Gaza 2

Harvey Chisick

Hi Norb,

Your poem reminded me of a poem called “Power Songs” that you wrote many years ago. I could  imag­ine a way to sing that poem/song. The world it reacted to was clear and my  oppo­si­tion to it was moti­va­tion to want to find a way to sing it. The  “Gaza” poem you posted is mostly unspe­cific, and, if I read it as intended, it does not take sides but takes aim at the vio­lence and war. Violence  and the harm­ing of weak or inno­cent peo­ple is always dis­taste­ful and  immoral. The nar­ra­tive I have of the Gaza sit­u­a­tion, and which at present  I can­not see is basi­cally inac­cu­rate, makes it dif­fi­cult for me to  accept the poem’s cos­mic even­hand­ed­ness. Hamas has clearly and  repeat­edly stated its pol­icy that Israel is ille­git­i­mate as an alien and hos­tile ele­ment in Daar-al-Islam and must be destroyed. Since the  evac­u­a­tion of Gaza  it has fired more than 5,000 rock­ets at  set­tle­ments within range, often tim­ing them for when kids are leav­ing  home for school. They have killed tens of inno­cent peo­ple and  cel­e­brate each death. So how, polit­i­cally, or poet­i­cally, am I to  relate to that? The Israeli response was a gift to the media-savvy  Hamas. But what were we to do? What is an appro­pri­ate response to the  posi­tion, artic­u­lated by rocket fire, that we have no right to exist?

The song I would be inclined to sing here is the lament of a  Palestinian mother in Gaza caught between the fanat­i­cal  politico-religious ide­ol­ogy of some of her own peo­ple and an enemy  that responds with Hobbesian harsh­ness to attacks on its own people.

 This is not to say that I don’t appre­ci­ate your poem, only that we  seem to be work­ing from dif­fer­ent meta­nar­ra­tives. And maybe that the broadly lib­eral assump­tions that seem to work in Europe and North America don’t work so well where peo­ple don’t share the rel­a­tivist and indi­vid­u­al­ist val­ues, or lack of val­ues, of the West. Can most North Americans get into the mind of the Spartan mother who asked a sol­dier return­ing from bat­tle whether Sparta had won and when she was told in reply that all her sons had been killed she said that she had not asked about her fam­ily, but whether Sparta had won? When she was told it had, she seemed pleased. Or can we under­stand the Japanese wife and mother whose hus­band wanted to become a kamikaze? The Japanese army being, like most armies and big orga­ni­za­tions, run by a ratio­nal bureau­cracy, had its cri­te­ria for dif­fer­ent kinds of missions.

As a mar­ried man and father, he did not meet the cri­te­ria. The sol­dier applied for sui­cide mis­sions a num­ber of times and was turned down each time. His wife was sen­si­tive to the suf­fer­ing this caused him. So she drowned her chil­dren and then com­mit­ted sui­cide. The soldier’s next appli­ca­tion was approved, and he flew as a kamakaze. According the the TV pro­gram on the Second World War where I heard about this (so it must be true), this fam­ily is com­mem­o­rated in a museum for the kamakaze some­where in Japan. Do we see in this story mon­stros­ity, or do we see a kind of hero­ism and devo­tion to the com­mon good that we can hardly grasp? The Spartan mother has daugh­ters in Japan, among the fun­da­men­tal­ists Palestinians, and among the fun­da­men­tal­ists in Israel. There are prob­a­bly fewer in Israel, very few in Tel Aviv, quite a few in the ter­ri­to­ries. But enough to intro­duce absolute and irra­tional val­ues into Israeli pol­i­tics, and these are lever­aged out of pro­por­tion to the size of the pop­u­la­tion that holds them, But that is another story. You have my vote in favor of a rea­son­able com­pro­mise to the Israel-Palestine con­flict. Now some­one needs to con­vince the Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ists in Hamas and Hezbollah and the rest of the Islamic world, and the reli­gious nuts in Israel.

