Heart Loss, Heart Loss

Well, I;ve been to the dr.'s office and the emergency room this week and it is still only Thursday. I've been given nitroglycerine and my blood pressure meds have been doubled and I've had an ekg and a chest xray and the test to see whether I was having a heart attack, and none of that came up bad, so here I am, evening time, chest pain, back pain, tylenol, not eating salt, not drinking (well, I had the rest of a bottle of zinfandel at dinner), going to bed too early, not getting shit done.

And of course I am full of doubt and fear. Not that I fear death. I don't really fear it, but I fear getting there and I fear leaving Piper and Kimberly here, without me. I am just 59 but what are you gonna do?

So this week, with the congress tanking on health care reform, and with my personal finances totally in the toilet, and still hoping to get to New Hampshire next week and feel okay, I am just swirling counter clockwise in the toilet of life itself.

I have re=written a poem that is important to me, Jambalaya. Now entitled Again the Spicy Stew. I use the making of jambalaya, the cajun stew, as a metaphor of my life and it, of course, brings up the women that circle the drain at the point the poem was originally set, in the mid 1980s. I use such pedestrian metaphors as rice for the days of one's life, and I use the chilis and meats to refer to sexual adventures and relationships. It is true that most of my relationships were more like chilis than they were like meat.



So, I am in no mood for anything anymore. Wish me luck. Say a prayer if you believe there is a supernatural power that can effect this. Some day, hopefully not soon, I will indeed disappear. For the sake of my remarkable, beautiful six year old daughter I hope to hell it is not soon.

And I hope that the congress of the united states, particuarly the repubs and the blue dogs, go fuck themselves and deny themselves their own health care. Fuck them all.

And may I have the Lady's mercy this evening in July, 2009. Peace be with you all.

That's How the Light Gets In

This post is a review of the new Leonard Cohen album. This is crossposted from my private blog and is not significantly different than that post.

My wonderful daughter, Paige, bought me a copy of Leonard Cohen's Live in London collection, via the web last week. I finally got it moved to our mp3 player, and have been listening to it in the car for the last week.

First, let me say I can remember the first time I ever heard a Leonard Cohen song. I can remember the first time I read Cohen's novel "Beautiful Losers". I still have the first collection of Cohen's poems that I ever owned, "The Spicebox of Earth". So obviously I have been his fan for a very long time now.

Therefore it will come as no surprise to anyone that I really like this recording. One of the more remarkable aspects of these performances is that Leonard Cohen is 73 years old. He's in full touring mode here, and he is better than he has ever been (and I have two previous live albums from way back when). It's almost hard to fathom, really. He's better than Sinatra was, as a performer, at that age. The personality stuff, the riffs between songs, they are extremely funny, very dry, but sweet and comfortable. He is grateful, through these songs. Grateful to us who listen to him, and read him, and grateful to those who have befriended him, and grateful to the women who have comforted him (as he would probably put it). Not since seeing Tony Bennett in the early 90s (before he got popular with the younger generation), have I heard a performer who was so gracious and caring about those who were his audience.

Of course, listening to these songs brings me many memories and an examination of my relationship to the words and thoughts over the years. Particularly the song "Sisters of Mercy," from the sixties. When I was a junior in high school, 1967, Judy Collins' released an album, Wildflowers, that had this song on it. For those who are not familiar with it, it is a song about having spent a carnal evening with two women, after having been in a state of despair.

The women are presented as "sisters" in the sense of those devoted to the deity. The "you" in the song, the person to whom the singer is speaking is of course all of us that live. The Sisters were "waiting for me when I thought that I just can't go on ..." And "you/ who must leave everything that you cannot control ..." are directed to the find the Sisters. The narrator tells us that they took him in and "they lay down beside me/I made my confession to them..." "I touched the dew on their hem." And after that the most important statement of the piece: "If your life is a leaf/that the seasons tear off and condemn/they will bind you with love/that is graceful and green as a stem."

So it is a simple statement of redemption. The love of these two women bring him back to life. I like the aspect that the love is "green as a stem", tying us directly to the Lady's world. The final statement of the song is to the effect that he hopes we run into them, and if they "sweeten your night" it is okay, because we "weren't lovers like that, and besides it would still be all right."

At that time the very idea that sexual love was essentially healing was a revelation to someone who had grown up in the roman catholic church. If there is one thing that modern catholicism is about it is that sexuality is in and of itself a very bad, disturbing thing, that leads directly to death and hell. Since I was 16 at the timeI first heard this song I was very gratified to find this vision that sex could be good. It was almost a complete relief, to tell you the truth, since I was of course as obsessed by sex as any teenage boy. And maybe even more so, due to the negative take on it in my school experience.

I date my interest in the Lady to this song and the changes it wrought in my consciousness 41 years ago now. It is not the only Cohen song that has had a profound effect on me. There's also the novella in song form, "Famous Blue Raincoat" that speaks to the problems of infidelity and love in the lives of three people. I am still chilled by the first line, "It's four in the morning/the end of December/I'm writing you now/just to see if you're better ..."I used to imagine singing this song for Kimb's family at one of their family gatherings, but never did because I understood that, though it is a remarkable and profound statement, it is not entertaining in that way. I think I just wanted Bob to hear a really great song that was probably outside of his experience.

Cohen makes some very funny cracks throughout these performances. And the audience are clearly people familiar with everything he has written. Cohen has always been more popular in Europe than the states. He's a canadian, Montreal Jew, and because of that he has at his fingers both roman catholic iconography, and european jewish references. And he has always used both.

It was Cohen who introduced me to the concept that carnality could be and is an aspect of the spirit. That there is intrinsically something holy about the body and its interactions with others. What a shocking idea, that sex is about godliness, about the boundaries of the self and that self's relationship to the rest of reality.

