“There’ll Be The Breaking Of The Ancient Western Code…Your Private Life Will Suddenly Explode”

lc

Mentioned my love of Leonard Cohen just yesterday, and now he’s sadly gone. In 1966, he said, “I think history and time pretty much build obsolescence into poetry unless it’s really, really the great stuff.” His was.

Would there have been the same backlash if Cohen, rather than Bob Dylan, had won the Nobel Prize for Literature? I don’t know. As monumental as Cohen was as a songwriter, he retained an outsider status, a mystique, that might have made him more acceptable to those who cried the award should have instead gone to Margaret Atwood or Philip Roth (who, of course, are both very deserving, as is Dylan). He also wrote poetry and novels, so perhaps that would have made him more palatable, though it was clearly his lyrics that would have earned him the honor if it had happened.

Cohen, who was never sanguine about the present, spoke fearfully and prophetically, in 1992, about the future, tapping into a violence, an invasion, that he thought was fast approaching. He believed there would be a seismic shift, that privacy would become a thing of the past, and he was right. He didn’t, however, foresee that the centralization of media power–what he had decried earlier in “Tower of Song” as “the rich having their channels in the bedrooms of the poor”–would be overturned by new technology. The channels grew exponentially and were now in our hands. We’ve thus far clearly fumbled them, or is there just no way they can be handled?

THE FUTURE

Give me back my broken night

my mirrored room, my secret life

it’s lonely here,

there’s no one left to torture

Give me absolute control

over every living soul

And lie beside me, baby,

that’s an order!

 

Give me crack and anal sex

Take the only tree that’s left

and stuff it up the hole

in your culture

Give me back the Berlin wall

give me Stalin and St Paul

I’ve seen the future, brother:

it is murder.

 

Things are going to slide, slide in all directions

Won’t be nothing

Nothing you can measure anymore

The blizzard, the blizzard of the world

has crossed the threshold

and it has overturned

the order of the soul

 

When they said REPENT REPENT

I wonder what they meant

When they said REPENT REPENT

I wonder what they meant

When they said REPENT REPENT

I wonder what they meant

 

You don’t know me from the wind

you never will, you never did

I’m the little Jew

who wrote the Bible

I’ve seen the nations rise and fall

I’ve heard their stories, heard them all

but love’s the only engine of survival

Your servant here, he has been told

to say it clear, to say it cold:

It’s over, it ain’t going

any further

And now the wheels of heaven stop

you feel the devil’s riding crop

Get ready for the future:

it is murder

 

Things are going to slide …

There’ll be the breaking of the ancient

western code

Your private life will suddenly explode

There’ll be phantoms

There’ll be fires on the road

and the white man dancing

You’ll see a woman

hanging upside down

her features covered by her fallen gown

and all the lousy little poets

coming round

tryin’ to sound like Charlie Manson

and the white man dancin’

 

Give me back the Berlin wall

Give me Stalin and St Paul

Give me Christ

or give me Hiroshima

Destroy another fetus now

We don’t like children anyhow

I’ve seen the future, baby:

it is murder

Things are going to slide …

When they said REPENT REPENT …