Peace and love, Harvey

Reflexive Polyphony

Norbert Ruebsaat

Vancouver: A Poem

By George Stanley

New Star Books, 2008

125 pages 

The idea that your mind could hold a city within itself, and that a city could be a kind of group mind, was excit­ing when many of us first read William Carlos William’s book-length poem, Paterson, in the 1960s. Williams’ sug­ges­tion to give our atten­tion to the things imme­di­ately around us, to “the local,” in order to expe­ri­ence a place directly, unin­ter­rupted by inher­ited ideas or way­ward thoughts, excited many. “No ideas but in things,” ran Williams’ imag­ist slo­gan, and a per­son, espe­cially a poet, by apply­ing it, could become “a man”  (gen­der delin­eations were strict and exclu­sive in those days) in a city that was “his” in a pre­vi­ously un-thought-about way.  

George Stanley’s new book, Vancouver: A Poem, picks up Williams’ heady theme and asks how it looks and feels here, today. Stanley takes us on walks and bus rides through our Paterson, read­ing Williams’ text as he goes, and he pays atten­tion to the things. There are old things: the W atop the for­mer Woodward build­ing (the bea­con could orig­i­nally be seen in Chilliwack); the shoe depart­ment at the Army and Navy store; the Stanford pub at Pender and Gore. And there are new ones: vacant city lots fenced off so res­i­dent chil­dren can no longer use them as play­ing fields of the mind and body; “seniors’ homes” where the old (they used to be old peo­ple, now they’re seniors, Stanley quips) wait for a moment…they don’t know what kind of moment…they know there will be/ the right moment… the right time — . His atten­tion goes to the grungier parts of town, the Downtown Eastside where Vancouver got started, and crosses Burrard Inlet …many times — /peaceful waters of the mind; and it fre­quently finds itself in gen­tri­fied Kitsilano, or look­ing up to The Lions, Landmarks… We see two rocks, & call them Lions. 

Stanley’s obser­va­tions are sharp, almost mer­ci­lessly truth­ful. They have rhythm and heart in the objec­tive sense, and are direct descen­dants of the imag­ist tra­di­tion Williams taught.

I noticed major dif­fer­ences, though, between the two poets and their books. Where Williams could imag­ine a man as a city, Stanley, despite his read­ing efforts and focus, can­not. Or does not. I am not a man, and this is not my city, he states, right at the start of the book. He means this in both the auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal sense (Stanley grew up in San Francisco and came to Vancouver in the 1970s) and in the metaphor­i­cal sense: A man can­not, he implies, be a city any­more in that old manly sense, and a city can’t be owned (or, let’s say, held by) a set of verses. The roman­tic whole­ness and sen­sual democ­racy that Williams envi­sioned can’t be known (bib­li­cal sense) any­more in the utopian mode that ener­gized the exu­ber­ant ’60s. 

What hap­pened? Two things. One is that the things of the city (and when he men­tions things, by the way, Williams also means voices, peo­ple, writ­ten records, news­pa­per clip­pings, land deeds, per­sonal let­ters, etc.) have shape-shifted. They are not the often nat­ural but also human-made objects Williams knew and could encounter phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cally, that is, with­out his­tor­i­cal or rhetor­i­cal bag­gage — for Stanley, they are things, more often, in the eco­nomic sense. They are com­modi­ties. Things today in our cities (cities are no longer ours, by the way; they belong to some­thing else called the mar­ket) sig­nify exchange, not use value (to use the Marxist short­hand).   

That’s one thing. Stanley describes it this way:  

I’m perched on a welded steel stool lean­ing on the steel counter of a pomo cof­fee shop which I guess is called Trees Organic Coffee Co. (at least that’s what it says on my cof­fee cup — dark Sumatra cof­fee — the image — the image of the map — of Indonesia — from the Globe and Mail & BBC on-line — in mind) east side of Granville just north of Pender… 

The other thing, as you can already start to see from the above, is that what a per­son is has also changed. A man is no longer a man, or even a less specif­i­cally gen­dered being; he is a con­sumer. Of places and things and expe­ri­ences. The trans­for­ma­tion of real­ity into prod­ucts, (or of the local into the post-modern glob­al­ized) is pretty com­plete in our day, and even a poet of Stanley’s acute sen­si­bil­ity—espe­cially a poet of such sen­si­bil­ity — takes note of this. 

