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There are 89 entries for possibles idiomatic expressions with to fall + other words in the Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English; from fall about one's ears to fall within. But no, there is no to fall up.

Simon,

Neither of those two books includes illustrations, so this one was created by someone who interpreted their ideas in a certain way, and I would have liked to know who that person was. That’s why I asked where you found it.

Sefer Yetzirah – Book of Creation – is a very short “book”, about 3 pages long, but it exists in many versions and hundreds of elaborate interpretations. It is one of the greatest riddles in Jewish history, because it appeared suddenly in the 10th century, and there is no way of finding out who wrote it or when. It includes an original cosmologic system, according to which God has “chiseled” (not “created”) the world with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the numbers 1-10. There is a mention of “six ends”, but the author also plays with other numbers, and there is no special priority to the number six. Sefer HaZoahr – The Book of Splendor – on the other hand, is a huge book, printed usually in 3 thick volumes and a forth of later additions. People often found in it whatever they wished to find.

Tom Sakic wrote:

Leonard Cohen wrote:I thought it was my own design, but much later I read in a book of Jewish history that such a design was discovered in the ruins of an ancient synagogue in Asia Minor. The book did not give an illustration of the decoration, but described it, I believe, as "interlocking hearts". Very recently I learned that a German pharmaceutical company uses the design as their logo. I don't know where they got it from. Perhaps it predates my own design. Somewhere in my notebooks from the early eighties there is my own first crude sketch, two hearts, one on the other, one up, one down, but not interlocking. The interlocking, common to renditions of The Star of David, was drawn by an artist at McClelland & Stewart, my Canadian publisher.

Designer's name is stated on back cover of the book = "cover design: Michael van Elsen".

I started reading BoM to follow this thread, and I noticed that the word 'loneliness' is repeated time and again, in the context of being distanced from God. That got me thinking about the theme of loneliness in human relationships in LC's work. There is a large overlap between being exiled from self and others, and difficulty in spiritual endeavour/closeness to God.

I'm sure this must have been discussed before, but I am struck by the distance in the relationships between the men and women in his songs, particularly the early ones. The women in the songs are cold and remote: "I lived with a child of snow"; "You stand there so nice, in your blizzard of ice"; "Why do you stand by the window, abandoned to beauty and pride?" "Our lady of solitude"; "her words were few and small". There is no real connection or intimacy in these relationships.

These cold, aloof women are attractive: "Something in me yearns to win such a cold and lonesome heroine"; "I love your solitude, I love your pride."

The relationships where there are real connections seem to be those which remain platonic: Suzanne (you've touched her perfect body with your mind), and The Sisters of Mercy (We weren't lovers like that...I made my confession to them). But in Chelsea Hotel no2, for example, there is no meeting of minds, and no confession.

There is the impression that Leonard's songs are concerned with trying to reach the divine through a woman, but not with her. Take that other oral sex song, Light as the Breeze:

So I knelt there at the delta,
at the alpha and the omega,
at the cradle of the river and the seas.
And like a blessing come from heaven
for something like a second
I was healed and my heart
was at ease.

I cannot help but wonder about the woman in that song. Where was she at the moment her man's heart was blessed, healed and at ease? Not even making eye-contact with him. He might have made her feel good, but he wasn't with her, heart-to-heart, he was on his own. In fact, it sounds like he soon recovered from his reverie and left her physically alone too:

It's dark now and it's snowing
O my love I must be going,
The river has started to freeze.
And I'm sick of pretending...

I can't find anything in that song about the deep love and connection men and women can experience in a sexual relationship, on the contrary:

Then she dances so graceful
and your heart's hard and hateful
and she's naked
but that's just a tease.
And you turn in disgust...

This lack of intimacy inevitably leads to loneliness. If your heart is hard even as she dances, it sounds pretty hopeless, and if "your loneliness says that you've sinned" (from Sisters of Mercy, as opposed to Book of), deep down you must be feeling unworthy of revealing yourself to the other.