I should also talk a little about Beautiful Losers, Cohen's 1966 novel. I first read it freshman year of college (1968), and since then I have probably read it at least a dozen times. It was the novel that most influenced my early writing. And had I not allowed myself to be dragged away from that style by Knoepfle, I probably would have written several books in that beatified, crazed style that Cohen uses in this book. Much of the book acts like a prayer, a series of statements that seek to make an emotional song out of all that we encounter in our self and in others.

The end of the book announces that it has been rented to the Jesuits, who proceed to call for the beatification of the Iroquis indian maiden, Tekakwitha. And yes, that is meant to be funny, in a very dark and twisted fashion.

There are so many good moments on this record. "Anthem":

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

That's how the light gets in. "Democracy," "Everybody Knows," "Dance Me to the End of Love," "Who by Fire," "Suzanne."

The band is great. The chick singers include Sharon Robinson, who has co-written a lot of songs with Cohen and who has a wonderful voice and a real sense of what Leonard likes to accomplish in his work. It's so gratifying to hear the man, out there, singing his songs again. Of course there is also a wonderful version of the song "Hallelujah," which became popular in a version by Jeff Buckley earlier in this decade. The song was used to great effect in the first Shrek movie. Piper recognized it right away. Cohen makes it his song, again:

There was a time you let me know
What's really going on below
But now you never show it to me, do you?
And remember when I moved in you
The holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

You say I took the name in vain
I don't even know the name
But if I did, well really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah

So I just want to say thanks to Cohen. I've learned a lot from him over these many years. The beauty still raises the hairs on my forearms. That's Robert Graves' description of what a real poem should do, when encountered. He was right about that.

I will say this also, it is true that Cohen went on this tour because his business manager squandered his fortune during the five years Cohen spent in a buddhist monastery, yet, it seems like it was ultimately a good thing, a freeing thing. Cohen sounds wonderful, the songs are better than ever. How many creative artists can stand up at 73 and give in this fashion? How many singers/celebrities/artists could come back from being completely ripped off and turn the experience into a chance to create beauty?

All the best to anyone who lasted this long. I know I tend to reel on and on anymore. But, I suppose I always did. May the Lady's love and mercy get us through this strange, dark time. I hope you are well.

Ring the Bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.

The Gloved One

Now that Michael Jackson is in the ground, or wherever they have him stashed, it is finally appropriate to actually consider what he might mean to the common culture. The frenzy surrounding his death is truly sad, but entirely to be expected. The guy sold a lot of records and performed in front of many millions of human beings. His songs were catchy, and sometimes meaningful, and he could dance well enough that Fred Astaire praised him. It is just not surprising that the media can feed off this event, even in the face of the tragedy that our current economy has caused in this country and the world.

I remember when Elvis died, and the media was shocked that a million people turned out on the streets in Memphis. Elvis, at that time, just wasn't hip enough for the media elites (and there is such a thing, believe me). He wasn't as cool as the Beatles, so they just reported it and let it go. Then they had to backtrack and do what they could to catch up on the real emotional impact of Elvis' early death.

Of course, Elvis was a fine american boy who was defeated by fame and its attendants, sycophants and drugs. He had too much money and not enough introspection to survive it all. So naturally he od'ed on the toilet. Very american, I would say.

And Michael, he was stressed and needing to meet capital obligations so he was about to go out and tour again, doing the hardcore stage act that he was always famous for. A difficult, physically trying thing. So he already had a drug habit, and now he was stressing a 50 year old body, trying to appear to be a 20 year old icon for his vast audience that he was going to charge 50-200$ a ticket.

Now he has entered celebrity sainthood, not to be touched, really, by any kind of reality. I think most people still believe he had some sort of weird pedophilic thing going on. A grown man just doesn't sleep with young boys without suspicion of something being wrong. I tend to believe he wasn't guilty of sexually abusing these boys, but it doesn't matter. It was still wrong of him to have these friendships and have intimate moments, him and them, just because he was trying to have a childhood his father denied him. If no other, that is his sin. Pretending something that so easily could be misconstrued. The guy was famous, but apparently stupid. Hey, that's like Elvis, too, isn't it?

Sullivan has had stories talking about Jackson's actually being gay, and I tend to think there is something to that. There are reports of partners speaking about having trysts with the man. But he kept that quiet, lived in the closet. Too bad. Think how powerful it would've been if MJ had been able to speak about his orientation, assuming it was a gay one. Of course, Jermaine Jackson also claims that MJ was leaning to Islam and about to convert. So the rumors will always be there. One thing and another. I have to say you'd have to be some kind of lightweight, intellectually speaking, to convert to Islam in this day and age. Of course Michael was a Jehovah's Witness, an even more non-scheduled worldview theology. So I suppose anything is possible.

But, what makes MJ important is really only one thing: Art. There is no doubt that the guy could dance, sing, and write songs and routines that touched people in that emotional truth fashion that real art does. Yes, it often wanders over into mere celebrity worship, but the fact of his art is real and will be around. It does work. I am currently pretty tired of those songs and dances, but there isn't any real argument that "Billy Jean" and "Thriller" and "Off the Wall," are true works of art. They spoke to people in that way that the truth in art can act. What Robert Graves called "the hair on the back of your neck standing up." A recognition of something in the emotinal makeup of being human and interconnected.

So, I loved a lot of his work, and even converted a J5 greatest hits vinyl to MP3s recently. All I can say is this, quoting a song from that disc: "Remember me as a sunny day/you once had along the way/remember me as a good thing."

Thanks to the Lady for this world and its artists. They bring us Her mercy.