Leonard Cohen: Book of Longing I can't make the hills
The system is shot
I'm living on pills
For which I thank G-d
I followed the course
From chaos to art
Desire the horse
Depression the cart
I go around some street corners and have an idea in my head clear as a picture of time between March and October. I like the cut-out I'm moving around in, slowly, toward change, dying of something, while I just keep on going, at least for the moment - how do you write about still being alive among objects that are all used up and possessions that shine, lists without specifics, so to speak? Some things just wait for me to stop defending myself. In the air shining insects.
No matter the time or place, I’ll always grow for the one who is the sea. With one thin finger cut in half. That is why I’m the oldest recipient of your on-again, off-again love. And that is why I grew up in the desert, with nothing but a single slice of sweet melon.
I’ve made you into a cure, I’ve emulated you. I’ve torn up some of my poems, and procured new ones.
And if I’ve passed too quickly from one situation to the next— Not because of blood, not fatally—but through a kind of companionability, Now, at last, I’m the strength there is in numbers. It’s just a memory, if I clam up, looking at my finger-stub.
As I open my eyes, you’re the sun hung out on the line. You’re a blue child, you’re our love Peering out at me from the middle of a blue warehouse.
“Talking only makes me feel more alone,” you said once in the car outside the clinic. Two years later, you spoke the same sentence word for word one night after friends had gone. Within a month, you’d erased yourself . . . Erased? “To absent oneself,” I found scribbled on a wrapper a year later . . . Now sunlight and tree shadow rush over the windshield of the car: I’m talking with my new wife — then gone, absented. “Sometimes I feel almost too much joy,” you wrote from the balcony of your cheap hotel in Paris. “What are you thinking?” she asks. Light shutters across us. Wherever you are in me I’m there, though it’s not what you wanted. Infidelity by Philip White
I’m one of eight men waiting for the doors of Toys R Us to open in a mall on the eastern tip of Long Island. We’ve come for the Japanese electronic game that’s so hard to find. Last week, I waited three hours for a store in Manhattan to disappoint me. The first today, bundled in six layers, I stood shivering in the dawn light reading the new Aeneid translation, which I hid when the others came, stamping boots and rubbing gloveless hands, joking about sacrificing sleep for ungrateful sons. “My boy broke two front teeth playing hockey,” a man wearing shorts laughs. “This is his reward.” My sons will leap into my arms, remember this morning all their lives. “The game is for my oldest boy, just back from Iraq,” a man in overalls says from the back of the line. “He plays these games in his room all day. I’m not worried, he’ll snap out of it, he’s earned his rest.” These men fix leaks, lay foundations for other men’s dreams without complaint.
Dawn in New York has
four columns of mire
and a hurricane of black pigeons
splashing in the putrid waters.
Dawn in New York groans
on enormous fire escapes
searching between the angles
for spikenards of drafted anguish.
Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth
because morning and hope are impossible there:
sometimes the furious swarming coins
penetrate like drills and devour abandoned children.
Those that go out early know in their bones
there will be no paradise or loves that bloom and die:
they know they will be mired in numbers and laws,
in mindless games, in fruitless labors.
The light is buried under chains and noises
in an impudent challenge to rootless science.
And crowds stagger sleeplessly through the boroughs
as if they had just escaped a shipwreck of blood. "A Poet in New York" by Federico Garcia Lorca
One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes--I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. Frank O'Hara
"Alvy, you're incapable of enjoying life, you know that? I mean you're
like New York City. You're just this person. You're like this island
unto yourself."
Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh. It is easy to display a wound, the proud scars of combat. Leonard Cohen, "The Favorite Game"
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them; Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one: The shapes a bright container can contain! Of her choice virtues only gods should speak, Or English poets who grew up on Greek (I'd have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek.)
How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin, She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and stand; She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin: I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand; She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake, Coming behind her for her pretty sake (But what prodigious mowing did we make.)
Love likes a gander, and adores a goose: Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize; She played it quick, she played it light and loose; My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees; Her several parts could keep a pure repose, Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose (She moved in circles, and those circles moved.)
Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay: I'm martyr to a motion not my own; What's freedom for? To know eternity. I swear she cast a shadow white as stone. But who would count eternity in days? These old bones live to learn her wanton ways: (I measure time by how a body sways.)
She asked: "Remember your last mistake?". I told her all about it. When I went to sleep, she went into action. She deleted all her pictures and emails. Packed and mailed any old letters I may have stored away. Anything she thought might remind me of her is Gone. She decided to aid my melancholic memory.
Today I realized that all three comic book series whose endings I've really lamented, "Sandman", "Preacher" and now "Y: The Last Man", were all published by Vertigo.
