The Virtue of Memoir

"The Trinity, understandably called a mystery, lies at the heart of Christianity. It achieves two major goals: it posits a realm that transcends the physical world, in which reality is made by the word. History is filled with rulers who claimed divinity to justify their superiority, but not until Christianity and the sacralizing of the notion that language creates reality does the debate between appearance and reality begin to pervade Western literature and thought. Increasingly what is said - the Emperor has new clothes - is called real, while physical reality fades into invisibility or is denied..."*

This is exactly why the difference between memoir and fiction is important.

A Wolf at the Table** is hyper-clear, vivid, tense, exact... There are charismatic people; this is charismatic writing, as it were: all the good things intensified.

As autobiography, A Wolf at the Table speaks intimately to all varieties of modern culture: titled for the dinner-table, sited within the house - that nexus of neurosis, ambition, jealousy, dissatisfaction, bullying, denial, invisibility, quasi-slavery, all called love - the house and the psyche both isolated.

It says monsters and madness can exist among some of the people we knew, are bound to, frequent, depend on in one way or another: the words for known people and places are not antonyms of humanity's nastier aspects.

It says outrageousness can be as close as the sweat on your skin, and don't you forget it.

==

* French, Marilyn, From Eve to Dawn: a History of Women, Volume 1, Origins, New York, The Feminist Press, 2008, p. 245. 

** Burroughs, Augusten, A wolf at the table: a memoir of my father, New York, St. Martin's Press, 2008.

But I Have Also Been Doing Other Things

And they are here and here.

Song of Exasperation

And so at work I listen to Pandora. The free version because I'm cheap (an oligarchic synonym for poor). I'm at my desk all day, on an intellectual assembly-line, a kind of battery-hen of the mind. (Archetypal women's work of the last five to ten thousand years.) And so I listen to Pandora.

And so, fishing around for things to listen to, I made the mistake of telling Pandora (from whose box all hope is long since fled), that I liked "Hallelujah."

I have a troubled relationship with LC. The most evil woman I have ever known ad such a way with metaphor that I stayed in her company until I had learnt the trick and her betrayals were many and complete and far beyond doubt. It was in her company that I first heard "Suzanne," which caught me with its insistent and paradoxical chorus, its assonant images, and the melody's limited, circling range. That was the Noel Harrison version. I didn't actually know who'd written the song. I assumed it was Harrison.

When we were first married my faithful dinner companion played a lot of LC - Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrre is my gypsy wife tonight - until I'd bellow across the living-room, "She left you because you're such a lugubrious son of a bitch." (I loved son of a bitch and don't give a good goddam in daily speech. Different rhythms, long middles of short syllables, very different - trochaic? dactylic? from the invective I knew.)

But a Cohen song is one thing and a Cohen LP is another. Standing and listening, it becomes clear that the song is not the work; what emerges from a cycle of Cohen songs is the sense of women/Woman as a reservoir of sustenance and forgiveness. Kind of OK, less cruel than some of the single songs, but, Jeez. When will women ever be just human beings, like the unnamed other in the poem about the gay man's encounter, no animal, vegetable, or mineral metaphors?

Eventually the faithful dinner companion's LC phase faded. I can live with a lot of Brian Eno & Phillip Glass & Bowie & ECM jazz (& just as well).

However, telling Pandora that I liked "Hallelujah" was a mistake. Firstly: like is not  exact. Was fascinated by the linguistic intricacies of, wanted to dissect, wanted to steal what I could from and so needed to hear several times  - any of those would have been closer, but they're all beyond Pandora's range of choice. (You say algorithm, I say playlist.)

Secondly: unless I order up Madre Deus or ambient or Segovia instead - categories I can let run for hours without having to alter, which vignette the corners of my mind - see extreme attention to detail eight hrs/day - I end up hearing "Hallelujah" at least twice a day, five days a week - far too often for any song in any language you actually speak. LC, Annie Lennox, KD Laing, Sinead Bloody O'Connor (all of whom I like). Rufus Fucking Wainwright, who's too busy producing beautiful enunciation to honor the lyric by singing it as written, to sing "you" as "ya," which is the fucking rhyme the fucking song actually fucking depends on-ya -
 
I suppose Anthony's version wd. cost me $10 a month. Hooray for being poor.

With Leonard Cohen it's the LC single song thing - a single song will be OK, depending on the song (Suzanne is better than Sisters of Mercy - is that its name? - for example) in terms of not being mildly depressing or infuriating if you hear it once. With Pandora, it's really best not to communicate at all.