words inspired by poems and songs

(Cohen, Milosz, Heaney)

Leonard Cohen’s Heart with No Companion -‘a manual for living with defeat’

This piece was originally written about ten years ago and published by Allan Showalter who has hosted a Leonard fansite for many years. I wrote it because I loved the lyrics to this slightly lesser known song, and because I felt it captured what I call 'the after life of sorrow' - the positive humanizing impact that wrestling with gloomy moods and difficult circumstances can have on our capacity to love.

Now that Leonard Cohen has left this dimension, it seems clearer than it has ever been how deeply beneficient his presence among us has been, and how profoundly we loved him, and how powerful his transmission to us was. (I find myself thinking of Aristotle's concept of Eudaimonia - a type of flourishing more profound than happiness. "Even in circumstances which are stressing to an individual, a virtuous person will always act in a good manner, carrying himself in a better way and will not be brought down by a weak spirit." For Aristotle, the reputation and 'trace' of a man after his death, fully revealed the extent of his flourishing... the goodness of his life...

The voice of Going Home on Old Ideas speaks of a wish to write ‘a manual for living with defeat.’  This phrase captures one of the things Leonard Cohen has come to symbolise:  how to live with grace and beauty, amid our many failures and disappointments. He is one of the finest voices we have, have ever had, and perhaps will ever have, of the value of bearing with what hurts and haunts us.

On Love - Czeslaw Milosz

Czeslaw Milosz' Love brings together deep, beautiful truths about love – not romantic love or even familial love - rather the kind of love that redeems us, and in redeeming us, redeems our relationship to life.

One of the elements I treasure in this poem is how it touches on so many essential themes – calling, narcissism, service, non-dual belonging – in a way that illuminates each. It invites us to be touched – in tenderness - by all things, including our own belonging. Its' lines have soaked into my bones over the past years and return to me repeatedly...

 Here’s the full text (translated by Robert Hass):

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills—
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.

Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn’t always understand.

Lineage and Learning - Seamus Heaney

a gentle reflection nudged on by Leonard' Cohen’s s instinct to redeem our days, inspired by Heaney's beautiful introductory verse in Clearances -

Interviewer: ‘Do you generally begin a song with a lyrical idea?’
Leonard Cohen: ‘It begins with an appetite to discover my self-respect.     To redeem the day…’

 From Clearances
by Seamus Heaney

She taught me what her uncle once taught her:
How easily the biggest coal block split
If you got the grain and hammer angled right.

The sound of that relaxed alluring blow,
Its co-opted and obliterated echo,
Taught me to hit, taught me to loosen,

Taught me between the hammer and the block
To face the music. Teach me now to listen,
To strike it rich behind the linear black.