The subsequent days have been better. A talk with Dal helped me step back from the
edge – he assured me that Leonard Cohen was as anxious about his talent as I am
about mine and felt his smallness in the shadow of those who inspired him. He assured me that my grief was acceptable and
my doubt was natural and held me in my tempest of tears as I raged against
grief and death. He steadied my faltering
footing so that the rest of the week was exhausting but less of a burden.
This morning I was up early and wrote my daily pages
and poem by candle-lit darkness and decided to take advantage of the extra time
and head back to the forest with my ipod to walk with Cohen and see what he
could reveal to me today. I read a
couple of articles which echoed Dal’s notions from earlier in the week and I
wanted to commune with the cool winds and rain and that voice…those words…to
see if there was any hint anywhere of the portal to the poetry.
To see if I could plug into what it was, this loss,
for me – where he entered my life…not when…where…what part of me opened to him
and his imagery, his permission for pain and loss.
I remember it now…There
was a child named Bernadette. I heard the
story long ago, she saw the Queen of Heaven once and kept the vision in her
soul. No one believed what she had
seen. No one believed what she’d heard:
that there were sorrows to be healed and mercy, mercy in this world…
I was
in my mid-twenties and had recently moved to Victoria to go to school. Sitting in the driver’s seat of my red
Firenza, Jennifer Warnes shared the story of Bernadette and I saw, for the
first time in twenty years, the “Queen of Heaven” and felt every word and note
so deeply, I could feel my DNA change. I
realised, in that moment, for the very first time…that I was broken…deeply,
profoundly broken. I had seen an angel
and was told I wasn’t special enough for that.
I had been the focus of sexual inappropriate appetites of family members
and strangers and had buried all of it so deeply there hadn’t been a whisper of
it until that moment, with those lyrics, in that front seat. I froze.
Then I broke open like the levies after Katrina and melted into a
thousand pains.
I met Cohen through Jennifer Warnes and the Famous Blue Raincoat album. I have the entire thing memorised.
Joan
of Arc spoke to me in the days before that moment in the
front seat of my Firenza…the marriage of the martyr to the fire intrigued
me. I loved the incongruity and
juxtaposition of the images and sentiments.
Cohen was cheeky and sarcastic.
…and lusty. I
found that layer in The Future and in
the collection of his work that came out in ’93, Stranger Music. I read the
work I didn’t know and felt relief. I
had been writing pieces that could have fit there next to his. The poems entered into my by osmosis,
probably, and competed with my attention to Plath, who I was devouring
voraciously at the time. I was uprooted,
a new-ish mother, and wanted to find a place for my writing in my mothering. Therapy was happening on a fairly regular
basis and causing me to look into balancing motherhood and art and who I was as
a sexual person…a survivor but also as one who loved to feel desire and desired
– as we all do.
Water
Whisper freedom in my ear.
Let the fingertips of your soul caress mine.
Softly.
Softly.
Softly.
I see you:
The way you’ve always been:
Alive
Alone
A man.
Pluck not a blood-red rose for me,
It pales next to your beauty.
These words repeated
Over
And
Over.
How many have said this to so many?
Let me drink in your timeless,
Breathless,
Regal face.
Sipping your lips.
Gulping the ageless wisdom of your eyes.
Touch me
Caress me
Move me to extremes.
You do this without lifting a finger
R. L. Elke 10&11/07/93
I am sure that if I had known Take This Longing then, I would have echoed take this longing from my tongue…let me see your beauty broken down
like you would do for one you love. Your body like a search light, my poverty
revealed… Who wouldn’t?
At least I would have had the words for the regret and
loss I had felt – missing one I was in love with, who was not my husband at the
time.
If you’ve ever loved beyond measure and lost beyond
grief – Cohen gives you the language for both.
We learn how to gracefully process those lost great loves and to be ok
with the aching desire for those in front of us. Good bye has never been so beautiful.
He has awakened in me the ache of inadequacy. Every piece more beautiful than the last. I mean, come on, The Sisters of Mercy is a revelation.
Those older pieces came to me of late – I am new to
them, they to me. So beautiful and
painful and perfect: when you’re not feeling holy, your
loneliness tells you you’ve sinned…
SERIOUSLY?
Where do you have to go to access that?
I go there all of the time but nothing seems to sound like that –
ever: if your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn, they will
bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem…. No words.
He did say, in a New Yorker interview that he wrote
every day before the sun came up – I do that.
He also had this to say about the miracle of writing:
Does
artistic dedication begin to touch on religious devotion?...I start with
artistic dedication. I know that if the
spirit is on you it will touch on the other human receptors. But I dare not begin from the other
side. It’s like pronouncing the holy
name – you don’t do it. But if you are
lucky, and are graced, and the audience is in a particular salutary condition,
then these deeper responses will be produced.
Well. Ok. Good.
That is how I approach my kitchen table every morning a little after 5
am, or
earlier…I just show up. I just show up and write. Or I walk the forest paths, like I did today,
and absorb the woods and, sometimes the word, starving for the soul’s
nourishment.
Losing Prince was different. It hit different places for me. Cohen was the foundation of who I understood
I am as an artist…and human. Famous Blue Raincoat healed me from the
inside out, like good Art should. It
humbled me.
His work humbled me.
I remember standing in front of paintings by Botticelli, Klimt,
Rossetti, Gentileschi, Monet, and others in the National Gallery and aching –
physically feeling aches in my body and my heart – because I would never be
able to pick up a paint brush and create like that. Cohen, Keats, Whitman, Sassoon, Brittain,
Thomas, Plath, Sorley – all make me feel like that about my writing. All I want to do is to create something that
can sit next to them on a page and hold it’s own.
My throat aches with the pain of it.
It’s four in the morning, the end of December, I ‘m writing you now just to see
if you’re better…Jane came by with a lock of your hair. She said that you gave it to her that night
that you planned to go clear. Did you
ever go clear?
I want my poems to feel like prayers: The
birds they sing at the break of day. “Start
again,” I heard them say. Don’t dwell on
what is passed away or what is yet to be…Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.
I tried today, I really did. I have been trying all week to capture the atmosphere
and my pain on Tuesday on that walk and I just can’t seem to hear it yet. Maybe soon.
I’ll be silent and listen for it.
Good
bye
I cannot move past the anguish of souls and the ties
that bind theirs to mine.
And sometimes the best thing to do is to be silent
inside and listen to the voices of grievers gone before to find a way out –
or the grace to stay silent in it for a while.
Walked through the mist in a freezing November morning
when I wanted to waltz to the muted Flamenco ¾ guitar.
Balancing beside the bird on the wire, outside the
Chelsea hotel.
My famous blue raincoat discount,
not Burberry.
Absorbing, by slow decay, this –
the bareness of bare branches and leaves pounded to
pablum beneath my falling feet –
not feeling holy,
loneliness reminds me I’ve sinned.
Feeling guests pass by and reach out so near me I feel
the tips of their fingers.
Chasing the ¾ time through the hunger, like an arch
where the troops passed through.
I nearly held it – the words this longing on my tongue
–
but just can’t hold them any more than I can grab a
hold of this mist and the hands of the ghosts passing through.
So I walk and scream into silence the voices in my
head
to learn what to say, by fire and water,
that could ever be a decent way to say goodbye.
R.L. Elke
Nov. 27/16
I dunno.
I just dunno what else to do – so I’m gunna just keep
writing. Maybe he can reach me now that
he is spirit.
I hope so.
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