Leonard, a Memoir

Leonard Cohen was my mentor, my encourager and one of my favorite heroes. 

I met him when I first came to Hydra, a rock island in the Aegean where, because it bakes in the sun without much relief from trees, summer seems even hotter than in the rest of Greece.

With others in the foreign community I hung out at Bill’s, a bar run by a public-school educated Englishman who, though he was a friend of Leonard’s, and though, as I later learned, Leonard had financed the enterprise (“I’ll go down to Bill’s Bar, / I can still make it that far”), didn’t care for his lugubrious music. Bill was a Django-Fred Astaire guy, and played Leonard Cohen tapes only when Leonard was around.

Like so many young writers, I gave Leonard something of mine to read. He accepted it graciously, and I supposed that was the end of it, but he came in a few days later and said, “I read your piece—which I fully intended to ignore—and got so involved that I couldn’t leave it to take a piss, and I really had to piss!”

What a charmer. The island opened its arms to me, I spent more and more time on it, and lived there for a few years. Eventually I ran out of money and moved into Athens to teach at the American College, but that’s another story. For me Hydra represents Paradise, not least because it was a sexual romp. Those were days before the new diseases, and the new Victorianism, and it was copulation on an Olympic scale. One did stretching exercises between encounters, and had (as the Americans say) “multiple” partners each day.

Ah, yes.

A no-car island

And of course, Leonard was the poet of the orgiastic. His achievement, in so much of his work, is to treat bare lust with wistful tenderness.

We took ourselves to someone’s bed,
And there we fell together.
Quick as dogs, and truly dead were we—
And free as running water…
The way it’s got to be, my lover.

Having so many ladies raises the problem how to say good-bye, his central theme. He remarks in The Favourite Game that John Donne’s poem of farewell, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” is the very essence of poetry. “Hey, that’s no way to say good-bye.” Leonard said a lot of them. For him it was a sin not to:

But I lingered on her thighs a fatal moment.
I kissed her lips as though I hungered still.
My falsity, it stung me like a hornet.
The poison sank and it paralyzed my will.

—“will” in the Elizabethan sense, as in “willy,” as in Will shaking his big spear.

And then leaning on your window sill
He'll say one day you caused his will
To weaken with your love and warmth and shelter.

One late night at Bill’s he told me the story of “What Does a Woman Want,” which I have tried to reproduce here as closely as possible in his style of phrasing.

I went to see him when he was preparing to leave the island in his costume of choice at the time, dark gray suit, T-shirt and black cowboy boots. The suit had suffered some stains and he was touching it up with Magic Marker. “They’ll never get me,” he said, giving me his wicked smile.

Marianne bathing on The Rock

Shall I tell you what he was? He was gorgeous. (See Gorgeousness.) Not that he thought so. One of his poems speaks of hours in the mirror. “You hide your double chin, even from yourself.” At his tryst with Janis Joplin,

You told me again you preferred handsome men
but for me you would make an exception.
And clenching your fist for the ones like us
who are oppressed by the figures of beauty,
you fixed yourself, you said, "Well never mind,
we are ugly but we have the music."

But he was an undaunted man of action. That’s one reason he admired Hemingway:

The judges said you missed it by a fraction.
Rise up and brace yourself for the attack.
The dreamers ride against the men of action.
Oh, see the men of action falling back.

I love Hemingway too (see Hemingway for Wimps), and Leonard, and action, but my own models were dreamers like Fellini (see Fellini), Robbe-Grillet and Bunuel, not to mention Shakespeare, in whose sea we all swim—adapted, of course, to my musical-comedy mind. I'm too impressionable to have any state of mind for more than a few minutes, but that's my default setting.

Leonard constantly assured me I was going to “hit” (I’m still waiting, Leonard), and I wish I could claim him as an influence. But we were playing different games, and he didn’t altogether approve of mine, which involved frivolity and laughter and je-m'en-foutisme. Though he could be extremely funny himself, in person and in print (Beautiful Losers is a great comic novel), he had a grain of seriousness in him that looked askance at the purely comic.

