In a world crying out for your attention, thank you for choosing to give your attention to Lost in Wonder. Just a reminder: you can respond to these newsletters like any email; just hit reply! I’d love to hear from you. Also, if you enjoy reading, please consider sharing and subscribing.
I tend to think of myself as someone with a fairly ecumenical musical taste. I definitely have preferences, but I have discovered that a little curiosity and time can open me up to sounds, rhythms, or melodies that were at first off-putting because they were simply foreign to me.
This is why I have little time for people’s musical opinions (and often any other opinion!) after they make a broad assertion like “I don’t like rap” or “I don’t like country.” What do you mean? You don’t like all rap? You’ve listened to Outkast, Kurtis Blow, Lauryn Hill, Kendrick Lamar, Nicki Manaj, and A Tribe Called Quest (or George Jones, Kacey Musgraves, Garth Brooks, Ralph Stanley, and Lil Nas X) and you couldn’t find anything in there that was interesting? I don’t believe you. Try again; try longer; pay closer attention.
However, I’ve found that within any genre, the people I tend to be drawn to most strongly are those whose musical outflow seem to be sourced from a deeply spiritual, even mystical, place within them: Natalia LaFourcade, Bob Dylan, Roberta Flack, Thelonius Monk, Arvo Pärt, Emmylou Harris, Bach, Sufjan Stevens, Rhiannon Giddens, Gustavo Santaolalla, Joni Mitchell. But somewhere close to the top of my list is Jewish-mystic-turned-Zen-Buddhist Leonard Cohen.
Yes, anytime you mention Cohen, the long shadow of “Hallelujah” creeps in from the west and the C to Am arpeggiated intro is heard faintly on the wind as people run for cover. For we’ve all grown accustomed to the ordo of the secular liturgy: a tragedy strikes, a benefit concert is held, and inevitably some fading pop star takes a hack at the secular hymn. Heck, a whole book has been given over to the song and its rise.
Don’t get me wrong; it is a great song! For my money, there are fewer better lines in modern poetry or song that describe the human condition and possibility of redemption than “and even though it all went wrong, / I’ll stand before the Lord of Song / with nothing on my tongue but hallelujah.” But familiarity too often breeds contempt.
“Hallelujah” has become a victim of its own success not only because we’ve become sonically and thematically habituated to it, but also because it too often buries the rest of Cohen’s other work. At a minimum, everyone should be familiar with “Suzanne,” “Bird on the Wire,” “Famous Blue Raincoat,” “Sisters of Mercy,” “Everybody Knows,” “Anthem,” “You Want It Darker,” “Come Healing,” and perhaps a dozen others. If I had to pick only one Cohen song to take with me to the desert island though, it would be “If It Be Your Will,” in part for these perfect verses:
If it be your will
that a voice be true,
from this broken hill,
I will sing to you.
From this broken hill
all your praises they shall ring,
if it be your will
to let me sing.If it be your will,
if there is a choice,
let the rivers fill,
let the hills rejoice.
Let your mercy spill
on all these burning hearts in hell
if it be your will
to make us well.
(There’s also two killer covers: the more popular version by Anhoni [then part of the group Antony and the Johnsons] and a more gospel-tinged version [that sax!] that I prefer by Mavis Staples.)
The hyperfocus on “Hallelujah” also diverts attention from Cohen’s spiritual journey and sacred poetry. There is a hard-won wisdom in his creative writing that only comes from a lifetime wrestling with the Holy One. That grappling is on full display in the contemporary psalms of his 1984 Book of Mercy. There are beguiling lines like baited hooks that catch and pull me, wriggling, out of my inattention:
“We stand in rags, we beg for tears to dissolve the immovable landmarks of hatred”
“Crush my swollen smallness, infiltrate my shame…Count me back to your mercy with the measures of a bitter song, and do not separate me from my tears.”
“O beloved speaking, O comfort whispering in the terror, unspeakable explanation of the smoke and cruelty, undo the self-conspiracy, let me dare the boldness of joy.”
"I search among the words for words that would not bend the will away from you.”
