Let Us Compare Mythologies
06.06.2024 Charlie Trenerry
06.06.2024 Charlie Trenerry
FOLK SONG
The ancient craftsman smiled
when I asked him to blow a bottle
to keep your tears in
And he smiled and hummed in rhythm with his
hands
as he carved delicate glass
and stained it with the purple of a drifting evening sky.
But the bottle is lost in a corner of my house.
How could I know you could not cry?
If you’re looking for an artist, a writer, a poet to touch your heart, rip it out, show it some harsh truths and shove it back into your chest still beating, with a tinge of bitterness but a renewed fervour for life and love, and the gruesome beauty in that act of ripping, look no further than Leonard Cohen. My step-grandfather first introduced me to this man who I still consider to be one of the greatest lyricists of all time. That is to say, my grandmother’s second husband, but as much of a grandfather as any other. A great, and, in the years I knew him at least, a seemingly mystical man. Filled-to-bursting with life, stories, and a vibrant love of music and literature. Perhaps one of the places I drew it from.
A love of Cohen’s music has followed and carried me throughout much of my life. I can credit an appreciation for his creations with some of my most vital and memorable experiences, and the most long-lasting connections and relationships I’ve formed, with people who know and hold him as dearly as I. It took longer for me to delve into his writings, prose and poetry alike, simply because, for a long while I didn’t know they existed. Once discovered though, oh boy did I delve. I thought I had devoured all that was on offer to me (my research skills back then were mainly word-of-mouth based and lacked their current finesse); until one day, once again meandering the crisp, blustering streets of Paris in winter, I came across today’s recommendation: Let Us Compare Mythologies.
Artwork by Freda Guttman
THESE HEROICS
“If I had a shining head
and people turned to stare at me
in the street cars;
and I could stretch my body
through the bright water
and keep abreast of fish and water snakes;
if I could ruin my feathers
in flight before the sun;
do you think that I would remain in this room,
reciting poems to you,
and making outrageous dreams
with the smallest movement of your mouth?”
Published in 1956, when Cohen was just twenty-two years old, Let Us Compare Mythologies is Leonard Cohen’s first book. Only four-hundred copies were published at the time, accompanied by illustrations by Freda Guttman.
Achingly beautiful, like so much of his work, but raw with youth, and perhaps more so for the lack of music behind it. Not that anything is lacking–on the contrary, each of these poems is exactly as they are meant to be. Each word and letter and line of illustration belongs where it lays on the page. And they will absolutely break your heart because of it.
Our author, later in his career, and indeed also even here, comfortably (and sometimes deeply uncomfortably) in a breath, spans religion, loneliness, desperation, sexuality, love. His songs, so often a lament, and his poems so much the same. His disdain and simultaneous adoration for humanity, and utter frankness in the face of being human himself, lends a tone that has held steadfast throughout his musical and literary career, a tone of longing and of disgust. You can taste in his words rage, envy, and complete ardour for himself, for the world, often for the women who find themselves the subject of his poems, and so much for nature.
Awe, at the creatures he sees and the way he finds life reflected in them, or them in it. The devastation with which death and loss and longing is described on the wings of an eagle, on the scales of a fish. The jolt in the starkness of colligation between gifts of flowers and nuts, and the blood-sopped pillow and half-rotted heart to which they are being delivered.
I leave you with the experience of his father’s death, with the knowledge that my vernacular is not wide nor graceful enough to convey how this author, this poet, this artist and his words have touched me, or how I wish for you to give them the opportunity to do the same for you.
“Bearing gifts of flowers and sweet nuts
the family came to watch the eldest son,
my father; and stood about his bed
while he lay on a blood-sopped pillow,
his heart half rotted
and his throat dry with regret.
And it seemed so obvious, the smell so present,
quiet so necessary,
but my uncles prophesied wildly,
promising life like frantic oracles;
and they stopped only in the morning,
after he had died
and I had begun to shout.