All Hallows Eve

Tags

death, joy, leonard cohen, love, music, songs, volcanos, Werner Hertzog

 

I have always liked this day, this night, which grows increasingly poignant as Time decays. So many lovely souls now lost to the dateless night closing in on us all. So many. My lifeline to the planet’s progress, or egress, CBC Radio’s The World At Six, is 50 years old today. Ho-hum. The police in Montreal are now tapping a journalist’s telephone. The Great American Disaster now slouches towards its inevitably foul finale, with the FBI illegally interfering in an election that, one hopes, will remain the all-time nadir of western democracy. This is a day for reflection and remembrance. The earth has grown still and silent, as life retreats below to wait for spring and more life. A winter chill envelops huddled trees and empty fields. Up here, in the mountains, even people seem to disappear until the tenderness of new green leaves is once more seen. Byron and Algis are off to Mexico. It is usually a melancholy time, yet I find myself thinking of not-so-small mercies, the recent blessings that have come.

By now, I have purchased Leonard Cohen’s latest album, You Want It Darker, and I am overwhelmed with gratitude and admiration. Previously, I thought the title song was cause enough for rejoicing – and, to be honest, I expected no more. Now I find this is one of his very best albums – which, for Cohen, is saying a lot – a compilation of ten exquisite songs almost heartbreaking in their truth and beauty. It was produced by his son, Adam Cohen, who has created a masterpiece of subtle restraint, with plaintive strings, reminiscent of Beethoven’s Last Quartets, always haunting his father’s balefully evocative and irreducibly concise words.

 

If you are the Dealer

                   I’m out of the game

                   If you are the Healer

                   Then I’m broken and lame –

                   You want it darker?

                   We kill the flame…

 

          Leonard Cohen was not well when he recorded this album, it seems. The sessions were held in his house, and the microphone fixed up over a medical chair. No doubt the extreme physical exertions of his recent tours – falling to his knees to sing Hallelujah – exacted a toll. The songs do indeed sound elegiac, yet I hear no sense of an end-time farewell, as some do. Indeed, the gently tinkling piano and the modest cooing of back-up singers lends a hopeful air to extravagantly ambiguous lyrics. Flames may be killed, he might be “out of the game” – but his heart has always been heavy with a love so bittersweet it is barely distinguishable from sorrow. Even the phrase, “I’m ready, my Lord,” which repeats in the title song, is not a quietus – Leonard has long been ready for his Lord, and, unsurprisingly, he still is. Although now he may be:

 

Somebody who

Has given up on me and you…

 

I might be that somebody too, so I can dig it – as we used to say.

 

I’d better drink this glass of blood

Try to say the Grace Try to keep the peace…

 

They are not words of weary resignation. So many of these fine songs express the equanimity that comes

 

Year by year

Month by month

Day by day

Thought by thought

 

I’m not sure why Leonard Cohen’s triumph at 82 should so transfix me with joy – yet it does. Possibly it encourages me, at 66, to anticipate many more years of abundance? Possibly. But, listening to all the shitty contemporary music which spurts from my radio if I don’t get there fast enough, I am inclined to think it is because great singer-songwriters may be waning, but they’re not dead yet – and, who knows, they may inspire another generation to match standards that seem anything but standard? Well, Lenny, what a feat!

 

