Book of Mercy #16-19

Debate on Leonard Cohen's poetry (and novels), both published and unpublished. Song lyrics may also be discussed here.
DBCohen
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Post by DBCohen »

Today, May 27, is an anniversary of sorts: it is six months today since we’ve embarked on this enterprise of reading and commenting on BoM. When we started I predicted that it will take us between a year and two years to go through the whole book; by now we’ve covered a little over one third of it, so if we continue on the same pace we may be done in less than 18 months. However, the future of this undertaking is not clear. There is still the possibility of the Forum closing down, although Jarkko promised to reconsider his decision. Also, many good people have drifted away, either because of the bad atmosphere on the Forum recently, or because they’ve lost interest or are occupied with more urgent matters. Still, I hope that this discussion can be revived fruitfully, and that those interested in sharing their views will gradually return or join in. I’ve also noticed now that Judith had scratched out some of her postings, and I’m really sorry for that; I hope she will rejoin us with her important contributions.

The discussion of the last prayer introduced, I.18, did not go very far, but everyone is welcome to return to it, and to earlier prayers as well. I’ll now introduce I.19 without comment. It is shorter and more concise than the recent ones, and its beauty speaks for itself. There are several phrases and words in it familiar from our earlier discussions, and further commentary is of course possible, but I’ll leave the honor of first comments to someone else.
I.19
You let me sing, you lifted me up, you gave my soul a beam to travel on. You folded your distance back into my heart. You drew the tears back to my eyes. You hid me in the mountain of your word. You gave the injury a tongue to heal itself. You covered my head with my teacher’s care, you bound my arm with my grandfather’s strength. O beloved speaking, O comfort whispering in the terror, unspeakable explanation of the smoke and cruelty, undo the self-conspiracy, let me dare the boldness of joy.
evelyn
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book of mercy

Post by evelyn »

Since we've been given a reprieve, I'll try to take advantage of this
wonderful vehicle of knowledge and communication - at least when I have the time!

My first impression of this beautiful prayer :

Iron out the kinks in my ego "my self-conspiracy" and open my heart to
fully appreciate what You have given me and Thank You, Thank You, Thank You!

evelyn
Manna
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Post by Manna »

you gave my soul a beam to travel on
This bit struck a beam in me. Thoughts like these have been showing up a lot to me lately, once in a meditation, and also in the reading of several things. Strings everywhere connect all things like we exist in a big connect-the-dots, and various parts of us – soul & breath & meaning – can move along that golden connection.
You let me sing, you lifted me up, you gave my soul a beam to travel on. You folded your distance back into my heart. You drew the tears back to my eyes. You hid me in the mountain of your word. You gave the injury a tongue to heal itself. You covered my head with my teacher’s care, you bound my arm with my grandfather’s strength. O beloved speaking, O comfort whispering in the terror, unspeakable explanation of the smoke and cruelty, undo the self-conspiracy, let me dare the boldness of joy.
As a whole (and I have preface this with an apology, I’m sorry), this prayer reminds me of the movie K-Pax with Kevin Spacey and that other guy, The Dude. Whatshisname? Of course, I’m undermining the beauty of the prayer.

This is obviously directed toward God, but I’d like to try to understand it as not being directed toward God, maybe a lover or a parent, and then see how that applies to it being about God. Was it in these BoM threads that I read someone likening God to parents? That feels like long ago. I think I most prefer the idea that this is directed toward Love Itself, which may be what God is in a way, anyway.
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~greg
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Post by ~greg »

You let me sing,
you lifted me up,
you gave my soul a beam to travel on.
You folded your distance back into my heart.
You drew the tears back to my eyes.
You hid me in the mountain of your word.
You gave the injury a tongue to heal itself.
You covered my head with my teacher’s care,
you bound my arm with my grandfather’s strength.

O beloved speaking,
O comfort whispering in the terror,
unspeakable explanation of the smoke and cruelty,

undo the self-conspiracy,
let me dare the boldness of joy.

I think that's a common form:
1) Characterize the subject
2) Address the subject
3) Make a request of the subject

But what I really want to say is that, besides God,
and lovers, I think Cohen also means his mother.
(with the understanding that time (and tense)
means nothing in the human mind)

"you lift me up"
- whoever or whatever this means,
it means, first and foremost, 'mother'.

"beam to travel on"
- means her smile.

"folded your distance back into my heart"
- has to do with a mother tucking an infant
- in under sheets,

"drew the tears back to my eyes" -
-is the mother wiping the kid's tears away

"hid me in the mountain of your word"
- is the breasts, and the cooing mothers do.

