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The Gypsy Scholar is proud to dedicate this page of the Tower of Song in honor of its Orphic Troubadour, Leonard Cohen
"I'm Your Man" in the Tower of Song
Leonard Cohen is one of the Gypsy Scholar's
"singing-masters of my soul."
and
his Tower of Song is the
"singing school ...
studying Monuments of its own magnificence."
"Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence ....
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul."
~W.B. Yeats, 'Sailing to Byzantium'
(As a young poet, LC was deeply influenced by
Yeats, whom he has called "the master".)
Meme by B.F. Gypsy Scholar
In Memoriam
Leonard Cohen
September 21, 1934 - November 7, 2016
Now I bid you farewell, I don't know when I'll be back
They're moving us tomorrow to that tower down the track But you'll be hearing from me baby, long after I'm gone
I'll be speaking to you sweetly from a window in the
Tower of Song.
The Gypsy Scholar takes this verse as indicating that his Tower of Song program fulfills Leonard Cohen's promise that he will be heard after he's gone.
Leonard Cohen:
The "Romantic Outsider" as Poet-Musician
The Gypsy Scholar locates Leonard Cohen in the poetic tradition of the
19th-century Romantic Movement.
The GS's early intuition of the Romantic poets as Leonard Cohen's poetic influences has been substantiated by both LC himself (as to his influences as a young poet: "I studied the English poets and I knew their work well, and I copied their styles...." [2011] ) and by his critics and biographers. However, LC's is a special type of Romanticism. He has been identified with the late 19th-century poetic school of "Black Romanticism" (associated with Baudelaire): "Yet it is precisely this tradition, that of the contemporary Black Romantics [Genet, Burroughs, Grass] as we might call them, that Leonard Cohen appears to belong" (Sandra Djwa, 1976). LC himself has stated that as an aspiring young Montreal poet he took his inspiration from, and identified with, the Romantic poets, like Blake, Byron, Shelley, Keats and W. B. Yeats. ("... a young man who was growing up and discovering Byron and Blake." "It was also a place where a young poet could try to connect with the ghosts of Byron and Shelley and Blake." "Leonard Cohen was reborn as John Keats." [Leibovitz, 2014]. Bono, a great admirer, has this to say about Leonard: “Here was a man, who inside of a pop-song ... you know, puts big ideas, big dreams. It reminded me of Keats or Shelley or, you know, they were poets I was reading as a kid. I said this is our ... Shelley, this is our ... Byron.") Leonard has called W. B. Yeats "the great master." In his poem 'Time Out,' Cohen takes a line from Yeats' poem 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree': "I shall arise and go now." Cohen hears the Romantic call and longs to "arise and go now," and for a time he is set apart in order to grow. (LC also referred to Yeats in 1997: "Yeats's father said poetry is the social act of a solitary man ....") Thus, the GS sees Leonard Cohen as part of that esteemed "Visionary Company" (Harold Bloom) of the early 18th- and late 19th-century Romantic poet-prophets, those "ringers in the tower" (Yeats)--the "Tower of Song." (Regarding Bono's insight into LC that "inside of a pop-song ... you know, puts big ideas, big dreams" and identifying him with Romantic poets: the GS, as a young college student of English Lit and specializing in the Romantics--who sometimes called their poems "Songs"-- his desire to have Romantic poems set to music and his fantasy of a Romantic poet as a musician--because of his non-academic preoccupation with Sixties folk-rock music--was fully realized when he first heard the songs of one-time poet, Leonard Cohen. Indeed, these "big ideas" of high literary/philosophical culture "inside of a pop song" of low culture was a dream come true--and, looking back, probably the inspiration for later in life becoming the "Gypsy Scholar" on radio, who sought to mix high, academic culture with low, popular culture.)
My time is running out
and still I have not
sung the true song
the great song.
And Shelley had his towers, thought's crowned powers
he called them once
I declare this tower my symbol; I declare
This winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair is my
ancestral stair....
—W.B. Yeats, 'The Winding Stair and Other Poems'
I shall find the dark grow luminous,
the void fruitful when I understand
I have nothing, that the ringers in the tower
have appointed for the hymen of the soul
a passing bell.