Of course, men and women seem to each want a slightly different balance from love and sex, so it could be that I am over-stating things a little. As Simon pointed out elsewhere, men are more interested in the 'oui' than the 'we'. Yet men want the 'we' too, and get there via the 'oui', n'est pas?

(Jumping forward quite a few years from the songs I've quoted, Blue Alert seems to be more about "we"...)

The song Hallelujah admits that the 'Hallelujah' of love has been cold and broken. That song says (as others noted in the Hallelujah thread): this is my reality; I am painfully exiled from love, "I couldn't feel so I tried to touch", and I honour this as the place where I stand right now. "I told the truth"; I am sharing my truth as it is, and therein lies intimacy with self/other/God.

From this point of view, in the current psalm, God is accepting him even though he has fallen into a state of "disgrace". Maybe that's why falling feels so good?

My twopenneth.

Diane

Your substantive "twopenneth" worth many fold more, Diane. Thanks for bringing all that together here. Excellent, relevant observations. It brings the comfort of the fall into a valid light. Your analysis really resonates with/for me.


~ Lizzy

Diane wrote:
My twopenneth.

You might not think that there is a lot that one can do with two pennies these days but that is not so. Near my house there is a mall and in that mall they have one of those large round plexiglass receptors of charity. When you drop your two pennies in there you can watch as they spiral together toward the center where they drop into a place where you cannot see but you know is for the common good.
There is something more we in two pennies than in just one.

I very much like what you wrote.

Diane wrote:(Jumping forward quite a few years from the songs I've quoted, Blue Alert seems to be more about "we"...)

In such an extraordinary way. I can't find a single line on the CD that couldn't be sung either by a man or a woman and have it make sense.

Jack

Psalm I.9

Blessed are you who has given each man a shield of loneliness so that he cannot forget you. You are the truth of loneliness, and only your name addresses it. Strengthen my loneliness that I may be healed in your name, which is behond all consolations that are uttered on this earth. Only in your name can I stand in the rush of time, only when this loneliness is yours can I lift my sins toward you mercy.

So we have reached number 9, John Lennon's mystical number...

Diane, you actually have timely and beautifuly introduced psalm I.9. Unless I am mistaken, the word 'loneliness' appears here in number 9 for the first time in the book. And it appears four times in eight lines, so it comes in almost as a shock treatement or almost as a cry for help.

What you are touching upon is very central I think in understanding LC's work, central in my own life, and I'd risk saying central in any man's life. So it may be that the discussion on this short psalm will be a rather long one. Now that we enticed you into reading the book again keep throwing your two pennies at us, please.

I'll give my perception of this psalm shortly.

We have moved away from the buddhist angle slowly and it seems it will remain so until about psalm I.22.

Diane wrote:(Jumping forward quite a few years from the songs I've quoted, Blue Alert seems to be more about "we"...)

But in Blue Alert the "we" is kind of expressed as an 'agreement'...

We’re joined in the spirit
Joined at the hip
Joined in the panic
Wondering if
We’ve come to some sort
Of agreement

from Thanks For The Dance

Whose panic? Thanks For The Dance is a song of loneliness.

Diane wrote: Of course, men and women seem to each want a slightly different balance from love and sex, so it could be that I am over-stating things a little. As Simon pointed out elsewhere, men are more interested in the 'oui' than the 'we'. Yet men want the 'we' too, and get there via the 'oui', n'est pas?

I already felt that I have posted too much in response to 1.8 and thought I had reached the end but I am a sucker for a good question and your's above seems to be as good as they get and I would like to try and answer it at least from my point of view.

I don't think the significence of the fact that we are born into this world so ignorant and helpless can be overestimated. We are born in the face of mystery and in the face of mystery we begin to experience the world and those who are sharing in the experience. Others who have come before us do what they can to provide us with something to help us cope with mystery but often it is just a denying that mystery exists. What is often the best tool to help us relate to what no one knows completely is myth.

