Li-Young Lee's "This Room and Everything in It"

“it had something to do / with death… it had something / to do with love”: The Eroticism of Memory in “This Room and Everything in It”

Li-Young Lee’s “This Room and Everything in It” explores human memory as inherently erotic, in other words, as grounded in the restless vicissitudes of human desire. The act of memory figured in Lee’s poem involves the desire to transcend desire so as to reach a state of perfection in which the fundamental connection between love and death can be remembered. In the end, though, desire slips through memory’s fragile constructions and resumes its pre-rational primacy in the “room” that is human life.

The principal trope at work in “This Room and Everything in It” centers upon the ancient art of memory, the practice of utilizing a multifaceted, imaginatively complex topos in which to store various items or facts wished to be remembered. The memorial topos, in addition to featuring a “room” of some sort – an internal dwelling through which the person practicing the art of memory could move in imagination, associating the items to be remembered with the unchanging characteristics of the room – also commonly involved a fully developed cosmology in which various divine figures were utilized as mnemonic objects. This ancient art reveals the inherent bi-directional connection between imagination and memory: humans imagine so as to remember and remember so as to imagine. In Lee’s poem, however, the art of memory, “the one thing I learned / of all the things my father tried to teach me” (49), proceeds in a seemingly inverse manner. Rather than starting with the general and unchanging, and imaginatively associating concrete particulars with it, the speaker in the poem starts with fleeting, individual erotic moments – the very moments that one would think would need to be remembered rather than would serve as the imaginative ground for an art of memory! When the speaker proclaims that “I am letting this room / and everything in it / stand for my ideas about love / and its difficulties” (49), the room and everything in it is not an architectural but an erotic space:

I’ll let your love-cries,

those spacious notes

of a moment ago,

stand for distance.

Your scent,

that scent

of spice and a wound,

I’ll let stand for mystery.

Your sunken belly

is the daily cup

of milk I drank

as a boy before morning prayer. (49)

In the traditional art of memory, various “ideas about love,” personified as gods or goddesses, would often serve as mnemonic devices; in Lee’s poem, though, ideas about love are the items that the poet wishes to remember: specifically, “distance,” “mystery,” and some idea figured in “the daily cup / of milk I drank / as a boy before morning prayer.” By reversing the associative direction of the art of memory, Lee’s poem seems to suggest that if memory itself arises out of desire, then desire can only be remembered in the form of “ideas” that allow memory the means of getting beyond its own ground so as to articulate it.

The speaker’s art of memory ostensibly comes about so that “one day, when I need / to tell myself something intelligent / about love, / I’ll close my eyes / and recall this room and everything in it” (50). On a deeper level, though, the speaker’s activity seems to be in service of fixing (i.e., making permanent) the exultation of desire that is possible in physical love: “My body is estrangement. / This desire, perfection.” In other words, the speaker marshals various “ideas about love” so as to remember the longed-for self-oblivion of physical love: the speaker longs to remember that at times of physical passion he is capable of forgetting himself. This is the “greater idea” that the speaker seeks to inscribe in and through his various ideas of love. If memory succeeds for a moment in remembering the mystery of physical passion – a mystery that “ha[s] something to do / with death… something / to do with love” – soon enough the memory is gone and must be re-discovered. This necessity of re-membering physical passion stems, according to the insight offered by Lee’s poem, from the inherent eroticism of memory, from its inseparability from human desire.

Now I’ve forgotten my

idea. The book

on the windowsill, riffled by wind…

the even-numbered pages are

the past, the odd-

numbered pages, the future.

The sun is

God, your body is milk…

useless, useless…

your cries are song, my body’s not me…

no good… my idea

has evaporated… your hair is time, your thighs are song…

it had something to do

with death… it had something

to do with love.

By the poem’s end, memory appears scattered, forgetful of or at least blurring its prior associations: both the lover’s cries and thighs become song. Desire seems to have collapsed the formerly clear ideational associations that memory had made vis-à-vis physical passion, and thus desire must in a sense remember itself anew.

