No more a roving

On June 25, I did a Tarot read in which I asked about the roles various people have to play, and I drew this card with reference to myself:

There is a pretty obvious sense in which this is "my" card. My surname means "son of Tychon," a name which ultimately derives from Tyche, the Greek counterpart to the Roman goddess Fortuna, making me "Will of Fortune." When I drew it on June 25, I was struck by the central brass-colored disc covered with engravings, and by the four Cherubic creatures in the corners, each with its book. This ties in very neatly with the Round Book of Brass Plates and with the book called the Cherubim from the vision recounted in "Étude brute?" Thinking about it today, after posting about the zebra-striped flag of Brittany in "Dreaming in black and white," I noticed the zebra-striped headdress worn by the sphinx at the top of the wheel.

It was then that I realized a possible link between "Étude brute?" and the Brittany theme. I had previously taken it as a reference to the Ides of March, my birthday, but Caesar's assassin was not the only Brutus. According to a very old legend, the name Britain derives from that of the island's first king, Brutus of Troy. Since Brittany derives from the same root as Britain, it would also thus be named after this Brutus.

As I was thinking about this and making these connections,  my attention was suddenly drawn to one of the books in my study, a 1000-plus-page compilation of the major works of Byron, with the edge of a bookmark sticking out above the pages. I had a very strong impression that I should take the book down and see which page was bookmarked.

The bookmark was between pages 314 and 315. Page 314 is the last page of Manfred, which I last read in 2014. Since then, the only works I've read from that book have been short poems which didn't require moving the bookmark around, so there it still was.

Page 315 -- the page corresponding to the Ides of March, my birthday -- has this short and fairly well-known poem:

So, we'll go no more a roving
    So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
    And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
    And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
    And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
    And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a roving
    By the light of the moon.

Note the immediate context: I had just been thinking about "Étude brute?" as, among other things, an Ides of March reference, and about the Wheel of Fortune Tarot card in connection with myself. Do you know how the word "wheel" is written on old French cards? ROVE.

"The sword outwears its sheath" also fits the Tarot card, on which a sphinx holds an unsheathed sword. It's also a link to "Makmahod in France?" and "This sword will never be sheathed again." In the Rider-Waite version of the card, where the wheel is a Brass Plate, it stands to reason that the unsheathed sword would be that of Laban.

Then there are those moonlight references. I looked up a French translation, and sure enough:

Ainsi, nous n'irons plus vagabonder
Si tard dans la nuit,
Même si nos coeurs restent accordés
et que la lune toujours luit.

Car telle l'épée usant son fourreau,
l'âme use la poitrine à respirer.
Le coeur doit pouvoir ėtre au repos
et même l'amour se délasser.

Bien que la nuit soit faite pour s'aimer
et que l'aube ne soit qu'infortune,
Pourtant, nous n'irons plus vagabonder
La nuit, au clair de lune.

When I was searching for a French translation, autocomplete thought I might be looking for Leonard Cohen's rendition of the poem. I didn't know he had done one:

The album cover art -- a black-and-white portrait of a young woman -- caught my eye, and I wondered if there was a story behind it. Searching for that led me to this thread. Early on, one person mentions that the woman's expression reminds him of Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar, and everyone picks this up and runs with it. "Joan" -- with no surname except in the first reference -- is mentioned a whopping 36 times in the thread.

After I'd played Cohen's take on Byron, YouTube queued up the next song automatically: "New Slang (When You Notice The Stripes)" by the Chins. I posted "When you notice the stripes" on May 9, connecting that line from the song with the idea of using the stars and stripes on the US flag to create a constellation. The syncs in this present post began with my noticing the stripes on the Wheel of Fortune card and connecting them with stripes on a flag.

What is being communicated by drawing my attention to that Byron poem? Is this Claire/Joan saying goodbye, or at least announcing a hiatus? Time will tell.

Stand me by those pillars, let me take this temple down

Given how much I've been blogging about Samson lately (here and at The Magician's Table) and about songs about New Orleans, and given how often I cite the lyrics of Leonard Cohen, it might seem hard to believe that I never knew there was a Leonard Cohen song called "Samson in New Orleans." But I didn't. I discovered it tonight.

Here are the lyrics, with a few interesting passages highlighted.

You said that you were with me
You said you were my friend
Did you really love the city
Or did you just pretend

You said you loved her secrets
And her freedoms hid away
She was better than America
That’s what I heard you say

You said how could this happen
You said how can this be
The remnant all dishonored
On the bridge of misery

And we who cried for mercy
From the bottom of the pit
Was our prayer so damn unworthy
The Son rejected it?

So gather up the killers
Get everyone in town
Stand me by those pillars
Let me take this temple down

The king so kind and solemn
He wears a bloody crown
So stand me by that column
Let me take this temple down

You said how could this happen
You said how can this be
The chains are gone from heaven
The storms are wild and free

There’s other ways to answer
That certainly is true
Me, I’m blind with death and anger
And that’s no place for you

There’s a woman in the window
And a bed in Tinsel Town
I’ll write you when it’s over
Let me take this temple down

Deus vult.

I have a suspicious mind

In a comment to my previous post (qv) I mentioned an apparent additional synchronicity: Shortly after writing the post, which uses the phrase "Sister of Mercy" several times, including in the title, I went to YouTube and played a couple of Leonard Cohen songs, and YouTube suggested a third -- a 1967 release called "Sisters of Mercy." Though I know a handful of Leonard Cohen songs and listen to them fairly often, I can't say I'm all that familiar with his work; I never knew that he had written a song with that title, and YouTube had never suggested it before. (As a longtime reader of Strieber, I would have noticed.)

