Leonard Cohen cleverness. Love. Aging. Heroics.

“Roshi [his Zen Buddhist teacher] said something nice to me one time. He said that the older you get, the lonelier you become, and the deeper the love you need.

Which means that this hero that you’re trying to maintain as the central figure in the drama of your life— this hero is not enjoying the life of a hero.

You’re exerting a tremendous maintenance to keep this heroic stance available to you, and the hero is suffering defeat after defeat.

And they’re not heroic defeats; they’re ignoble defeats.

Finally, one day you say, ‘Let him die— I can’t invest any more in this heroic position.’

From there, you just live your life as if it’s real— as if you have to make decisions even though you have absolutely no guarantee of any of the consequences of your decisions.”

Stranger Song on Once More with Felix, 1967

#TheTallestManOnEarth and Idiot Wind. Famous couples. Folk singers.

Honestly, the way these two look at each other – it almost makes up for the whole Susan Sarandon/Tim Robbins travesty.

When he performed it in Johannesburg a few weeks ago, they couldn’t get through a line of the song without giggling at each other.

As long as they, and the Lamontagnes, and Tom Waits/Kathleen Brennan are fine, I think we’ll be alright.

Are folk singers just really clever about love?

Harvey Milk wisdom #love

“Go after her. Fuck, don’t sit there and wait for her to call, go after her because that’s what you should do if you love someone

don’t wait for them to give you a sign cause it might never come

don’t let people happen to you, don’t let me happen to you, or her

she’s not a fucking television show or tornado.

There are people I might have loved had they gotten on the airplane or run down the street after me or called me up drunk at four in the morning

because they need to tell me right now and because they cannot regret this

and I always thought I’d be the only one doing crazy things for people who would never give enough of a fuck to do it back or to act like idiots or be entirely vulnerable and honest

and making someone fall in love with you is easy

and flying 3000 miles on four days notice because you can’t just sit there and do nothing and breathe into telephones is not everyone’s idea of love but it is the way I can recognize it because that is what I do.

Go scream it and be with her in meaningful ways because that is beautiful and that is generous and that is what loving someone is, that is raw and that is unguarded, and that is all that is worth anything, really.”

Midnight in Paris | Ernest Hemingway | Love and the Fear of Death

I haven’t stopped thinking about this piece of dialogue in the carriage scene since I watched Midnight in Paris.

Corey Stoll was magnificent in this. Magnetic. And Woody Allen’s screenplay was just luminous – his best in years.

“I believe that love that is true and real creates a respite from death. All cowardice comes from not loving or not loving well, which is the same thing.”

Sorrow and its Stain | Nina Simone | Leonard Cohen

There are lots of ways for great sadness to manifest itself. You can experience love and loss as soon as it happens, and you can wear it in plain sight on your face and swim in it so that, as Paul Simon says “Everybody sees the wind blow”.

Something less often acknowledged is the fact that, once you’ve truly sad in the deepest sense, it never quite leaves you. You’re stained with the memory of something enormous that’s inhabited you, and the stain remains after the grief has gone.

It’s never about what caused the sadness to begin with, because that becomes meaningless over time. Grief is always bigger than its cause.

So you get up, and you walk around, and you love and live deeply, perhaps even deeper, but your every action after that sadness is coloured by the fact that you have that capacity for terrible, terrible sorrow, and you felt it completely. And that awareness is a fearsome thing.

What I’m saying is, sometimes, despite the smiles, despite the fact that the songs we sing are upbeat, the words we’re singing are no less tragic.

And just when you want to tell her
that you have no love to give her
She gets you on her wavelength
and she lets the river answer
That you’ve always been her lover