Poetry Sunday

Today I'd like to honor the great Lawrence Durrell, that mercurial "assassin of polish," by sharing two of his better poems. "Bitter Lemons" speaks for itself, while "Style," which I've often used in my teaching to introduce freshman to the study of poetry, is a delightful bit of ars poetica.

BITTER LEMONS

In an island of bitter lemons

Where the moon's cool fevers burn

From the dark globes of the fruit,

And the dry grass underfoot

Tortures memory and revises

Habits half a lifetime dead

Better leave the rest unsaid,

Beauty, darkness, vehemence

Let the old sea-nurses keep

Their memorials of sleep

And the Greek sea's curly head

Keep its calms like tears unshed

Keep its calms like tears unshed.

STYLE

Something like the sea,

Unlaboured momentum of water

But going somewhere,

Building and subsiding,

The busy one, the loveless.

Or the wind that slits

Forests from end to end,

Inspiriting vast audiences,

Ovations of leafy hands,

Accepting, accepting.

But neither is yet

Fine enough for the line I hunt.

The dry bony blade of the

Sword-grass might suit me

Better: an assassin of polish.

Such a bite of perfect temper

As unwary fingers provoke,

Not to be felt till later,

Turning away, to notice the thread

Of blood from its unfelt stroke.

The Return of Led Zeppelin

Critics and fans alike are universally praising as a rousing success the most anticipated reunion gig in rock history, Led Zeppelin's ostensibly one-off performance Monday night at the O2 in London. Joined by the son of deceased drummer John Bonham, the three surviving members of the original quartet romped through a two-hour set and miraculously managed to live up to the mythic expectations of both aged Zep-head baby boomers and youthful converts. In an age dominated by bubble-gum pop and innocuous computer-manufactured sound -- three-minute shots of catchy mediocrity to import into one's iPod -- there's undoubtedly something exhilarating about the Robert-Johnson-on-acid primal thunder of Jimmy Page (it's easy to forget, when marveling at the sheer muscularity of Zep's recorded output, that the band features only one lead/rhythm guitar player!) and the libido-unloosed pomp of Robert Plant. And face it, for sheer spectacle value, a Zeppelin gig at this stage of the game is hard to beat: Can Robert Plant, now a grandfather, still pull off wailing about giving every inch of his love? Can Zeppelin, the band whose mammoth popularity paved the way for every Spinal-Tap rock-band cliche, overcome the seemingly inevitable fate of self-parody? (That the Led Zeppelin mythos has reached absurdly large proportions, observe that Wikipedia has an entire entry devoted to the infamous shark episode).

Apparently the answer to both questions is yes, as "Whole Lotta Love" exhilaratingly exploded from the stage during the band's first encore, and "Stairway to Heaven" -- a song whose hyper-overexposure has transformed it from mystical ineffability to pretentious comedy -- actually somehow sounded fresh. I can comment on all this because, like an estimated half a million other people, I watched the morning-after fan-filmed clips that dutifully appeared on YouTube -- only to be removed by Warner music group, then placed back on, then removed again, ad infinitum. And this brings me to the real crux of what I want to say about Zeppelin. In the wake of this overwhelmingly successful return, as they face immense pressure from fans and critics alike to take the show on the road for a world tour that industry execs estimate would be the biggest tour in rock history (the band would reportedly earn a minimum of 300 million dollars), Plant, Page, and Jones once again confront the paradox of Led Zeppelin: from the beginning of their fame in the late sixties, the band's explosive popular success has been both a response to and a perversion of what is truly special about Led Zeppelin.