Then it occurred to me -- because I have a suspicious mind -- that this might not be a coincidence at all. YouTube is Google, and Blogger is also Google, so perhaps YouTube knows what I have recently posted on Blogger and takes this into account in its algorithm. So, by way of testing this hypothesis, I'm writing this post about what a suspicious mind I have. Yessirree Bob, if you were to ask me, "What one word best describes the sort of mind you've got?" I would have to say "a suspicious mind." Most people who know me would say the same thing -- or at least I suspect they would, because I'm just suspicious like that. My mind is, I mean. It's what you might call a suspicious mind.

Now I'm off to YouTube to play "Hound Dog" and "Burning Love" and see what it suggests I play next.

Inspiration as bondage, inspiration as freedom

The central conceit of the Leonard Cohen song "Going Home" is that, instead of Leonard Cohen singing about God, it's God singing about Leonard Cohen.

I love to speak with Leonard
He’s a sportsman and a shepherd
He’s a lazy bastard living in a suit 

But he does say what I tell him
Even though it isn’t welcome
He just doesn't have the freedom to refuse

He will speak these words of wisdom
Like a sage, a man of vision
Though he knows he’s really nothing
But the brief elaboration of a tube

This would seem to be a literalistic twist on the familiar metaphor of the inspired man as the mouthpiece of the Lord -- for what is the mouthpiece of a clarinet or a trumpet but "the brief elaboration of a tube"?

Cohen here describes himself as completely passive, playing no role in the creation of his "words of wisdom." He may speak "like a sage, a man of vision," but this is an illusion. His words no more belong to him than they belong to his microphone, both being mere passive media through which the Lord speaks. It's the auditory equivalent of Meister Eckhart's ideal of being "a clear glass through which God can shine." (The point of such a role has never been clear to me. If a clear glass is better than a clouded one, surely best of all is no glass at all!)

Nor does Cohen have any choice in the matter, any more than his microphone does. "He just doesn't have the freedom to refuse" to pass on whatever message the Lord gives him. He is being used -- an "instrument in the hands of God," to borrow a phrase from the Book of Mormon.

He wants to write a love song
An anthem of forgiving
A manual for living with defeat 

A cry above the suffering
A sacrifice recovering
But that isn’t what I need him to complete 

I want him to be certain
That he doesn’t have a burden
That he doesn’t need a vision
That he only has permission
To do my instant bidding
Which is to say what I have told him to repeat

"Burden" is here being used in the biblical sense of "prophetic message" -- as when Isaiah prefaces each of his oracles against the nations with "the burden of Tyre," "the burden of Moab," etc. (The etymological connection is that the prophet "lifts up" his message before the people.)

Again Cohen emphasizes the unfree and almost mechanical nature of his role. He doesn't have permission to write what he wants to write, only to repeat verbatim what the Lord dictates to him. And he "doesn't need a vision" -- needn't have any personal understanding of the message he is relaying. His is not to question why, but simply to execute commands, soldier-like. I don't pay you to think, Leonard!

⁂

How similar -- and yet how completely different! -- is Nietzsche's description, in Ecce Homo, of his own experience of inspiration. (And Nietzsche was -- who can deny it? -- far more deeply inspired than Leonard Cohen.)

Has any one at the end of the nineteenth century any distinct notion of what poets of a stronger age understood by the word inspiration? If not, I will describe it. If one had the smallest vestige of superstition in one, it would hardly be possible to set aside completely the idea that one is the mere incarnation, mouthpiece or medium of an almighty power. The idea of revelation in the sense that something becomes suddenly visible and audible with indescribable certainty and accuracy, which profoundly convulses and upsets one -- describes simply the matter of fact. One hears -- one does not seek; one takes -- one does not ask who gives: a thought suddenly flashes up like lightning, it comes with necessity, unhesitatingly -- I have never had any choice in the matter. . . . Everything happens quite involuntarily, as if in a tempestuous outburst of freedom, of absoluteness, of power and divinity.

Nietzsche, too, admits to feeling as if he were a mere "mouthpiece or medium"; to acting "with necessity," "quite involuntarily"; to not having "any choice in the matter" -- but then, after saying all that, he goes on to characterize the experience as "a tempestuous outburst of freedom."

⁂

How is it that such similar experiences felt like freedom to Nietzsche and like its opposite to Cohen? Presumably because Nietzsche, proudly refusing to countenance even "the smallest vestige of superstition," saw the commanding voice as coming from an aspect of himself rather than from an external God. "Wherever I found living things," his Zarathustra says, "there heard I the language of obedience. All living things are obeying things. And this heard I secondly: Whatever cannot obey itself, is commanded. Such is the nature of living things."

Self-control or self-command is a familiar concept, and it can only mean one aspect of oneself obeying another. Is Nietzschean obedience to oneself, then, just the same thing from a different point of view? No. Anyone who has experienced both ascetic self-command and inspired self-obedience will know that they are not the same experience at all, that on the contrary it is the same part of oneself -- the one we think of as simply "I" -- that commands in the one case and obeys in the other. This implies that there are at least three parts of the self: the higher that commands, the lower that obeys, and the central that is free to obey or to disobey, to command or to abdicate command.

To Cohen, who externalized the voice and saw himself as a mere instrument, we might imagine Nietzsche saying, "Could it be possible? This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that GOD IS DEAD!"

"God is dead" was the inchoate expression of a very deep truth which the religious have not as yet even begun to face up to or assimilate -- but of course it is not the whole story, either. What is needed is further thought on the relationship between God-without and God-within, such as Bruce Charlton attempts here.