Reflections: Leap Day, 2012

Having not posted anything here for many days, I feel that I cannot in good conscience let a Leap Day pass without being dated by a brief post.

I have felt for several days that radiation from the recent solar storms has been affecting my body chemistry and my brain waves, bringing me strong dreams by night and a sometimes almost unbearable sense of dread in my waking hours. It is not as though real-time circumstances on the ground haven't been sodomizing me for real; but it's been more than that. And I blame the sun and his tantrums for my distress. It helps me to have that target.

Please admire the portrait of this old man, donated to the cause by my Irish FaceBook friend, Fiona Clements, a.k.a. F3. If you want to know why that alias is, you'll have to ask the lady.

Check out this tiny piece by Leonard Cohen from his Book of Longing:

WORK IN PROGRESS

he's going to get sick
and die alone

he is the main character
in my little story called

The House of Prayer

That says it all. Just wait. You'll get old, if you're lucky. Or whatever.

So, it's Leap Day. But I'm afraid of heights, so I'm not jumping into anything. Just waiting.

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Readings: A Portrait of the Poet as an Old Man

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Considering that I have absolutely revered the man since he came onto the scene back when I was in college, I have written very little about Leonard Cohen on this blog. He ranks near, or at the top, of my personal patheon of  'sixties-era singer-songwriters. His only competition would come from Dylan, Paul Simon, and Joni Mitchell. Honorable mention goes to Neil Young and Van Morrison. But, no--Cohen is king. There have been several pop stars who have published books of poetry. But I think that Leonard Cohen may be the only one who was a published poet (and novelist) prior to becoming famous in show biz.

For my recent birthday, my daughters gave me a gift certificate to the bookstore that one of them works in. And my father gave me a bit of money. I used some of the money to buy Leonard Cohen's new CD. I used part of the gift certificate to buy his 2006 book of poetry and drawings, Book of Longing. I have been reading in that book this evening.

The birthday was my 65th. Some kind of milestone, I guess. The birthday following which one can no longer deny being old. That being the case, the poem from Cohen's book that I will be sharing below definitely resonates with me tonight. As usual, he says it perfectly. He speaks for "Sixties Survivors" everywhere, I think, in the poem,

TOO OLD

I am too old
to learn the names
of the new killers
This one here
looks tired and attractive
devoted, professorial
He looks a lot like me
when I was teaching
a radical form of Buddhism
to the hopelessly insane
In the name of the old
high magic
he commands
families to be burned alive
and children mutilated
He probably knows
a song or two that I wrote
All of them
all the bloody hand bathers
and the chewers of entrails
and the scalp peelers
they all danced
to the music of the Beatles
they worshipped Bob Dylan
Dear friends
there are very few of us left
silenced
trembling all the time
hidden among the blood -
stunned fanatics
as we witness to each other
the old atrocity
the old obsolete atrocity
that has driven out
the heart's warm appetite
and humbled evolution
and made a puke of prayer

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In case you were wondering, that's exactly how some of us feel when we observe those who are left in power as we Boomers drop off the tree, over ripe; an invitation to bugs, scavaging birds and little furry rodents.
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Readings: A Tough Pill to Swallow

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This morning I finished reading Leonard Cohen's poetry collection, The Energy of Slaves. Most of the poems were written in the late 1960s. The collection was published early in the 1970s. There are 116 poems in the book. Most of them are very short. Most of them have no title other than a number, although a handful do have titles.

It seems to me to be an angry, bitter book. The short poem I share here, number 114, seems to me to typify the world-view that Cohen creates with these works:


114

Every time my wife has a baby
she goes crazy
she sees the world clearly
and she goes crazy
We have to put her away
so we can get back to the war
Men and women are killed
right in front of the baby

To see the world clearly is to go crazy. I have to admit that it often seems that way.

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Riffs: da Futcha

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I think there are a couple of pithy lines missing here, but it still kicks ass:


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UPDATE: wrt to the "missing pithy lines" referred to above, I believe that Cohen (most likely for the benefit of kiddies watching Canadian tv) here substitutes "give me speed and careless sex" for the original "give me crack and anal sex."
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Riffs: A Nice Jewish Boy

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As long as I'm on a music kick, here is another of my favorite artists, doing my favorite of his recent tunes:





That is some septuagenarian soul, baby.
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Update: In truth my favorite song on that album is Boogie Street, but I couldn't find a video that matched my enthusiasm for the song. Play it anyway.
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