Language... has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone. Paul Tillich
Dear xxx, Your letter was too short. You asked: "How goes your obsession?" My answer: Which one? : I refuse to give up a love which I believe is good. I believe it's good because it's not linear, just an obsession; but calm, rich, and many-angled.[ Kathy Acker ]
My hotel room felt like an accident. Hours of being there culminated in an discharge of several letters that were long overdue. But yours never reached you. Don't worry, you only missed a few delineated romances, complaints about culture and miniature compliments to make you smile.
"A tale without love is like beef without mustard--insipid" [Anatole France]
What I miss the most are your accounts of saturnalia dreams. Maybe even your capricious chasm and your delicate expectations of me. I am bound to ignore the expiration date on our friendship. Eventually. The anticipation could almost be called delight. Am I your subject or your object? I squint to tell the difference.
: I have to erase you out of my life so I can keep on living. no matter how passionate no matter how perfect no matter how deep love, it fades and there's nothing. I won't stand for it. [ Kathy Acker ]
"Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it, and it darts away" [Dorothy Parker]
He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves. - Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
I looked at that face, dumbfounded. The lights of métro stations flew by; I didn't notice them. What can be done, if our sight lacks absolute power to devour objects ecstatically, in an instant, leaving nothing more than the void of an ideal form, a sign like a hieroglyph simplified from the drawing of an animal or bird? A slightly snub nose, a high brow with sleekly brushed-back hair, the line of the chin - but why isn't the power of sight absolute? - and in a whiteness tinged with pink two sculpted holes, containing a dark, lustrous lava. To absorb that face but to have it simultaneously against the background of all spring boughs, walls, waves, in its weeping, its laughter, moving it back fifteen years, or ahead thirty. To have. It is not even a desire. Like a butterfly, a fish, the stem of a plant, only more mysterious. And so it befell me that after so many attempts at naming the world, I am able only to repeat, harping on one string, the highest, the unique avowal beyond which no power can attain: I am, she is. Shout, blow the trumpets, make thousands-strong marches, leap, rend your clothing, repeating only: is!
She got out at Raspail. I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.
When we hold each other, in the darkness, it doesn't make the darkness go away. The bad things are still out there. The nightmares still walking. When we hold each other we feel not safe, but better.'It's all right' we whisper, 'I'm here, I love you.' and we lie: 'I'll never leave you.' For just a moment or two the darkness doesn't seem so bad. Neil Gaiman
One of the prized books on my shelf, a signed first printing of Stardust signed by Neil with a drawing of a Luna in it. Neil is awesome. Are you going to go see the movie or What!
“Poor me. There’s nothing so sweet as wallowing in it is there? Wallowing is sex for depressives.” Jeanette Winterson
“It’s a pity if someone… has to console himself for the wreck of his days with the notion that somehow his voice, his work embodies the deepest, most obscure, freshest, rawest oyster of reality in the unfathomable refrigerator of the heart’s ocean, but I am such a one, and there you have it.” Leonard Cohen
Never complain about a situation while it is still going on; if you
cant believe its happening pretend its a movie, after its over, find
someone to pin the blame on and never let them forget it. Andy Warhol
I only miss you in my sleep. I only miss you when my pride lets my heart speak.
but all I wanna do is miss you tonight.
all I wanna do is miss you tonight.
- I don’t remember the source
We are all improved by the glow of memory.
- Neil Gaiman
+ Leonard Cohen - Under Review: 1934-1977 - Thanks to this I now have a great little introductory DVD for my friends who ask "Who is this Leonard Cohen person?"
"As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility, and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day." Against the Day - Thomas Pynchon {via}
I have never loved a woman for herself alone, but because I was caught up in
the time with her, between train arrivals and train departures and other
commitments. I have loved because she was beautiful and we were two humans lying
in the forest at the edge of a dark lake or because she was not beautiful and we
were two humans walking between buildings who understood something about
suffering. I have loved because so many loved her or because so many were
indifferent to her, or to make her believe that she was a girl in a meadow upon
whose approved knees I laid my head or to make her believe that I was saint and
that she had been loved by a saint. I never told a woman I liked her and when I
wrote the words “My love,” I never meant it to mean “I love you.”
Grant Morrison, obviously Capt. Jean-Luc Picard's Happier Twin
"I'd like to have them all released as a boxed set of issues that you
can shuffle around and also as individual miniseries plus bookends in a
sumptuous Absolute collection printed using the finest intelligent inks
from Mars and Venus on paper so smooth and so sexy that one touch is
like fortnight's worth of non-stop latex sex." said Mr.Grant Morrison
on the subject of his Seven Soldiers series.
