On nights like this 3

LC: Well, you know, there’s depression and depression. What I mean by depression in my own case is that depression isn’t just the blues. It’s not just like I have a hangover in the weekend… the girl didn’t show up or something like that, it isn’t that. It’s not really depression, it’s a kind of mental violence which stops you from functioning properly from one moment to the next. You lose something somewhere and suddenly you’re gripped by a kind of angst of the heart and of the spirit…

Leonard Cohen, from a French interview (trans. Nick Halliwell)

On nights like this 2

Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight,
let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels.
Let not even one of the clearly struck hammers of my heart
fail to sound because of a slack, a doubtful,
or an ill-tempered string. Let my joyfully streaming face
make me more radiant; let my hidden weeping arise
and blossom. How dear you will be to me then, you nights
of anguish. Why didn’t I kneel more deeply to accept you,
inconsolable sisters, and, surrendering, lose myself
in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
to see if they have an end. Though they are really
seasons of us, our winter-
enduring foliage, ponds, meadows, our inborn landscape,
where birds and reed-dwelling creatures are at home.

Rilke (trans. Stephen Mitchell)

On nights like this

The Only Poem

This is the only poem
I can read
I am the only one
can write it
I didn’t kill myself
when things went wrong
I didn’t turn
to drugs or teaching
I tried to sleep
but when I couldn’t sleep
I learned to write
I learned to write
what might be read
on nights like this
by one like me

Leonard Cohen

A very bad story

On the growing list of forbidden words:

auburn
apologetic
frantic
as soon as my/his/her head hits the pillow
finally
I was ____ when ____ happened.
cosmic
chortle/chortled

Thus I now present a very bad story:

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The Answer

I was ready for them when they finally came — at least I thought I was. They pretended to be gentle and apologetic, but I saw through them. I knew where they wanted to take me. Sure enough, their masks soon dropped. They told me it was a safe place but I knew there were no safe places left. I told them what I had been whispered in the seventy tongues: that we had poisoned the clouds and mutilated God’s mouth, and that even the seat of mercy was turning against us. When I saw one of them chortle at me behind his hand, I lost it. I was frantic for the state of all the burning gaping hearts in hell with no answer, awaiting us as if we had anything that could help them. They surrounded me and one of them managed to stick me. My blood slowed and my limbs melted. I dropped down into myself like a pebble sinking into deep water. The vision began as soon as my head hit the pillow: I was being swallowed by a great auburn-scaled snake. It wound through jungles, cities, oceans, devouring all it could, and grew bigger and bigger until the very Earth was too small for it. It coiled through the cosmos, through the seven rivers of fire and the seven of hail, drew down the stars and terrorised the sun. And I saw that the world had been forsaken, that the throne of glory had finally withdrawn from our abominations, leaving the universe a dead machine, and that there would be no crystal waters for us, only the terrible second death that we ourselves had chosen.

The vogue of ordinariness

Most contemporary novels are not really ‘written’. They obtain what reality they have largely from an accurate rendering of the noises that human beings currently make in their daily simple needs of communication; and what part of a novel is not composed of these noises consists of a prose which is no more alive than that of a competent newspaper writer or government official. A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel-reader is not prepared to give.

From T.S. Eliot’s preface to Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, 1927

.

Certain producers of plain prose have conned the reading public into believing that only in prose plain, humdrum or flat can you articulate the mind of inarticulate ordinary Joe. Even to begin to do that you need to be more articulate than Joe, or you might as well tape-record him and leave it at that. This minimalist vogue depends on the premise that only an almost invisible style can be sincere, honest, moving, sensitive and so forth, whereas prose that draws attention to itself by being revved up, ample, intense, incandescent or flamboyant turns its back on something almost holy - the human bond with ordinariness. I doubt if much unmitigated ordinariness can exist. As Harold Nicolson, the critic and biographer, once observed, only one man in a thousand is boring, and he’s interesting because he’s a man in a thousand. Surely the passion for the plain, the homespun, the banal, is itself a form of betrayal, a refusal to look honestly at a complex universe, a get-poor-quick attitude that wraps up everything in simplistic formulas never to be inspected for veracity or substance. Got up as a cry from the heart, it is really an excuse for dull and mindless writing, larded over with the democratic myth that says this is how most folks are. Well, most folks are lazy, especially when confronted with a book, and some writers are lazy too, writing in the same anonymous style as everyone else.

