| Leonard Cohen – Love Calls You By Your Name Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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This song, for me, is about life...life which is glorious at one moment and the same life which crawls and creeps in dungeons of desparation, the next...and, how love, that fragile, ephemeral thing that happens in between these high and low points...which gives it meaning. Love is a surprise when it happens each time...you will think, it would never happen. Cohen write, "you thought it could never happen to all the people you became" - life's scars leave you a different person each time, each wound makes you a different person, a harder, more sterile one...and, love, which opens you up, makes you soft...you will think, you have lost it over time. But, then, it surprises you with its suddenness... And all this happens, here, right here...in this world, which can be interpreted either as glorious or as a gutter... It is either a birthmark, a distinctive and personal thing, which is yours and yours alone, or it is just a stain, which mars your perfection...the world is either a huge thing, deep and full of mysteries — the ocean — or it is just you, and your pain...your open vein. And, very often, it is only a question of how you see the same thing, there is an ocean of pain in your open vein...and, it is so ephemeral, so transient, just a single minute of glory, when you build a snowman, a work of art crafted from the elements...and the rain which destroys all, including your work — all these images are about the way of looking at life, the same thing can be viewed in two different ways, and the extreme transience that exists in this world of huge binaries...of elations and deep misery. And, it is in this state of being pulled between extremes which are fast fleeting that love calls you — you feel that love is calling you by your own name...calling you especially...the experience of love is always very personal. It is so new to the person who has gone through it...”no one else would have loved like me” feeling! All men have a women’s scrapbook. They are the images with which he lives. They are his past loves, or the ones he is searching...or even the ones he wanks off in his loneliness and frustration. He praises and blames all of them at the same time. They have tied him — to his fingernails...this obvious has a double meaning. When a man is tied to his fingernails and is staring at women’s images in scrapbooks — he is a lonely wanker. But, he is also a guitarist, an artist, who works with his fingernails. The wanker is also a creator...and the women in his scrapbook are not just pornographic images to be consumed and then blamed...but, also goddesses of creativity, his muses, whom he praises...and, through them, he climbs the halls of fame as an artist. But, this is all life has to offer...you are a bird caught in a cage, waiting for your peanuts...your images of desire which you can consume but never escape into the vast skies...life is like the wait for a performer before he or she enters the stage...the short while after he has left the darkness, the mystery of it and the vastness of it and the loneliness of it, behind...as well as the moment where the light floods into you, the stage, where you perform, your moment of glory...and, time...the single hour which can become the age, the moment which sets the ethos of the century itself...It is in these moments...of desperations of petty desires and being pulled between loneliness and moments of glory — that loves calls you by your name. Your loneliness, that makes you madly violent inside, is like a gun...that you will never learn to aim...you are like a wild beast then, you will hurt others badly because you do not know how to use your loneliness. It becomes a dangerous and mad weapon at your disposal. And, life is like a movie, that you think you can control because you are just watching, like a spectator. But, then, surprising you, you suddenly find yourselves inside the frame...and, you are racked by the emotions that you thought you could escape by just being an observer. And, it is in very fine points that you find love, by chance, in the shortness of this life which is pulled by extreme beauties as well as ugliness — between the moonlight, which lights up the world in its painfully romantic glow and the dark lane...of loneliness. Between the darkness of the tunnel of misery and the train, which is fast approaching it, flooding it with light...the short moment before the blood stain appears on the victim of a physical attack’s body...life is full of such moments of pain — it is there that love appears. He has left the lady of his life, she is still meditating on love and he does not wish to claim her love. So much has happened in these moments in their lives, he comes down the hundred steps...of depression and misery...and strange, the street he left remains the very same, with crowds and the same problems of life continue, though he has gone through so much, the world remains the same. And, what is life? Just a short moment between the dancer, a beautiful, agile creature in his youth and beauty, who can use his body the way he wants...become old and using a cane...that short moment in between is life. It is the fine difference between a sailboat which can journey into the open sea and see the world or the drain, which only creates stink...another water body, nevertheless. And, it is the moment before the story of your life, a story of your own tiny pain, petty problems...unfurls before you in the movie house and the newsreel is running before that. It is precisely in these strange place, called life that love calls you by your name. Everybody has disappeared...the women in his life, Judy and Ann...and the way they imagined they have been rescued by their princes in stallions...everything has gone, the women, as well as their lovers...everything has changed. Now, when the end is coming, the bandage — a sign of your past pain — is slowly being removed — you wonder...what had happened to me? Was I just limping? Or had I actually become lame and could never walk? You don’t know, how the wounds of life would leave you...if you will be all right ever again? And, it is between the small moments before the grain is ground by the mill, and the assassination of a traitor and the moment before the execution happens...before death/change/misery takes over your little lives that love calls all of us by our names..... |
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| Leonard Cohen – So Long, Marianne Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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The song begins in the conventional, love song style - The lover saying to his beloved: "Come over to the window, my little darling." He wants to read her palm. Reading the palm, is an excuse to hold her hands. It is also reading her destiny, her future, and along with it, his future. The first indication of what happened between them comes in the next line: "I used to think I was some kind of a Gypsy boy Before I let you take me home." The masculine difficulty to "settle down" is expressed here. The refrain which follows clearly indicates the lovers have gone through a lot of ups and downs. They have met again, after a long parting. Both of them lots of compalints and memories. It is time to forive, forget and at the same time, to cry...but, also to laugh. The next stanza speaks about the first time them met and Marianne's reaction and what she expected from him. She held onto him like a crucifix - a holy, sacred thing. This attitude is very differnt from the Gypsy boy's attitude - of wander lust, experimentation and curiosity.They were both "kneeling through the dark." That is, they have both passed through many difficult times, together. The reference to Marianne's letters "whcih say that she is beside" him now clearly indicates they are not together anymore. The gypsy boy has also realized how lonely he is, without her. the next lines, I feel,are some of the most beautiful lines about love: "I am standing on a ledge and your fine spiderweb is fastening my ankle to stone." He is on a ledge - a place he can jump off, or turn off...a place which can change his life, for worse, mostly...but, perhaps, also for the better. And what is stopping him from taking that step - probably, a step into madness, depression, suicide or even a new relationship - is her find spiderweb - her words that she writes to him, perhaps...or the tender thing that she weaves with her love, which catches him like a fly - and makes his step turn to stone. Towards the end we realize that Marianne did not wait for him endlessly. she has gone and changed her name again...yet, both of them cannot forget each other. And her "hidden love" for him continues. Another line that created difficulty over here - "I wash my eyelids in the rain." I see it as purifying through misery...you wash your eyelids usually with tears...and, any washing is part of a purificatory process...and, you wash youselves with the misery of your strong emotions, which pours like rain...and, your eyelids wash themselves...since they are tears raining through you...Years of complexity of emotions associated with Marianne has that effect on the lover. Her love is hidden now because she has gone and changed her name again - remarried. |
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