Whence the seriousness? For one thing this Orthodox Jewish boy had fallen in love with the Catholicism of his beloved Montreal, all those plastic virgins on taxi dashboards. Rue Sainte-Catherine is the main east-west street there, and Beautiful Losers is about the Indian saint we suppose it's named after, Kateri Tekakwitha, and the Jesuits. “Homage to the Jesuits” he says, and their “thirst for souls.”

This was Leonard’s thirst too. World domination was his passion. He wanted all the women, all the fans. He idolized Jesus for that reason, and he idolized Hitler. Oh, yeah. His early book of poems, Flowers for Hitler, goes some way to humanize the Führer. And when the lovers in Beautiful Losers go to Rio, they find him in their beach hotel working as a waiter.

(Which reminds me, his favorite actor was Dirk Bogarde. One thinks of The Night Porter.)

“I was born with the gift of a golden voice.” He’s not talking about his voice voice, though well he might—it’s a superb instrument. He’s talking about his power as a poet. “My voice,” he says in one of his poems, “is in you like a hook.”

A mutual friend met him walking down Fifth Avenue just after the Wall came down, and said, “Isn’t it great?” “Of course it is! My song did it!” He took Berlin.

On the island, though, he was sweet, modest, polite. Good manners were his style.

Donkeyshit Lane, coming down from Leonard's place: "Our steps will always rhyme."

The second source of his seriousness was his scholarly, almost his rabbinical Jewishness. For a brief time he was an Israeli soldier, and saw action. He shocked me, and I let him know it, when he spoke in favor of vengeful bloodletting in Lebanon. Never fond of Islam, he yet had a grudging respect for the Muslim habit of covering their women. “They know that’s all we think about.”

In a late poem he speaks to himself (he’s always speaking to himself) of an insect on his table: “It pleased you not to want to kill it.” The “pleased you” is self-mocking; the usual thing is to crush the little fuckers. But then we hear God talking: You are the insect, “so busy in the light of my eyes,” and the “pleased you” resounds as a prayer—May it please you, my Lord—to himself.

He has a wonderful way of pivoting on a word like that:

Thanks for the trouble you took
From her eyes.

His album title, Various Positions (I saw it for the first time in a Tel Aviv shop window) made me laugh out loud.

The third source of his seriousness was depression, which plagued him all his life, for which he was on prescription drugs, and which was the source of some of his best work. “Even damnation is poisoned with rainbows.” He could get way down.

With Suzanne, not the one in the song, but the mother of his children. L suspected she had family in the Jewish mafia, which tickled him.

When I showed him Mortal Coil, he didn’t entirely approve of a book that made fun of death and the dead. “I understand the position,” he allowed—but then came up with a line from near the end of the book (he always read them through, bless him) that amused him: “Don’t worry about photographs of yourself. You don’t look like that.” This matched his taste for directness and simplicity.

He told me once that the ten commandments as they’re written in Deuteronomy have nothing of the formal Thou-shalt-not about them, but are simple colloquial speech: Don’t do that. This is how you reach people, with simple language and simple experiences—sex, God, doing the dishes. Leonard used his intellectual gifts to be pop culture. Beautiful Losers is a submission to pop culture as a spiritual discipline, Ray Charles running his fingers down a cosmic keyboard at the climax.

Leonard wanted to reach everybody. He wanted, as who does not, to be God—and was determined to make good on it. What state of mind is a man in who names his son Adam?

(When his kids came to visit, he was helpless with them. He gave Adam, who was then a scrappy twelve-year-old, Mortal Coil, presumably to keep him occupied. “I like the ‘jokers,’” Adam told me—the name my undertaker calls the corpses. Lorca, two years younger, threw tantrums and threatened to kill herself—not because of my book. Leonard approached her with desperate caution: “Hi, darling!”)

