Lorca and Cohen: The Wandering Gypsies (Prayer of the Deep Song)

 

‘I want to pass through the arches of Elvira

 To see your thighs and begin weeping’

 

According to Leonard Cohen, these may be the words which created who he was to be. Entering a bookshop in his teens, Mr Cohen happened upon a book by the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, opened the book, read those lines (the words may have been different as there is no one translation, however, this is how Mr Cohen recounts the tale) and his life was changed. From that moment he knew he was going to be a poet.

 

Throughout Mr Cohen’s work he references the work of Lorca (even naming his daughter after the poet)

 

‘It weeps, like an arrow without a target’ (Lorca- The Guitar)

 

‘The children come, the children go

Like arrows with no targets

Like shackles made of snow’ (Cohen- True Love Leaves No Traces)

 

Indeed, possibly his most famous song pays homage to the great poet, who was friends with Dali and returned to Spain for the civil war only to be executed by Franco’s militia,

 

‘Come over to the window, my little darling

I’d like to try to read your palm

I used to think I was some kind of Gypsy boy

Before I let you take me home’ (So Long, Marianne)

 

However, the influence is never starker than on two songs- one on the posthumous album Thanks for The Dance in the song The Night Of Santiago which plays upon Lorca’s poem The Faithless Wife.

It is fair to say that Mr Cohen was the greater of the two but how he took Lorca’s work and made it his own elevates both. The poems can be summed up by a handful of lines from Mr Cohen’s poem

‘She said she was a maiden

That wasn’t what I heard

For the sake of conversation

I took her at her word

…

And yes, she lied about it all

Her children and her husband

You were born to judge the world

Forgive me but I wasn’t’

The poem is, rather crassly, the tale of the narrator meeting a lady, taking her down to the river only to find that she is married. One, from a feminist viewpoint, may accuse both men of misogyny, putting the blame squarely on the ‘maiden’ but I think that would be unfair as the story is only superficial and we never learn more than the context of the act:

 

‘I touched her sleeping breasts

and they opened to me suddenly

like spikes of hyacinth.

The starch of her petticoat

sounded in my ears

like a piece of silk

rent by ten knives

…

Her thighs slipped away from me

like startled fish,

half full of fire,

half full of cold.

That night I ran

on the best of roads

mounted on a nacre mare

without bridle stirrups.

I took her away from the river.

The swords of the lilies

battled with the air.

 

As a man, I won’t repeat

the things she said to me.

The light of understanding

has made me more discreet.

Smeared with sand and kisses’ (Lorca)

 

‘I touched her sleeping breasts

They opened to me urgently

Like lilies from the dead

Behind a fine embroidery

Her nipples rose like bread

…

Her thighs they slipped away from me

Like schools of startled fish

Though I’ve forgotten half my life

I still remember this

Now, as a man I won’t repeat

The things she said aloud

Except for this, my lips are sealed forever

And for now

And soon there’s sand in every kiss

And soon the dawn is ready

And soon the night surrenders

To a daffodil machete

I gave her something pretty

And I waited till she laughed

I wasn’t born a gypsy

To make a woman sad’ (Cohen)

 

The other best example (if that is not a logical impossibility) is Lorca’s poem Little Viennese Waltz

 

‘In Vienna there are ten little girls,

a shoulder for death to cry on,

and a forest of dried pigeons.

There is a fragment of tomorrow

in the museum of winter frost.

There is a thousand-windowed dance hall.

 

Ay, ay, ay, ay!

Take this close-mouthed waltz.

…

In Vienna I will dance with you

in a costume with

a river’s head.

See how the hyacinths line my banks!

I will leave my mouth between your legs,

my soul in a photographs and lilies,

and in the dark wake of your footsteps,

my love, my love, I will have to leave

violin and grave, the waltzing ribbons’ (Lorca)

 

‘Now in Vienna there’s ten pretty women

There’s a shoulder where Death comes to cry

There’s a lobby with nine hundred windows

There’s a tree where the doves go to die

There’s a piece that was torn from the morning

And it hangs in the Gallery of Frost

Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay

Take this waltz, take this waltz

Take this waltz with the clamp on its jaws

…

And I’ll dance with you in Vienna

I’ll be wearing a river’s disguise

The hyacinth wild on my shoulder,

My mouth on the dew of your thighs

And I’ll bury my soul in a scrapbook,

With the photographs there, and the moss

And I’ll yield to the flood of your beauty

My cheap violin and my cross

And you’ll carry me down on your dancing

To the pools that you lift on your wrist

Oh my love, Oh my love

Take this waltz, take this waltz

It’s yours now. It’s all that there is’ (Cohen, Take This Waltz)