"gave the injury a tongue to heal itself"
- kids learn to talk first and foremost from
-mothers (or 'primary care givers' generically)

"covered my head with my teacher’s care"
- and mittens and galoshes and lunch box.

"bound my arm with my grandfather’s strength"
- i have no idea.

~~~

I think that's a slightly different take anyway,
and maybe somebody else can work it out more convincingly.
Manna
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Post by Manna »

Here I am following you around... again! Yeesh.

Oh well. Tough.

I really appreciate your reformatting of this.
But I take issue with this:
Approximately Greg wrote:"drew the tears back to my eyes" -
-is the mother wiping the kid's tears away
That's not how I read it. Wiping away tears is not the same as drawing them back to the eye. I read this as saying that at the edge of sorrow, the sorrow was shown to be unmerited. Wiping away tears means giving comfort in the face of discomfort; drawing tears back inside means undoing that which caused the discomfort.
DBCohen
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Post by DBCohen »

Greg,

Thank you very much for this interpretation. Indeed, the figure of the mother is often overlooked in favor of the more obvious figures of God and of the lover, but her presence should be kept in mind.

About the line “you bound my arm with my grandfather’s strength”, I believe it is an allusion to the Teffilin (phylacteries), which already came up in I.14 (“Blessed are you who binds the arm to the heart”, and please see what I’ve written there). He mentions his grandfather as the bearer and transmitter of the tradition (and it would have been his grandfather who prepared him for his Bar Mitzvah, an occasion on which the phylacteries are used for the first time). This was my original thought, but after reading your interpretation I remembered also LC often talking of his grandfather (on his mother’s side) as a scholar and writer, and of himself as another link in the chain, so the strength gained from the grandfather and going into the arm should have to do also with writing (or maybe even playing music?).
Steven
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Post by Steven »

With regards to the line: "You drew the tears back in to my eyes" --
a bit of gentle criticism seems not unwarranted. He wasn't intending
to communicate about retention of emotions. As such, the line
as it stands is both ambiguous and, strictly speaking, faultly.
DBCohen
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Post by DBCohen »

Steven,

“Ambiguous” – yes (and that’s not necessarily bad; on the contrary, in my view, as far as poetry is concerned), but why “faulty”? Could you elaborate a little on what bothers you here?
Steven
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Post by Steven »

DBCohen wrote:Steven,

“Ambiguous” – yes (and that’s not necessarily bad; on the contrary, in my view, as far as poetry is concerned), but why “faulty”? Could you elaborate a little on what bothers you here?
But, ambiguity here, with this line isn't useful, as far as I can see and
seems to be out of character for Leonard Cohen, a poet of self-admitted
obsessiveness over what should be a final draft of his song lyrics (and
presumably one would imagine his non-song poetry). Inappropriately
repressed emotions are the cause of many emotional and physical
problems. The drawing of tears back into the eyes could be mistaken
as somehow regarding pent-up tears as being a good thing here.
This wouldn't be what he intended, though, and if the possible
carelessness or oversight had been avoided, the writing might
have benefitted. If for e.g. he would have expressed
the sentiment of praise as having allowed the tears to be
healing waters or some such thing, the writing, i.m.o., would
have been better.
DBCohen
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Re: Book of Mercy #16-

Post by DBCohen »

Let me say how I understand this prayer in general terms, although this might come out a bit simplistic. In many earlier prayers he talks about all kinds of suffering, which is a theme familiar throughout his work. He talked about being at odds with the world, even with its beauty; see, for example, I.12
You mock us with the beauty of your world. My heart hates the trees, the wind moving the branches… etc.
The same prayer ends with an important request:
Count me back to your mercy with the measures of a bitter song, and do not separate me from my tears.
As a rule, LC acknowledges suffering, and does not wish to be miraculously rid off it. He acknowledges the value of tears and pain as part of our existence. But here (I.19) he speaks of the opposite possibility, that of joy. He approaches it carefully. He seems to say: “Is it possible at all to have joy in such a terrible world?” He mentions the personal terror of living, the smoke and cruelty (probably an allusion to the Holocaust). He regards the fact that it is still possible to have joy besides suffering as a gift: “You let me sing”. He never turns his back on suffering: “You gave the injury a tongue to heal itself” – his ability to express his suffering through the poetry is valuable to him. But he can also experience joy, and he can even feel, for a moment perhaps, as if the tears are drawn back into his eyes. He never denies the tears or the suffering, but he acknowledges the possibility – which he seems to believe to be God’s mercy – of having joy as well. Therefore that line should be viewed in the context of the specific prayer and of what he says along the book, and not in isolation.
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blonde madonna
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Re: Book of Mercy #16-

