Intimacy
Dear Eugene,
I went to the first hockey game of my life last night, in heavy snow too, a man's idea of having fun and now I had it.
It was fun indeed. A friend won a pair of tickets and invited me. We called it an "experience" for the lack of any before this.
The place was noisy, and the game violent as expected. There're big screens with big images, all moving, and fast too, even a movie trailer to showcase the players grinding ax (literally) and sporting killer look, all to bump up an aggression that was intensifying itself with every step we took up the stairs to enter the sanctuary. It's a pilgrimage, a gathering of the faithful and hopeful, a crusade, for the fulfillment of a prophesied promise. No one came to know anyone one did not know already. The demigods on ice were much smaller than rumor has it.
All in all it's a standard church experience.
I thought Leonard Cohen held his last Vancouver concert in BC Place back in 2012 but no, I looked it up online and found it was in here, Rogers Arena, the very place of worship I was wrapped up in, 20,000 souls packed. Last night the place was almost full, but not Cohen-full.
"It's wonderful to be gathered here, on just the other side of intimacy," Cohen would sometimes joke at the beginning of his huge concert. This is not the right place and time to do what I am going to do to you now, he meant to say, to ask from you nakedness of various degrees, love-making in assorted positions with the beautiful strangers beside you, tears to atone for what you fear to be at-one with.
I wondered last night, sitting there in a big crowd that was quickly disillusioned by disappointment, how Cohen did it then, first to summon an audience of this size, being an octogenarian who hardly moved on stage, then to preserve and nourish intimacy in a most impersonal arena like a gladiator ready to die for love, what he saw in the deep dark space where 20,000 faces hid, what he heard in the cacophony of whispers and heart murmurs, how he brought himself to say goodbye by night's end, to leave without abandoning, to linger on as a creative presence that endured long after.
What went on must have been more violent than a hockey game.
Yours, Alex
I'd be interested in your definition of "violence" in your final line, Alex. As a hockey player and also a fan of the Canucks (I know, I know... it is contradictory to my Anabaptist convictions), I much enjoyed these reflections on your first hockey game.
ReplyDeleteDear Tim,
ReplyDeleteI am glad you asked.
I think what I was toying with, in a way that I hope to have honored Cohen's own playing, is the irony of what we think we have experienced is often not what we have intended for the experience to conjure up. The lamb is the lion is the lamb, if you will.
I suppose a hockey fan overcame "financial and geographical difficulties" (as in how Cohen often expressed genuine surprise at what people would endure to attend his concert) to see a certain longing come to fruition, and that longing would have to do with, let's be honest, a victory via rather violent means.
There's a sense of solidarity, shared destiny in the air, not least when the notes in the two national anthems were hitting the highs and lows of our self identity. In this way you can say there's a connectedness, an intimacy with the stranger beside you, that we go there to find our own place in a collective narrative.
Yet "no one came to know anyone one did not know already." And intimacy is summoned up to the chant of blood thirst and bone crunch. I am sure someone finds that extremely sexy, as I've read what people said about boxing. I am not saying it is bad taste. It's the irony itself that is interesting to me.
And with Cohen the irony works the other way around. The cultured, debonair poet laureate, the "lazy bastard living in a suit," as he called himself, seemed to be all about getting people worked up in various intimations of intimacy. (I find it hard to imagine someone waving down the soft-drink lady or chowing down on pizza during his concert.) But if you listen closely to what he was singing, you will hear it's all about profound violence.
"Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah"
So you might say it is a more intimate kind of violence that goes beyond being banged against the glass or shaking off your gloves. If there is any axe-grinding it's intended to be used as a surgical knife :)
Yours, Alex
Alex, my brother, one of the things I really appreciate about you is your attention, and your intention. The intention of the surgical knife! Your reflections woke me to a realisation that I can't even remember reflecting on the intimacy that can form through a shared experience of violence. Or vice versa.
ReplyDelete