In the midst of the psychedelic late sixties and early seventies, drug-drenched hippie self-exploration and social activism merged with a sudden pastoral fantasy of return -- decidedly not a Rockwellian return to conventional values and comforting archetypes, but a mystical and myth-soaked longing to uncover the hidden roots of culture in the marginal, the problematic, the strange (what Greil Marcus, writing about Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, calls "the old, weird America"). Bob Dylan likely set this pastoral turn in motion, rebelling against the prescribed role of social savior with scandalously-plugged-in high modernism (Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde), and then, as if rebelling against his own rebelling, secluding himself in rural upstate New York with his touring band (the band that would later become The Band) and plunging into obscure blues and folk material, and the Bible. A critique of a psychedelic hippie culture that itself was becoming conventional, the music that Dylan and The Band made in the basement of Big Pink (among other places) sounded as scratchy and strange as the mysterious, remarkably influential six-album Anthology of American Folk Music put together by Harry Smith in 1952 (Smith, by the way, whose parents read Madame Blavatsky and described themselves as pantheist theosophists, was a lifelong occultist, and his work as an ethnomusicologist attempted to locate within forgotten American folk and blues recordings a nascent mystical spirituality). Out of the occult laboratory of that Big Pink basement ultimately came The Band's debut, Music From Big Pink, one of the greatest albums of the sixties, an album -- along with the bootlegged Basement Tapes -- that was heard by British folk-rock groups and in turn inspired their own culture-specific pastoral creations: most notably Fairport Convention's Liege and Lief and the Kink's Village Green Preservation Society. Taken as a whole, the pastoral turn that arose out of and to some extent in rebellion against psychedelia (nota bene: drugs still played a decided role in various bands' pastoral explorations -- witness The Band's Robbie Robertson describing the Basement recordings as "a period of reefer run amok") led to some of the most moving, inventive music of the period, even if the pastoral turn itself would inevitably become all-too-conventional and hackneyed (two words: The Eagles).

Tracing lines of musical influence is of course a critical abstraction, as is naming as "pastoral" a no-doubt multifaceted phenomenon in late-sixties music. But, since every perception and insight in the world at large is made possible only by perceptual/intellectual "fictions," so an engagement with music history must proceed by means of critical fictions. Regardless, the above digression was necessary because I believe that Led Zeppelin is indeed most fruitfully appreciated when located within such a pastoral line. "Led Zeppelin" is what happens when American folk and blues influences (Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, etc., etc.) are blended with hippie psychedelic sensibilities, British/Celtic pastoral mysticism, rockabilly, classical music, and 1970's excess. There is thus a cultural and imaginative depth to Led Zeppelin that highbrow rock critics of the 70's frequently overlooked precisely because the band was so annoyingly popular (nothing bothers highbrow critics -- this one included -- like commercial success). Of course, Led Zeppelin's depth is not primarily a lyrical depth -- one does not find much sophisticated verbal wit in Zeppelin -- but neither is the strange, mystical allure of early American blues and folk recordings -- an allure codified by the likes of Harry Smith -- based on intellectual verbal sophistication. Indeed, the best of American rhythm and blues is decidedly a folk phenomenon, exuding a carnivalesque melange of coarse sexual innuendo, earthy imagery, and common-man idioms that intellectualists of all periods seem irresistibly drawn toward. Led Zeppelin, like the American folk-blues tradition as a whole, appeals to the thinking man by offering a non-verbal poetry that is based on an energy -- primarily of the earth, of the body -- that points to the same pre-linguistic mystery that, paradoxically, language both arises from and reaches toward. Pushed to the limit, thinking turns into poetry, which turns into music, which, if expressing both the roots and wings of human yearning, rocks.

Pre-linguistic mystery is of course the traditional concern of religion, and, interestingly enough, a common characteristic of the musical strand I am here outlining is its reliance upon spiritual traditions of anti-tradition. If Christianity is after all based on the Word, in other words, on the attempt to spiritualize linguistic appropriation of mystery, the marginal, heterodox spiritual influences at work in the blues-folk-rock tradition tend to the hermetic, the alchemical, the gnostic -- the attempt to use the raw materials of the imagination and the world itself to reveal the hidden spiritual depths that transcend language (including the generative language of the Master Linguist, the All-Good Creator God). Lest you think this far-fetched, as if I'm here artificially importing a scholar's interest in the occult into rock history, consider the fact that, in the early 70's, Jimmy Page, the mastermind behind Led Zeppelin, owned an occult bookshop and publishing house in London -- Equinox Booksellers and Publishers -- that specialized in alchemical lore and the Kabbalah. Furthermore, according to Wikipedia, "Page owned the Boleskine House, the former residence of occultist Aleister Crowley." In other words, Page, whose guitar mastery has frequently been associated with black magic, demonstrated during the peak of Led Zeppelin a more than passing interest in the occult.