He consulted a fortune-teller once, a palmist, who told him he was going to lose all his money. Here Leonard did influence me: he went into detail about the experience—inking the palms, recording the experience—that I used in The President’s Palm Reader. Decades later Leonard did lose all his money; his assistant in LA cleaned out his bank account and absconded—who knows where she is now?—forcing him to go on tour again. “It would be funny,” he said, “if it happened to somebody else.”

The palmist told him, “You will always be moving between the monastery and the brothel,” and yes, from beginning to end, that was Leonard. In The Favourite Game his teenage alter ego, on discovering sex, looks down from Westmount at the morning city and wonders why anybody’s going to work.

My street

He declares, in a poem of later years, but in prose, that the image of a naked woman appears to the average middle-aged man every fifteen seconds. “Where did you get that?” I said. “From Masters and Johnson.” Nietzsche, the Bible, Masters and Johnson—and much more, of course, but these were on his mind.

And he was the hero of the sexual impulse right down to the end: “I was just a tourist in your bed, looking at the view.” What are we going to do without him to defend us against the new puritanism?

We stayed in touch via the posts and film reviews I email to my list of people.

Blog is great.
Just wanted to join the applause.

About Woman in Gold and Helen Mirren’s Body:

Great work, bro
The whole 9 yards
L

Last I heard from him, he said (in verse form, naturally):

the old vehicle has sprung a few leaks
in and out of the shop these days
not much use on the road

That was June last year. I checked in a few weeks ago and didn’t get an answer. Now I know why.

He won some prizes. The Governor General’s Award he didn’t accept. To my private relief he wasn’t offered the Nobel for Literature, which is a guarantee of mediocrity—and something of a consolation prize. Faulkner won because he just wasn’t Joyce. (The poor judges, what would they have done if they’d had to read Joyce? Faulkner they had in translation, but how do you translate Joyce?) Beckett won because he just wasn’t Kafka. And Dylan won because he just isn’t Leonard.

His best friend on Hydra was George L, who looked like the president of the world. First time I met him I said, “So, George, what do you do?” He said, “Well, Bob, I don’t do anything.” Hah! I loved him. I wrote a roman-à-clef about him, and about the island (here it is), in which he’s murdered. Somebody came across him reading it in a café. He said, “I’m trying to find out how I die.” Now he knows—he’s gone too. His daughter’s an actress, though, and I made a movie with her.

Let me finish with a long-ago poem I wrote about Leonard:

Here is my plaster statue

Of Leonard Conen,
Best thing groanin.
His spirit is off
Being true to itself
Or possibly trying to renew itself
While here in the silence
I bow my head in homage
To what I have briefly become
To see if I could use,
And muse.

Monkish whorer
I loved your contradictions.
So purely you burn
For fifteen-old girls
(How can I live in the world with your exploits?),
So neatly fold yourself
Into your disciplines.
Everything is a discipline,
It's tiresome
And I don't care for purity.

Doubting psalmist,
Failed saint,
Rabbinical Jesuit
Hearing your own confession
(There can little interfere
Between your mouth and your ear),
Behind each a clinical depression.
Fearer and trembler,
Comforter of puberty,
The bride still unravished,
The song less new.

Hitler groupie
(Who else believed you?),
Israeli warrior,
Meditator,
Partisan hater,
Priest of pop liturgy
Praying for power and
The Arab veil,
The preferred fate for your sister.
Chemistry-set tradition-monger,
Star without capped teeth.
Interesting, if fetal.

Aspirant slave
Who would bribe exaltation,
The soul's, the body's,
With prostration—
It falls off me.

I prefer not to grovel
Unless at gunpoint
Or its equivalent.
No doubt I'll learn.

Retreat meanwhile
To an uncandled niche
In the cathedral,
Bleed in the dark
Like my mother,
Quietly reproach my arrogance
When some whim
Brings me in
From the glaring street
For cool incensed air
And a friendly ceiling,
A ten-minute tourist of your pain.

Leonard's response to the poem was to lend me money. Which I never repaid. I hope he’s someplace where he doesn’t need it.

