Thank you, Sue!
and every one who contributed to this thread!
I very much appreciate this kind of thread.
And this one in particular.
Sue wrote: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 ...
. 
.
. Thanks, Joe 
.