Equally delightful is Werner Herzog’s latest film, Into the Inferno, now available on Netflicks. Of course, I could not actually see it, but I heard it, and heard about it. Ostensibly a look at volcanoes and volcanologists, it is naturally far, far more than that, delving into matters as deep and dark as those Leonard Cohen toys with. The footage of eruptions and lava-flows is evidently mind-boggling, yet much of this is stock-footage – and Herzog happily admits it. What interests him is the ancient interplay between humankind and this most dramatic display of nature’s destructive potency. Numerous far-flung regions have a mythology inextricably linked to the earth’s proclivity for devouring her inhabitants in a rage of molten rock, of pyro-caustic rivers rushing down at a thousand miles an hour to obliterate all that was once a landscape unchanged in millennia. One South Pacific island even has a relatively recent commemorative cult. Jon Frum, an American GI, parachuted – presumably by accident – into the island’s volcano crater. But, like Jesus, he will one day return, bringing gifts of bubble-gum, candy, and washing-machines for everyone. This is not a barroom yarn. It is a nascent religion – one that could, if circumstances permitted it, dominate half the world. Herzog does not ridicule it either. With his usual wry wisdom, he presents it in comparison with Christianity – and these comparisons are many. Herzog is the perfect polite observer, always eager to understand another’s point of view, and never judgmental. Somehow, he manages to enter North Korea, where a great volcano – Mount Pekatu – has been incorporated into the ruling party’s mythology. Noting the country’s restrictions on media, the director simply informs us that North Korea prefers to be seen from its own point of view. He allows the images to speak for themselves – the “human pixels” choreographed in displays of hundreds of weeping thousands celebrating the nation’s birth. It would be mawkish to comment on such images. Instead, Herzog pinpoints nuggets of information that reveal far more even than his images. The original Kim Il Jong, for example, the fighter against “Japanese imperialism” who fathered the nation, also declared himself the “leader for all eternity” – which is why his son and , now, his grandson have never declared themselves leaders. There can be no other leader. As Herzog shows us, the nominative leaders are always portrayed with the volcano behind them. It is a metaphor for strength, and a symbol of the regime’s connection to North Korea’s vast antiquity. We see students in military dress sing odes to the volcano, and Herzog merely remarks, in his droll way, that it is hard to picture American college freshmen and women performing such a ritual in deadly seriousness. Hard? It is impossible. In Ethiopia, he stumbles across anthropologists who have just uncovered fossilized human remains a hundred-thousand years old. It is only the third such find in all of Africa, and he captures beautifully the mood of scientists whose lives generally involve sweeping through dust and finding nothing. It is, perhaps, his interest in human reactions to the extraordinary that makes Herzog such an exceptionally great director. This, and his willingness to allow his films to jolt off on tangents offering huge digressions. Here, he muses on our distant ancestors, their short lives dictated entirely by a natural world we have now learned to subdue – and will possibly destroy in the process. His film is a powerful reminder of the planet’s proven ability to destroy itself unaided. Herzog’s histories of ancient volcanic events – one of them nearly exterminating the inchoate homo sapiens – are essential to our current dilemma of believing ourselves to be brutal masters of the planet. Nothing matches the earth herself in brutality. We merely float upon an inferno, that can shrug us off whenever it wishes. Thank you, Werner Herzog, for so many wonderful films, so much bizarre fun, and a great deal to think about. Now the Ghoulies are coming to my door…

 

Paul William Roberts

Election Songs

Tags

Canada, election, harper, john lennon, justin trudeau, leonard cohen, politics, songs

Song with Apologies to Leonard Cohen

 

Everybody knows Harper’s sinking,

Everybody knows his truth is lies,

In his eyes there’s that awful feeling,

No one will mourn him when he dies.

Everybody knows defeat will kill him,

Everybody knows he scorned the House;

Where he was never asked the question if his tactics came from Leo Strauss.

But the neo-Fascist shows,

And everybody knows.

Everybody knows the man’s a racist,

Everybody knows he’s a corporate slave,

And the rich are who his base is;

The rest of us his knaves.

That’s how Harper’s vision goes, and everybody knows.

Everybody knows he’s bribing voters,

Everybody knows that greed works best;

Everybody knows he needs the floaters, but would exterminate the rest.

The Fascist shows, and everybody knows.

Everybody knows he rigs elections,

Everybody knows that to win’s his real goal,

But he cannot abide defections,

Over ethics or burning coal. They wreck his phony pose, and everybody knows.

Everybody knows he’s the one Prime Minister called ‘un-Canadian’ and even ‘sinister’;

No one cares where the hell he goes, but he’s gone, and everybody knows;

He’s now the stateless terrorist he dreamt up, the man in those media shows;

He caused the fear that crept up, and everybody knows.

Everybody knows the war is raging; everybody knows Mr. Harper’s fate is toast,

And nothing’s there to save him, not even the Holy Ghost;

It’s by fiction the cash pile grows,

And everybody knows.