What’s the result? Stanley’s prosody echoes the frag­mented, enthu­si­as­tic, some­times over-the-top-and-breathless “heart” rhythms of his men­tor, repeat­ing the dashes, half-stops and full stops that mark Williams’ peri­patetic verse style. But Stanley’s inter­rup­tions are of a more con­tem­po­rary kind: 

Watching it go by on the bus even — that’s rel­a­tiv­ity — I mean watch­ing me go by — the city. So a cat­a­logue of moments, glimpses — no, just a dis­con­nected (I imag­ine a poem about Vancouver in which Vancouver never appears — no, I mean no glimpses — Vancouver only in the mind of — try­ing to let it be, think­ing that if (and what about the sub­ject posi­tion? that revealed coyly or just blurted out?)…  

What’s hap­pen­ing here? Well, we hear the poet as often as we hear the poem. We get a reflex­ive polyphony that reminds us of our selves even as we hear the voices of the com­modi­ties on offer. It’s almost, at times (at least it was for me), as if we — poet and lis­tener — were one of the com­modi­ties, a cel­e­brated thing among all the other things trick­stered into prod­ucts. 

The idea that the poet should step between the poem and the reader with auto­bi­og­ra­phy was a no-no for Williams, but Stanley, with what sounds often like a sigh—Take refuge in a long poem//Avert/inspiration.///Write care­lessly—lets in the post­mod­ern self/voice that encoun­ters itself while it walks and bus­rides though the city. Yes, we are on dis­play, it says. The self that Williams called the mind, splits:  I can’t stop think­ing of this — my mind’s/a cap­tive audi­ence of my brain, doomed/to hear it out. Brain says — /I’m run­ning this pro­gram, & you/just pay atten­tion.. [My brain] is won­der­ing how it thinks. It ought to know… and: The thought has no words and no name./If it had words, it could be given a name.  

This mind-brain split becomes a major player in Stanley’s Vancouver, and I read the book at times as elegy. If my mind holds in it noth­ing more than my brain (or does the brain hold the mind?), what hap­pens to the city? When names become brands, how do we talk? What hap­pens to place and the local and the things and voices that in Williams’ world were still numi­nous; that had — yes, let’s say it — heart? 

The good thing about Vancouver: A Poem is that Stanley asks these ques­tions and gets our read­ers’ minds and brains and tem­pera­ments — and, yes, our hearts — involved, and he does not at the end cash in his chips and leave the split-decked pomo table. He per­sists; he makes poetry. He makes it new: leave it to the brain,/leave it to the big boy to feel, even if it/makes big mis­takes, it’s the big boy,/it’s the one/must/(& I will not say die. 

And Stanley’s poem “Seniors,” set in the mid­dle of Vancouver: A Poem, is a must-read for those who read Williams back then and who — yes we can — are still read­ing today.

Gaza

Norbert Ruebsaat

Gaza, January 18, 2009

Norbert Ruebsaat


A word is a thing that we have against death.
It is only a word:
It is as sim­ple as a feather.

I hold it up:
Here is the word, I say.

My enemy holds his child against his body
For pro­tec­tion.
He shoots: who falls?

Name me not as your killer,
Says the word.
I am that which you have
Against death.





Name
The silence of weapons,
The sound that fol­lows a gun­shot:
Who are you?
Asks this silence.

Describe your exact fea­tures.
Describe the coun­try you come from,
The names its lips have re–
Collected.
Describe your worth.

When you can­not speak,
When silence holds you,
When all of you aches
Like a lost arm,
When you curse your birth,
And your mother, long dead,
Has for­got­ten your skin,
What is left of you?

When you crouch in the space
Behind your teeth,
Give your­self a name.
Urge for­ward,
Dream it.




A coun­try that failed.
Its inhab­i­tants flee.
Where they then were
Is not.
You are fac­ing into a wind,
Your thoughts inhabit
Phases of you
That whip by.

Turn, and you remem­ber
An equa­tion, some­thing
Someone said. Once.
No longer a mir­a­cle.

