Book of Mercy #8-10

[lazariuk]

Jack, I think you could equally discuss the weak nuclear force that holds us all together if you want to discuss this in scientific terms.

No I couldn't. Maybe you could. To me that would be like discussing that trolls are behind the moon to make the tides rise.

I am not opposed to changing the terms, but I really don't think that Leonard was considering Einstein when he wrote this work.

I have no way of knowing if that is true or not. I do get the sense that his direct contact with nature seems to be central to what inspired him, as In: The birds they sang at the break of day, start again I heard them say. The two Catholic saints he honored were the two patron saints of the environment. The founder of the hasidim who he seems to hold in esteem was known as the one who could talk to the birds and other animals.

I think that Leonard would consider anyone who was looking at the facts of our experience in an honest way. I don't mind looking at the Bible viewpoint as well though as it is a very central book in my life.

Jack[/quote]

[lizzytysh]

Yes ~ I understand that uneasiness and your reasons for it. It also seems to have oft been used as a 'dividing' mechanism [the evolved/the unevolved], when it would seem that the intent of the lessons to be learned through such experiences would be the reverse of division... the true and deep understanding of the commonality between people.

Well, I'm tired, too tired, to try to express what I really want to here... so I think I'll call it a night.

It < < < < "Night!"


~ Lizzy

[tomsakic]

Tom, you mentioned that there was in fact 150 original psalms of which he selected 50 to mark his 50th anniversary.

Well, I can't recall I ever said this, maybe you read it in one of 1985 interviews you scanned? This is actually first news to me that there was 150 psalms. Seems much writing!

Then the exile closed around me.

I was surprised that nobody picked up here the idea of ‘exile’. ‘Exile’ will come up again in the psalms. Exile from what, from where? He is known as the ‘canadien errant’ and he’s mentioned feeling exiled here and there over time in his work and in interviews.

Probably you're right: exiled from Israel (as being Jew), exiled from Canada (being "canadien errant"), exiled from poetry (writer's block was pretty big on LC those days), then maybe conception of life itself as the exile (from G-d? from Eden? from Mercy?).

Also, Book of Mercy was mostly written in France, as Judith Fitzgerald wrote here in October - in Villa Vaucluse in Villefranche-sur-mer. That was somwhere in the middle of Solitude and Loneliness thread in Everything Else (this link leads directly to her post).

So maybe the literally reference was exxile in France at the time (when probably piece "Why I Love France" from Book of Longing was written; as I wrote earlier, its prose structure reminds me of pieces from Book of Mercy, and there's similar merging of political metaphor and God as we will see later in Book of Mercy).

And not only France, but Hydra also; maybe it was some kind of exile from Canada. I mention this because - even he didn't go to Hydra for ten years during his monastery period, I have firm proof by one local journalist that he visited LC on Hydra in early 1980s, in period of Book of Mercy's writing (they anyhow listened to early demos of Hallelujah in c.1982 on portable LP).

[DBCohen]

I was surprised that nobody picked up here the idea of ‘exile’. ‘Exile’ will come up again in the psalms. Exile from what, from where? He is known as the ‘canadien errant’ and he’s mentioned feeling exiled here and there over time in his work and in interviews. Here maybe he felt exiled from his creative power, wasted on female humours or on his own semen.

I have mentioned earlier briefly the meaning of “exile” in Jewish context, and said I’ll return to it later, but I didn’t have the chance to do so yet. Meanwhile Tom posted with a detailed reference to the life of LC when writing BoM, and I would like to caution against this approach. Even if we don’t wish to adopt Derrida’s dictum that “there is nothing outside the text”, and even if we no longer go along with Barth about “The Death of the Author” and the rest of the structuralist business, I believe that we should try to learn as much as we can from the text itself, and not try to interpret everything in it in terms of the author’s life, because it is easy to go astray when we follow this path. I too may have been guilty of this practice before, and I’m not sure I can totally free myself of this approach henceforth, since it is impossible to free our minds totally of what we know about the author, but it is worth keeping that in mind, if we can.

