The War and Evening Wear

Never does death sound so vital.

When everything else tastes dry and you're now nourished, it's words made flesh you know. Your flesh, and words too. And you can grieve finally with the proper vocabulary.

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Dear Alex,

You pen a song as Cohen sings in blog, both speaking the same differently.

He ditched them all - the war, the job, the world - to love loving and love the right things more.

Face, hair, day or evening wear, we love. Lover of them all, Cohen wielded his choice, freedom and will in his final sigh and breath to write and record his final rising of a bow to the world. You want it darker. The war, the job, slipping between the sentries of the heart. Who’s moving on?

Before he moves on, Cohen thanks us for the dance, his final words moving us to dance through eternity. Never is the sound of death so vital.

This evening a new book arrives at my doorstep. My local library does not carry it and neither does the inter-library loan collection. I suspect it is not a popular book. You will likely not hear about it from a hand-me-down Hi-Fi, Xbox or YouTube. Its cover page tells you something darker: “Words at the Threshold: What We Say As We’re Nearing Death” by Lisa Smartt, a linguist, poet and educator.

In her study of the language from the dying in their final weeks or months of living, Smartt re-tells us who’s kidding who:

“... it appears that who we are in life is who we are in death; we cross the threshold with the symbols, metaphors, and meanings of our life narrative and enter into another dimension, or way of seeing, as our language gives way to increasingly figurative and nonsensical expressions.”

Never does death sound so vital for you to move on. Put on your T-shirt, sing in war or in evening wear. Love them more - the moody CD, the hair, faces and bloody world.

Yours, Kate