When the sense of mystery is too overpowering we sometimes find that we are left hanging by myth alone and all other so called wisdom seems secondary. At this point if myth fails us we are left with no other choice than to discover our own. In trying to understand why we are born male and female and what part romantic love and sex plays in the face of mystery I felt that I was forced to find my own myth. Maybe if I would have gone to school more I might have found one that was suitable but I didn't and so it led to my own little myth tale and your question draws it from me. Here it is.

I have no way of knowing if it is true or not other than it feels true to me. I don't think of myself as anyone special and so I think it is also true of all men.

I was born in the year 1950. This was the same year that the pope of the catholic church proclaimed the Assumption of Mary.  Carl Jung was later to remark that he felt that this was the most significant event of the century.  He did so because during the course of his lifetime work dealing with the events of the psyche he had been witnessing the emergence of the female aspect of divinity.
As human beings we sometimes feel balanced as a bird of the wire, balanced between heaven and earth, between the sacred and the profane, love and fear, matter and ghost.  We have to make decisions constantly- do we strive after love for God or love for a woman?  Is that a conflict?  Can it be resolved? If I come to think that there is no conflict then how am I seeing the world that I live in?  As a man how am I seeing women?
Men are different than women.
Women are continuous, only women can conceive, gestate and give birth to both female and male humans.  They are the continuation of human life regenerating eternally. Because of this they are able to 'feel' the connection of this continuation. They are beautiful, caring, feeling  beings and it is very understandable to like them and the feeling warmth that they can provide. Men, on the other hand men are discontinuous with a biological function of activating the birth process.
This not being continuous is terrifying beyond a woman's wildest imagination. "Mother I'm frightened of the thunder and lightning I'll never come through this alone" Women are able to recirculate their offspring through generation after generation trying to get it right. Men are terrified and want to get back in and this accounts for this drive we have toward sex.
I think that women can know fear only to the extent that they know men and men can only know love to the extent that they can know women.
It is our contact once again with the female and her continuousness.  If we could get right back into the womb we would. We have some kind of connection with women and that accounts for any feelings of harmony and caring we have.  It is not part of our male nature. To the degree that we are separate from relation with women we have no feelings of compassion. Although our natural inclination is to just get back in we also have deep within our memory an experience of being within the female and during this time we got to see and experience the Goddess within womanhood.
She was beautiful and appealing beyond anything that we will ever experience separate from her and she made it clear to us that we are being sent out because she needs us to do something that will please her and we can imagine no reward so great than pleasing her. As a man disconnected from the continuousness I long for relation with Her.
"When will she summon me, when will she come for me, what must I do to prepare? "
What do I know about Her? Well She seems to be concerned with ALL Her children.  Will she accept what these useless hands have done? This longing from my tongue?  How do I direct my actions so that they are directed by a heart that is complete compassion when my heart without Her is an empty shell? This is what men ask themselves, and we come again and again to the mystery of the attraction between men and women and thousands of kisses and touches confirm that this mystery contains the key. We go to women to be healed, but we go in a twofold way.  Balanced between love and fear and time after time it is the fear that controls the situation.  When we get close to women it is not the Goddess that we are meeting.  Not the one who is concerned with the whole human race but we meet one who is concerned only with her very private needs which manifest as greed. Like hummingbirds we adapted ourselves to derive sweetness from the contact. We keep thinking that if we satisfy all the needs that it will lead to the relation that we are longing for but it doesn't.  Then we start to question what brought us into contact - on both sides.  Did I come to her door because of my fear and was I looking to find a way to avoid accepting new and strange social responsibilities and just trying to get back into the womb. Was she attracted to me because I offered her a way to keep her personal needs alive and fed. Is this the role of a ladies-man? I thought that Leonard's book and music of Death of a Ladies-man was very much a turning point for him. I think it was a time when he saw that men and women were not being for each other that which was going to lead to freedom and happiness. It was time to die.
Then something new. He wrote “I want to try your charity until you cry now you must try my greed “
I've thought about that line a lot and I couldn't get it to make any sense to me until I thought of it as a very radical change in his relationship to women.  Here seemed to be a man taking a stand and addressing the Goddess in the woman he meets saying "Yes I will be in relation with you because I see that we can share love, but I am just a man and if you put the weight of your needs on me I will fail you. I believe in love and I believe in She that is within you and if we base our relation upon my devotion to Her then when my relation is established enough She will be able to direct my satisfying your needs as well. I have been writing about this from the male point of view but my thoughts also contain considerations of how this can be seen from the female side which I will keep silent about. There has been some talk in some of the women's newsgroups that biologically women can get by without men and that this might be the preferred situation.  I think that men have some gifts to offer. The Goddess seems to want these gifts to be able to do the most good for all the people in the shortest time. We don't know how to do that as well as women and we need their help in finding the practical application of what these hands and heart and mind and soul can do. You can't help us do that unless you are attuned to the Goddess within.
Do men and women find a way to be in relation where it is reflecting a marriage that is happening in Heaven?  Can they find a way not to put the burden upon each other?