Everybody knows he won’t play fair;

Everybody knows his dirty tricks;

Everybody knows that Justin Trudeau will be the one a voter picks.

That’s what honest polls show, and everybody knows.

Everybody knows his power is waning, everybody knows his platform’s fake;

Everybody knows his budget’s draining social programs into a filthy Tory lake.

That’s how corruption goes, and everybody knows.

Everybody knows he’d kill the planet, if his masters made a buck or two.

Everybody knows the way to end them is just a vote by me and you.

That’s what history shows, and everybody knows.

Everybody knows his business plan was just a one-trick sham;

The eggs were in a basket, without bread or even ham;

As a glance at The Dow Jones shows, and everybody knows.

Everybody knows the rich are richer, and we know where the money went;

Everybody knows the Middle Class is dwindling, the savings all now spent;

Everybody knows the banks are thriving, Thanks to Harper’s sly conniving, since that’s where our money goes, and everybody knows.

Everybody knows where the numbers never cease to grow, and no one can ever reap what they sow, as bank reports show, and everybody knows.

Spied upon, unfree, and over-taxed,

Poor even if we break our backs;

Such is the way our nation goes, and everybody knows.

Everybody thinks a vote for Harper is sure to make them rich,

As if cloth of gold could be fashioned by one single little stitch.

The deceiver in him shows, and everybody knows.

Everybody knows he sang Imagine, John Lennon’s utopian song,

Everybody knows this was pure cynicism, an almost sacrilegious wrong.

Everybody knows he can’t imagine, everybody knows his soul’s long gone; and inside is an empty feeling, a dull resounding gong, like the darkness he’s imposed; and everybody knows.

Everybody knows we’ll have that piano; everybody knows the song we’ll sing, with Yoko’s kind permission, as the bells of all faiths ring;

Everybody knows we’ll show compassion, as hard as it might be, and everybody knows we’ll sing Imagine, and what the words will be: as for the pose: everybody knows….

 

( Sudden change of tune, with thanks and love to Lennon)

 

Imagine there’s no Harper, it’s easy if you vote,

No tyrant’s vile agenda, an economy still afloat;

Imagine all Canadians living once again in peace,

No egotistic leader wishing wars will never cease.

Imagine wealth is shared, no poverty or crime; fair treatment for First Nations, and a mandate to be kind.

Imagine equality and decency accorded every race; and all who seek asylum with a smile on every face.

You can’t say that I’m a dreamer because most of us agree sending Harper off to nowhere will set this nation free.

Imagine there’s a vote card clasped in your hand, and that your vote would make life better for all living in this land;

Imagine you don’t use it, and have to live with that, live with a representative lazier than your very lazy cat;

Imagine that those not voting lose many other rights, returning what was fought for back to a medieval night, when the barons owned everything, including all your rights.

Imagine there’s no government to help you, would you want that vote again? Imagine you had broken something no one now can mend: a wasted vote is guilty of summoning such an End.

For Harper is a schemer, and he’s not the only one;

I hope that you will join us, for the worshippers of Mammon are already on the run.

Imagine there’s no Harper, you won’t need to imagine long; for the vote will go to Justin, then you’ll wish you’d helped him on.

Imagine trust and hope in Ottawa, it’s no easy thing to do, which is why the end of Harper is eight years overdue.

 

(Suggestion for Harper’s Farewell Song)

 

It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to, cry if I want to;

You would cry too if your party dumped you…

++++++++++++++++++

Remember, your vote not only counts but is your responsibility to use, not for any party, but for the person you feel cares and will do his or her utmost for your area when in Ottawa. If a candidate has not visited your house or home in person, it is a good sign that they care little about your needs and will do even less about lobbying for them. Think about the qualities of an individual, not the vain promises of party leaders, which will become increasingly desperate and fictional over the next two weeks. This is not the USA: we elect representatives not leaders. Think carefully about the representatives you know, and vote for the best one, regardless of his or her party. This is a system that has proven its worth over many centuries. Cherish your good fortune to have such a fine system and the glorious land smart enough to avoid adopting the unworkable chaos of Washington.

 

As always with love,

 

Paul William Roberts