November 23, 2016

Chris McDonnell, UK

A tune is lost
in the morning chill

(Comments welcome here)

chris@mcdonnell83.freeserve.co.uk

A poet – T S Eliot – once wrote that ‘April is the cruellest month’. Maybe so, but the November days we have just experienced have been turbulent to say the least.

The election is over. The

United States

has elected its 45^th President and we pause and wonder. When Cardinal Raymond Burke declares that he is ‘very happy’ with the election result saying that the President-Elect is ‘undoubtedly’ preferable to Clinton one begins to question right judgement. Single issue politics get us nowhere. We had no vote, nor did others outside the

, but all of us will experience the consequence of that Tuesday in early November. It is said that you can judge someone by their friends. Start watching who is in the new administration very carefully.

Towards the end of that fateful week, it was announced that Leonard Cohen, the Canadian poet and singer had died at the age of 82. Only three weeks earlier he had released the CD ‘You want it darker’. Many words have been written in subsequent days reflecting on his unique talent, sifting through his lyrics and his life, I will add only a few thoughts.

Cohen was in so many ways an outsider, a looker-on from a Jewish background, born in Montreal , who understood much of both Catholicism and Hinduism and who in later life spent five years in a Buddhist monastery in California , Mt Baldy, taking the name Jikan, the silent one. His lyrics reflect that hinterland, just as his personal experience of depressive illness influenced his work. It has been said that if you are depressed, then listen to Cohen and you will hear someone worse off than you. An apocryphal story no doubt, about a man honest enough to admit life’s difficulties. We have all been there at some time or another. He was not without a rueful sense of humour, demonstrated on many occasions during live performances. Above all there was honesty in his words and compassion in his voice. As one of my young grandsons said on hearing his final recordings ‘that’s deep Grandad’.

The songs that Cohen wrote and sang were good because the lyrics were poetry and his memorable voice will not be easily replicated. As one of those final songs says ‘I’m leaving the table, I’m out of the game’. Enough said, may be rest in peace. A few lines taken from his song ‘Suzanne’ to conclude.

‘And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said "All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them"
But he himself was broken
Long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone’

In the closing days of this Year of Mercy, Francis visited an apartment in Rome to greet seven men, their wives and children, seven men who had left the ordained ministry to marry. How gracious, how generous his action, in such contrast to the original experience that many men have had over the years, when they informed their bishop of their circumstances and intention. The children are reported to have run to greet the pope with their joyful parents watching. It was an occasion when the arms of compassion, the experience of love, were demonstrated for all to see.

We are living in fragile times, when many of the sureties we have grown to accept are being challenged. Talk of a return to the tensions of the Cold War, of the rise of political extremism, both at home and abroad, the fires of armed conflict that disturb our planet, all make for uncertainty.

The task of the poet is to reflect and comment, remind and inspire, but, above all, to write fearlessly and honestly of their times, for their words are potent. When the Pinochet dictatorship came to power in

Chile

in the early Seventies, overthrowing the elected President, Salvatore Allende, the poet and Nobel Laureate, Pablo Neruda, a friend of Allende, was ill in his home. His house was raided by soldiers, looking for weapons. Neruda’s response? “You will find nothing here more dangerous than poetry”. Within a fortnight he was dead. The inspiration of the poet’s words can outlast the terror of weapons. Writing is important.