““[Y]our cowardice has led you to believe that the victor does not limp.”
And then there’s a few that sing in their entirety:
“Sit down, Master, on this rude chair of praises, and rule my nervous heart with your great decrees of freedom. Out of time you have taken me to do my daily task. Out of mist and dust you have fashioned me to know the numberless worlds between the crown and the kingdom. In utter defeat I came to you and you received me with a sweetness I had not dared to remember. Tonight I come to you again, soiled by strategies and trapped in the loneliness of my tiny domain. Establish your law in this walled place. Let nine men come to lift me into their prayer so that I may whisper with them: Blessed be the name of the glory of the kingdom for ever and ever.”
and:
“Blessed are you who has given each man a shield of loneliness so that he cannot forget you. You are the truth of loneliness, and only your name addresses it. Strengthen my loneliness that I may be healed in your name, which is beyond all consolations that are uttered on this earth. Only in your name can I stand in the rush of time, only when this loneliness is yours can I lift my sins toward your mercy.”
and:
”Holy is your name, holy is your work, holy are the days that return to you. Holy are the years that you uncover. Holy are the hands that are raised to you, and the weeping that is wept to you. Holy is the fire between your will and ours, in which we are refined. Holy is that which is unredeemed, covered with your patience. Holy are the souls lost in your unnaming. Holy, and shining with a great light, is every living thing, established in this world and covered with time, until your name is praised forever.”
But my favorite in the collection (and I swear I’m getting to the hymn!) takes our most common fear and nightmare—falling—and reimagines it.
“In the eyes of men he falls, and in his own eyes too. He falls from his high place, he trips on his achievement. He falls to you, he falls to know you. It is sad, they say. See his disgrace, say the ones at his heel. But he falls radiantly toward the light to which he falls. They cannot see who lifts him as he falls, or how his falling changes, and he himself bewildered till his heart cries out to bless the one who holds him in his falling. And in his fall he hears his heart cry out, his heart explains why he is falling, why he had to fall, and he gives over to the fall. Blessed are you, clasp of the falling. He falls into the sky, he falls into the light, none can hurt him as he falls. Blessed are you, shield of the falling. Wrapped in his fall, concealed within his fall, he finds the place, he is gathered in. While his hair streams back and his clothes tear in the wind, he is held up, comforted, he enters into the place of his fall. Blessed are you, embrace of the falling, foundation of the light, master of the human accident.”
In a tradition where The Fall was the source of all that was evil and broken in the world and falling from grace (i.e., “backsliding”) was about the worst thing a Christian could do, to reinterpret the fall as not only necessary but even good was a revelation. What if what we experience as a fall from grace is sometimes a fall to grace? In this text, I used this readjusted lens Cohen provided to imagine how falling could be truly good news when we have climbed the toxic summits of our world.
At the height of success
and the apex of greed,
where we live to impress
and ignore those in need,
may the status we’re gripping
escape our embrace,
for there’s mercy in slipping;
the fall is a grace,
a grace,
a grace.
For there’s mercy in slipping;
the fall is a grace.
On the peak of control
where we frantically try
to inhabit a role
that our neighbors will buy,
may the footholds that crumble
secure our release,
for there’s rest when we stumble;
the fall is our peace,
our peace,
our peace.
For there’s rest when we stumble;
the fall is our peace.
At the summit of pride
when convinced we are right,
for the Lord’s on our side
and demands that we fight,
may the views none can alter
surprisingly shift,
for there’s hope when we falter;
the fall is a gift,
a gift,
a gift.
For there’s hope when we falter;
the fall is a gift.
When we shudder in fear,
as we swiftly descend,
that our judgment is near
or the plunge will not end,
may we find the fall frees us
from perils above.
At the bottom is Jesus;
we fall into Love,
to Love,
to Love.
At the bottom is Jesus;
we fall into Love.
I sent this text over to my long-time (and first!) collaborator, Ben Brody, whose lively, oft-descending tune reinforces the theme of falling grace. Here’s a demo, played simply because I kept forgetting to hit the Ab’s:
You can purchase the music here.