On youtube

In print

Leonard, a memoir

Robert MacLean is an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a film reviewer, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. Committed to making movies that don't matter. No brains, but an intellectual snob.

“There is no happiness that is not idleness and only what is useless is pleasurable.”—Anton Chekhov

In Bed with the Girls

The Light Touch on Amazon Prime

The Natural Wish to Be Robert MacLean

Also on YouTube:

Boccaccio’s "The Husband" 

Boccaccio's "The Horse Trade" 

Boccaccio's "The Stupid Friar" 

Chaucer’s "The Miller's Tale"

"Red Devil Rag"

"Attack of the Giant Feminists"

"But Is It Love? Or, The Destruction of West Los Angeles"

Germans

“Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.”—Otto von Bismarck

The Germans.  Always a problem.

Under the Celts, Europe was one country.  Under the Romans, under the Church, under Napoleon, under Hitler, Europe was one country.  And now, under Merkel, Europe is, for the moment, one country.

When the Celts had it, it stretched from Ireland to what is now Turkey, and it’s still basically Celtic.  The Germans—Angles, Saxons, Franks, Lombards, Goths, etc.—later settled on the Celts as ruling classes, and gene-testing is revealing that the “English,” for example, are mostly Celts, as the "French" have always believed themselves.   This is in addition to the pockets of more or less “pure” Celts that survive in the British Isles, Brittany, Belgium, Spain, Switzerland and Venice, which is not an exhaustive list.

The Romans brought North Africa and the Middle East into the mix, as later did Napoleon and Hitler.  But the Romans excluded Ireland, the Picts—and Germany.  Stay on your side of the Rhine, they told the Germans, and when they raided into Gaul the Romans retaliated by raiding into Germania (with a hard “G”), which was as far as the Romans cared, or dared, to go.

Attila

The Germans were never Romanized.  That’s why they’re like that.  And when they (or rather we—see My Racial Profile) got the upper hand, it all fell apart.

Charlemagne almost put it back together, and he did push into Germania.  But to be legitimate he had to be crowned in Rome by Pope Leo, who used him like a rook on a chess board, and influenced politics from Britain to Constantinople.  That's where the power lay, and where it stayed: seven centuries later Vasari tells us that Michelangelo “spoke to the Pope as the King of France would not have dared to speak to the Pope.”

Germania became a collection of principalities, and it is remarkable, to me at least, that this brilliant people produced no literary masterpiece for so much of the modern period.  Martin Luther was a model of German prose (“Sin bravely,” he said; I have that on a T-shirt), but he died in 1546, and until Goethe nothing literary happened, at least nothing exportable.  There had been Winckelmann, but Goethe had to tell me about Winckelmann; I’d never have known. 

Meanwhile, of course, they were writing the world’s music, if I may take the liberty of including Austria in Germania, as Charlemagne did.  Austria had been Romanized; maybe that explains something.

They are a wonderfully clean people, Germans.  In Duck You Sucker, Sergio Leone introduces a German military advisor in Mexico by showing him in his seat on a train brushing his teeth.  Exactly.  In bed with a German you can, and do, go anywhere; in bed with a French or a British person you must proceed with caution.

They do not, however, queue up.  If you’re in line for the ski lift and one or more Germans come down the slope they’ll butt right in at the front and have to shouted at and waved away.  When, in Casablanca, Carl tells Rick that he gave the Germans the best table, “knowing they would take it anyway,” he’s not making rah-rah war talk, he's referring to this tendency of theirs to arrogate.

Here’s a better example: when the Nazis were advancing on Paris Clare Boothe Luce was staying at the Ritz, and as they approached, the hotel emptied out.  But she, intrepid reporter (she invented Life magazine), stayed on till she was the last one, and the concierge came up and told her to leave: “The Germans are coming!” he said.  She got out her notepad: “How do you know?”  “They have reservations!”

Ah, but now it gets heavy.  Now we must touch The Subject.  When I was a film professor a German colleague said, “Do you think the world will ever forgive the Germans?”

