Songs of Love and Hate

Love and Hate

It’s 1:30 am and I’m listening to Leonard Cohen singing “Did you ever go clear?”, looking at the fragments of my life scattered in the aftermath of a breakup. A breakup. I suppose it doesn’t behove a man of science to display feelings but we can’t help being human once in a while.

“Avalanche” and “Famous Blue Raincoat” are two of my favourite songs, “If I am on a pedestal, you didn’t raise me there, your laws do not compel me to kneel grotesque and bare”. In many respects Cohen is incomparable in what he brings to music. These songs have long been emblazoned into my brain and these echoes remind me of the infinite pathos that man’s resolute soul can bring upon itself to bear.

Pathos

It’s funny, as everything seems funny to me in a certain light, that I never displayed so much emotion when I was with her. I can perhaps imagine sertraline has numbed me to a certain extent. At most times I feel nothing. Ignorance isn’t bliss, cynicism is.

But pathos is sure and it arrives fast and strong, in waves upon waves of reconciliation of the soul to its true place. It reminds you that you’re nothing, were nothing and eventually will be nothing. Yes the Eternal Footman snickers. You are it.

You Who Wish to Conquer Pain

“You who wish to conquer pain must learn learn to serve me well”. Sartre wrote that poetry, modern poetry is meaningless, as it is without a purpose. And yet as I ingest these words, they make sense, “You who wish to conquer pain, you must learn what makes me kind”. Cohen’s songs have a lot of references to Judeo-Christian religious tenets. “I” here is a wrathful God, who must be served. “I” here also changes into a humble broken man. They’re both the same.

So are we, so am I. We’re the center of our worlds, yet are so vulnerable and so fallible. Hollow men, made of straw. That’s another reference for another time however. Cohen mixes his own emotions with religious imagery and his words sound like gospel. He’s worshipping his own pain, just as I am perhaps?

“I” who feels

I used to say that all of art is solipsism. What is it if not a rendition of the self? I could compare it to more abstract pursuits such as mathematics and reduce it to more primordial feelings which as a consequence would be less evolved, and less…human. But that’s now what I said just a little earlier, is it? Man (and art, and perhaps even science) exists at the intersection of the primitive and the refined, the heart and the mind, the impetus and the reason. “I” who thinks may only think if “I” feel like doing so. And so here I am thinking what I’m feeling trying to make sense of it, and simultaneously thinking because I’m feeling. In short, I’m lost.