I'll Go Your Way Too

You'll probably want to buy the CD. Now, iTunes will download it for you, but before you do that, let me tell you about an article I read a couple of years ago. It was in the Music section of our local newspaper, a blinded study of sorts. A DJ, a sound engineer, and an orchestra conductor were given very expensive earphones, and asked to listen to a number of recordings in various formats. They were CD, Lossless, 256 kbps and 128 kbps. The DJ couldn't separate them, obviously due to occupational hearing loss or concurrent substance abuse or both. The engineer and the conductor delivered the same results - CD the best, 128 the worst, and they could not separate Lossless from 256. So if you want to hear Leonard Cohen Live In London in concert-quality then get the CD. And the DVD.
Not just for Mr. Cohen. For Sharon Robinson and the Webb sisters, blues nightingales. For the best collection of musicians in a long time. And Leonard Cohen, well, I don't pretend even to try and add what is written about the man. You know it all. Especially that there appear to be three phases to his performing life - the literature, the early voice - thin, almost tuneless but enthralling - and the later voice, mellifluous and matched perfectly to his colleagues on stage.
The poetry varies, all interesting, some naughty, to use an old-fashioned word, and occasionally one verse. His Book of Longing was published in 2006, and has all these forms of poetry. The shortest one is the best. It delivers a feint then the punch, and it's about love, all in two lines. It goes "You go your way I'll go your way too" It's just that bit better than the Roman "Ubi tu Gaius..." wedding vow because it suggests togetherness, not just amalgamation. And that's love.

Dreaming Up A Brilliant Labyrinth

If there's one thing Jorge Luis Borges has over Benedict de Spinoza, it's Style. Borges, a beloved son of Latin America and some say the best author never to win a Nobel Prize, nurtures his beguiling short stories until each develops a life of its own. Their content is rich and complex and always character-full, for want of a real word. Walter Truett Anderson said of postmodernism that it "mixed rituals and traditions like greens in a salad" and this is a good description of a Borges story.
Spinoza is unreadable. No, I take that back. Spinoza is unreadable to most of us. But some would say he is more important than Borges. He develops truly original concepts of pantheism and determinism and other isms in the form of The Geometry Textbook. You know, A is to B as C is to D so E...you get the picture.
So what happens when Borges writes a poem about Spinoza. I'll tell what happens - we suddenly get to love Spinoza. Borges writes about Spinoza polishing his lenses with the hyacinth in the confines of the ghetto walls, a quiet Spinoza "free of metaphor and myth". And when he writes that Spinoza sits there "dreaming up a brilliant labyrinth", the picture of Spinoza is complete. In those five words we suddenly see through the convoluted philosophical details, and appreciate the man himself. It's Borges' Style over Spinoza's Substance. The best of both worlds.

Well Then, Give Me Your Pain

I'm not sure that anyone reads Lou Salome, or about Lou Salome, anymore. The peripatetic Russian psychoanalyst and feminist, born in 1861, was linked to famous men of her age, including Ree, Nietzsche, Wagner, Freud and Rilke, inter alia. In fact, there was a menage of sorts with the first two, the Poet and the Philosopher, a deep love affair with Rainer Maria Rilke, and a love-filled albeit (supposedly) celibate marriage of 47 years with Friedrich Andreas. She was profoundly intellectual, smarter than pretty well anyone she met, and wrote profusely, in fact being one of the first to discuss female sexuality. Not a bad curriculum vitae.
She wrote a poem for Nietzsche. It's hard to track down, but you can find it in her own published portrait of Nietzsche, thankfully still in print. Ode to Life starts with an affirmation of her love of life, especially its joys and its riddles and its dangers, but the bottom line, after her cry "If you must destroy me", has to be on a par with Dylan's "Do Not Go Gentle". She dares life to "Throw all you have into the battle. If no more is left of joy, well then, give me your pain".
Its fitting that she wrote this poem for a man who believed Life itself created its own codes and structures and morals, and that Life was there to be celebrated whether happy or sad or dying. But it's tough when you are sad or dying. Does this challenge "Give Me Your Pain" help anyone. I don't know, but it's worth taking the baton offered by her, and running with it.

My Body Of A Sudden Blazed

In his Nobel Lecture delivered on December 15th, 1923, shortly after receiving the Prize for Literature, WB Yeats spoke at length about the Irish Dramatic Movement. The speech is a little like his poetry - brilliant, seductive and mellifluous, although the reader always feels that a PhD in History or Literature or Linguistics would be useful for full appreciation. But, buried in the characters and events and opinions, you can find a mystical spark, just like in many of his poems. He says "you desire beautiful emotion...and care not how fantastic its expression".
His poem that best demonstrates this statement is very short, and has the rather indecipherable title of Vacillation IV. The scene is set. Yeats is fifty, alone in a crowded shop, obviously miserable. The second stanza appears as though shot from a gun: "While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed; And twenty minutes more or less It seemed, so great my happiness, That I was blessed and could bless".
This brief intense happy transformation is good if you can get it. Mystics strive after it, some call it Sartori, or Prayer, or Nirvana, or whatever.  It doesn't have to last long. Yeats even suggests twenty minutes "more or less", but let's not put too fine a point on using time to measure something that is, well, timeless.