I didn’t have to ask for what.  I treated this as thinking out loud, and ignored it.  When he persisted I said, “No,” as curtly as I could. 

“Why not?”  

“For four reasons,” I said, trying to scare him off.

Didn’t work.  He wanted to suffer.  “What's the first?”

“Morality,” I said.  “So vague.  What we did to the Indians, what we did to Dresden, what we did to the Italian villages we bombed—Churchill said if we lose this war they’ll try us for war crimes.  But there was a case for it.  You could argue for it.  You could discuss it.  The truth about Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that we were experimenting to see what the effects would be on human flesh.  Harry Truman said we did it to shorten the war and save lives, but we could have done that by blowing up Mount Fujiyama or giving them a show in Tokyo Bay.  Still, there was a case for it.  You could argue for it.  But with the camps you gave us clarity, a relief from the ambiguity we waffle around in, something black and white.  We're not likely to let that go.”

I trusted that would suffice.  But no.  “What’s the second reason?” he said.

“It was a terrible thing you did,” I shrugged.  “Why should we forgive you?”  (“You,” notice.  I knew he was standing in for his people.)

He nodded.  “The third?”

“You’ll never forgive yourselves.  Why should we forgive you?”

On the surface he was digesting all this.  “And the fourth?”

“Well, when you say the world, you don’t mean Asia or Africa.  They’re not interested—they’ve got their own histories.  You mean us—the Germanic peoples, including the blond Visigothic aristocracies lording it over the Indians in “Latin” America.  We’re Germans.  You embarrassed the family.  And in family life there’s no forgiving or forgetting.”

Now he was depressed.  I felt bad.  “On the other hand,” I said, “one of the great achievements of humankind was landing on the moon, and that was accomplished by a former SS man.”

Another German friend (I know a lot of Germans; they’re going to love this piece) is a painter, an Expressionist.  (Most German artists are Expressionists; it has something to do with horror.)  He was middle-aged before he went to his father and said, “How could you do that?”  I don’t know what the answer was.  Maybe there was none.  Maybe it was unrepeatable.  What could it be?  But the sense of a curse lingers, on the people and on the land.

And Angela Merkel works under that curse.  When France and Germany conceived the Euro-dream in 1951 it was to make sure Germany wouldn’t attack France again.  Simple as that.  The aim of the Union is to put an end to war in Europe, which a glance at history will show is continual here.  Simple as that.  But once again, Germany dominates. 

The trouble is, Europeans can’t do anything.  It's endemic.  British incompetence is as monumental as it is dignified, from the top down.  A Canadian woman who transferred to the London branch of her company confessed to me, “You just want to push them!”

A Frenchwoman, lounging topless by the Greek sea, said to me, “You Americans [for her I was willing to be an American], you act [inviting me, as it were, to action]; we French are dreamers.”  Quite right.  Don’t ever try to get anything done in France. 

When Portugal and Spain and France and England were young barbaric countries they conquered empires.  Those war lords Ferdinand and Isabella were burning down university towns in the suave Muslim civilization of the time, even as they were sending Columbus off to augment their holdings.  But that was then.  These days it takes a Napoleon or a Hitler to actually do something, and of course the results aren’t always ideal. 

A friend of mine—actually he’s not a friend of mine, I’m not even speaking to the son-of-a-bitch—anyway, he’s a yacht skipper.  You rent your yacht for a vacation and he brings the crew and sails it where you want to go, and when you’re out there and something goes wrong, he fixes it with tape and a coat hanger and gets on with it.  But the German clients are standing there with the manual in their hands.  “Yah, but zis iss not za right vay!  Ziss is not—”  They’re by-the-book people, Germans, and they’re trying to force their considerable will on the anarchic non-work-ethic Greeks.  The Greeks have never heard of the book.  (See Greece versus the Puritans.)