—W.B. Yeats, 'Per Arnica Silentia Lunae'
Leonard Cohen's secret society of the Romantic "Visionary Company" (those poet-prophet "ringers in the tower") of the Tower of Song:
"The Order of the Unified Heart"
Leonard Cohen's Final Albums: You Want It Darker & Thanks for the Dance
This is a music video of the Leonard Cohen song "Traveling Light," from his last album, You Want It Darker. The video contains never before seen clips of Leonard at his LA home during his final days.
This is a video of the "Leonard Cohen: You Want it Darker" press conference held October 13, 2016, shortly before Leonard passed away. With him is his son Adam. It should give some clarity for those who feel so confidently entitled to speak for him, because of their religion. When LC is questioned: "What is the importance of religion in your life, at this stage in your life?," he probably shocked many fans who took it for granted that he's deeply "religious": "I've never thought of myself as a religious person ...." (Cf. "Well, for one thing, in the tradition of Zen that I've practiced, there is no prayerful worship and there is no affirmation of a deity.") The GS wasn't at all taken back, since he had long argued on radio during his Leonard Cohen birthday specials that LC was, in fact, not "religious"--that although Judeo-Christian references occur in a number of his poetry and songs, and run heavy all through You Want It Darker, biblical tropes and imagery serve (except for song-prayers like "If It Be Your Will") not as traditional declarations of faith but rather what LC's "master," William Butler Yeats, described as "metaphors for poetry." As the GS has argued, "Poetry is not simply religious dogma set to verse." To read biblical imagery in poetic verse or song lyric as straightforward confession is to read as a literalist. Therefore, LC's biblical metaphors serve, in the GS's view, to enhance an existential situation, whether it be concerning love, life or death.
This is a music video of the story about making Leonard Cohen's
posthumous album put together by his son Adam Cohen entitled
Thanks for the Dance, which was released on October 22, 2019.
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Memes About Leonard Cohen
by B. F. Gypsy Scholar
Leonard Cohen Biographical Memes
by B.F. Gypsy Scholar
Leonard, in talking about being a young poet in Montreal, among a group of idealistic young poets, quotes the line from Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley
Leonard Cohen Philosophical Memes
by B.F. Gypsy Scholar
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"As rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them (HOMO INTELLIGENDO FIT OMNIA), this imaginative metaphysics [Giambattista Vico's New Science] shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them (HOMO NON INTELLIGENDO FIT OMNIA)." ~ Prof. N.O. Brown, Closing Time (1973)
Leonard Cohen's song "Hallelujah" was released in 1984, when he was 50 years old.
L. C. has acknowledged that Yeats is one of his primary poetic mentors--"the master."
Leonard Cohen Memes on Poetry & Music
by B.F. Gypsy Scholar
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That "sanctuary" is metaphorically the "Tower of Song"
This is a revelation to the GS, who conceived of his discursive "musical essay" as elevated speech that must at its most intense level morph into song—preferably consisting of rock guitars. As Patti Smith so aptly puts it: "Three-cord rock merging with the power of the word.
Leonard Cohen Memes on Sexuality and Love
by B.F. Gypsy Scholar
This is Leonard Cohen's version of one of Blake's arguments in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Shambhala Sun interview, 1998. This is what the GS has been asserting all along about what kind of philosophy is behind some of LC's love songs: "... there is no difference between the spiritual and the profane. But it's reached through the profane rather than the spiritual ...." Now, here's the confirmation from LC himself !
These two memes depict prime examples of Leonard Cohen blending sexuality with G-d, or eroticism with spirituality, which equals what can be called "sacred sexuality."
This reads like Leonard Cohen's rephrase on C.G. Jung's
concept of the anima and animus.
This, again, reads like Leonard Cohen's rephrase on C.G. Jung's
concept of the anima and animus.
Leonard knows that love as an "ailment," a "fever," or "disease" is not an original idea. In fact, as the GS has discussed in his musical essays on the 12th-century troubadours, these poet-singers conceived of love as such (which they probably got from earlier Arabic medical treatises that went on to influence Western medical treatises, the most famous being Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621 and its category of "lovesickness").
