I read your post very carefully.

You present your main points in a deliberately round about way,
but I think I got them. One of them is that "Leonard has been pretty
generous to organized religion in interviews". Another is that
you are "a practicing Catholic."

I'd appreciate if you would reference where Leonard
was being "generous to organized religion in interviews."

I know that he did say something to that effect, but I can't
remember where, and I can't recall in what sense he meant it.
It would be good to review, though, because, however he meant it,
it's certain he worded it carefully.

~~

I said I like this thread, and threads like it, but I didn't say why.
The reason is simply that Sue limited her post to a very small
number of very specific interesting questions about a small
number of specific details about a small number of specific
songs. And the other posts in the thread followed suit.
And every single quote that was brought in,
- everything mentioned, - had a very clear and
cogent bearing on the specific questions at hand.
And I like that.

David said to Sue: "I really enjoyed your comments
and found them very thought-provoking."

And I said "I very much appreciate this kind of thread.
And this one in particular."

And you said: "I, too, love these discussions, though...."

I trust that you won't be offended, Joe, because I honestly
don't wish to offend you, but the fact is that your post here
isn't anything like Sue's was. Yours isn't driven by details.
It seems to me it was sparked by something I said that
got your goat. And I don't know what that was, for sure,
because you fall shy of stating your motive explicitly.
But my guess is it was my conclusion that "The Faith"
is essentially negative about those three particular
"organized religions".
And that bothered you "as a practicing Catholic".
And your counter argument was that "Leonard
has been pretty generous to organized religion in interviews".

This seems to me to be what YdF took from your post
and responded to.

And Tchocolatl, in her inimitable dream-time walk-about like way,
--seems to have gotten herself caught up in the same eddy (maybe).

~~~

"Organized religion" obviously refers to groups of people
organized in some way around religion. In the United States
it has tax-exempt implications.

And certainly group behavior
is very different from individual behavior.

However, other than the rare case of a child reared by wolves,
no human being is, psychologically, an individual.

A person may read the Bible on their own, but they are continuously
imagining themselves to be a member of the various tribes
mentioned in it. And also a member of an abstract community
of fellow readers of the Bible. Even those who read the Bible
only for its historical and psychological content know that they are
just one of many others doing the same thing. And if, or when, it
becomes illegal to read the Bible in that secular way, some
of them will simply find something else to do, because their
secular relationship to the bible is not a religious relationship.
But others of them will react exactly as if their own family had
been attacked. Because for them their "secular" relationship
to the Bible is in fact a religious relationship.
Object has become totem for them,--emblem of the tribe.
(It needn't be the Bible, of course.) But ultimately religion
is nothing other than this feeling of being a member of some
family or community that is capable of being threatened.
And in this sense the "organized" vs abstract distinction is meaningless.
Any abstract religious community in this sense is tinder that can erupt
instantaneously into anything ranging from group-action-committees
to individual-suicide-bombers, when it feels threatened,
- exactly as if it had been overtly organized all along.
And this insight is especially relevant to Islam, because Islam
is not organized at all, in the sense that different Christian
sects are thought of as being organized or not.
(Those who know sociology may recognize some of Durkheim's ideas
in the above. I am reading his: "The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life",
which I expect will continue to be compatible with my way of thinking.
However I'm not at all far into it yet, so you can't blame him for what I say.)

~~

So.
I do not understand this "organized religion" distinction.
And I definitely have no dog in the fight, if it comes to a fight.
And if Leonard says it's ok, then I'm ok with it.

But here's the thing, Joe:

Where is the evidence IN THE SONG "The Faith"
- that THE SONG isn't negative about these religions?

More importantly, who says that a poet always writes
everything he writes, from a single point of view?
Which moreover apparently has to be consistent
with everything he's ever said in interviews!

To my way of thinking poetry is about imagery,
and engaging ways of saying things.
Not polemics!

You have your point of view, Joe, and I think it makes it
difficult for you to approach "The Faith" strictly on its own terms.

Which is odd to me because the only reason I responded
to this thread in the first place is because I thought that Sue
and David and Tom had a point of view that was preventing
them from seeing "If It Be Your Will" on its own terms.

It was the comparison between Neil Diamond and Leonard Cohen
viewtopic.php?p=62093
that made me realize this.

Because I knew that Cohen wasn't always the inveterate
"ironist" that the article nearly implies he always is.
Not even relative to Neil Diamond, he isn't.

Often Cohen is disarmingly straight!

(Sometimes a penis is just a penis, Freud said.)

And in particular "If It Be Your Will" is straight.
It is pure prayer.
Without a trace of irony.
Or theology.

And in the context of prayer the line "if there is a choice"
does not stand out like the sore thumb it would stand
out like if it was in an ordinary poem instead, (--like "The Faith".)

Which doesn't mean we just have to let it go!

I don't think anyone can let it go.
It has to be accounted for.

But I think that it can only be accounted for in terms of the psychology of prayer.
And that trying to account for it in terms of theology and philosophy
the way Sue and David and Tom were trying to do, is just wrong,
and evil, and leads the understanding of the song into an
wholly irrelevant conceptual quagmire.

And therefore I was going to say that Sue and David and Tom
were "over-intellectualizing" this particular song.

And I was going to say that obviously a song can't
actually be ruined by over-intellectualizing (or over-analyzing) it.

But that if that's the wrong approach,
and if you take that approach, then you will miss taking
the right approach, if there is one, and then you miss
getting the most that can be gotten from the song.
Simple as that.