All of these facets of Page, Plant and company tend to get obscured and even perverted by Zeppelin's massive popularity: the blues tradition of graphic sexual innuendo becomes a crude expression of adolescent, misogynistic machismo; a legitimate interest in the occult becomes easily-parodied airy (empty) mysticism; the energizing depth of the music is flattened out because of excessive airplay. Page and Plant themselves seem aware of this. Indeed, check out the various interviews of Page and Plant available on YouTube (e.g., Plant on Charlie Rose). If anything can dispel the tendency to reduce Zeppelin to the challenged mental capacities of many of their stoner, head-banging fans, it's the shocking articulateness of the two men at the center of the band: these are wise men who would make fascinating dinner companions. So, would a massive world tour further pervert what is special about Led Zeppelin, or somehow clarify it? I suspect the former, and it would seem so does Robert Plant. When asked shortly before the big reunion concert about the prospects of cashing-in with a world tour, Plant remarked: "The whole idea of being on a cavalcade of merciless repetition is not what it's all about."

One thing is certain: If Led Zeppelin's mass popularity remains a misunderstanding and perversion of the band's actual complexity, the group's enduring appeal after all these years results because there is more to Zeppelin than proto-heavy-metal screeching.

On an internet forum that I happened upon, a voice of caution spoke up to calm the frenzy of enthusiasm being expressed in the wake of the Zeppelin reunion concert. "Sorry, people, but it's not possible to go back home," the voice soberly warned. "I used to like Led Zeppelin, but then I grew up. You should too." This warning is to the point, though it misses something. It of course isn't possible to make it back home, and part of one's maturity is to recognize this hard existential fact. Nevertheless, if the recent return of Led Zeppelin proves anything, it's that home, even if forever unreachable, is still there -- an English castle shimmering in the mist, full of "fairy-goddess devil women" (to quote the recent LA Times piece about Zeppelin), wailing blues guitar, and the primal energy of sexual and spiritual mysteries. If you squint really hard, and remain open to the occasional "bustle in your hedgerow," you can see it.

Incomplete Transactions: Marianne Moore's "When I Buy Pictures"

Incomplete Transactions: The Meditative Gaze in “When I Buy Pictures”

In Poetry and Criticism, Marianne Moore borrows from Joseph Conrad in an attempt to articulate the complex matrix of language, perception, and imagination that constitutes the human soul as an inherently creative reality inventing fictions in and through which to recognize both the world and itself:

“Seeing, and saying;—language is a special extension of the power of seeing, inasmuch as it can make visible not only the already visible world; but through it the invisible world of relations and affinities.” The world of the soul? Deficient as it is to define the soul, “creativeness” is perhaps as near a definition as we can get. (in Costello, 137)

For Moore, seeing and saying are part of one indissoluble imaginative act; rather than language functioning to report upon an already constituted experience, language exists as the experiential ground of the ever-circulating “relations and affinities” beneath all human fashionings of the “real.” Objectivity and subjectivity merge, for Moore, as saying it as one sees it becomes inseparable from seeing it as one says it. Language thus serves as the means of connection to oneself, others, and the world, even while it prohibits, due to its intermediary status, any direct, univocal, static knowledge.

The creative base of perception finds expression not only in the meta-poetic musings of Moore’s critical essays but also in her overall poetic project. Indeed, that prefix meta- becomes redundant, as Moore’s poetry is always simultaneously reflecting and reflecting upon its reflecting. An example of this self-reflexivity is Moore’s “When I Buy Pictures,” a poem that in its form and content demonstrates the doubleness, duplicity, and “creativeness” inherent in perception.