The coun­try that failed
Walks away from its inhab­i­tants
Like a sea­man,
And lone­li­ness invents
New rules.
   
You are within earshot.

for HC.

Poetry and Truth 3: Smart People

Norbert Ruebsaat

I.

On our drive to Lynn Canyon Park in North Vancouver some weeks ago, my grand­son Caleb, who is seven, told me about some smart peo­ple, both adults and chil­dren, that he knew. After lis­ten­ing for a while (I’ve for­got­ten the names of the smart peo­ple) I asked him what “smart” meant, and he said it meant you know stuff. 

I asked then (because I had been read­ing American philoso­pher Richard Rorty on the sub­ject of pure ver­sus instru­men­tal rea­son) whether know­ing stuff meant you knew some­thing, or you just knew how to do some­thing. Caleb said, Both: you knew stuff and you knew how to do stuff.

I asked if you could be smart if you only had one of the two: for exam­ple, you knew how to do some­thing but you didn’t know how or why that some­thing worked; or you knew how and why some­thing worked, but you didn’t know what to do with it or why you would do any­thing with it. He paused for a moment and then said, Can you give me an example? 

I was going to say some­thing about the com­puter (I know how to do some things with it but I don’t know how or why it works) but before I could get started on this Caleb said, Well, for exam­ple, my leg: I know how to move it, but I don’t have to think about how to move it. It just moves.

I said, Well, do you know how your leg works? He said, Sure: my brain sends a sig­nal to my leg and my leg moves. 

I asked, How does this sig­nal get from your brain to your leg? He said, Well, lit­tle elec­tri­cal things or prod­ucts or some­thing, lit­tle balls, move down some pas­sage­ways, they’re like, they’re nerves, and they go from your brain to your leg and make your leg move. But you don’t have to think about it; it just moves by itself. 

Norbert: So do these elec­tri­cal balls or prod­ucts talk to your leg and tell your leg to move? How do they com­mu­ni­cate with your leg when they get to it? Caleb: They send a sig­nal. Norbert: I guess it’s pretty smart, then, that leg. Caleb: Yeah. The signal’s smart, too. 

Norbert: Where did you learn all this? Caleb: From Brain Pop, on the computer. 

Later we hiked along Lynn Creek and a sign attached to a fence read, Danger. Steep Bank. Keep Back. Caleb sounded it out aloud and repeated it just as Caius, his brother, who is four, and who had been walk­ing and singing along some dis­tance behind us, caught up. 

 Caius said, No, the sign doesn’t say that. It says No Cows Allowed.

II.

I had no idea where Caius’ quip about the cows came from. I put it down to his often-commented-upon abil­ity to come up with side-splitting non­se­quiters, out­landish puns and other vocal brain-defeaters. 

I sent the story (above) to a few fam­ily mem­bers and friends, and my youngest sis­ter Gisela wrote back that Caius’ words made pre­fect sense to her. Here’s part of her email:

I see the dif­fer­ence between the two boys (at least as fil­tered through the story) as rep­re­sent­ing the dif­fer­ence between gath­ered knowl­edge on the one hand, and instan­ta­neous aware­ness that comes from the imag­i­na­tion or intu­itive side, on the other. Both have lim­i­ta­tions and ben­e­fits. For Caius, given the con­text, what might the sign say? It’s a fence, so no cows allowed on the wrong side of the fence. Cows on one side, humans on the other.  Cows have four legs but maybe those legs are dumber than our human ones so the cows need more guid­ance, hence the sign.

Made total sense. But I hadn’t seen the sign. I had (like Caleb) read a sign. But not a loca­tion. A wooden fence, for Caius, means farm, and a farm means cows, and yes, on a pro­found Paleolithic, not to men­tion semi­o­log­i­cal level, humans and — domes­ti­cated — ani­mals must be sep­a­rated. Otherwise you get a mad dis­ease, or a flu that’s spread by pigs with wings.  