Leonard Cohen Memes from His Poetry Books
by B.F. Gypsy Scholar
This prescient poem (1964) that declares "no Opposition" is very relevant today when the science of quantum physics philosophically affirms both Eastern and Western wisdom traditions which teach that all oppositions are ultimately illusions (inside vs outside, organism vs nature, body vs mind, self vs other, nature vs spirit); that these are actually not opposites but "polarities" in a unified whole. Of course, LC's 1974 album cover depicted this same truth. It was an alchemical illustration from the "Rosarium philosophorum" text (1550), in which two naked, winged, and crowned angels are in a sexual embrace. This is an illustration of the "unio conjunctio" or union of opposites.
Other Leonard Cohen Memes and Images
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Leonard Cohen's poetry book: Book of Longing (2006)
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Leonard Cohen Song-lyric Memes
by B.F. Gypsy Scholar
"It's written on the walls of this hotel
You go to heaven once you've been to hell."
"I made a date in Heaven, Oh Lord
But I've been keepin' it in Hell."
~ Leonard Cohen
"Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained;
and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling.
And being restrain'd it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire.
The history of this is written in Paradise Lost. & the Governor or Reason is call'd Messiah….
But in the Book of Job Miltons Messiah is call'd Satan…
It indeed appear'd to Reason as if Desire was cast out, but the Devil's account is, that the Messiah fell, & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss."
"I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity."
~ William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
"So, so you think you can tell / Heaven from Hell? / Blue skies from pain? / Can you tell a green field / From a cold steel rail? / A smile from a veil? Do you think you can tell?"
~ Pink Floyd, "Wish You Were Here"
"Winter's people watching / As I sail from season's four / To join some crazy ladies / In a game upon the shore / None of them with broken wings / But still refuse to fly / So with sweetness on my lips / I smile a last goodbye. / And now I spend my life / On the velvet side of hell / Aimlessly here searching / For what I cannot tell."
~ Steve Miller Band, "Your Saving Grace"
These lyrics are an early version of the opening lines of "Ain’t No Cure For Love." They reflect LC's criticism of Band Aid benefit concert in 1985.
T
H
E
F
U
T
U
R
E
“In the jungle of cities, the new barbarism. It is later than you think.... The sense of ending: Western Civilization is over…. On the verge of closing time…. In the meantime, waiting waiting…. In the meantime, an interim in the time of the Not yet…. In the interim, an interlude … an interlude of farce…. An interval of timeless formlessness, an interregnum.... Interregnum, or Saturnalia, satire for the Saturnalia.... Farce makes farce out of tragedy..... Waiting for Lefty, Waiting for Godot, waiting to stop the show, the farce … waiting to bring the house down…. Waiting for a new dawn. Calling all downs. ‘It is imperative that we sink.’ (W.C. Williams). Farce ... the swan song of dying civilizations.... Beyond tragedy and farce is the fusion of these opposites.”
~ Prof. N.O. Brown, Closing Time (1973)
The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true. as I have heard from Hell…
… the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite. and holy whereas
it now appears finite & corrupt.
This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.
~ William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
“No One After You” is a song by Leonard Cohen & Anjani, released on her Blue Alert album in 2006
A 1992 Song “About An Orgasm”
by Leonard Cohen & Dave Stewart
Artworks for Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen Song Artworks
Leonard Cohen's Art Prints
Leonard Cohen Portraits
Leonard Cohen In Concert Portraits
Leonard Cohen Concert Posters
Leonard Cohen Early Concert Photos
Leonard Cohen 2008-9 World Tour Concert Photos
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The Gypsy Scholar Commemorates
Leonard Cohen's 2008-09 World Tour Concert in San Jose
The Gypsy Scholar attended the HP Pavilion Concert in San Jose, California on Friday, November 13, 2009. And thus his first program tribute to Leonard Cohen on November 23rd included a reading (and critique) of the article in the METRO entitled, appropriately enough, "The Tower of Song."