In the context of “When I Buy Pictures,” the concrete act of buying a picture becomes a trope for the act of perception itself. More specifically: the notion of buying a picture as a means of owning it functions as an analogue for a certain kind of perception in which appropriation of the thing perceived is the ultimate goal of the perceiver. The quest to master a concrete object through the human act of perception is, for Moore, not close enough to the ambiguous truth of the actual transaction between self and world. Instead, the opening lines of the poem serve as a foil for the notion of ownership implied in buying pictures:

or what is closer to the truth,

when I look at that of which I may regard myself as the

imaginary possessor,

Being an “imaginary possessor” of a picture – a perception – is quite different from literally possessing it; it implies an unavoidable go-between separating self and world, so that imaginary possession (possession of something by or through the imagination) becomes the most complete act of possession/perception possible. Though an object can be approached, approximated, and enjoyed in its unmasterable otherness, it can never be fully owned by the human subject who buys it. Also important in these opening lines are the two simultaneous forms of looking presented by the speaker of the poem. The speaker describes both looking at an object and looking at herself looking at it: “when I look at that of which I may regard myself as the / imaginary possessor…” In these lines “look” and “regard” occur as two parts of one complex act of seeing in which the speaker discovers both herself and an object – discovers them not in their separateness but in the mysterious place where they collude and collide. Of course, a third form of looking going on in the poem involves the reader’s gaze into the language that, through its simultaneous mirroring and projecting, contains the other forms of looking and makes imaginary possession a “visible” reality.

Does this imply a Romantic form of solipsism in which the human self swallows up the outer world in the act of perception (buying and eating both at once in a kind of capitalistic cannibalism)? The speaker of the poem, in elaborating the nature of her looking, appears to suggest this:

I fix upon what would give me pleasure in my average moments:

the satire upon curiosity in which no more is discernible

than the intensity of the mood,

The “intensity of the mood,” the flights and fancies of the speaker’s subjectivity, constitutes the limits of the discernible. However, this Romantic form of vision is immediately contradicted in the lines that follow, thus subtly bringing into question the precise location of subjectivity. Is mood a quality of a person or of a thing? Does the speaker fix upon the intensity of the mood

or quite the opposite – the old thing, the medieval decorated

hat-box

in which there are hounds with waists diminishing like the

waist of the hour-glass,

and deer and birds and seated people;

The speaker of the poem moves from regarding herself looking to examining the thing itself looked at, in this case the “medieval decorated / hat-box.” This quick, somewhat contradictory movement from one form of looking to another is common in Moore’s poetry. The move from the intensity of the mood to the “old thing” presents a shift that resists easy accommodation (appropriation) by the reader eager to understand the poem’s twistings and turnings in a logical manner. The poem presents two contrasting ways of seeing seeing that nevertheless cannot be torn asunder. To put this within the content of the poem: the speaker can only perceive herself seeing, and experience the mood attendant upon this act of seeing, in and through the concrete hat-box that she sees; and vice versa: the hat-box is only seen because she can regard herself looking at it. The intensity of the mood thus resides both in the speaker and in the hat-box itself. But there is more to the hat-box, and more to the poem, than mere epistemological musing.

Unlike the formal syllabic structure of many of Moore’s poems, “When I Buy Pictures” features unstructured free-verse that approaches prose. Also, unlike Moore’s best known poems, her complex meditations upon various animals (sleekly subtle ones like the jerboa and the plummet basilisk), “When I Buy Pictures” appears to focus more overtly on perception itself as the object of the poem. Due to these characteristics of structure and content, it is tempting to take “When I Buy Pictures” as a kind of philosophical treatise, as poetic theory thinly disguised as poetry. However, the odd list of things that follows the intrusion of the hat-box into the poem works against abstraction and creates the pleasure of bafflement that Moore prizes: the bafflement of the reader confronting the enigmatic movement of the mind amid the things of the world:

it may be no more than a square of parquetry; the literal

biography perhaps,

in letters standing well apart upon a parchment-like expanse;

an artichoke in six varieties of blue; the snipe-legged

hieroglyphic in three parts;

the silver fence protecting Adam’s grave, or Michael taking

Adam by the wrist.

