Tonight we boldly start to unpack the poet’s claim that “the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and has overturned the order of the soul” –this, a calling to release the chains of guilt and indignation and CONSCIOUSLY TURN to love, ” the only engine of survival.”
“Your servant here he has been told to say it clear, say it cold, it’s over, it ain’t going any further…The future… it is murder.”
Cohen conjures the images of a “woman hanging upside down, her features covered by her fallen gown,” recalling the oldest written myth of a feminine goddess, Inanna, who chooses to descend and face Ereshkigal. Realizing what these women represent symbolically, together, is mostly hidden until we wake to the mudslide of our own broken nights, mirrored rooms, secret lives, and self-torture. Inanna hangs there until we stop pursuing “absolute control,” “crack and careless sex.” She hangs there as we continue asking for the “return of the Berlin Wall, Stalin and St. Paul.” And as she hangs there, we are challenged to acknowledge how, even with our ideal intentions, we are “taking the only tree that’s left to stuff the hole of culture.”
