[Video: black-and-white still images over Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love,” sung by Madeleine Peyroux. (Lyrics here.) See the note at the foot of this post for more information.]
From whiskey river:
The way we move within time is a kind of dance. We are always keeping time within one rhythm or another. Music, of course, is exemplary. One reason we love music so much is that it’s so complete and the notes harmonize with one another in time to make a beautiful, ideal statement; not like our daily life where the rhythms are more subtle or hard to find or are constantly being interrupted or changed in ways that aren’t so easy to handle.
(Mel Weitsman [source])
…and:
Sometimes, I Am Startled Out of Myself,
like this morning, when the wild geese came squawking,
flapping their rusty hinges, and something about their trek
across the sky made me think about my life, the places
of brokenness, the places of sorrow, the places where grief
has strung me out to dry. And then the geese come calling,
the leader falling back when tired, another taking her place.
Hope is borne on wings. Look at the trees. They turn to gold
for a brief while, then lose it all each November.
Through the cold months, they stand, take the worst
weather has to offer. And still, they put out shy green leaves
come April, come May. The geese glide over the cornfields,
land on the pond with its sedges and reeds.
You do not have to be wise. Even a goose knows how to find
shelter, where the corn still lies in the stubble and dried stalks.
All we do is pass through here, the best way we can.
They stitch up the sky, and it is whole again.
(Barbara Crooker [source])
…and:
Why be saddled with this thing called life expectancy? Of what relevance to an individual is such a statistic? Am I to concern myself with an allotment of days I never had and was never promised? Must I check off each day of my life as if I am subtracting from this imaginary hoard? No, on the contrary, I will add each day of my life to my treasure of days lived. And with each day, my treasure will grow, not diminish.
(Robert Brault [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Exploring the Pastime Reaches and Beyond
(excerpt)Living among the trilobites
I learn you cross great lengths of time
by stilling the waiting in yourself.
From scavengers I see how you can live
off your own dead kind.
I gum the grit of a tidal flat
and have no name.A chance letter brings me home,
telling how I was found.
Returned I sit
like water in a jar,
light from a window passing through,
a slow rain of precipitate
remembering the bottom.
(John Barr [source])
…and:
Billy had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his method for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living. A lot of patients who saw the prayer on Billy’s wall told him that it helped them to keep going, too. It went like this:
god grant me
the serenity to accept
the things I cannot change,
courage
to change the things I can,
and wisdom always
to tell the
difference.Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.
(Kurt Vonnegut [source])
…and:
Husband
What could be more picturesque
than us eating lobster on the water,
the sun vanishing over the horizon,
willing, once again, to allow us almost
any satisfaction. William James said
marriage was overlooking, overlooking,
yes, but also overlapping: opinions,
histories, the truth of someone not you
sitting across the table seeing the you
you can’t bear to, the face behind
the long fable in the mirror. Freud said
we’re cured when we see ourselves
the way a stranger does in moments.
Am I the I she tried to save, still lopsided
with trying to be a little less or more,
escaping who I was a moment ago?
Here, now, us, sipping wine in this
candlelit pause, in the charm of the ever
casting sky, every gesture familiar,
painfully endearing, the I of me, the she
of her, the us only we know, alone together
all these years. Call it what you like,
happiness or failure, the discreet curl
of her bottom lip, the hesitant green
of her eyes, still lovely with surprise.
(Philip Schultz [source])
About the video and song: From Madeleine Peyroux’s 2004 album, Careless Love, this song has become something of a signature piece for her. Unsurprisingly, nearly all the YouTube videos which feature it take the title literally — mashing up images and clips from Broadway and Hollywood musicals, ballet, and so on. The ones which play the music over dance numbers struck me as the least successful; the failure of the dance(s) depicted to match up with the rhythms of the song itself really clanged, in my eyes and ears. The visuals in the video I’ve used here seemed to be the most restrained.
Interestingly, Leonard Cohen didn’t start out to write this as a “love song.” In a 1993 interview, he told Jools Holland that his inspiration came from the practice, in Nazi death camps, of using string quartets and other classical musicians to glue a veneer of faux civilization over the horror of every passing minute.
Leave a Reply