Alas, Moore’s bestiary steps into this poem as well – from the earlier-mentioned hounds, deer, and birds to the description of the hieroglyphic as “snipe-legged”; and the “literal biography” is written on a parchment-like expanse – parchment originally refers to the skin of a sheep, goat, or other animal, prepared for writing on. For Moore the animals of the imagination figure into so-called literal life, and perhaps the imagination itself can be figured as a subtle animal leaping and bounding amid the interstices of human perception and language. And then comes Adam, the first human charged with bringing language to bear (so to speak) on his perception of the animals.

This complex list, introduced after the dash following “or quite the opposite,” serves as an antidote dashing the subjective mind’s illusion of mastery over the things it perceives. The list of things demands of the mind numerous associative leaps to make sense of it. As described above, the list can lead to considerations regarding the relationship of the literal and the figurative; in addition, Adam’s grave and “Michael taking / Adam by the wrist” introduces an allegorical dimension relating to the fall and to Adam viewing the history – the “literal biography” – of humanity. How exactly, though, does all this relate to “an artichoke in six varieties of blue”? Here the poem frustrates intellectual maneuvering. The meanings circulating around the list of things are potentially inexhaustible and the associations forever incomplete, though at the same time they are precisely delimited by the things found in the list. In the end, the reader is left with the things staring back at him, aware of the inherent double vision that constitutes human perception. The blue artichoke, the snipe-legged hieroglyphic, and the silver fence prohibit the poem from being reducible to diagrammatical philosophical assumptions; indeed, their insistent stare makes the poem itself a totem object provoking questions rather than answers to the enigma of human perception. No single meaning or conclusion inheres in the poem, though it appears to urge readers to look and look again, to look into one’s looking so as to see one’s reflection in the things of the world. It does this through language, which serves as a medium for seeing into seeing without disrupting the puzzling and provocative fluidity of perception.

In line with all this, the poem continues:

Too stern an intellectual emphasis upon this quality or that

detracts from one’s enjoyment.

It must not wish to disarm anything; nor may the approved

triumph easily be honored –

that which is great because something else is small.

Here Moore grounds perception (or picture looking/buying) not in understanding but in enjoyment: the eye responds to beauty rather than logical consistency. Further, Moore implies that the ultimate failure of intellectual understanding provides the enjoyment inherent in the act of looking (and reading). The elusiveness of the things of the world creates the enjoyment that sparks the interest to look at them and formulate this looking in language. In addition, Moore anticipates deconstruction by at least thirty years in seeking to displace any standard interpretation (“the approved / triumph”) invisibly based on hierarchical ordering (“that which is great because something else is small”).

The final lines of the poem brilliantly embody the quiddity of poetic looking and the double-gaze inherent in perception:

It comes to this: of whatever sort it is,

it must be “lit with piercing glances into the life of things”;

it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.

If the perception that Moore favors is “‘lit with piercing glances into the life of things,’” it therefore involves looking at an object while simultaneously seeing the object looking back. This double look in turn involves the imagination, which provides associations and fills in the gaps between the always elusive, never-finally-graspable things of the world. This process of imaginative vision is revealed in content and process in Moore’s pithy line: though the quotation marks enclosing it mark it as a source lifted from another context (Moore’s notes confirm this), they also mark the line itself as double, capable of existing in this context even while it can be lifted into another one. In other words, the line itself looks back at the poem, and therefore the reader, through its quotation marks.

“When I Buy Pictures” is a tour de force enactment of the kind of vision Moore is engaged in repeatedly throughout her poetry. Perhaps more overtly than in other poems, however, it also demonstrates the similarity between the poet’s project and the reader’s reading of it. Language as an organ of perception connects both writer and reader as they seek to glimpse the movement of the mind in its engagement with an ever-fleeting world in which it is always immersed. This act of imaginative perception through language involves a spiritual dimension – “it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.” Looking into the things of the world to glimpse the fleeting sparks of spirit that animate them and mysteriously connect them to the human requires a meditative gaze content with partial knowing. Moore contrasts this meditative approach to the world with the hard, level gaze of ownership that is blind to the piercing glance of its own subjective fantasy of objectivity looking back at it from the uncontainable things of the world.

