You’re drifting away from shore. You’ve practised ventriloquism for so long your cries sound like someone else’s. I can hardly make out your features. You’re not flailing yet, but I know the currents are strong. I got caught in them once, and I’ll build a fortress out of honest isolation before I let anyone tempt me out there again. Don’t look back for help. Turn around and search the horizon for the banks of your fake Jericho while you still can.
I recall the furtive languor with which we dressed and silent as accomplices made our way down the gloomy staircase into the street. We did not dare to link arms, but our hands kept meeting involuntarily as we walked, as if they had not shaken of the spell of the afternoon and could not bear to be separated. We parted speechlessly too, in the little square with its dying trees burnt to the colour of toffee by the sun; parted with only one look - as if we wished to take up emplacements in each other’s mind forever.
It was as if the whole city had crashed about my ears; I walked about in it as aimlessly as survivors must walk about the streets of their native city after an earthquake, amazed to find how much that had been familiar was changed. I felt in some curious way deafened and remember nothing more except that much later I ran into Pursewarden and Pombal in a bar. And when Pombal said: ‘You are abstracted this evening. What is the matter?’ I felt like answering him in the words of the dying Amr: ‘I feel as if heaven lay close upon the earth and I between them both, breathing through the eye of a needle.’
Lawrence Durrell
I want to thank the guardians
of the current state of beauty
for taking such pains to
touch me so lightly
or not at all
for disregarding
my old dishonoured horizon
and pointing me to this hole
where I can shed my
last skin of doubt
wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you
That is the background of the whole record, I mean if you have to come up with a philosophical ground, that is. “Ring the bells that still can ring.” It’s no excuse… the dismal situation.. and the future is no excuse for an abdication of your own personal responsibilities towards yourself and your job and your love. “Ring the bells that still can ring”: they’re few and far between but you can find them. “Forget your perfect offering”, that is the hang-up, that you’re gonna work this thing out. Because we confuse this idea and we’ve forgotten the central myth of our culture which is the expulsion from the garden of Eden. This situation does not admit of solution or perfection. This is not the place where you make things perfect, neither in your marriage, nor in your work, nor anything, nor your love of God, nor your love of family or country. The thing is imperfect. And worse, there is a crack in everything that you can put together, physical objects, mental objects, constructions of any kind. But that’s where the light gets in, and that’s where the resurrection is and that’s where the return, that’s where the repentance is. It is with the confrontation, with the brokenness of things.
Leonard Cohen on the meaning of Anthem, from Diamonds in the Line
She parted the valley of her thighs for him only when she knew they’d taken each other’s pride. When she finally saw that he’d clawed his own back for good, she packed and left. There was nothing he could do about it. He’d made his choice, even if it didn’t seem like a choice. Soon he was back on the hidden road inside himself that he’d always hated.
Something about you that I can’t shake,
Don’t know how much of this I can take,
Baby I’m under your spell.
I was knocked out and loaded in the naked night.
When my last dream exploded, I noticed your light.
Baby, oh what a story I could tell.
It’s been nice seeing you, you read me like a book
If you ever want to reach me, you know where to look.
Baby, I’ll be at the same hotel.
I’d like to help you but I’m in a bit of a jam,
I’ll call you tomorrow if there’s phones where I am.
Baby, caught between heaven and hell.
I’ll see you later when I’m not so out of my head,
Maybe next time I’ll let the dead bury the dead.
Baby, what more can I tell?
Well the desert is hot, the mountain is cursed,
Pray that I don’t die of thirst,
Baby, two feet from the well.
Bob Dylan and Carole Bayer Sager
Oh, the hours I’ve spent inside the Coliseum,
Dodging lions and wasting time.
Oh, those mighty kings of the jungle, I could hardly stand to see ‘em,
Yes, it sure has been a long, hard climb.
Train wheels running through the back of my memory,
When I ran on the hilltop following a pack of wild geese.
Someday, everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody
When I paint my masterpiece.
Bob Dylan
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