One of the problems with Merkel—one, I say, of the problems with Merkel— is that she grew up in East Germany, resisting Soviet thoughts, yes yes, I know, but the eastward look was her horizon.  The Euro-dream is a West-German dream, not a Merkel dream.  She has not explained to her voters that if they break the Mediterranean countries there’ll be no market for what they make, and the Greeks, as a matter of patriotism, are already refusing to buy anything made in Germany.  Nor has she mentioned that if they don’t pump their precious money into those countries their own euros won’t be worth much anymore.

M'ma!

The Greeks suspect the Germans, who, it must be conceded, rarely do anything without a plan, of forcing them to privatize their companies and sell them cheap so Germans can buy them; and to cut salaries so the new owners will have a low-rate labor force.

And the Greeks, rather than ruin themselves at German command, are playing for time—one of the things they do best.  “Wait,” they love to say.  “I don’t want to wait,” shouts the Nordic, and the German in me sympathizes.   “Wait,” they say. 

Now they will lean their chins in their hands and watch the German economy crumble.  Then we’ll see where we are.

Some Notes on God

 

1. Is God vulnerable?

 

Apparently.  To feel is to be vulnerable, is it not?  To suffer?

The noise of humanity irritated the Mesopotamian gods so miserably that they wiped it out with a flood, the one on which the Genesis version is based.  Then they ran to their father Anu to shelter them from it.  Fraidy-cats.  Then they suffered remorse for having caused it.  They felt it all.

Isis was vulnerable to love and loss, and her brother-husband Osiris to deception, to assassination and—if you consider it a vulnerability—to rebirth.

The Greek gods, who Homer said "dwell in bliss," nevertheless suffered jealousy, envy, anger, fear, indignation, ugliness, deformity, lameness, castration, and ultimately death.  So much for bliss. 

And they suffered pleasure, if you consider that a vulnerability.

The Nordic gods were subject to the same things, and of course to twilight.

The Judaeo-Christian-Muslim God was notoriously jealous, and with some reason: scholars are telling us all those names of his were actually of other gods, lots of them.  He suffered anger, rage, vengefulness and, we can only conclude, a sense of obligation to put on our own vulnerability, sweat blood in terror, and submit to torture from which death could only be a relief.  It’s a beautiful story, “The notion,” as T.S. Eliot says, “of some infinitely gentle, Infinitely suffering thing.”

If only it weren’t so mixed up with hellfire and sexual prohibition.  “As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on,” says William Blake, “so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.”  Hence the hypocrisy of the diaper: the Romans didn’t nail anybody up in his underwear.  Even Salvador Dalí paints it on.  Only Michelangelo gives us a nude Christ.

It is debated whether Jesus spoke and read Greek, which had been the lingua franca of the Eastern Empire since Alexander; moreover, the flight into Egypt must have brought the Holy Family to the Jewish community in Alexandria, the world’s intellectual capital, and the logical place for Jesus to pick up enough to wow the Temple priests with at the age of twelve—not that logic has to be involved.  Certainly he talks more like Socrates than like Moses.

And like Socrates, he may just be a character in a book.  The four most important people in Western culture—Homer (for Alexander wanted to be Achilles, and Caesar wanted to be Alexander), Socrates, Jesus and Shakespeare—may never have existed.

"Homer"
May be as misnomer
For several otherwise out-of-work guys
Half his size.

Dalí once remarked that he adored weakness, which he found consonant with modern physics, and that he painted anti-matter angels.  Perhaps we could imagine an anti-matter God, who submits himself to his cosmos like any artist to his work, and then what happens happens.  The price for freedom, after all, is vulnerability.

But let’s not get carried away.  Ignorance—and here’s an adage I can sign—is bliss.  Who knows what's behind the curtain?  On Isis’s statue the inscription said, "I am all that was, is and will be, and no mortal has yet lifted my veil."

  

2) Is God evil?

 

There’s a case for it.  The shadow side of our culture is Gnosticism, the belief that we ourselves are sparks of the original God, held prisoner here by a second-rate god, a Demiurge, psychotic and inferior, who split off from Godhead and trapped us.  Vulnerability again: apparently it’s eternal.