Here is the Leonard Cohen front-page spread in the METRO: Silicon Valley's Weekly Newspaper entitled, "The Poet King," with the byline, "At 75, Leonard Cohen Has Become An Unlikely Arena Sensation" (Nov. 11-17, 2009).
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The Gypsy Scholar Commemorates
Leonard Cohen's 2010 World Tour Concert in Oakland
The Gypsy Scholar attended the Paramount Theatre Concert
in Oakland, California on Monday, December 6, 2010
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This iconic photo of LC was taken by his daughter, Lorca, supposedly at the Paramount Theater .
Paramount Theater in Oakland , California was the venue for LC's two magnificent World Tour shows. Described on the theatre's website as “one of the finest remaining examples of Art Deco design in the United States,” it is one of a number of former "Movie Palaces" that now serve as beautiful theaters in the USA. It was completed in 1931 and is now a National Historic Landmark.
For the Gypsy Scholar's money, he can't think of a better venue for a Leonard Cohen concert than the Paramount Theater, with its rich gold and silver ornamentation, which consists of human and animal figures (and goddess figures in the lobby). Oh, and the angel figure on the ceiling right above the stage [see picture] reminded him of William Blake's titanic forms. Yes, the perfect place. So when Leonard hit the high note on "Hallelujah," he swears he saw the angel soar upward! And suddenly, the Gypsy Scholar found himself inside the secular Temple of Music he's always imagined--the Tower of Song.
The Gypsy Scholar Commemorates
Leonard Cohen's End of the World Tour Concert in Las Vegas
Dec. 10 & 11, 2010
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The Gypsy Scholar Commemorates
Leonard Cohen's Old Ideas 2012-13 World Tour
(Final Concert Tour)
This gallery contains photos of LC's last time on stage at Auckland, New Zealand (Dec. 21, 2013)
Images for the Gypsy Scholar’s Musical Essay:
“Leonard Cohen, Darkness, & Soul-making: What Boogie Street Is For”
The GS interprets these "Kabbalistic inflected" lyrics of "Boogie Street" as reflecting the alchemical union of opposites (unio coniunctio; sacred marriage), depicted here as sun/light/male and moon/dark/female. Psychologically (according to Jung), it represents the integration of the psyche and a new level of being. The image below is also an alchemical depiction of the unio coniunctio, a variant of the one LC used for the cover of his New Skin For The Old Ceremony album (1974).
Hallelujah!, the Gypsy Scholar has at last found a music journalist/critic writing about Leonard Cohen who gets him— who groks what he's about.
I mean someone who would agree with my argument in the musical essay I presented years ago in honor of LC's birthday: “Leonard Cohen, Darkness, & Soul-making: What Boogie Street Is For."
The basic argument: LC is not "religious" (he has said so himself). Thus, if he's indeed "a man of faith" (in Judaism) he can be heretical (uniting sacred and profane, and thus achieving transcendence, paradoxically, through the profane—the "left-hand path"), agnostic, even a-theistic by turns in his poetry and songs (as evidenced in last solo album, You Want It Darker. (For instance: "tho' there be a God or not"). But not agnostic or atheistic in the normal way that the run-of-the-mill Western skeptics, agnostics, and atheists are. (This is an important qualification in order to avoid misunderstanding where LC stands in terms of "religion" per se— misunderstanding from the traditional non-believers on the one side and from the believers on the other).
No, not like common agnostics or atheists but like uncommon non-theists such as Alan Watts, who talks about a Zen Buddhist non-belief in deity and a flat-out rejection of any kind of religious talk or "theology." (Cf. LC: "Well, for one thing, in the tradition of Zen that I've practiced, there is no prayerful worship and there is no affirmation of a deity.") This is, according to Watts ("the foremost interpreter of Eastern thought to the West") a "higher atheism" that forms the paradoxical "Religion of No Religion."