 

I think it is fair to say, despite themes and language, the influence of Lorca on Cohen goes far deeper, rather it goes to that rarest of all things- essence of being. one might argue that Lorca gave Cohen the right to be who he is and surely that is the greatest gift of all, to give a person that brief moment of reassurance that they are allowed to be who they are which, as with the briefest of thaws, lets the ice of one’s soul break and allows one to become who they are, and who they are is simply who they are meant to be. it might sound trivial, but it is extremely rare.

 

‘till next time

 

Ps, check out Cohen’s songs on Youtube etc. plus the video from the transcript below. In 2011 Mr Cohen was honoured with the Spanish award, ‘The Prince of Asturias Awards were established on 24 September 1980, with the creation of the Prince of Asturias Foundation, in a ceremony presided by Felipe, Prince of Asturias, then heir to the throne of Spain, “to consolidate links between the Principality and the Prince of Asturias, and to contribute to, encourage and promote scientific, cultural and humanistic values that form part of mankind’s universal heritage’, read the transcript below

—————————-

 

Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Excellencies, Members of the Jury, Distinguished Laureates, Ladies and Gentlemen:

 

It is a great honor to stand here before you tonight. Perhaps, like the great maestro, Riccardo Muti, I am not used to standing in front of an audience without an orchestra behind me, but I will do my best as a solo artist tonight.

 

I stayed up all night last night wondering what I might say to this august assembly. And after I had eaten all the chocolate bars and peanuts in the mini-bar, I scribbled a few words. I don’t think I have to refer to them. Obviously, I am deeply touched to be recognized by the Foundation. But I’ve come here tonight to express another dimension of gratitude. I think I can do it in three or four minutes — and I will try.

 

When I was packing in Los Angeles to come here, I had a sense of unease because I’ve always felt some ambiguity about an award for poetry. Poetry comes from a place that no one commands and no one conquers. So I feel somewhat like a charlatan to accept an award for an activity which I do not command. In other words, if I knew where the good songs came from I’d go there more often.

 

I was compelled in the midst of that ordeal of packing to go and open my guitar. I have a Conde guitar, which was made in Spain in the great workshop at Number 7 Gravina Street; a beautiful instrument that I acquired over 40 years ago. I took it out of the case and I lifted it. It seemed to be filled with helium — it was so light. And I brought it to my face. I put my face close to the beautifully designed rosette, and I inhaled the fragrance of the living wood. You know that wood never dies.

 

I inhaled the fragrance of cedar as fresh as the first day that I acquired the guitar. And a voice seemed to say to me, “You are an old man and you have not said thank you; you have not brought your gratitude back to the soil from which this fragrance arose.” And so I come here tonight to thank the soil and the soul of this people that has given me so much — because I know just as an identity card is not a man, a credit rating is not a country.

 

Now, you know of my deep association and confraternity with the poet Federico Garcia Lorca. I could say that when I was a young man, an adolescent, and I hungered for a voice, I studied the English poets and I knew their work well, and I copied their styles, but I could not find a voice. It was only when — when I read, even in translation, the works of Lorca that I understood that there was a voice. It is not that I copied his voice; I would not dare. But he gave me permission to find a voice, to locate a voice; that is, to locate a self, a self that that is not fixed, a self that struggles for its own existence.

 

And as I grew older I understood that instructions came with this voice. What were these instructions? The instructions were never to lament casually. And if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all, it must be done within the strict confines of dignity and beauty.

 

And so I had a voice, but I did not have an instrument. I did not have a song.

 

And now I’m going to tell you very briefly a story of how I got my song.

 

Because — I was an indifferent guitar player. I banged the chords. I only knew a few of them. I sat around with my college friends, drinking and singing the folk songs, or the popular songs of the day, but I never in a thousand years thought of myself as a musician or as a singer.