The eternal feminine leadeth us
Ever upward and on!

(Goethe, Faust ll. 12110-12111)

Yes, I'm with you Jack. I have my own phrasing for what you are describing but the core is the same. Very cohenesque, that's why we are here I guess. It's been a while since I tried to structure my thoughts on the matter of the feminine, but it was a constant preocupation in my twenties and thirties. It reminds me now of 'L'éternel Féminin' by Teilhard de Chardin. I'll have to come back later to the matter. no time for now.

The loneliness evoqued now in psalm I.9 could point to the narrator's relation to the feminine. But maybe not. The first thing that crossed my mind upon reading the psalm the first time was that it may relate to the mystic's retreat from the world leading to direct contact with the divine. Moses on the mountain, Jesus and Mohamed in the desert. Buddha at the foot of the holy tree. Saint John of the Cross is a good exemple of the mystics of loneliness and silence. In native American spirituality the vision quest ritual is another exemple where the seeker retreats in loneliness in the wild, often fasting for days on until a vision is attained. This seems to contradict psalm I.3

This is what it's like to study without a friend.

Here now loneliness is desired as the priviledged way to the devine. It could also be interpreted as a refuge from the «consolations that are uttered on this earth» (women?). Maybe in I.3 the narrator is speaking as a layman, and in I.9 he is speaking as a Cohen.

This is going to be a mere brush of the totality... like the dove's wing against the sphere of the Earth. You've written so much of great depth, and I wonder how many women reading it are as astounded as I am, that you've done so much peeling away and studying of the layers, in the ways you have, to arrive at your own myth; and how many men are saying, "Yes! He's got it!" or "That's not how I feel about it." Impossible, with the lack of time, to explore what you've written in any depth at all; however, still wanted to ask about a couple things. The first quote [below] at first seems to be inaccurate [the reduction and magnification of needs to "greed"], and/or that you're approaching the woman in an idealized way, such that she should have no needs of her own... and if/since she does, she's transformed in your [men's eyes] into an ugly form... no longer a lovely creature of nurture, but rather a monster of consumption... of you.

Not the one who is concerned with the whole human race but we meet one who is concerned only with her very private needs which manifest as greed.

Yet, later, you seem to answer this with:

"Yes I will be in relation with you because I see that we can share love, but I am just a man and if you put the weight of your needs on me I will fail you. I believe in love and I believe in She that is within you and if we base our relation upon my devotion to Her then when my relation is established enough She will be able to direct my satisfying your needs as well."

Am I reading this right? Are you suggesting that it's more about process, the beginning of which is filled with halts and fear and assessments/reassessments. However, other things being equal [other, numerous variables], if the process is trusted and followed through upon, the outcome should be/will be symbiotically fine?

I'm really struck by all that you've written and have, clearly, thought much about, more than once and for greater than a second... as you've sought your own heart to be at ease.


~ Lizzy

Diane says:

"There is the impression that Leonard's songs are concerned with trying to reach the divine through a woman, but not with her."