~~~

I have begun, and hope to finish soon,
my approach to "If It Be Your Will"
strictly in terms of the psychology of prayer.

It would have been my only post to this thread
if I had finished it in time. But it is turning out
to be much more difficult to do than I expected,
even though the conclusion isn't in doubt.

In the mean time, due to Sue's questions,
I began to realize that "The Faith" is in fact a "real poem."

I do not have my own definition of "real poem" all worked out,
It's just a feeling I get sometimes about some songs and poems.
Not all songs. Not even all of Cohen's songs. Even many poems
aren't "real poems."

But "The Faith" is a real poem. And one thing I mean by that
is that every connotation of every word in it resonates with
every other connotation of every other word in it. They all
expand each other.

Or, pragmatically speaking, a "real poem" is anything
that can stand up to, and sometimes profit from, a virtually
unlimited amount of analysis. Which is what I was trying
to demonstrate about "The Faith" in my last post.

And that's all I was trying to do there.
And it wasn't my ultimate goal.
My ultimate goal was to show how very different
"If It Be Your Will" is from "The Faith".
Because "The Faith" is a poem that can only
be understood by using both the head and the heart
together (You, Joe, would understand it only with your heart,
- what you want it to be.)
Whereas "If It Be Your Will" is pure prayer,
and can be understood only by the heart.
The head is all wrong for it. (Sue David and Tom
tried to use their heads. Mistake!)

I'll finish this post with a few more words to Joe.
And then my next post to this thread will be about
Sue's observation about the connection between
"Death of a Ladys' Man" and "We Shall Not Be Moved".

I do still want to make clear the difference
I see between "The Faith" and "If It Be Your Will".
But I won't do it until I understand prayer better
than just to recognize it when I hear it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dear Joe, again, ...

I, too, love these discussions - though, I've been told
on a few occasions that they risk ruining a perfectly good song
through over-analysis - whatever that is.

Joe, what your

whatever that is

is doing there is, in effect, putting

over-analysis

in "ironic" quotation marks.

It is becoming very spooky to me how Wikipedia always has the best things
to say about everything. (I smell the devil in it.)
Nevertheless:

Another important use of quotation marks is to indicate
or call attention to ironic or apologetic words. Ironic quotes
can also be called scare, sneer, shock, or distance quotes.
Ironic quotes are sometimes gestured in oral speech
using air quotes:

My brother claimed he was too "busy" to help me.

Ironic quotes should be used with care.
Without the intonational cues of speech, they could obscure
the writer's intended meaning. They could also be confused
easily with quotations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Irony

I quoted that because I was told when I was a child
that ironic quotes should never be used. And
therefore whenever I use them I always feel guilt
and shame about it. But obviously, as the Wikipedia
article implies, they do have a use. They just have to be
"used with care".

In particular obviously no word should ever be ironically quoted
more than once at a time. It should either be accepted (reluctantly)
or else replaced with a better word. Or else the subject should
be dropped.

That's what's usually said about how to correct their mis-use.

But I think what's more important is that it should either be
obvious why the word was ironically quoted in the first place,
or else it should be explicitly stated why.

Because otherwise ironic quotes are worse than "scare, sneer,
shock, or distance quotes". They are gamesmanship ploys.

...Gamesmanship, the first of his {Stephen Potter's} books
that purport to teach "ploys" for manipulating one's associates,
especially making them feel inferior and thereby gaining the status
of being "one-up" on them."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Potter

Joe -- you putting "over-analysis" in ironic quotes like that
was a passive aggressive act,
---considering how you started your post!

1) "Sue ...has great insights"
2) "Greg, ...I enjoy your posts. ..."
3) "I, too, love these discussions",

4) "though, I've been told on a few occasions"

5) "they risk ruining a perfectly good song"
6) "over-analysis"

7) "whatever that is"


Now Joe,

You did not like my saying that "The Faith" was negative about organized religion.