 

One day in the early ’60s, I was visiting my mother’s house in Montreal. The house is beside a park and in the park there’s a tennis court where many people come to watch the beautiful young tennis players enjoy their sport. I wandered back to this park which I’d known since my childhood, and there was a young man playing a guitar. He was playing a flamenco guitar, and he was surrounded by two or three girls and boys who were listening to him. I loved the way he played. There was something about the way he played that — that captured me.

 

It was the way I wanted to play — and knew that I would never be able to play.

 

And I sat there with the other listeners for a few moments and when there was a — a silence, an appropriate silence, I asked him if he would give me guitar lessons. He was a young man from Spain, and we could only communicate in my broken French and his broken French. He didn’t speak English. And he agreed to give me guitar lessons. I pointed to my mother’s house which you could see from the tennis court, and we made an appointment; we settled the price.

 

And he came to my mother’s house the next day and he said, “Let me hear you play something.” I tried to play something. He said, “You don’t know how to play, do you?” I — I said, “No, I really don’t know how to play.” He said, “First of all, let me tune your guitar. It’s — It’s all out of tune.” So he took the guitar, and — and he tuned it. He said, “It’s not a bad guitar.” It — It wasn’t the Conde, but it wasn’t a bad guitar. So he handed it back to me. He said, “Now play.”

 

[I] couldn’t play any better.

 

He said “Let me show you some chords.” And he took the guitar and he produced a sound from that guitar that I’d never heard. And he — he played a sequence of chords with a tremolo, and he said, “Now you do it.” I said, “It’s out of the question. I can’t possibly do it.” He said, “Let me put your fingers on the frets.” And he — he put my fingers on the frets. And he said, “Now, now play.” It — It was a mess. He said, “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

 

He came back tomorrow. He put my hands on the guitar. He — He placed it on my lap in the way that was appropriate, and I began again with those six chords — six chord progression that many, many flamenco songs are based on.

 

I was a little better that day.

 

The third day — improved, somewhat improved. But I knew the chords now. And I knew that although I couldn’t coordinate my fingers with my thumb to produce the correct tremolo pattern, I knew the chords — I knew them very, very well by this point.

 

The next day, he didn’t come. He didn’t come. I had the number of his — of his boarding house in Montreal. I phoned to find out why he had missed the appointment, and they told me that he’d taken his life — that he committed suicide. I knew nothing about the man. I — I did not know what part of Spain he came from. I did not know why he came to Montreal. I did not know why he stayed there. I did not know why he he appeared there in that tennis court. I did not know why he took his life. I — I was deeply saddened, of course.

 

But now I disclose something that I’ve never spoken in public. It was those six chords — it was that guitar pattern that has been the basis of all my songs and all my music.

 

So now you will begin to understand the dimensions of the gratitude I have for this country.

 

Everything that you have found favorable in my work comes from this place.

 

Everything, everything that you have found favorable in my songs and my poetry are inspired by this soil.

 

So I thank you so much for the warm hospitality that you have shown my work because it is really yours, and you have allowed me to affix my signature to the bottom of the page.

 

Thank you so much, ladies and gentlemen.

The Law of Consequences

 

One of the great things of having a bad memory, wrote the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, is that people can overcome misfortune by simply forgetting about it.

 

We live in a world which is governed by causality. Regular readers will know that I don’t believe in causality as things are as they are and causality removes all value from what has happened by creating false values, however, we appear to live in what appears to be a deterministic universe (I. E. There is no ‘chaos’ as everything happens governed by laws that we cannot comprehend) yet people do not realise that actions also have consequences.

 

I was speaking to someone the other day. This person was telling me how they were currently in therapy for anxiety and depression. The reason why, they told me, had been determined to have been caused by mismanagement of them by their managers (note: this person has now left their workplace). She was, she told me, held accountable for the insecurities of her managers. Her managers were people who only cared about how they appeared to others and following policy not taking into account that most simple, yet almost mythical of all things, humanity.

 

The person told me how the actions of the others, which was bad, were supported by other members of the senior management and when the person had gone to human resources for help human resources quickly sided with the management and, it seems as punishment, management decided to remove all of the medical support required by her. Needless to say, she left soon afterwards and, according to a former colleague of hers, her former line manager, one of the, from what she said, worst people you can imagine, was given a promotion and massive pay rise.

