Courting the song

It’s basically like a courting process, like hunting women. Most of the time it’s a hassle. And you feel you’re not really getting as much as you should, and you’re unsatisfied. And from time to time there doesn’t seem to be anything you can do. Of course from time to time you connect. The time you don’t connect, you just kind of scratch.

Leonard Cohen (on songwriting)

The forking paths

I can no longer ignore them, these guides (if that’s what they are). They call me over the hills, pull me into a night I can’t refuse and say, Enter it and swallow it though it confuses you totally - only then might dawn break through from beyond your broken song, from where you are not, and emerge saying, I assent so you can praise; when will you stop trying to impress me with your own music? At times like these there’s nothing but night and dawning. All is seduction and undergoing, the touching of things to life or death, and forking paths in gardens of desperation. No, I can’t woo them, my guides (if that’s what they are), nor master their current, not be one with it, but stay, perhaps, and listening to the roar, feel my way in.