СOHEN: There is a crack in everything
ANTHEM
Leonard Cohen
The birds they sang
At the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
Has passed away
Or what is yet to be
Yeah the wars they will
Be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
Bought and sold
And bought again
The dove is never free
Ring the bells (ring the bells) that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything)
That's how the light gets in
...
* * *
From "Broken Halleluja" by Liel Leibovitz:
Another song “Anthem” was even more bluntly prophetic “Ring the bell that still can ring” it declared. “Forget your perfect offering/ There is a crack in everything/ That's how the light gets in.”
Cohen was channeling millenia of Jewish thought - the crack is a favorite kabbalistic metaphor - and composing an anthem that celebrated what most anthems dared not acknowledge, namely the irreparable condition of human life.
“the light” he told an interviewer, “is the capacity to reconcile your experience, your sorrow with everyday that dawns.
It is that understanding, which is beyond significance or meaning, that allows you to live a life and embrace the disasters and sorrows and joys that are our common lot.
But it's only with the recognition that there is a crack in everything. I think all other visions are doomed to irretrievable gloom.”
* * *
I'm now reading the book “Hurry down Sunshine”, a memoir of a father whose daughter got into a hospital with acute Bipolar disorder.
Well, the father, Michael Greenberg, has a strong Jewish background as well (he admits somewhere in the book). And he had the same Crack thought in his writing
“it's something of a sacrilege nowadays to speak of insanity as anything but the chemical brain disease that is on one level it is”…
...“I'm in the grip of an unshakable sobriety, compensation perhaps for the psychic drunkenness of Sally (his daughter).
It is as if her crack-up has made me saner than I wish to be...”
Leonard Cohen
The birds they sang
At the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
Has passed away
Or what is yet to be
Yeah the wars they will
Be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
Bought and sold
And bought again
The dove is never free
Ring the bells (ring the bells) that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything)
That's how the light gets in
...
* * *
From "Broken Halleluja" by Liel Leibovitz:
Another song “Anthem” was even more bluntly prophetic “Ring the bell that still can ring” it declared. “Forget your perfect offering/ There is a crack in everything/ That's how the light gets in.”
Cohen was channeling millenia of Jewish thought - the crack is a favorite kabbalistic metaphor - and composing an anthem that celebrated what most anthems dared not acknowledge, namely the irreparable condition of human life.
“the light” he told an interviewer, “is the capacity to reconcile your experience, your sorrow with everyday that dawns.
It is that understanding, which is beyond significance or meaning, that allows you to live a life and embrace the disasters and sorrows and joys that are our common lot.
But it's only with the recognition that there is a crack in everything. I think all other visions are doomed to irretrievable gloom.”
* * *
I'm now reading the book “Hurry down Sunshine”, a memoir of a father whose daughter got into a hospital with acute Bipolar disorder.
Well, the father, Michael Greenberg, has a strong Jewish background as well (he admits somewhere in the book). And he had the same Crack thought in his writing
“it's something of a sacrilege nowadays to speak of insanity as anything but the chemical brain disease that is on one level it is”…
...“I'm in the grip of an unshakable sobriety, compensation perhaps for the psychic drunkenness of Sally (his daughter).
It is as if her crack-up has made me saner than I wish to be...”