I have been reading this thread for awhile with enjoyment but this is my first posting. Excuse the length but I will start with some background and forgive me if this has already been mentioned. I found ‘The Counterfeiter Begs Forgiveness’ by Scobie was a good starting point when trying to understand what Cohen is doing in BoM. In it Scobie says:
I would now see as the major trilogy of Cohen’s self-deconstruction: The Energy of Slaves, Death of a Lady’s Man, and Book of Mercy.
The poet here is set aside; he is simply the vessel of prayer.
I also see Various Positions as a companion to this book. To me the songs are a public version, the book is a (seemingly) private version, of a self-abnegation that Cohen wanted to experiment with and explore more fully. The song ‘If it be your will’ is the most obvious connection point to BoM where the singer’s will becomes transparent to a higher will and truth is also dependant on the will of the Other. There are also images and feelings, if not words and lines, that repeat between songs and prayers.
It is interesting that Greg has seen the ‘you’ in I.19 as possibly being Cohen’s mother and others assume this ‘you’ is god because the writing is recognizable as a prayer. DBC also refers to Cohen himself (though he has warned against doing this in earlier posts) in his explanation of this prayer. I want to address the use of pronouns in BoM. The Siemerling article (the link was provided earlier in the discussion) points out that pronouns
are linguistic shifters that are empty of lexically defined meaning and thus offer a considerable mobility
In the prayers ‘I’ interplays with ‘he’, which interplays with ‘we’, and they interplay with ‘you’. This constant shifting from prayer to prayer means the reader can never be sure who is speaking, or who is being spoken to, or who is being spoken for. For me the changing use of pronouns in each prayer heightens the effect of a journey back and forth, and around, the recurring ideas of truth, longing, sin, will and loneliness.
So in I.19 he is addressing ‘you’ and I don’t think we can identify who that you is. The best I could say is that the meaning of you is oscillating between god, parent, teacher, a universal Other or even himself (in the same way he refers to ‘he’ in other prayers). All at the same time. As Scobie has said
“You” is pure address, an emptying of the pronoun, nothing but the attitude and verbal gesture of prayer. Prayer itself is not a stable, achieved position, but rather something ephemeral, transitory: “Our prayer is like gossip”.
The line that struck me most in this prayer and which I think is central (structurally occurs in the middle and thematically links the different parts) is ‘You gave the injury a tongue to heal itself.’
In the first sentence ‘you’ gives what sound like gifts. In the second sentence ‘you’ gives pain.
‘You folded your distance back into my heart. You drew the tears back to my eyes’
I think these two sentences allude to the disconnection from other (distance) that causes sorrow (brought tears… again).
I agree with Steven that lines are ambivalent and I think this is deliberate. ‘You hid me in the mountain of your word’ is ambivalent. It could be protection or imprisonment and is possibly the tongue (word) that came with the injury. Ambivalence continues with the following two sentences: ‘covered’ competes with ‘care’ and ‘bound’ competes with ‘strength’. So I have the sense that the poet has been given a two edged sword that wounds at the same time as it aids the fight.
The closing lines continue this pattern of opposites in ‘speaking’ and ‘unspeakable’, ‘comfort’ and ‘cruelty’. However, in these lines a task is set for the healing of the injury by the undoing of self-conspiracy and the daring of joy.
There is a short poem in BoL called ‘True Self’ in which Cohen writes
True Self, True Self
has no will
. In BoM I think Cohen is looking for that True Self and that’s why I don’t think we should look for him. By the same token the poet gives no consistent name for an Other (king, master, teacher, god, she) so I don’t think we should look for god either, at least not a fixed God. My sacriligious suggestion is that maybe Cohen is using the formal language of religion to find a True Self outside of that religion.