Leonard Cohen on what makes a saint – The Marginalian

Within the pre-scientific world, within the blind outdated world with its outdated language, we had a phrase for the folks most awake to the sacred marvel of actuality, most capable of awaken the native goodness of human beings – the goodness that naturally flows between us after we are stripped of our biases and free of our little constraining frames of reference. This phrase was “holy”.

Saints nonetheless stroll our world, although now we’d simply name them heroes, if we acknowledge them in any respect – heroes whose superpower is love.

Leonard Cohen (September 21, 1934 – November 7, 2016) – one of many fashionable heroes – explores what makes a saint in a passage from his 1966 novel beautiful losers (public library).

He writes:

What’s a saint? A saint is somebody who has reached a distant human chance. It’s unimaginable to say what this chance is. I believe it has one thing to do with the vitality of affection. Contact with this vitality leads to the train of a form of steadiness within the chaos of existence. A saint doesn’t dissolve chaos; if he had, the world would have modified way back. I do not suppose a saint solves chaos even for himself, as a result of there’s one thing smug and warlike concerning the notion of a person setting the universe so as. It’s a form of steadiness that makes its glory. It rides the fins like a breakaway ski. Its course is the caress of the hill. His piece is a drawing of the snow at a specific second in its association with the wind and the rock. One thing in him loves the world a lot that he surrenders to the legal guidelines of gravity and likelihood. Removed from flying with the angels, he traces with the constancy of a seismograph needle the state of the stable bloody panorama. His home is harmful and finite, however he’s at house on the earth. He can love the form of human beings, the skinny and twisted shapes of the center. It’s good to have amongst us such males, such balancing monsters of affection.

A yr later, Cohen mirrored on what these “balancing monsters of affection” do for us in her tune “Sisters of Mercy”:

In case your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn,
They’ll bind you with swish love and inexperienced as a stalk.

Full with Walter Lippmann’s magnificent meditation on what makes a hero, impressed by Amelia Earhart, then revisit Leonard Cohen on creativity on the finish of life, the language and poetry of presence, the ruptures and redemptions of democracy, and when (to not) stop a inventive venture.