And you countered with Leonard having said good things about organized religion.

Which is faulty logic.
But that's not what bothers me.

And your later assertion that

The "Holy Dove" is of course a reference to the
Holy Spirit and the third person in the "trinity".

is also bizarre, to say the least.

"Trinity" is a specifically Catholic notion
(-it's one of the reasons I said in my last post
that "mind" might naturally associate with "cross",
- more so, anyway, than with "star" or "minaret")

Whatever Cohen thinks about Jesus, I can not believe
that he subscribes to specific notions about the "trinity".
He may associate the "Holy Ghost" with the female aspect
that was removed from the Christian notion of trinity.
But that's not what you were trying to say.
("Trinity" of course had many forms,
- Persephone, Demeter, Hecate being my favorite,
due to Joseph Campbell's "Masks of God". ).

But bizarre, illogical, or whatever, none of that bothers me
about your post.

It probably wouldn't bother me at all if you'd said it was
my post you were criticizing . My post was definitely over-long.

But what you did say was:

these discussions...risk ruining a perfectly good song through over-analysis

- you should have exempted the others, Joe.

And I was going to explain in detail why "over-analysis" is a ploy
and how when where and why it's used.
But you already know that it's a meaningless characterization. That's why you ironically quoted it.

But why did you say it at all?

You said it
because you didn't like my conclusion.
And you didn't have a logically coherent argument
against it.
So you threw in a slur.

Joe. It's just like any other slur.
And your transparent way of pretending to distance yourself from it is just like all others of the sort:

but that's not me - don't get me wrong.
Some of my best friends are ...

You threw the slur into the mix, hoping that it would stick
all over everyting, subliminally, but otherwise like napalm.
All over everything, so you wouldn't need to deal with any detail.
And all without you needing to take any responsibility for the slur.

For some reason it reminds me of Mel Gibson.

Now, if you still think you've gotten away with it,
please read the following , carefully, and deal with
it in your own Christian conscience: ...

{ ... }
61. The truth about moral good, as that truth is declared in the law of reason,
is practically and concretely recognized by the judgment of conscience,
which leads one to take responsibility for the good or the evil one has done.
If man does evil, the just judgment of his conscience remains within him as a witness
to the universal truth of the good, as well as to the malice of his particular choice.
But the verdict of conscience remains in him also as a pledge of hope and mercy:
while bearing witness to the evil he has done, it also reminds him of his need,
with the help of God's grace, to ask forgiveness, to do good and to cultivate virtue constantly.

Consequently in the practical judgment of conscience, which imposes on the person
the obligation to perform a given act, the link between freedom and truth is made manifest.
Precisely for this reason conscience expresses itself in acts of "judgment"
which reflect the truth about the good, and not in arbitrary "decisions".
The maturity and responsibility of these judgments - and, when all is said and done,
of the individual who is their subject - are not measured by the liberation of the conscience
from objective truth, in favour of an alleged autonomy in personal decisions,
but, on the contrary, by an insistent search for truth and by allowing oneself
to be guided by that truth in one's actions.

Someday I'll tell you what I think about things.

~greg

:) In hoc signum vinces

[Young dr. Freud]

You threw the slur into the mix, hoping that it would stick
all over everyting, subliminally, but otherwise like napalm.
All over everything, so you wouldn't need to deal with any detail.
And all without you needing to take any responsibility for the slur.

For some reason it reminds me of Mel Gibson.

Speaking of slurs, Greg...Nice touch throwing in Mel Gibson. Now that's passive-aggressive.

YdF

[lizzytysh]

I'm not sure how I missed all of this in Joe's post. Maybe you know each other better to have seen all of it. Or maybe you're just on a wind-up with your friend. My first thought, as I read was that you'd gotten up on the wrong side of the bed, Greg .

It seemed to me that, without feeling compelled to continue analytically in exactly the same vein as others, he wanted and chose to add some other things to the discussion, whilst regarding what the rest of you were already doing, reenforcing it by saying he was enjoying it... and in a tongue-in-cheek way suggesting that "overanalyzing" is rather an absurd notion, and that he's all in favour of analysis. He also seemed to me to highly compliment you, Greg... bringing a new way of perceiving or thinking to someone is quite a challenge and managing to do it, quite an accomplishment. It's like what Snow does with his input. The quotation marks seemed to suggest that he was making sure that he was understood as referring to exactly what he placed them around. He also seemed to acknowledge some of the 'shortcomings' [if that's the right term] of his own faith.

I really have to allow for your having been on a wind-up with all this... and all that I've said here is irrelevant, which it may be, anyway .

It was just odd to have read Joe's post and then yours. They seemed to be such contrasting attitudes.

Can you clarify any of this for me? Thanks.

