Spring Thoughts

News is that Prince Charles has named Leonard Cohen his favorite singer. By appointment to HRH the Prince of Wales.

A creditable choice. For my money, Cohen is the best poet currently writing in English.

Here’s a selection of lyric from his latest album:

The Faith

The sea so deep and blind
The sun, the wild regret
The club, the wheel, the mind,
O love, aren’t you tired yet?

A cross on every hill
A star, a minaret,
So many graves to fill
O love, aren’t you tired yet?

The sea so deep and blind
Where still the sun must set
And time itself unwind
O love, aren’t you tired yet?
O love, aren’t you tired yet?

- Leonard Cohen. The liner notes say, “based on a Quebec folk song.”

You can’t beat that. That’s everything poetry should be.

What does it mean? Maybe better we do not know. Poetry is not about meaning, on the conscious level.

But Cohen is, like most, maybe all, poets and artists and writers, maybe scientists and engineers too, in deep veneration of the universal feminine, aka the Muses. For my money, Cohen goes too far in this; but never mind. This is not just a classical poetic fantasy; it seems intrinsic to the creative impulse. Beauty and creation are themselves feminine things. So all artists and creators love the feminine, and generally, love women in the particular as well.

Scientists and engineers too perhaps necessarily venerate Nature, invariably conceived as feminine: now called Mother Nature, in past ages called Demeter, Gaia, Mae Toranee, Kali, Venus, and so on. God is masculine; therefore physical creation is feminine.

And physical creation, and the universal feminine, involves not just the world in spatial terms, but in temporal terms as well. She is time, and so fertility, or energy, or change (birth, but also death and dying.)

All of this seems encapsulated in Cohen’s perfect little poem: she, Love, is the sea of flux, she is energy, and so too emotional energy: love, lust, regret, hysteria, anger, fear, desire. She is all the cycles by which we measure time: of the sun through the day and the year, the moon winding through its phases; time itself.

Standing above her are the hills of spirit: the Star of David, the cross, the minaret. The masculine, God, order. The call to something transcendent. Something, in some absolute sense, superior.

And yet, and yet… as William Blake said, “eternity is in love with the productions of time.” God is in love with the creation, and with the individual human soul, as a man might love a woman. Some day she will rise, redeemed, Mary redeeming Eve, Sita redeemed by trial of fire, Guan Yin redeeming Mahamaya, Sarasvati redeeming Durga. As Wisdom redeems the Shekhinah from the crusts of her concealment.

This is salvation history: it is the resurrection of the body.

But it is a mystery; something always only dimly and intuitively perceived.


From the same Cohen album: here are the words to “Dear Heather”:

Dear Heather
Please walk by me again
With a drink in your hand
And your legs all white
From the winter.

What is Heather here but heather, the flowers of spring? This is the earth goddess, the fertility goddess, Kore or Demeter, rising from death and winter. “Heather” is sketched on the album cover with hair half black, half white, to show her dual nature: birth and death, youth and age, and, yes, good and evil.

Heather, “all white from the winter” is the world returning to life, visibility, and fertility again, after one more bitter Canadian winter. The ice breaks and the water and the sap and the energy again flows—the drink in her hand. She keeps walking by us again, and each time is old love renewed.

Mary, Stella Maris, Our Lady of Good Help, mother of God, redeemer of old mother Eve, walks by us again.

Mary Magdalen, the whore of Babylon redeemed and again virgin, walks by us again.

Time pauses for the winter. And then walks by us again.

You just can’t do better than Cohen.