Thanks For The Dance

I knew three wise men once.

Sometimes I forget what they taught me.

~~~

I think I spend too much time these days looking for the father I had
and the father I didn’t.

I spend too much time wondering about my legacy.

I spend too much time flipping between old and new testaments.

I spend too much time back there,
instead of right here.

I spend too much time wondering about God.

I spend too much time trying to define me, pin me down, rid myself of uncertainty.

~~~

Yesterday, for all sorts of reasons, was one of those days all the searching and wondering got a bit too much. So I decided to listen to the new Leonard Cohen album.

Separation, distance, introspection: Adam, his son, and a whole load of others who loved and worked with Cohen, had posthumously slipped soft, sure, delicate music in and around and under nine of his poems. Mexico was here, the borderlands, America, Canada, Israel, Greece, sweet guitars, gentle pianos. It was nice and neat and reassuring but, that first time round, words and music, life and death, me and him, here and there, all felt a little semi-adhesive, fog-glimpsed, grey. I’d stopped the work I’d been doing to listen to the album, but stayed distracted, obsessed with the day’s hurts, started piling wondering on wondering: half-listening, half-thinking in fragmentary circles, pointlessly pondering the relationships between poetry and lyrics, between music and words, between song and conversation, between rhythm and melody, between life and death.

The second time I listened to the album, though, it decided to give me what I wanted: no more wondering, no more analysis, a coming together of heart and soul. There was truth and wisdom - hand-round-the-shoulders, kick-in-the-arse wisdom - a blue-warm, fiery, firm, unapologetic masculinity, a rage at injustice and hatred, a joyous love of life and words and song, of our histories and our futures. Dark, never black. Serious, though only fleetingly sombre. Spoken, momentarily sung. Clever, but never, ever pretentious. And embracing, never depressing. I started remembering the lessons.

Our legacies, our fathers, our Gods, our nows, our testaments: for that second thirty minutes, I’d stopped searching and I’d stopped wondering and I’d sat in Zen and I’d understood. I realised the man who convinced me to walk into Leonard’s world about a decade ago would have loved it. That Leonard would have loved him. And that I loved them both and - somewhere, deep down - knew by heart what they wanted me to hear.

RIP.