In the GS's musical essay, it was speculated that LC's interest in Kabbalah and other esoteric traditions gave him the idea of a totally unmanifest Godhead that is beyond human knowing and about which nothing can be said, as opposed to the manifest creator deity or "personal God." (In Indian Philosophy: “Saguna Brahman” describes a God with tangible attributes as opposed to the “Nirguna Brahman,” which describes a God with no tangible attributes.) This "God beyond God" concept can also be found in the (mystical) Christian tradition of Meister Eckhart and his "negative theology" (technically, "apophatic theology" as opposed to the normative positive "cataphatic theology:" a form of theological thinking and religious practice which attempts to approach God, the Divine, by negation, to speak only in terms of what may not be said about the perfect goodness that is God). The same "negative theology" can be found in The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous work of Christian mysticism written in the latter half of the 14th century. (Cf. LC: "Come forth from the cloud of unknowing / And kiss the cheek of the moon," from song "The Window.")
Of course— and this is important to understand— because the lower or manifest God of monotheistic theology (who has attributes and can be talked about) is denied as the "ultimate reality," this looks to our modern Western-educated, "scientific" skeptics like flat-out atheism, but the crucial difference is that for negative theology this is a paradoxical negation in service to the unmanifest "Godhead"— not in service to scientific materialism.
Therefore, the GS is linking to a piece called "Leonard Cohen: Poet of Holy Sinners" by a Rabbi no less! (Rabbi Jay Michaelson, a contributing columnist for the Forward and for Rolling Stone.)
Images for the Gypsy Scholar’s Musical Essay:
“Leonard Cohen & the Dark Goddess: Brokenness, Woundedness
& the Crack In Everything”
Images and Memes for Leonard Cohen's
Via Negativa Paradox of Brokenness
Akhilandeshvari, a lesser-known Hindu deity, is one of the main forms of the Hindu Goddess Adi Parashakti, more commonly known as Goddess Dandini Devi. She is also said to be a form of the Tantric goddess Shakti. “Ishvari” in Sanskrit means “goddess” or “female power,” and the “Akhilanda” means essentially “never not broken.” In other words, “The Always Broken Goddess.” The double negative here means that she is broken right down to her name.
Akhilandeshvari is, like Kali, a dark goddess. She derives her power from being broken: in flux, pulling herself apart, living in different, constant selves at the same time, from never becoming a whole that has limitations. Because this dark goddess is about the power of being broken, she helps us to find the light of our essence through the cracks from the chaos. She helps us to see beauty in imperfection. Thus, one of her many gifts is to remind us of the power to be found in our brokenness, in the loss, the fear, and the despair or anguish.
For the Gypsy Scholar, the Dark Goddess Akhilandeshvari is the reigning deity of our aeon (in Sanskrit, kalpa) and Leonard Cohen—the High Priest of Brokenness—is one of her great poet-prophets.
“The brokenness of things.” ~Leonard Cohen
“It's not some pilgrim who claims to have seen the Light
No, it's a cold and it's a very broken Hallelujah.” ~Leonard Cohen
Memes for Leonard Cohen's Via Negativa
Paradox of Descent & Darkness
These lyrics testify to L.C.'s Tantric type of "via negativa," whereby the very things that in orthodox religion are taboo—like sexuality—are used for liberation.
This meme is to illustrate what the GS is calling Leonard Cohen's post-religious spiritual path on Boogie Street: a "via negativa" (a descent into the underworld for transformation).
Therefore, this meme by the Gypsy Scholar (taken from LC's song, which is probably based upon his time in the Buddhist monastery) illustrates what the GS is identifying as a "via negativa" —a classic descent into the underworld for transformation. In this case, the underworld descent results in a transformation from believing into genuine gnosis .