When you get the gnosis, the knowledge, from a redeemer or just by waking up, you can never lose the sense that you are God, and the sky-god isn’t.

It’s been with us since the first century, the idea that the Demiurge put us in a garden and told us we could do anything we wanted except eat the fruit of a certain tree.  Well, what else could we do?  Then he came looking for us—very creepy: “Who told you you were naked?”  In this version the serpent is the redeemer, the ancient symbol of wisdom.

Then "God" wiped us out with a flood, after which he promised he wouldn’t do that any more; next time he’d do it by fire.  Thanks a lot.  (Which Planet of the Apes movie is it where the people worship an atom bomb as a manifestation of God?  It's what James Baldwin called The Fire Next Time.)

But there are lots of versions.  The texts were suppressed, and until recently the only source we had on them was the Church Fathers, who summarized them to condemn them.  The thing went underground and spread to Islam, where the Sufis adopted it, and were horribly beaten down.  The great Persian poet Rumi was a Gnostic.

In the middle ages Gnosticism emerged in Kabbalah.  And from Islam it came, through both the Muslim-occupied Balkans and Muslim-occupied Spain, to northern Italy and the south of France, where it appeared as Catharism ("Purism"): the Cathars were vegetarians, egalitarians, feminists—the whole trip—and embodied a heresy so threatening that the Pope sent a crusade against them.

The leader of the crusade, Simon de Montfort (I’m quoting the Wikipedia) "ordered his troops to gouge out the eyes of 100 prisoners, cut off their noses and lips, then send them back to the towers led by a prisoner with one remaining eye."  It didn’t work, so they slaughtered them and burned down their cities.  The Cistercian abbot who led the attack on Béziers was asked how to distinguish Cathars from Christians.  "Kill them all," he said.  "God will know his own."

Courtly love comes down to us from poems written at that time, and in that place, and imitated ever since.  We’re still in the habit of letting ladies go first, though we no longer hold their chairs while they sit or take our hats off in their presence, possibly because we’re not wearing hats.

And though the exaltation of women was a civilizing force in those barbaric times, it’s no exaggeration to say that the women’s revolution has been against courtly love.

The schism between the Orthodox east and the Catholic west happened before these events, so courtly love never took hold in Greece.  Here in anarchic Athens, where people park their cars on the sidewalk and there’s often room for only one person to pass at a time, women smile at me when I step back for them (I can’t help it): it tells them I'm from the West, and Greeks love foreigners.

But here’s the thing: many people believe that courtly-love literature was not about lovers and their high unattainable ladies, but about the poet yearning for his high unattainable self, his godhead.  Saying it in code is better than having your eyes gouged out.

Notice that the lover never "attains" his beloved—that’s one of the rules.  In the north of France, where it took the form of romance, Tristan and Isolde don’t have sex; they sleep with a sword between them: their job is to yearn.  And it’s that way down to Wagner, down to pop songs.

Dante seems to have sensed the spiritual meaning.  His sonnets to Beatrice are the strongest courtly-love poems I know; and it’s she who, in the Commedia, leads him up to the light.

God as gay

In Paradise Lost Milton, who knew the ancient languages—and the Fathers by heart—puts the Gnostic arguments in Satan’s mouth.  Milton, as Blake says, "was a true Poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it."  It’s Milton’s Satan who inspires English Romanticism.  In Byron’s Cain, Cain is a hero who defies the illegitimate God and commits murder, fuck you.  "I have a great mind to believe in Christianity," said Byron, "for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned."  Shelley despises the world he finds himself in, and even gentle Wordsworth adapts Satan’s speeches to his own sense of self.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
          The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
              Hath had elsewhere its setting,
                And cometh from afar:
              Not in entire forgetfulness,
              And not in utter nakedness,
          But trailing clouds of glory do we come
              From God, who is our home.

