To Match a March

"And love is not a victory march
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah"

Leonard Cohen, "Hallelujah"

**********

Dear Alex,

Love is. Love is not. Love in knots.

Hallelujah is a union of 2 Hebrew words: “hallelu-" means praise, “-jah" for Yahweh or LORD.

The paradox of Cohen’s lyrical couplet looks more slanted in tormented cuts. Mince his words to interpret them in your voice, mine or another, and we can praise or profane love in permutation. Love is cold, broken. Not a march or victory. Hallelujah. Hallelujah x 20+ in refrain.

The genius of Cohen depresses us, skims past the surface to slice through skin and soul. No wonder he sings of dying to love in your rousing to each dawn: The Magi were depressed; the journey was depressing, the homecoming even more so. We shall always be deserted in our undying need for something beyond and beneath the veneer of a good life, the American Dream, perfection.

I wish I could say I am a musical person in sync with poetry in psalms. But I am not. I have tried to reason with myself after over a decade of classical piano playing and music theory studies with my examinations certified by the Royal Conservatory of Music: I have the official seal of approval as a musical learner but I still feel tone-deaf, cold and broken to melody. Perhaps this is why I feel handicapped even in writing, a paradox dissonant to my praise for unknown artists with hammer or pen, spatula and broom.

To me, Cohen is a mythological riddle, someone I could listen to and read about yet misunderstand, a foggy figure. His words upend figures of speech and figments of assumption. A question mark in exclamation and parentheses, ebbing and swelling in no-man span between on- and offscreen. You must be lonely and depressed to listen to him. Same with his legions of fans across sea and time, including Justin Trudeau in Twitter on the November night of Cohen’s death: “No other artist’s music felt or sounded like Leonard Cohen’s. Yet his work resonated across generations. Canada and the world will miss him.” Then Trudeau quoted Cohen’s Hallelujah in his mourning tribute for the late legend.

Love in mourning and loss. Hallelujah.

Summer is vanishing, daylight hours dwindling. My daughter will start school next week. Her SAT is scheduled in a few days. Plans are in full push, marching in hope for victory. She and all the high school graduates of 2020 are singing in and out of love in this season of many critical decisions. There does not seem much time to stall or stop at once. The Earth continues to spin on its axis at an angle of 23.5 degrees, singing to the shifting seasons. Climate change or not, economy in recession or obsession, we have families and funds to manage, business and pleasure to pursue, holes to mend and bugs to kill. Let’s talk about grit and tactic, fixes and fixations, the bottomline. Not love in punk poetry. Come on with the march!

Not until I hear Cohen’s sonorously strained voice in YouTube, his “hallelujahs” in backward steps of moving up to heal, sideways with others and no ways to say more. Until tenderly, unjust and splitting, sacrifice change weep - grammar & order and expectations entangled, reversed, the unmaking of my makings, break ing d own to f u l l S.T.O.P.

Love is not a victory march. It is the march of a martyr.

Yours, Kate

**********

Dear Kate,

It's been a while since I wrote to you. You haven't stopped gifting me your writing but I was too temperamental to match your effort and generosity.

I've always been a disciplined writer, I'd like to believe, but I must attribute this season of barrenness to my temperament, which is more than emotion, beyond life's circumstance. Shall I call it a lifelong habit that finally inhabits a life for its being lived long enough?

"Love is not a victory march."

Is anything ever is, an unqualified, unequivocal triumph? And why are we so desperate to put on a prideful parade?

"It was all good until the managers came," someone said to me last week.

Until the make-sense people tried to make sense of it all, for you and me and everyone else. They talked a lot and the story became good enough that I wanted to find my role in it.

Then one day I woke up and realized I wanted to be a manager too. What I’ve been served I wanted to serve it too and serve it better. I was on board but now I wanted to own the board and run it too. I will give what it costs to be like you, a grown-up, an expert, a person with conviction and authority, a light to this world of darkness. I want to initiate, to ignite and inspire. I got poetry in me.

Sometimes the airplane sounded like rain, a sudden downpour. Things went right over my head, swoosh. That’s when I needed to try extra hard to stay focused. You can’t let your head play games with you. You’ll need to manage it too, your head. Maybe to manage it most.

I found a pack of drink coasters, felt squares snuggly bound in a clear plastic casing made just for the four of them to cosy up. The set was moved from house to house in the last two decades or so undisturbed, always somewhere in the kitchen close to my collection of mugs, my recollection of unneeded useful things. Today I found it because I wanted to. There were a dozen loose cork and paper coasters on top but this time I reached for the bottom and summoned the untested. I pulled one felt out and the case maintained its shape. The rest went right back to where they were but now breathing easier than before. Everyone else in the clan top to bottom received a tidy-up, an acknowledgement of its single-minded devotion to the Cause, marching onward.

Yours, Alex