INDG 401 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Leonard Cohen, God Speaks, Soul Singing
9 Jun 2018
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ENGL 409, Lecture March 29, 2018
If it be your will cont.
- Practicing humility and passivity
- “If it be your will” as expressing a certain astonishment that the will might not be his own
- Speaking back to discourses of mastery in earlier works, right up until the distasteful
fantasies in Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers
- The need to repeat the line “if it be your will” is a way of practicing passivity, suggests
it’s difficult
o Career so much concerned with mastery, sometimes with unpacking and attacking
it like fascist mastery in Flowers for Hitler
- Note mortality moment in the song, typically a delightful pun
o “I shall abide until / I am spoken for”
o Recognition that when God speaks for you, you are done for like in Who by Fire
o Important moment in the accomplishment of passivity
- Suspicion of the effort of passivity in the song?
o Passivity and willfulness may be construed similarly
o Passivity still a kind of performance in the song, doesn’t exclude a response to a
powerful sense of surrender
- Still a landscape of Flowers for Hitler
o What comes to us as light, we’re very good at flipping around turning into
grounds for atrocity
- Affirms that we are not working towards a fixed clarification, illumination that will
cancel the equal truth of human violence and brutality
Hallelujah
- Dualism
- Centred at the centre of human experience
- Suggesting there are moments when you are able to transcend this dualistic system
- How does this walk the line between sacred and profane?
o Recall to story of Batsheba and David as well as story of Samson and Delilah
o Layering powerful stories of biblical men being weakened by their own actions
- Blending of Leonard Cohen with King David in “the baffled king”
- Profaning the sacred
- Leonard Cohen figure is activated in this song as well
- Fourth stanza
o “Even though it all went wrong”
o How Cohen feels c. 1984, career has flatlined, poetry is dead, he’s about to
release a book of psalms (verse poetry)
o This line can be glossed in relation to his biography
- Arc of brokenness in the album?
find more resources at oneclass.com
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Document Summary
Speaking back to discourses of mastery in earlier works, right up until the distasteful. If it be your will as expressing a certain astonishment that the will might not be his own fantasies in favourite game and beautiful losers. Suspicion of the effort of passivity in the song: passivity and willfulness may be construed similarly, passivity still a kind of performance in the song, doesn"t exclude a response to a powerful sense of surrender. Still a landscape of flowers for hitler: what comes to us as light, we"re very good at flipping around turning into grounds for atrocity. Affirms that we are not working towards a fixed clarification, illumination that will cancel the equal truth of human violence and brutality. Centred at the centre of human experience. Suggesting there are moments when you are able to transcend this dualistic system.