Wonder-ings
I’m often more of a story- and character-driven reader than one who reads for the beauty of prose, but man, I’ve read two wonderful books in the former category that maybe that preference is shifting in my old age. The first is Ali Smith’s 2014 How to Be Both. Having already inhaled her Seasonal Quartet earlier this year, I’m now planning on working my way through the rest of the oeuvre because she’s gone five-for-five.
Like many prose-forward books, It’s hard to sum up the story of How to Be Both. Written in two parts, the first (in my copy) follows a fifteenth-century Italian fresco painter who has somehow been transported to the present and is fated to follow a sixteen-year-old girl while simultaneously attempting to interpret with varying degrees of accuracy changing modern technology and the unchanging human condition. The second follows the sixteen-year-old George (short for Georgia), a pedantic teen whose life has imploded after the death of her mother and has been drawn in her grief to the mosaics of the aforementioned artist Francesco del Cossa. I wrote “in my copy” because the book is published in two different editions with the order of the stories reversed depending upon which copy you buy. It hardly matters, because you’ll want to re-read whichever you read first with the new interpretive keys you picked up in the second half (or at least I did).
Exploring themes of gender and grief, art and meaning making, the two stories are laced with insight:”There was a lot more world: cause [read ‘cuz] roads that look set to take you in one direction will sometimes twist back on themselves without ever seeming anything other than straight…Many things get forgiven in the course of a life: nothing is finished or unchangeable except death and even death will bend a little if what you tell of it is told right.”
and:
“Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.”
and:
“She sat in a clump of grass at the side of the path in the early spring sun. The grass was wet. She didn’t care. There were bees and flies out and about. A small bee-like creature landed on the cuff of her jacket and she flicked it away with a precise flick of her thumb and first finger.
But a fraction of a second after she did she realized the impact her finger must have had on something so small.It must have felt like being hit by the rounded front of a giant treetrunk that’s been swung through the air at you without knowing it was coming.
It must have felt like being punched by a god.
That’s when she sensed, like something blurred and moving glimpsed through a partition whose glass is clouded, both that love was coming for her and the nothing she could do about it.
The cloud of unknowing, her mother said in her ear.
Meets the cloud of knowing, George thought back.”
Recently long-listed for the 2024 Booker Prize in fiction, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital follows six astronauts from five different countries as they orbit the planet in a space station. While the setting might suggest the sci-fi horror of Alien or suspenseful adventure of Apollo 13, this story instead revolves (see what I did there?) around an ordinary 24-hour period in the lives of the astronauts as they orbit the earth sixteen times. But from that distance and speed, they gain new perspective on the fleeting wonder of humanity and the delicate beauty of “this fragile earth, our island home” (a favorite phrase from one of the eucharistic prayers in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer).
“Maybe one day we’ll look back in the mirror and be happy with the far-to-middling upright ape that eyes us back, and we’ll gather our breath and think: OK, we’re alone, so be it. Maybe that day is coming soon. Maybe the whole nature of things is one of precariousness, of wobbling on a pinhead of being, of decentering ourselves inch by inch as we do in life, as we come to understand that the staggering extent of our own non-extent is a tumultuous and wave-tossed offering of peace.”
and
The planet is shaped by sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured by want.”
and
“Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once, it seems he’s about to wake up and say. Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything. Some metal separates us from the void; death is so close. Life is everywhere, everywhere.
If stunning imagery and gorgeous prose is your jam, I commend both of these books to you!
After finishing the previously discussed Umberto Eco documentary, I read his 1995 article, “Ur-Fascism,” in which he enumerates fourteen features of Fascist movements throughout history. Some of them are all too familiar and important to recognize:
3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism…
“5. [D]isagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.
“7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged…”
Because I don’t want to end on a Fascist note, here’s one more Cohen nugget: “Let me raise the brokenness to you, to the world where the breaking is for love.”
May your break open for love and fall toward grace.
Peace,
Dave
Wow Dave, my head is exploding! Thanks