| Leonard Cohen – The Traitor Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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Well I guess, it is fundamentally positive, and for a long time I just amaze myself at the beauty of the methaphore, the idea of the world as a stage, as the scene of a quest, in which the spectators are the judges as well, then i heard Leonard Cohen's explaantion of the line of thought that made him write the poem. It goes like this: “It was called “The traitor”. It was about the feeling that we have of betraying some mission that we were mandated to fulfill, and being unable to fulfill it, and then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it, and that the deeper courage was to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you found yourself”. It talks about the unvoidable predicament of failure from without, and the only right posture when one's faced with a situation in which one cannot but fail: standing guiltless, in the predicament in which you find yourself. I think that is positive: not blaming yourself for outcomes of which you could not fully control. |
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| Leonard Cohen – The Stranger Song Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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I think that the meaning goes even deeper than the notion of "player": A player is honest, and relies only on chance, and the ability to read the hand given to the other players by studying their patterns of reaction and expression. A dealer, on the other hand is a cheat, even when dealing for the house, it is implied that the house always win. But the dealer is that dishonest player that depends upon a disloyal advantage. So while being a player is OK, for both man and woman, to be dishonest is not. It places one on the "Wanted" list, so the way he approaches people, relations from casual to intimate, is starting from the premises that he is known to be disloyal, but he has to come across as being cured of that illness, hopeful that he will be given another opportunity to "score" so big that he will become honest. In his philosophy the excuse given for cheating is an uneven chance that he cannot overcome otherwise, therefore the necessity of the enterprise. The song is one of the best ever written, it caries, like all Mr. Cohen's art a heavy load of philosophy of life, that putts him aside from all other composer-writers: the depth of his analysis, the humanity that evolves from his art. Amazingly beautiful, it shows the level of craftmanship, the attention for the minute detail. His art never ceasses to amaze me, more than likely it never will. Thank you Leonard. |
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