Everything, I told my media stud­ies stu­dents two days later, is con­text. Otherwise there’s no text (mean­ing). I wrote Gisela back and won­dered if her rev­e­la­tion might have some­thing to do with her being the younger child (I’m the old­est, as is Caleb) the one that finds niches in the larger world of texts being seam­lessly com­posed by the adults and wannabe adults, i.e. older children. 

They get right with the pic­ture. I thanked Gisela for the exegesis. 

Golden Voice II: Call and Response

Norbert Ruebsaat

CALL

Well Norbert, what puz­zles me about all this [see “Golden Voice”] is why you gave up an inter­est in “pop” in the first place, espe­cially given your con­cerns about poetry and soci­ety. Perhaps your use of the all-embracing junk label of “pop” is to blame. There has been some seri­ously good music out there over the last decades under many more spe­cific labels (rock, folk, blues, punk, and so on), and the best of it (of which there is, in my view, a lot) often acts as the car­rier for con­tem­po­rary poetry. Leonard Cohen is obvi­ously a poet, and stages him­self as such just as Dylan did. But lyric writ­ing is the poetry of our age, and most cer­tainly of the young each in their own gen­er­a­tion. As such, it is fab­u­lously suc­cess­ful, and for the stee­l­ier sort of mind, soci­o­log­i­cally inter­est­ing. Why did you stop lis­ten­ing? You must have fig­ured out that “expect­ing to learn some­thing about your future” was an unre­al­is­tic demand, arguably for any sort of poetry. That doesn’t stop you from learn­ing a lot about your times and yourself.

—com­menter Barry Buzan

RESPONSE

I used the word “pop” in the eco­nomic sense: some­thing that is widely mar­keted. Cohen pop­u­lar­ized poetry by singing it and adding pro­fes­sional instru­men­ta­tion and related pro­duc­tion val­ues and he moved there­fore from the world of poetry to the world of pop­u­lar music — which includes, in my usage, the gen­res you mention. 

I con­tin­ued pay­ing (par­tial) atten­tion to him because I had read him before I heard him sing, and I noticed while lis­ten­ing that he was mind­ful of the words he was singing and his voice always drew atten­tion to them. He was still a poet: a cat­e­gory of being with which I iden­ti­fied and whose exis­tence I value. 

I’m inter­ested in the dif­fer­ences between words and lyrics. And between what poets do and what musi­cians do. Dylan, indeed, began as a poet (albeit, I was not aware that he ever pub­lished a book) but quickly became a pop star, then an icon, then a secre­tive celeb. I did not lis­ten to his post-seventies lyrics because they no longer sounded like poems. They taught me — no, I’ve never grown up enough to stop believ­ing that poetry can teach me some­thing about my future — noth­ing about my future. 

By future, I mean the on-going inter­sec­tion of pri­vate (imag­i­na­tive) and pub­lic (polit­i­cal) life.

My inter­est in Cohen lin­gered because he didn’t entirely stop being a poet even after be became a pop­u­lar singer. I flat­ter myself and us by think­ing this has some­thing to do with his Canadianness. He believed in lan­guage (so I tell myself) rather than fol­low­ing the going tune and fill­ing in the words. 

He has cer­tainly become a per­former, which is the stage death poets can eas­ily suf­fer when they try and some­times suc­ceed at becom­ing stars, and media’s elixir starts to tweak them. Dylan (in my opin­ion) died of this elixir, as did, say, Paul McCartney (Lennon died of other causes) or even Paul Simon, who held out for a long time and is still to be praised for bring­ing to world atten­tion the singing of Ladysmith Black Mambazo. 

Cohen holds the edge, just barely, between poet and singer-songwriter. My friend Claudia, as noted in her com­ment on “Golden Voice”, was moved by Cohen’s recita­tion of a poem to the mass GM Place audi­ence: I was moved ini­tially, but noticed that, as more words poured into his mic, mean­ing began to drain out of them. The words, to my ears, became pop lyrics, spo­ken, country-and-western style, as I tried to explain in my ear­lier blog piece, and ceased being verse. 