 

I am citing the above as just one example of how we, as people, care not how actions impact others (‘I pay in blood, but not my own’- Dylan). Whilst the above case study is far less serious than the bombing of children by the Syrian government, it is no less impactful in terms of Trauma. Whilst the managers will forget what they have done and move on, the lady will have to live with the consequences of their actions- the pettiness of the few, dressed up as decency, destroying the lives of others.

 

The lady said she was now getting on better in her new work place but was still suffering from feeling worthless, humiliated and panic attacks. This, it must be noted, still impacts her private and work life and whilst those who performed this atrocity will fall prey to Nietzsche’s ‘my memory says I did it, my pride says I couldn’t have done that. Eventually my memory yields‘, the lasting consequences of their actions will live on in the life of another.

 

How does this make me feel? Angry? Sad? Indifferent?  Unfortunately, the answer to the question is unsurprised and surely that is the most heart-breaking answer of all.

 

‘Till next time

 

(Thank you X for permission to recant your tale here and the very best luck to you).

The One-eyed King

 

Throughout our lives we are told truism. We nod our heads and go ‘ah, yes, very true, very wise’ yet when we actually start to think about what was being said we go, ‘wait a second, that’s complete nonsense…’. The philosopher Berkeley wrote, ‘few people think yet all have opinions’ by which he meant often people tell us their opinions without any thought being behind it. Just the other day I was witness to two people who, in the space of ten minutes, explained everything wrong with America (Trump), the UK (immigration, in case you are wondering), the Middle East (Trump again) and so on and so forth until I was able to leave the room they were in.

 

The basis of their argument was that it was something which everybody knew and, thus they assured each other, must be true, no question, no doubt. If, for example, a constitutional lawyer or and expert of immigration had tried to counter their points with ‘facts’ (i.e. comments born of reason and understanding) then, in all likelihood, they would have fallen upon deaf ears. And therein lies the rub- all have opinions without the thoughts (remember is school when they always said ‘show your working’?) to back them up and if one had countered with a clear vision of what was really happening, well…. I use the word vision very deliberately as from childhood we are told that ‘in the land of the blind, the one-eyed person is King’. This, we take to mean, that the person who can see more clearly and understand clearly is elevated above the others by that rarest of all things, the bane of the Ancient Greek philosophers, Reason.

 

Speaking of the Ancient Greeks, in the Odyssey we read about wise Odysseus who, when encountering the one-eyed giant, the cyclops, the cyclops is quickly called a monster and, this simple shepherd, is tricked by those who have invaded his home and blinded him. Thus, the wise Odysseus makes breaking into the home of another, blinding him and then tricking him into being humiliated ‘Nobody attacked me’ (Odysseus had told him that his name was ‘Nobody’) into a noble act of heroism and thus the one-eyed man who sees the world clearly is vanquished.

 

If we are to continue with the Greeks, we can look at Plato’s parable of the Cave. We live in a cave (see the connection to the cyclops?) and what we see as reality is merely the shadows on the wall. The philosophers are the ones who realise that the reality is not ‘real’ and make their way back out of the cave. The truly great then return to the cave and try to inform those within that they are being lied to and that truth is greater than fiction- they have, to use the passive-aggressive sarcasm of Newton when being accused of plagiarising, seen further by standing on the shoulders of giants. And what happens to these brave souls who have returned (pun intended- think Buddhist reincarnation), well to answer this we can move away from fiction and philosophy and look at real world examples- Plato, himself, was exiled, Socrates sentenced to death, Jesus nailed to a tree, Galileo forced to recant or be killed, and so on and so forth with examples ranging from ancient history to, literally, today, whichever day you read this on.

Whilst it is tempting to hear truism and nod along with them, once we start to think about what we hear and read we can often see that what we know as ‘true’ is merely opinion created without thought and those who do think quickly find themselves on the wrong end of a hammer and nail. Ouch.

 

‘till next time

Coping with Uncertainty

I was recently having a conversation with someone about certainty/uncertainty. The person with whom I was speaking was a medical professional who has spent her career in mental health care and thus was interested in different notions of how one finds certainty. Regular readers will know that I define certainty as the ignorance of ignorance- one thinks one is certain as one does not realise that one cannot have knowledge (true certainty).