"I cannot help but wonder about the woman in that song. Where was she at the moment her man's heart was blessed, healed and at ease? Not even making eye-contact with him. He might have made her feel good, but he wasn't with her, heart-to-heart, he was on his own. In fact, it sounds like he soon recovered from his reverie and left her physically alone too:"

These observations are clarifying for me Diane, with regard to the relationships Leonard "does not develop" with women.
You could say that his incapacity to love is almost reptilian.
We are all capable of this "distance" but you seem to be pointing out that it is the "norm" for Leonard. And it is this distance from the ability to love that perhaps disgusts Leonard himself.

One could suggest a degree of autism here?

I'm enjoying all the posts, but this observation, for me, is the high point so far. It really makes me wonder about what it is that lures us to his work.

Matj.

lizzytysh wrote:Am I reading this right? Are you suggesting that it's more about process, the beginning of which is filled with halts and fear and assessments/reassessments. However, other things being equal [another large set of variables], if the process is trusted and followed through upon, the outcome should be/will be symbiotically fine?
~ Lizzy

Yes you seem to be reading this completely right and it's very encouraging.

It's one thing to have a myth and quite another to have one that you have tested out and had it sustain you. I'm trying to do that and so far it hasn't failed me, but I haven't gone very far. Just a beginning and I can never be sure about the outcome.
It seems that it is from a very alone place that it is possible to give women the distance they need to see what a man is.
"you won't hear my voice till it's far far away"
If I am putting my trust in what deep in my heart I believe to be the female God principal which is in every woman then to approach Her from this far away place I should approach how I see Her to be in my heart. For example I see that she seems to be concerned equally for all and so that is why it seemed so important for me when in this discussion to have you be a part of it because you seemed to manifest that aspect of the Goddess. You seem to find it easy to be accepting of all who come.
In other places where I am in dealings with women who are not so open I try in my own little way to awaken that concern for all rather than her concern for me especially. I hope by taking these small little steps that eventually I will be trusted with larger ones.
I like the line from a Dylan song that goes " I'll show you just how faithful and true a man can be" It seems like such a pure statement and the key word seems to be "can". That "can" might fall far short of what most women want a man to be for them but the best we can do as men is show them at least what it is and let them decide for themselves if it will do. The guide for that seems to be burning in our hearts. As Simon has pointed out this is reflected very well in the works of St. John of the Cross.
There is no reason that I should, because I seemed to have failed love so often, but I am just starting to feel like I am in love and it is a love that hasen't failed even though all the signs of failure are there.
Does that make any sense?

Topics into the topic again.

1) mystical numbers - I remember having read an Isaac Asimov's (very) short story about numerology which I think, like kabala, has Jewish roots? Am I right or wrong?

2) Before saying that a man - or a woman - can not - or can - love, I am in the opinion that the meaning of the world (I like this freudian slippery I keep it) love should be examined in every sides possible - down and up in the falls and raise.

Here is an appetizer, free are you, spirits, to develop on the subject :

A honest reading of - and thinking about that page should not bring any person to answer to this second topic into the topic before tomorrow, otherwise I'll consider this as a bird's brain answer. Sorry. Nothing personal. Just honesty.

http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Love




As for myself I just don't believe in romantic love which is the kind most in fashion in our culture - so unconsciously carved in our minds that we can not see all other meanings.

For me I would prefer respect as a person in a whole - different but a complete person.

Also it is difficult to respect an object, either this object is kept under control under a tchador or exposed nude in presence of all dressed up persons. It is the same thing. Both sides of the same damned thing.

Who wants to be an object? Even though it is a sacred object? Untouchable and unreachable? Or the contrary, a wore, can of garbage can, without anything human in it?

I prefer much, very much the sacred erotic indian godesse in each woman a lover can see - make of flesh and light, like a real warm living human being.

So it does not surprise me that men who would like to communicate really communicate with women in our culture had/has a lot of difficulty and vice versa.


3) Another topic (they are countless the topics, rays of the sun, that can be created from this thread):

Indians poetry uses a lot the image of the desired woman for the man to reach his "God" (or whatever it is called), just like Leonard Cohen.