Works Cited

Costello, Bonnie. Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1981

A Dirty Saint

I've just stumbled upon an astonishing eulogy that Leonard Cohen delivered upon David Blue's untimely death in 1982. For those of you who don't know, by the way, Blue, whom I've been listening to recently, was a folkie who came of age in the same Greenwich Village scene that spawned Bob Dylan. Though typically viewed as a mere Dylan wannabe (Blue's albums in the sixties undeniably sound like they're trying to sound like Blonde on Blonde), Blue is somewhat more complicated than that -- if Blue is indeed imitating Dylan, his peer and friend, he's after all imitating a master imitator. Regardless, for an introduction to Blue, check out the title cut from his These 23 Days in September (1968), a song that masterfully utilizes a strategically-placed sitar part to evoke in words and music an occult-reading, candle-lighting Durrellian heroine (troubled and sexy, and no doubt smelling slightly of patchouli).

Cohen's eulogy, as a eulogy, stuns me. I'll certainly be writing more about Cohen in this blog, but for now this unexpected find serves as a fitting introduction. Here is a part of it:

David Blue was the peer of any singer in this country, and he knew it, and he coveted their audiences and their power, he claimed them as his rightful due. And when he could not have them, his disappointment became so dazzling, his greed assumed such purity, his appetite such honesty, and he stretched his arms so wide, that we were all able to recognize ourselves, and we fell in love with him. And as we grew older, as something in the public realm corrupted itself into irrelevance, the integrity of his ambition, the integrity of his failure, became for those who knew him, increasingly appealing, and he moved swiftly, with effortless intimacy, into the private life of anyone who recognized him, and our private lives became for him the theaters that no one would book for him, and he sang for us in hotel rooms and kitchens, and he became that poet and that gambler, and he established a defiant style to revive those soiled archetypes.

What a thrill to read a eulogy that, rather than relying on saccharine-drenched platitudes, evokes a flesh-and-blood human being striving for a little bit of complicated transcendence. Granted, an artist is here writing about another artist (and thus inevitably also about himself), but we are all of us artists of a sort, and covetousness, disappointment, greed, appetite, ambition, failure, defiance -- this is the stuff of the human condition when looked at unflinchingly, the prima materia inseparable from purity, honesty, integrity, intimacy. (I'm getting these interrelated sets of terms straight from Cohen's words.) This is not Bill Bennett elegizing a puritanical conception of virtue that cuts the latter set of highly ethical attributes away from the former set of problematic qualities, for, in Cohen's book of virtues, greed and appetite can never be wrested away from purity and integrity. As Cohen's lyrics do so well, this little eulogy plays a serious game with language so as to open up an experience of the amoral, ever-shifting ground of human gravitas. One comes away feeling a bit more alive, which, paradoxically, also means a bit closer to death. Indeed, it is of special note that Cohen's words come in response to the death of a friend. In a culture that treats death either as a dark enemy to be exercised or medicalized away, or as a dogmatically understood otherworldly highway to eternal bliss, it's no doubt important to remember that "death is the mother of beauty," an un-deconstructable mystery much larger than any system of thought that seeks to contain it. To walk around with one's eyes and entire body and brain open to death -- one's own and the person's across the room -- may be the major means of approach to all that can be momentarily majestic about human nature. It may be, as Cohen's words imply, a significant way of falling in love, and of recognizing oneself in the process. And if we never, while alive, escape the painful struggle with the tension that Cohen finds in David Blue, perhaps an ethically responsible life manages to embrace such a complicated alchemy of human desire, an existence on the front lines of one's own life. Anyway, there's some comfort in knowing that, in death, one's own greedy, defiant purity can be seen, precisely in its reckless failure, as a kind of nobility.

Here's Cohen these days, in two pictures I've pilfered from a blog created by some young admirers wishing to memorialize an evening with the man and his current muse, the singer/songwriter Anjani (seen in the second picture). Need I mention that, where Thanatos goes, Eros is never far behind.