I don’t agree that music is or should be a car­rier for con­tem­po­rary or any other kind of poetry. When poetry requires a car­rier, it’s already dying. The proper car­ri­ers for poetry are the ear and the mind of the poetry reader/listener, and when musi­cal accom­pa­ni­ment is required to get the atten­tion of this ear, the future (see above) is already endan­gered because the means to get there are sus­pect: pol­i­tics and imag­i­na­tion drift apart and stop lis­ten­ing to each other. 

I don’t doubt that seri­ously good pop­u­lar music has been pro­duced in recent decades. Two things have kept me from lis­ten­ing to a lot of it. Reason one is that when verses turn into vocals and are embed­ded in denser and denser instru­men­tal and studio-engineered ambi­ences, I get dis­tracted: the accom­pa­ni­ment starts to over­power the singer and I don’t know which of the two to lis­ten to. What’s fig­ure and what’s ground? What’s solo and what’s tutti? What’s call, what’s response? 

Music labeled “folk” has avoided this foreground/background blur­ring, but it has become the domain, mostly, of the singer-songwriter pro­fes­sion, and here the prob­lem of my future arises again: singer-songwriters teach me lots about their inner, imag­i­na­tive (mostly love) lives, but they teach me lit­tle or noth­ing about the world of pol­i­tics. The folk music lega­cies of Seeger and Guthrie and singer-poets like Joe Hill or Phil Ochs have gone psy­cho­log­i­cal or envi­ron­men­tal (the new polit­i­cal) and every­one loves the planet and maybe each other but nobody’s sure about how to do, well, sim­ple things like sing songs together. 

That’s my sec­ond rea­son. I’m exag­ger­at­ing wildly in all of this, of course. Yes, early punk was good; I fol­lowed Billy Bragg for a while, because he was a poet first and singer sec­ond; I liked Ry Cooder and Dave van Ronk, men who stayed down in their bass voice ranges rather they cry­ing out like whin­ing teenagers in search of moms/dollars; I still like Johnny Cash. 

Many female singer-songwriters write mus­cu­lar lyrics that could lend strength to my wrestling matches with my future (which grow fiercer as the time I have to resolve them shrinks), but their ten­dency to become instru­men­tally involved with stu­dio back-up bands, elec­tronic mod­i­fi­ca­tion and multi-track voices so that they com­ply with the stan­dards of a music busi­ness that deals in sta­ble, mea­sur­able audi­ence seg­ments, makes me morose. It’s a con­di­tion iTunes down­load­ing doesn’t save me from. 

Again, there are many excep­tions. My main point here is that when poetry becomes per­for­mance, which it becomes when singing and music edge over into show busi­ness, the poem starts to die. The big story about poems is that they exist in a demi-world between life and lan­guage. They inhabit a space that is exactly halfway between music and words, between sound and mean­ing. That’s what the Muse is all about. When poetry strays too far into instru­men­tal­ized thick­ets, the Muse gets lost: there’s too much sound, and the ear starts to weep. Conversely, when the poem goes over into “tex­ting,” the Muse weeps because sound is sacrificed.

Poetry as a form of knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence is sink­ing below the emotional/intellectual hori­zon of North American life, and I con­sider this a tragedy. It’s maimed by high school English classes, and then mur­dered when the poet-as-singer/performer gets out there on Much Music and becomes video phe­nom­e­non, icon, then leg­end. Platform shift onto YouTube and the planet’s your uncle. Guitar Hero greets Karaoke Man. 

A eulogy, a requiem (quick, what’s the dif­fer­ence between eulogy and requiem?) is deliv­ered to me when the Bob Dylan (or Beatles, or Rolling Stone) tunes jin­gle then jan­gle in my ear as I’m swim­ming in my local pool where the radio morn­ing show ads on the sound sys­tem pro­vide the bored life­guards with some­thing to think about while they watch my ears dip in and out of the water. 

P.S.

It’s cus­tom­ary to locate singer-poets like Cohen and Dylan (the lat­ter more so than the for­mer) in the so-called bardic tra­di­tion of poetic per­for­mance. The point is well-taken, but does not address the difference-in-kind between aural recita­tion (or vocal per­for­mance) and elec­tri­cally enhanced and repro­duced aural recita­tion. The lat­ter mode cre­ates a split (Canadian com­poser Murray Schaefer called it schizo­pho­nia) between the source of a sound, and the occa­sion of its being lis­tened to, and this split changes lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence. It has huge ram­i­fi­ca­tions for bardic idioms. 