[DBCohen]

DBCohen I can't help but to see this with Christian's eyes, the crucifixion. And add to this your comment about "he" being God and Man, as Jesus is both. God sent His Son as a human being among human beings. It is written that he had to fall in order to succeed in his spiritual mission to be the Savior of humanity - to die and to resurrect from the deads - to bring a new life for humanity, because of God Loves. But at any time Jesus could have refused to do what God had asked him, but he choose to trust his Father, for a God it is easy but for a God in a human body, it was very much like falling. Christinanity is reliated to the Sacred Heart - or if you prefer in buddhist terms : it is there to open the chakra of the heart in a human being. Jesus said : "I am the light, I am the life, follow me and you'll have the eternal life".

When I read the above, Tchoc, I was reminded of the lines: “forsaken almost human / he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone”.

We can never exclude the Christian interpretation when reading LC, although when we started I said that BoM is arguably his most Jewish book. In that sense BL is his most Catholic book, and also his most Canadian, so there is no wonder that it is the book most studied and most analyzed in academic writing, especially in Canada (and rightly so, since it is one of the most important novels of the 1960’s). BoM is very much neglected in comparison (only lately it was taken up, at least partially, by the Jewish scholar Eliot Wolfson). I still feel that the Jewish layer is the basic and the deepest in this book, especially since almost in every psalm we find the language of the Jewish prayer and other Jewish sources. However, there is still a long way to go, and we may have surprises ahead. And the influence of Zen should not be forgotten either, although it did not turn up much after the first three psalms, if I'm not mistaken.

By the way, who’s that fine young lady whom you’ve planted up there?

[lazariuk]

There is one word in this poem that I have a problem with, that I think the editor should have tossed in the garbage, that, to me, seems at best a total waste of ink and could at worse be misleading. That is the word up

It leaves me really puzzled why he used the word up. It reads better without the word.

Jack

[DBCohen]

I don't remember who, but someone earlier breifly mentioned Rudolf Otto.
It's always been at the back of my mind that LC is in fact chasing what Otto calls the numinous. I just thought that it might be worth bringing the concept into the discussions about BoM.

I was going to mention Otto in the framework of our discussion on sin, but then he was just one in a long list of sources on this problem that I’ve put together, in both Jewish and Christian sources, from biblical time to modern theologians, but then I thought that we are not going to hold a full-scale theological seminar here, so I saved them all for the time being. But since you’ve brought him up I’ll just say briefly that Otto is credited with reintroducing into Protestant theology the wrath of God, which he shows to have qualities that are like “a hidden force of nature” and have nothing to do with morality. For him, the concept of “sin” is attributed to the feeling of absolute worthlessness and profaneness which a person experiences at the presence of the numinous. Now that's the dark side, but we should certainly look for the bright side as well.

[DBCohen]

LC at one level, maybe percieves feminine beauty as numinous, as an emanation of the divine. In dumbstruck awe he may be fooled in this perception that there is possible salvation in the relation to this beauty or to the feminine. But it may take more then glistenig fingers to reach "I-Thou" or even "I-It" for that mater. This is a continous process of trial and error. Wasn't David hit by the numinous when he first saw Bathsheba on the roof? Could it have been only a matter of lust. The man already had close to 200 wives. Why her? Why her at that precise moment?

Well, here's the bright side, perhaps, but it is also very sensitive stuff, considering the consequences. And even here, in the text itself (I.7) - and let's always go back to the text! - the consequences seem rather grim. It's an attractive suggestion, Simon, but we need to consider it carefully.

[lizzytysh]

Well... this may be aggravating... how some people will just plop something in the middle of the floor and walk away, letting others sift through it, if they want. However, I'm preparing for a meeting, and this idea struck me [not sure if it even has any merit], but if this is nothing but chaff, save a few grains, it'll be great if the grains can be pulled out. If not, well, then, the basket's over there ... or just push it to the side, and I'll sweep it up later.

Still the idea of falling struck me when I read this in the Bob Seger/Steve Inskeep [what are you doing on NPR, Tom ?]... "with reaching to the sky just to surrender", might "failing" be turned into "falling" for here?