The conversation we were having suggested that what we call certainty is the foundation on which we can build our lives. As uncertainty is usually a negative emotion (or perceived that way) one seeks certainty as that can promote the growth of a ‘foundation’. However, as I pointed out (rather irritatingly) the biblical parable of the man who built his house on the sand which washed away once the tide came in compared to his neighbour who built his house on rock that did not wash away, rock is, essentially, millions of grains of sand and over time even the rock will be worn away. This, we suggested, supported a hypothesis that all ‘foundations’ were illusional.

We discussed the things that people do to create a form of certainty- relationships with the first person who will take them, drinking, casual sex, religion, sport, family, work, friends, education and so on and so forth to create a foundation and we pointed out that if these were really the silver bullet to end uncertainty then they would not have to be repeated by the said individual ad nauseum.  The very fact that these actions have to be repeated would suggest that they, themselves, are not certain and thusly cannot give a secure foundation- whether they look like they are made of rock or smaller rocks (sand).

 

From this we concluded that one cannot have certainty and that all foundations are illusional. After all the biggest problems we have in life is when something we take for granted stops working (from a jet plane to a single cell).

 

The next question- which we could not answer, is, if all foundations are illusional- how can one cope with uncertainty. The answer, we hypothesise, would come from the study of the Stoic philosophers who spoke of the transient nature of life- don’t get attached- we are all going to die, anyway yet, as with religions such as Buddhism, the unattachment is also illusional as one gets attached to one’s concept of unattachment. Franz Kafka wrote:

 

‘You can withdraw from the sufferings of the world — that possibility is open to you and accords with your nature — but perhaps that withdrawal is the only suffering you might be able to avoid’    

 

So maybe the certainty we need is that there is no certainty and to cope with it one must embrace it as one would a lover or a child- without holding back and become not separate from it but part of it (remove the otherness of it). Yes, this is easier to write (and that as pretty hard) than do and may not work, but I know with almost complete certainty, the question of how to cope (in a healthy, genuine, way) is something that few, if any have been able to answer although the answer may come by first shedding your certainties (the religion, the sex, the family etc.) and try to shed the biggest lie we have of all, the most false certainty that we have, that of ‘You’.

 

‘till next time

Everything Is Made of Atoms (except atoms)

 

We live in confusing times, thus spakes everyone of every time in which they find themselves. The times in which we find ourselves is not remotely confusing if one studies history. I won’t retread old ground here (see previous weeks) but if one looks at history one will see that the dismantling of powerful states (if you suddenly find yourself thinking of the EU, NATO etc., don’t) leads to a rise of ‘bad actors’ (if you suddenly find yourselves thinking of Russia and China, etc., don’t) and after the breakdown of unions, (if you suddenly find yourself thinking of European or transatlantic ones, don’t) conflict breaks out and then after the conflict the need for unity prevails (if you suddenly find yourself thinking of the EU, NATO, UN, League of Nations, etc., don’t), or as William Blake put it:

 

‘Mutual fear brings peace

Till the selfish love increase’

 

The question at this point should be, how can I, or Mr Blake (yeah, we are in the same breath) predict with almost certainty that this will happen? Well, to be blunt, the times we live in are not very confusing really, the same way the people we are are painfully predictable. Just as there is no such thing as chaos, what we call chaos is actually ignorance (just because you can’t see the strings, doesn’t mean the man is really flying), nor is there such a thing as confusing times.

 

Both Einstein and Bohr in their theories of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, respectively, argued that everything can be broken down to a very basic level, or as 3^rd/4^th Century Greek philosopher Democritus said, everything, including the universe, is made of atoms. The fact that Einsteinian relativity and quantum theory cannot match up seems to be more of a problem with the attempts to explain the inexplicable (seriously, who invented mathematics? As if an arbitrary language with (as with all languages) no inherent value can explain anything that we can call ‘real’).

 

From the smallest atom to the very universe (which are, essentially, the same thing)  everything can be explained once you shed the layers of deception, the layers of ego, and acknowledge once and for all that the truth is, contrary to Oscar Wilde’s ‘The truth is rarely pure and never simple’, the Truth is always simple, always pure and always beautiful. It is only once values are placed upon it, only once it becomes buried under ignorance, insecurity and ego (and other synonyms), that it becomes lost and we find ourselves saying, ‘gosh, we live in confusing times’

 

Happy New Year to those for whom it is and happy whatever day it is, to this for whom it isn’t.

‘till next time

PS. going forward this year, don’t forget that atoms make us all matter.