Paul West

The man on the other bank

You, who’ve watched me through my own eyes all my life. My brother, my enemy. You, standing on the other bank, witnessing. I imagined you tut-tutting at my histrionics, accusing me by your very presence of being incapable of reform, back there where I was armed and mad and ready to destroy you if it killed me. I called you a coward and tried to scream you out of your silence. But you followed me. You live on behind the names I give you, like all the women I’ve berated myself for not winning and all the men who reached the courts of symmetry before me. On calm days I know we’re one but separate; I let you work out our destiny through me as I know I must. On happy days I even see in you my perfect reflection, my self fulfilled through no move of my own. But this isn’t one of those days. I drank all night in a locked room, and I’m hostile. Today I belong back there where I came from, I don’t know why I’ve come all this way. I don’t know who you are. Today I hate you: you make me cryptic, turn me against myself.

.

 

(Matt Magee, Double Daimon II)

I’ll unmask myself forever

Though I pant beneath you and unfurl like a nightflower, you’ll never have me. Though I offer up my body for pillage and flatter your pride, you’ll never have me. Though you try to change me, you’ll never have me. When you try to change me I’ll change myself and change again before your eyes. I’ll unmask myself forever. Because you boast of possession, you can’t own me. Your outlook is weak, your methods are wrong. You’re in the wrong universe. The spoils you think you own are not mine and therefore not yours. Do you know who you are? No matter what state of Himalayan purity you think you’ve achieved, no matter where you build your temple, I’ll always be a lie to you.

Ungraspable One

Don’t think that I’m wooing.
Angel, and even if I were, you would not come. For my call
is always filled with departure; against such a powerful
current you cannot move. Like an outstretched arm
is my call. And its hand, held open and reaching up
to seize, remains in front of you, open
as if in defense and warning,
Ungraspable One, far above.

Rilke (trans. Stephen Mitchell)

Venlafaxine

Before, she felt weak and unreal. She played people up against each other and made enemies. Her gaze was a trap for anyone with an open face. She felt guilty about nothing and lost all inspiration. Her clients stopped calling. After, the world slowly came into focus again. She looked though herself and into the world. She started talking to people as equals. One day she found herself turning on her laptop and opening the programme for the first time in months. She only made squiggles, but they meandered more freely than they used to. Soon she was creating large-scale designs that flowed from her mind as naturally as a spring flows down a mountain. New clients called. She looked at her plants with solicitude – she spoke to them and found better places for them. She cleaned blinds and lampshades and stood pursing: her house needed attention, rearrangement: there was work to be done.

An unsung song by Leonard Cohen

The Embrace

When you stumble suddenly
into his full embrace,
he hides away so not to see
his creature face to face.
You yourself are hidden too,
with all your sins of state;
there is no king to pardon you;
his mercy is more intimate.

He does not stand before you,
he does not dwell within;
this passion has no point of view,
it is the heart of everything.
There is no hill to see this from.
You share one body now
with the serpent you forbid,
and with the dove that you allow.

The imitations of his love
he suffers patiently,
until you can be born with him
some hopeless night in Galilee;
until you lose your pride in him,
until your faith objective fails,
until you stretch your arms so wide
you do not need these Roman nails.

Idolators on every side,
they make an object of the Lord.
They hang him on a cross so high
that you must ever move toward.
They bid you cast the world aside
and hurl your prayers at him.
Then the idol-makers dance all night
upon your suffering.

But when you rise from his embrace
I trust you will be strong and free
and tell no tales about his face,
and praise Creation joyously.

Leonard Cohen