Leonard Cohen's Jukebox
Leonard Cohen on radio
Leonard Cohen's Jukebox
"Gloomy Sunday" & Leonard Cohen's Jukebox
"Biggest Influence on My Music – The jukebox. I lived beside jukeboxes all through the fifties. … I never knew who was singing. I never followed things that way. I still don’t. I wasn’t a student of music; I was a student of the restaurant I was in — and the waitresses. The music was a part of it. I knew what number the song was." - Leonard Cohen (Yakety Yak by Scott Cohen, 1994)
In interviews through the years, Leonard Cohen has mentioned a handful of specific songs he favors. And one of his top favorites is the tragic song “Gloomy Sunday," composed by Hungarian pianist and composer Rezso Seress in 1933 to a Hungarian poem written by László Jávor, in which the singer reflects on the horrors of modern culture. It has been dubbed "the Hungarian Suicide Song" because people have jumped out of windows after hearing it. Leonard Cohen paid tribute to it with his own "suicide song" in the introduction to “Dress Rehearsal Rag” at the 1968 BBC Sessions:
"You know there’s a song in, I think it was in Czechoslovakia, called “Gloomy Sunday” that was forbidden to play because every time it would play people would leap out of windows and off of roofs. It was a tragic song. And I read in the Athens news the other day that the composer of it, who only really wrote that one song, he died recently, jumped out of a window himself. I have one of those songs that I have banned for myself. I sing it only on extremely joyous occasions when I know that the landscape can support the despair that I am about to project into it. It’s called the 'Dress Rehearsal Rag.'"
(An album was released in March of 2010, Leonard Cohen's Jukebox: Songs That Inspired the Man, by various artists and with "Gloomy Sunday" as one of the tracks. However, the album was not authorized by Cohen and seems to be nothing but a marketing ploy.)
Leonard Cohen Zen Monk Jikan
Meme by Gypsy Scholar
Leonard Cohen's Blessing
Meme by Gypsy Scholar
Postcard from Leonard Cohen
A Postcard from Leonard to the Gypsy Scholar
The Gypsy Scholar received a post card from Leonard Cohen in 1993 in response to a letter he had sent expressing his great admiration and describing his radio program, "The Tower of Song." Under Leonard's signature is stamped his "Order of the Unified Heart" symbol.
The postcard read:
Dear B. F. Gypsy Scholar,
Thank-you for your letter,
your kind words, and your
interest in my work. I
deeply appreciate it.
Sincerely,
Leonard Cohen
This is what the GS will be wearing
for the Leonard Cohen programs
Leonard Cohen "The Window" Music Video
by B.F. Gypsy Scholar
Meme by B.F. Gypsy Scholar
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This is a music video the GS created from Leonard Cohen's song "The Window." It begins with two "window" paintings by Chagall. Click on arrow to play.
The Gypsy Scholar found this letter (weeks after creating the music video) to Elliot Wolfson, a professor of Jewish mysticism at McGill University, from Leonard Cohen, who was replying to Prof. Wolfson's inquiry as to whether or not LC "has studied kabbalah or hasidism, and if so, he acknowledges a direct influence on his work." The Gypsy Scholar had the same question, as some of LC's songs seemed to allude to a familiarity with Kabbalistic mysticism. Knowing a little about Kabbalism, the Gypsy Scholar felt that the song, "The Window," contained hints to Kabbalistic mysticism. When considering the images to sync with the lyrics of the song, the Gypsy Scholar only had a snippet of information to go on; i.e., that LC had some knowledge of the work of the 16th-century rabbi and mystic Isaac Luria, who wrote on the Kabbalah. This letter now validates the Gypsy Scholar's use of the Kabbalistic images of the Tree of Life (and the Shekhinah , of which LC has made a drawing) to interpret the song's lyrics.
Leonard Cohen's Esotericism: from the Kabbalah to Alchemy
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This "Self-Portrait" (1979) is stamped with the
alchemical "Rosarium philosophorum" from LC's
New Skin for the Old Ceremony album cover (1974).
The original cover design for New Side for the Old Ceremony by Teresa Alfiera adapted a 1550 woodcut, the "conjunctio spirituum" from the text Rosarium philosophorum, of two naked, winged, and crowned angels in a sexual embrace. The image appears in Carl Jung's Psychology and Alchemy (1955), which is quite possibly where Cohen first encountered it, and represents one of Cohen’s abiding interests: love in all its dilemmas, manifest in the ideal union of male and female beings which, in alchemy. were embodied in solar and lunar elements respectively.
