The first goes outside at 1am on a clear November night, crackling forest on all sides, headphones blaring Past Lives firmly clamped over her ears, breathes in the sky and the potential. Everything is starlit, literally and figuratively: the world is in place, is kinetic, is everything she was worried it couldn't be again. And as she throws her arms up and raises her eyes, a single shooting star flashes across the sky.
The SECOND person is well fucking aware that literally no one is going to believe this shooting star story, but the arm-throwing wasn't about that anyway ----- it was part of a chaotic, frenetic dance that no one can see because no one is supposed to see it; a dance inspired by a fuckton of history and even more possibility ------ but, excited by this cliche of a fucking moment, the dance gets wilder and she rolls her friggin ankle over and trips and slices open her toe on a stick.
Guys there are two kinds of people in the world and I am both of them. Sometimes in the space of one song.
yeah yeah my toe's fine DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT sigh. Poise and grace just ain't my thing.
Here's something they don't tell you when you're studying to be an English teacher: Teaching media you personally love is fucking terrifying.
Okay picture it: you're standing in front of a bunch of generally apathetic teenagers, most of whom would rather be sleeping or on Snapchat. You hold, in your hands and your heart, something that definitively shaped you. They stare back at you blankly. Taking a deep breath, you press play or send or hand it out. The words are theirs, now. They're confused, they're bored, they're waiting for recess.
And now, vibrating with context and history and hope, you have to direct the discussion.
As a person, I am deeply defined by the media I love -- to the point where if you want to get to know me, I'd rather give you a song or a book than explain who I am. So as a teacher, I raaaarely bring stuff that has profoundly affected me into the classroom (unless I have a class that I know won't completely rip it apart and leave me raw and crying). There are, however, exceptions --- and Leonard Cohen is one of them.
Leonard Cohen has defined my literary and musical souls for as long as I can remember. Before Bowie, there was a low grumbling voice that barely hit any notes, expelling (because he never speaks) poetry. My father, a few years younger than Cohen, idolized him and grew up in his footsteps -- just a few neighbourhoods away from Westmount, where Cohen embodied (and, I'd argue, in many ways still embodies) the spirit of artistic Montreal. I was raised on Cohen. I knew the lyrics to Everybody Knows before I understand what any of it meant, would write down lines about taking Manhattan and then taking Berlin in my elementary school notebooks.
This is a fairly dangerous way to raise a little girl.
As she gets older, the lyrics will start to pierce and twist inside her. She'll realize that words hold volatile power; that they are, somehow, enough. She will become strange, and separate. And when she is old enough to start sincerely understanding what's behind formative explosions like Take This Waltz --- it will devastate her.
Take This Waltz shifts paradigms.
A translation of a Federico Garcia Lorca surrealist poem, and a professed thank you note to Lorca from Cohen -- this song is too much to process, the first few (many) times you hear it. Musically, I am sure it's the reason I now love 3/4 (waltz) time; lyrically, I'm sure it's from where much of my literary aesthetic derives. I can't even decide on one lyric to post; all of them shatter me ---- but I guess for the interest of enticement:
And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook With the photographs there and the moss And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty My cheap violin and my cross
I don't know that my father ever particularly loved this song -- but I vividly remember when I started loving it. It was one of the first instances I was aware that the music was mine, as opposed to chosen by my parents ------ I wasn't allowed to use the CD player until I got to high school (my dad was Very Into Sound Equipment) -- and I would always ask him to play me this song. It was my Leonard Cohen, it was viciously gorgeous, and it has never disappointed me.
My English classes are admittedly chaotic, but there are a few things I know with certainty -- and one is that, before you graduate high school in Montreal, you must have experienced Leonard Cohen. There are no two ways about this. His words are essential.
So every year I teach grade 11, I put on emotional armour, hope the kids won't laugh -- and press play. Sometimes they can't handle it, sometimes they just don't care -- but there's always at least one student I'm teaching for, one adolescent who reminds me of my little goth girl self, years ago; another person willing to open up their figurative veins and let in Cohen's quietly violent brilliance.
Almost exactly ten years ago, Norton anthologies in hand, I started my first degree ----- and I moved out.*
We take it for granted nowadays, but remember? Holding the key in your hand, eyes lighting up as you walked the perimeter, sitting in the middle of an empty room and really realizing: this is your space. You go, princess: you watch TV till 4am. You negotiate the noise level with your neighbours. You organize those cereal boxes. You answer to no one.
19 and blazing: it was 2005 and I was ready to fucking dance.
So of course I went home every weekend.
AHEM AHEM a few items of backstory:
1. My family (nuclear, extended, all of it) is unequivocally perfect.
2. My childhood home, in Rigaud, is literal forested paradise. If you have visited you know what I mean.
3. In August '05, my parents had just rescued a dog we eventually named Freyja, and I really liked her. I also practiced/taught karate on Saturday mornings in the next town over from Rigaud -- so it made sense to be there on weekends,
but 4. When I moved out, I took the family PC with me.
WAIT GUYS, CAN WE DO AN EARLY-2000s PAUSE AND REMEMBER WHEN THERE WERE FAMILY COMPUTERS?! oh my god
anyway I took it with me ~~for school.
so 5. My dad got a MiniMac.
6. External hard drives weren't compatible with both PCs and Macs (are they now? who knows). There was no highspeed, either: we're talking dial. up.
7. When I went home on Friday nights, I stayed up way later than I am decade-later capable ---- but
8. there was literally. one. song. to listen to on the shiny new family MiniMac.
And it was Hollins Steele's Tongue Tied.
And I listened to that song over. and over. and over.
I get bored quickly.
You wouldn't necessarily know it to look at me: I've been at the same job for six years (but the classes change every fall); I've lived in the same city for ten (but the city changes every day). But when things stay the same too long, I get restless; frustrated. I'll change the seating arrangement in my classroom; cancel all my plans and go wandering around the city; book a flight and spend ten days alone. I'm an introvert -- my shifts often happen internally, but they're always happening.
And lemme tell you: listening to the same song for more than a week is rarely something of which I'm capable.
So what was it about this song? I mean realistically speaking I could have transferred files or downloaded something else. But I didn't. I listened to this endlessly. And I can say oh it was the lyrics or oh it was the electropop (formative, to be sure), but none of that really captures it, does it? We listen to the songs we respond to in a moment. And oh my god: my fall of 2005 is absolutely, beyond doubt, contained in Tongue Tied.
Sometimes songs inextricably wind themselves around a particular feeling I had in the moment I loved them. Not happy, or sad; not memories, or at least not exclusively -- something more experiential, less articulable, something of its own particular quality. When I listen to the old songs, I am back there. It's as if I shift into the experiential state of the person I used to be -- like my cells refigure themselves to her, and I am living through her eyes.
For a moment.
While I listen.
I found an old mix from fall 2005 the other day; put it on in my car; blared Tongue Tied when it came on. Still a Montreal resident -- but driving, out of school, a young 'professional,' older than I ever pictured myself at that age. I am nothing like what I imagined I'd be. But when this song plays, I am every version of the self I used to be.
I've been out of Rigaud for ten years now. I'm on my 6th roommate; a gem, incidentally (there were roomie-overlaps...I'm really not that horrible to live with, I promise). There have been some vibrant, explosive nights -- some of which I'm sure will be described in later entries -- and some lonely, broken ones.
They are all -- in their emotion, their history, their glory and misery -- contained in songs to come.
The video I posted is live; different from the song I know: which is, really, in keeping with all these changes. But if you'd like the exact version I listened to, ad infinitum, ten years ago: here. It's worth it.
*With endless thanks to my parents for supporting my English Lit education. <3