~ Lizzy

[Joe Way]

Dear Greg (and Lizzy, and any others who have any interest in this stuff),

Ding, ding, ding. You win, you've conquered by your sign (the tilde, not the cross); and now, to explain, dear Lizzy, I deserved this for something I did to Greg many years ago in the archives of the newsgroup. I won't repeat it here-but it was quite thoughtless and an attempt at humour that failed. Greg's attempt, I think, has been more successful as you picked up on it readily.

You've won, Greg, and you deserve a prize-I don't think that you want the carneval plush so please pm me with your address and I'll send you the interview that you've requested: "How the heart approaches what it yearns."

This wonderful interview was sent to me by our friend, Jimmy O'Connell and I don't believe a transcipt is available. It was conducted by John MacKenna in 1988 and addresses many of the topics we've touched on.

But times have changed, and we know now that it didn't happen that way.
And that, in fact, the tide may be turning! Hence the need to revise
"Dover Beach". Essentially by ripping out its old fashioned notion
about religion withdrawing, and replacing its probably nationalistic
"ignorant armies" with, of all things, smart new religious armies!

"The sea so deep and blind" is like a blinded cornered animal
(-cornered by shores, -cornered by unwanted "western influences")
-- thrashing out wildly in acts of violence. What kind of violence?
Violence like "the sun" --- like an explosion - a terrorist act.
And "wild regret", - which is to say, panic and lamentation,
- is always the immediate and inseparable consequence
for the victims of such acts. Thus
"The sea so deep and blind,
The sun, the wild regret"
is an exceedingly compact echo, and updating, of Arnold's :
"Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night."

Ignorant armies? ok-they've probably exempted Rumsfeld who I've read cheats at squash.

You've asked for some evidence, and here you go: (from the aforementioned series).

I've tried to provide a transcript, but it is important to note that John MacKenna is providing a larger stage with his own narration-not simply a recollection of Leonard's sayings. This is why MacKenna speaks about Leonard in the 3rd person. It works very well in the recorded piece-not so well in transcribing.

John MacKenna (Mac): (In speaking of "Our Lady of Solitude"). There's more to that song-it reflects a Christian influence and it goes further into Pantheism. Ultimately, the image is strongly Catholic-the light from the lady's body-her dress of blue and silver-she is the vessel of the whole wide world.

Leonard Cohen (LC): Well, I don't think you can ignore these associations-and I come from a very Catholic city myself. And these images, you see I have a very sympathetic take on Christianity and Catholism. I wasn't brought up as a Christian or a Catholic, but I saw it operating from the outside so to speak and I didn't have to suffer any of the things that my friends said they suffered from it. Although they seem to be healthy and pretty tough and pretty soulful people. The ones who complain about the tyranny of the Catholic education-I always said to myself-well, sure they're complaining about something that is real, but they seemed to have turned out pretty good in spite of it. So maybe there is a certain genius to that education that operates even though there is an occasional thorn or stick. But anyway, yes, you can't disassociate that image from the song, but even the church can't conceal that these things have deeper images and even more ancient mysteries.

Mac: And more sensual. In the song Cohen thanks the lady for keeping him close while so many others stood apart. So would he term himself religious?

LC: Well, I wouldn't ever claim that title for myself-not remotely. But I do feel certain connections with certain entities or forces.

Mac: But to push the point-Cohen's most recent book of poems, "The Book of Mercy" is highly spiritual, if not religious.

LC: Well I guess I think that everybody leads a spiritual life-I don't know if it is even worthwhile to designate it that way. Everybody is in touch with their own resources, their own deep pools of divine activity-otherwise they wouldn't be here. Everybody is living a so-called religious life, a so-called spiritual life; everybody is in touch with these places-otherwise they wouldn't be around.

Mac: So does he see spirituality rather than organized religion as the answer to a lot of problems?

LC: I don't want to ever set myself up as an enemy of organized religion because these churches, these mosques, these synagogues give comfort and solace to millions and millions of people-and real comfort and real solace. So I don't think it serves anything or anybody to become an enemy of organized religion. Organized religion on the inside is very tender to its members. On the outside, it can be very antagonistic to other organized religions. Inside, they tend to act like family; outside they tend to act like states. And they are continually putting themselves in abrasive positions to one another. That I think is deeply sinful.

Also, I have to amend my description of being, "a practising Catholic"-I haven't been to Mass in several weeks.

Joe[/i]

[lizzytysh]

... and now I can sleep well . Thanks, Joe .


~ Lizzy

[tomsakic]

I think that I mentioned to you in Berlin, Joe, that this interview is on The Files, one of the oldest transcript. Anyway, I found it in Articles & Interviews section:

http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/rte.html