Well, that’s the sweet way of saying it.  You get your sweet Gnostics, like Emerson, and you get your bitter Gnostics, like Samuel Beckett, who thinks even after we die the torture continues.  Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is not just the black guy in white society; he's the unseen self.

Blake wondered what kind of God could make the tiger: "Did he who made the lamb make thee?"  (I have lambs and tigers in my own heart, it doesn’t seem that remarkable.)  Queegueg says the same thing in Moby-Dick which, along with Peter Pan and Under the Volcano, is the great Gnostic novel: when a shark he thought dead snaps at him he says, "Queequeg no care what god made him shark, wedder Feejee God or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin."  And we get it again with the enormous fat crocodile in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line: who made that thing?

Ingmar Bergman gave us a vision of God as a rapacious spider, and Stanley Kubrick had the Gnostic paranoia (see Some Thoughts on Stanley Kubrick).  David Lynch combines that with Presbyterianism, an easy fit: Romanticism is not only Gnosticism, it's post-Christian Presbyterianism; that is to say it's dualistic—it rejects the world.  (For more on dualism, see Catholics and Puritans.)

"That is God...a shout in the street."

Classicists like Joyce and Dalí don't care for that.  In 1943 Dalí wrote, "Hitler wants war, not in order to win, as most people think, but to lose.  He is romantic, and an integral masochist, and exactly as in Wagner’s operas it has to end for him, the hero, as tragically as possible.  The end to which Hitler aspires is to feel his enemy’s boot crushing his face, which for that matter is unmistakably marked by disaster."

I wonder what he'd say about Merkel.

Nevertheless our own time is heavy with Gnostics.  In Peter Weir’s Fearless Jeff Bridges looks up at the sky and says, "You want to kill me, but you can’t."  In Weir's Dead Poets Society those boys who stand up on their desks at the end are assuming their full stature by defying the Demiurge—who is really rather a nice guy, isn’t he?  And in his The Truman Show the Demiurge is a reality-TV producer who keeps Truman in a false world. 

For the young, of course, there’s The Matrix: God as computer.

The discovery of the Gnostic gospels at Nag Hammadi in 1945 had something to do with this mood: for the first time we had the real texts, and a different kind of Jesus, a stay-light-on-your-feet Jesus.  The Copts are the ancient guardians of this tradition.

But it's always with us, texts or no.  In its debased form it’s the content of all those Twitter messages, LinkedIn messages, inspiration messages, you-can-do-it messages.  Here’s a profile I just saw: "Beyond Your Fear Is A Whole New You!  We all have fear about something in our lives. Whether it is rejection, loss, failure or a number of any other emotions that are like anchors dragging behind us and holding us back from doing what...."  There are more redeemers out there than people who give a rat’s ass.

But that’s the way we see things these days.  Emersonianism is America.  "Yes we can!"  Harold Bloom says most Americans are Gnostics without knowing it. 

But what a paranoid vision!  And it’s a dogma!  I hate dogma.  There’s a difference, after all, between belief and faith. (See also Thinking about God, by Doctor Robert MacLean, PhD,)

Nor can I square it with my enjoyment of the world; Gnosticism is scarcely what you’d call earthy.  Mine is a precarious position, yes, but as my alter ego says in The Cad, "if you're not making a fool of yourself, you're not alive."  We speak from experience there, Toby and I.

And who says it has to be squared?  "Commonsense is square," said Vladimir Nabokov, "whereas all the most essential visions and values of life are beautifully round."

Socrates, whether he existed or not, said "The best theory of the gods is no theory at all."   

Enigma, then, is God's real name.  And the world's.  And yours.

 

3) Are you God?

Probably.  But don’t think about that now, you’ve got the rent to pay.

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A Comedy of Death

Robert MacLean is a bad poet and an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi, Scanbox, and YouTube, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a screamingly funny novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a reviewer of films, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. Committed to making movies that don't matter. No brains, but an intellectual snob.

“I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”―F. Scott

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To His Coy Mistress

Ode on a Grecian Urine