The Rosarium philosophorum (the Rosary of the Philosophers, 1550). In the fifth illustration Sol and Luna are copulating. The original text associated with this image reads: “O Luna, folded in my sweet embrace/ Be you as strong as I, as fair of face. O Sol, brightest of all lights known to men/ And yet you need me as the cock the hen.” Jung says of this image that “Our pictures of the coniunctio are to be understood in this sense: union on the biological level is a symbol of the unio oppositorum at its highest. This means that the union of opposites in the royal art is just as real as coitus in the common acceptation of the word, so that the opus becomes an analogy of the natural process by means of which instinctive energy is transformed, at least in part, into symbolical activity. The creation of such analogies frees instinct and the biological sphere as a whole from the pressure of unconscious contents.” (The Practice of Psychotherapy, p. 250)
The Gypsy Scholar presents this meme in honor of
Leonard Cohen's 88th Birthday —September 21, 2022
The verse in this meme is from the opening stanza of the poem "Ode" (1873) by the poet Arthur O'Shaughnessy.
Here are the next selected stanzas from the poem that the GS feels are particularly relevant to the late Leonard Cohen:
But we, with our dreaming and singing,
Ceaseless and sorrowless we!
The glory about us clinging
Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing:
O men! it must ever be
That we dwell, in our dreaming and singing,
A little apart from ye….
Great hail! we cry to the comers
From the dazzling unknown shore;
Bring us hither your sun and your summers;
And renew our world as of yore;
You shall teach us your song's new numbers,
And things that we dreamed not before:
Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers,
And a singer who sings no more.
_____________________________
In the poem "We are the Music Makers" refers to all creative artists as music makers; i.e., poets, painters, sculptors and all other artists. The poet calls all of them music makers since they create harmony and sweetness. When we listen to a song, a read a poem, look at a beautiful painting, sculpture, etc. we are struck by the harmony it creates and the sweetness it makes us feel. The poet calls all artists as "dreamers of dreams," since they dream what we all dream. Their dreams are, however, different from ours in nature. Whereas our dreams remain mere dreams and vanish after a while, their dreams get concrete shapes in the forms of poems, songs, stories, paintings, sculptures etc.
Thus, perhaps these "dreamers," these "World losers"—as Leonard Cohen's "Beautiful Losers"—are (beginning with the 19th-century Romantics) now (with the new paradigm revealed by "consciousness" research) finally winning the ontological and epistemological battle as to what's "real" and what isn't.
"Ah, the dreamers ride against the men of action
Oh, see the men of action falling back."
~LC, "The Traitor"
Meme by Gypsy Scholar
To go to the original Leonard Cohen webpage, where there's more LC photos
plus links to LC interviews and more, click button below.
Gypsy Scholar's Perfect Birthday Present (September 22, 2024)
Leonard Cohen is renowned the world over for his meditations on beauty, death, loss and the human heart. The objects, papers and artifacts from Cohen’s personal archive provide fresh insight into the artist’s creative pursuits and the arc of his career over six decades. Aware from an early age that he was destined to make a mark on this world, Cohen preserved an expansive collection of letters, journals, manuscripts, sketches and records. Together, they provide a rich visual road map to his evolution as a poet and songwriter.
The first publication to present the holdings of the Leonard Cohen Family Trust, Everybody Knows: Inside His Archive immerses readers in the many facets of Cohen’s creative life. Images of rare concert footage and archival materials, including musical instruments, notebooks, lyrics and letters, are featured alongside photographs, drawings and digital art created by Cohen across several decades. (Published February 28, 2023)
Look who's a Leonard Cohen fan!
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Could the answer to how Kamala Harris became a Leonard Cohen fan be that she actually lived in Westmount, Montreal?
In 1976, Kamala's South Indian mother accepted a research position at the McGill University School of Medicine, and moved with her daughters to Montreal, Quebec. Kamala Harris graduated from Westmount High School in Montreal in 1981. (Westmount is an enclave of Montreal.) After graduating, Harris attended Vanier College in Montreal in 1981–82.
Why is Westmount, Montreal significant here? Because Leonard Cohen attended Westmount High School beginning in 1948, where he studied music and poetry. Surely, Kamala must have heard a great deal about Westmount High's most famous student!