Marianne Ihlen...28 de julio 2016

“Bien, Marianne, hemos llegado a este tiempo en que somos tan viejos que nuestros cuerpos se caen a pedazos; pienso que te seguiré muy pronto. Que sepas que estoy tan cerca de ti que, si extiendes tu mano, creo que podrás tocar la mía. Ya sabes que siempre te he amado por tu belleza y tu sabiduría pero no necesito extenderme sobre eso ya que tú lo sabes todo. Solo quiero desearte un buen viaje. Adiós, vieja amiga. Todo el amor, te veré por el camino.”

What I’m Doing Here

I do not know if the world has lied

I have lied

I do not know if the world has conspired against love

I have conspired against love

The atmosphere of torture is no comfort

I have tortured

Even without the mushroom cloud

still I would have hated

Listen

I would have done the same things

even if there were no death

I will not be held like a drunkard

under the cold tap of facts

I refuse the universal alibi

Like an empty telephone booth passed at night

and remembered

like mirrors in a movie palace lobby consulted

only on the way out

like a nymphomaniac who binds a thousand

into strange brotherhood

I wait

for each one of you to confess

Waiting for Marianne

I have lost a telephone

with your smell in it

Interviewer: Are you suggesting the disintegration of personality when you quote from Primo Levi at the beginning of Flowers for Hitler?

That quotation [by Primo Levi, used at the beginning of Cohen’s Flowers for Hitler] is, ‘Take care not to let it happen in your own homes.’ He’s saying, what point is there to a political solution if in the homes these tortures and mutilations continue? That’s what Flowers For Hitler is all about. It’s taking the mythology of the concentration camps and bringing it into the living room and saying, ‘This is what we do to each other.’ We outlaw genocide and concentration camps and gas and that, but if a man leaves his wife or they are cruel to each other, then that cruelty is going to find a manifestation if he has a political capacity; and he has. There’s no point in refusing to acknowledge the wrathful deities. That’s like putting pants on the legs of pianos like the Victorians did. The fact is that we all succumb to lustful thoughts, to evil thoughts, to thoughts of torture.

Leonard Cohen