This is the excerpt:

"like every dealer he is reaching for the card that is so high and wild, he'll never have to deal another."... He's reaching for the sky just to surrender. And those two things, the title Beautiful Losers from Cohen's book and "reaching for the sky just to surrender," I can relate to that. People who set their goals so high that they're impossible, so they have comfort in failing. Does that make any sense? And that's what "Beautiful Loser" is all about. You... I don't know how to describe it but

. . .

SEGER: . . . How some people are like that.

INSKEEP: Was that guy you?

SEGER: Um, I don't think so. I've always been fairly ambitious (laughs), but I've known a lot of people who are like that, who set themselves up to fail by reaching too far. I think we all do.

INSKEEP: They want to be polite, they want to be nice and they want to be aggressive, they want to be at home, they want to be away.

SEGER: They want it all. And, boy, if there's anything you learn -- Picasso said you learn everything by the time you're 60, but you can't do anything about it (laughs). And that's where I am now. And if there's anything I have learned is that you can't have it all. You sure can't.

If anyone has any interest, do what you will [or won't] with this. I wish I had time right now to see if it even applies.

~ Lizzy

[Tchocolatl]

Lizzytysh, I really wish that you take time to contribute to this thread. You know that I tell things as they are to people, pleasant or not, and I always told you how great are your analysis of Leonard Cohen's work. I read many of them and I keep thinking that you are one of the best at it. I remimber one you sent me in PM not to annoy some people on the board with this, you told me - I consider that in this regard you are much too much too humble - you miss the target not going more often this way ON the board.

[Tchocolatl]

When I read the above, Tchoc, I was reminded of the lines: “forsaken almost human / he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone”.

Me too. But believe me or not I try not to follow every path that came to my mind in order to stay centered on one thing at the time, and this would have pointed out to Suzanne - and then we can consider that there was a numinous experience in me hearing that song at the radio at that particular time et la boucle est bouclée.

"And when he knew for certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said "All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them"
But he himself was broken
Long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone"


It came to my mind because of the idea of the fall, as well as the crack in everything which allow the light to come in.

How much more interesting is a real human being, a mixture of successes and failures in comparaison to the sole image of the personna aperson can be willing to show the world.

This is why I find all the paths taken by Lazariuk in regard of mystery are so interesting and valuable in term of contribution to the discussion.

So I must leave for now, and - of course - I have not exhausted all the potential in your post and other posts by other persons, it is not because I did not read it. I'll come back I don't know when. Cheers!

[Tchocolatl]

I just want to add that :

I look at the meaning of the symbol more than the form of it. Like let say, for example, David Star, well, that is pretty Jewish and nothing else, but deeper than this the symbolism has the same meaning for Christians, Buddhists, Indians, that could be find in there culture/religion too.

Very interesting. Joe, I'll come back on "If it be you will".

OK. Now that is true. I'm out of here.

[Tchocolatl]

Just a last thing, DBCohen : it is because you can explain Book of Mercy from the Jewish religion point of view (a thing I cannot do) that I find all this so interesting and all other paths are like fine rays of the sun, so to speak. Great thread!

[lazariuk]

Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone"

That line makes me think of the painting done by St. John of the Cross of Christ. The view is from above. I was once so moved by the poem "Dark Night of the Soul" by St. John of the Cross that I named my son after him. He is Jacob St. John.

How much more interesting is a real human being, a mixture of successes and failures in comparaison to the sole image of the personna aperson can be willing to show the world.

This is why I find all the paths taken by Lazariuk in regard of mystery are so interesting and valuable in term of contribution to the discussion.

It is very encouraging to hear that my telling my own story can be interesting and valuable in this way. Thanks

I too like hearing how Leonard's work assists people in sorting through the details of their daily lives and gives them a voice to express themselves. His work seems so open to that.

Jack[/quote]

[Simon]

Tom, I don't recall where I got that information about the 150 original psalms. I thought it was from you. I'll try to trace it and come back to it later.