Post by blonde madonna »

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.
the art of longing’s over and it’s never coming back

1980 -- Comedy Theatre, Melbourne
1985 -- State Theatre, Melbourne
2008 -- Hamilton, Toronto, Cardiff
2009 -- Rochford Winery, Yarra Valley
2010 -- Melbourne
2013 -- Melbourne, The Hill Winery, Geelong, Auckland
DBCohen
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Re: Book of Mercy #16-

Post by DBCohen »

BM (Beautiful Mystery, I wish I knew your real name),

Thanks for a great contribution.

First, I have to apologize for my inconsistency. Indeed, I sometimes opposed too specific interpretations, linking certain lines to events in LC’s life, but when he writes something like “you bound my arm with my grandfather’s strength”, I cannot but think that he has his real grandfather in mind.

The question of the pronouns was widely discussed in the earlier parts of the thread, and it is indeed one of the most ambiguous aspects of the book. We’ve seen often how “you”, “he” etc. can be interpreted in numerous ways. (And the deep connection between BoM and Various Positions was also acknowledged early on). I liked very much the way you’ve put it, especially the aspect of the “you”, for example:
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.
I certainly am willing to accept the coexistence of different possibilities here (although I do believe that we should make an effort to understand who “you” is in each occurrence). However, I believe there is a certain compatriot of yours who would strongly disagree…

I’m not sure, though, I agree with your specific reading of these two lines:
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 don’t think that “you” gives pain here, but rather relieves it. “You folded your distance back into my heart” celebrates the disappearance of the painful distance. “You drew the tears back to my eyes” I no longer consider ambiguous, but rather positive. “You hid me in the mountain of your word” is somewhat ambiguous, but I tend also to see as positive (the pleasure he feels in reading the Bible and the security he finds in it, for example).

Finally, I wish you’d elaborate more about how you see the “I”, the speaker here. LC looking for his “true self”? I am not sure I’m buying this. In the poem you quote from BoL he seems to regard this concept somewhat ironically.
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mat james
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Re: Book of Mercy #16-

Post by mat james »

My sacriligious suggestion is that maybe Cohen is using the formal language of religion to find a True Self outside of that religion.

Blonde Madonna

The sure path of any apostate.
The sure path of the individuated seeker.

Wonderful observations, Blonde Madonna!

Matj.
"Without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart." San Juan de la Cruz.
Steven
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Re: Book of Mercy #16-

Post by Steven »

DBCohen and Blonde Madonna,

Thanks to both of you for such considered posts. :)

Leonard covered a full gamut of emotions, as DBCohen pointed out quite well. And
I like that Leonard did so; it reflects an openness to a fuller experience of life, that,
regrettably, many people are closed off from. But, the willingness to appropriately
feel and express sadness (concurrent with free flowing tears) can allow for a process
of healing or change that can ease into an experience of joy. His specific language,
here, of the drawing back of the tears, seems out of synch with what he intended to convey. At the very least, the words appear to me to be clumsey.
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blonde madonna
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Re: Book of Mercy #16-

Post by blonde madonna »

Thank you for your grace DBCohen. I agree that the BoL poem I quoted has an ironic tone. I think Cohen can be quick to use this, as a way of undercutting what he says, but there are ideas that just keep repeating in his work so they must be important to him.

I will think more about what I am saying about ‘I’ and True Self because it is an idea I have only started playing with when I think about the prayers (in fact it came to me as I wrote that post) and I need to unpack it more. Fans of Leonard Cohen are prone to reading everything he writes as autobiographical (compare this to the way Dylan songs are received). Is it because he is such a charismatic figure? I feel it is a way that his writing has been devalued over the years.

Steven I liked what you said about the connection between sadness and joy. Is it that one cannot exist without the other? However, I don’t think the line ‘You drew the tears back to my eyes.’ is clumsy. I read the word ‘drew’ as a reference to the word veil, as in ‘veil of tears’. As both you and DBC say, it could be a good thing, I’m not sure. Isn’t it part of the beauty of these words that we can’t fix on a meaning?

I had a feeling you would like that last line Mat (and yet you quote the Bible when it suits you, I’m confused). It is the different perspectives on BoM that make this discussion interesting. I don’t read this as a Jewish book but it is fascinating to learn of the possible allusions to the Talmud and the teachings of the Kabbalah. Now Mat please explain
The sure path of any apostate.
The sure path of the individuated seeker.
I’m off to think, over to you.
the art of longing’s over and it’s never coming back

1980 -- Comedy Theatre, Melbourne
1985 -- State Theatre, Melbourne
2008 -- Hamilton, Toronto, Cardiff
2009 -- Rochford Winery, Yarra Valley
2010 -- Melbourne
2013 -- Melbourne, The Hill Winery, Geelong, Auckland
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