The voice, when split from the speaker’s mouth, face, body, and heard in cir­cum­stances removed from those in which the voice speaks or sings, lacks, in my lis­ten­ing, the “heroic” depth that (I’m imag­in­ing) bardic recita­tion in cul­tures with no sound sys­tems com­mu­ni­cated. Amplified and elec­tron­i­cally mod­i­fied vocals cel­e­brate tech­no­log­i­cal hero­ism as much as they cel­e­brate phys­i­cal and vocal hero­ism, and they steal, in so doing, a part of the voice’s soul. How? By con­fus­ing the soul about whether it’s lis­ten­ing to a per­son or a machine. 

Let’s recall Walter Benjamin’s pro­nounce­ment that when art is tech­no­log­i­cally repro­duced it cel­e­brates the power (hero­ism) of the pro­ducer, and only sec­on­dar­ily that of the artist.

Golden Voice

Norbert Ruebsaat

During his con­cert at GM Place in Vancouver on April 18, Leonard Cohen often kneeled at the front of the stage and bowed his head while singing. He also doffed his fedora fre­quently and held it to his chest and bowed to the audi­ence, and to band mem­bers and to his three female back-up singers when he had fin­ished a song. He moved near the lat­ter peo­ple dur­ing the applause and stood close to them and lis­tened with them to the clap­ping hands. 

I went to the Leonard Cohen con­cert because Cohen is the only pop singer whose career I have some­what kept up with since the days when I fol­lowed more pop singers’ careers because I thought I would while lis­ten­ing learn some­thing from them about my future. I had never seen Cohen in real life. The sec­ond rea­son I went to the Leonard Cohen con­cert was that I could walk there, in a short while. GM Place is sort of in my neigh­bour­hood (Strathcona), and so it seemed, although there were twenty-thousand-odd peo­ple there, most of them from places greatly beyond this neigh­bour­hood, that Leonard was pay­ing me and us a local visit. This gave me a sweet warm feeling. 

Cohen sang almost all the songs in his com­po­si­tional oeu­vre dur­ing this three-hour con­cert (there were four encores) and I was sur­prised to note that I knew all but three of them; I could eas­ily sing along, in my mind, with the lyrics, and could even hum a lot of the accom­pa­ni­ment — which was fan­tas­tic: Cohen’s band mem­bers are high-wired angels — and this sense of famil­iar­ity added itself to the warm feel­ing. At one point dur­ing “Hallelujah,” a man two rows above me in the sta­dium tiers sang out, loud, along with the cho­rus, and I got excited; I expected the entire audi­ence, or at least a good part of it, say fif­teen thou­sand, would soon join in on this well-known refrain (the song’s been cov­ered by many singers and topped charts) because they would know and remem­ber and then sing it just like I couldn’t resist doing. But when I sang then, and lis­tened, and looked into the massed crowd down on the floor of what is on other occa­sions an ice rink, I heard no voices. Not even funny ones. No coughs, either. I kept singing nev­er­the­less, along with the man in the row above me, and along with Leonard, kneel­ing down there on the stage (he holds the mic like a chal­ice, in two hands, close to his mouth) in sub­se­quent “Hallelujah” cho­ruses, and also in the “I’m Your Man” refrain; I glanced at the woman sit­ting beside me, a stranger (she was blond, and in my gen­er­a­tional range) and I thought she might start singing with me and with my buddy from two rows back and help us to even­tu­ally infect larger and larger parts of the audi­ence with the power of com­mu­nal song. Or she might help do the do dum dum dum that Leonard’s back-up singers repeated for quite a long time while sway­ing their bod­ies after he was, so to speak, gone. But the blond woman made no sound. She just looked at Leonard. And at the back-up girls. Silently. With her mind. I became self-conscious then, and heard my own voice get­ting thin­ner and stick­ing out, and entirely lack­ing in gold.