I want to be the hypnotist who takes no chances of falling asleep
himself. I want to kiss with one eye open. Or I did. I don’t want to
anymore” L. Cohen
I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling. Ecstasy, even, I felt, with flashes of sudden remembrance, and feeling sweaty and drowsy I felt like sleeping and dreaming in the grass. Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
1. Tell love you are going to Junior’s Deli on Flatbush Avenue in
Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if love stays, it can have half.
It will stay.
2. Tell love you want a memento of it and obtain a lock of its hair.
Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on
three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a
convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and
use them to paint a mustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are
someone new. It will stay.
3. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on
fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to
bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall
asleep. Love will be there in the morning.
"I am not protected from your agitation of my heart. I am a bee in your world. I am a squirrel. I move too quickly. I die too fast. Your song is cruel and selfish. You have no gasp to express me. I appeared in this world with you when you were lost in the pride of being alone." L. Cohen
"Solitude exists for us not to remember but to forget." Cristina Garcia
"Razumov longed desperately for a word of advice, for moral support. Who knows what true loneliness is--not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. Now and then a fatal conjunction of events may lift the veil for an instant. For an instant only. No human being could bear a steady view of moral solitude without going mad." Joseph Conrad
"I'm not a man of many faces. The mask i wear is one" Sting
"I'm a burning hearth," he said "People see the smoke, But no one comes to warm themselves" J.Mitchell
The Moon is outside. I saw the great uncomplicated thing when I went to take a leak just now. I should have looked at it longer. I am a poor lover of the moon. I see it all at once and that's it for me and the moon. Leonard Cohen
The moon's Celestial Highness; There's not a trace / upon her face Of diffidence or shyness: She borrows light / that, through the night, Mankind may all acclaim her-- And, truth to tell, / she lights up well, So I, for one, don't blame her. Ah, pray make no mistake; / We're not shy-- We're very wide awake, The moon and I..." The Mikado [ Nora Zehetner - The Sun Whose Rays Are All Ablaze ]
“That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose.”
J. D. Salinger
+ Who's the Voice of this Generation?Hemingway's rose like the sun. Kerouac found his on the road. So why can't today's young novelists express the essence of their era?
I have no desire to do anything. I am afraid of nothing and I
want nothing. I wait like a psychopath in a game of dodge-ball: breathing
quickly while the fools decide which one will throw at me next, and jumping aside
for no reason except that I like being in the middle. And there is no reason
for being in the middle. Why not quit altogether and like outside the circle?
I have no idea what to say, I don’t
know when I’ll see you again and I don’t believe in anything beyond the next
ten minutes. People keep calling me and telling me what a great friend I am.
Everybody is looking for someone who can stand up in the wind. It is lonely
standing up and crowded lying down. I
refuse to be an anchor for other people’s dreams – but then I refuse to anchor
mine to anyone else. So I have no choice but to stand up and piss into the
wind. Pardon my vulgarity.
"Era Lo, sencillamente Lo por la mañana, cuando estaba derecha, con su
metro cuarenta y ocho de estatura, con un pie enfundado en un calcetín.
Era Lola cuando llevaba puestos los pantalones. Era Dolly en la
escuela. Era Dolores cuando firmaba. Pero en mis brazos siempre fué
Lolita."
(Tomado del libro "Lolita" de Vladimir Nabokov)
If you are young and you don't happen to be Arthur Rimbaud we would prefer not to hear from you and if you happen to be Arthur Rimbaud we definitely don't want to hear from you Leonard Cohen, The Book of Longing
What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children's books, old operas, silly old songs, the naive rhythms of country rimes. Arthur Rimbaud , SECOND DELIRIUM: THE ALCHEMY OF THE WORD, A Season In Hell
If you like, you may live in a computer created world all day and all night. You will be able to try out a Virtual life with a Virtual lover. You can go into your Virtual house and do Virtual housework, add a baby or two, even find out if you’d rather be gay. Or single. Or straight. Why hesitate when you could simulate. And sex? Certainly. Teledildonics is the word. Jeanette Winterson, Written On the Body, 1992
Photo: Per Zennström To kiss well one must kiss solely. No groping hands or stammering hearts. The lips and the lips alone are the pleasure. Passion is sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided like mercury then gathered up only at the last moment. Jeanette Winterson
"Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the roads." André Breton
I tried to leave you, I don't deny I closed the book on us, at least a hundred times. I'd wake up every morning by your side. The years go by, you lose your pride. The baby's crying, so you do not go outside, and all your work it's right before your eyes. Goodnight, my darling, I hope you're satisfied, the bed is kind of narrow, but my arms are open wide. And here's a man still working for your smile. Leonard Cohen
She has turned her face, more than once, to the Outer Radiance and simply seen nothing there. And so each time taken a little more of the Zero into herself. It comes down to courage, at worst an amount of self-delu
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