From This Broken Hill I Sing to You by Marcia Pally
Author:Marcia Pally
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
These lines seem like an address to God/Jesus, âyou,â whose advice to turn the other cheek the narrator, âI,â canât follow. Yet later in the song, Cohen writes,
But I have to deal with envy
When you choose the precious few
Whoâve left their pride on the other side of
Coming back to you.
This âyouâ may too be God, who chooses his elect. But it also may be a plea to a woman whose fidelity Cohen cannot secure.
Ian Dennis calls this the ânot fully reliable first-person positionâ in Cohenâs work (2017: 8). Just who is that âIâ and, consequently, the âyouâ? More intriguingly, Siemerling (1994a) finds that the âIâs that ânever stay where we expect them toâ (Lee 1977) are a technique in pursuit of losing the self. They are an effort to be unburdened of the self-ness of the subject and its worldly commitmentsâto be free for some ecstatic, extra-worldly something-or-other (Siemerling 1994a). This recalls Jiri MÄsÃc and Stephen Scobieâs idea that Cohen sought a means to leave the body forâwell, for some ecstatic something-or-other. But perhaps more importantly, Cohenâs mobile âIâs and âyouâs recall Judith Butlerâs lesson that identity is never stable but an evolving process emerging from our practices and the meanings given to them in context (Butler 2011, 2006; Steinskog 2010). Identity is thus always in flux and mutable. In Butlerâs classic example, we are not âmaleâ or âfemaleâ but assemblages of practices and self-presentations that either construct/reinforce the âmaleâ and âfemaleâ of our cultures or challenge these conventions.
On this view, understanding Cohenâs mobile âIâs and âyouâs involves looking at the assemblage of what each does and what identity each presents in any line of Cohenâs work. It entails a readiness for multiple possibilities in which an âIâ or âyouâ may represent more than one set of practices and more than one identity as the reader or listener moves through the lines of lines of verse. Rather than pinning down identity or relationshipâlove of God as distinct from love of personâit suggests a fluidity among them.
Cohenâs mobile pronouns may thus be understood not as an âunreliable narratorâ or a yearning to be released from the body. They may be Cohenâs effort to get at the Moebius Strip nature of covenant and its breaches. That is, the pronoun mobility may strive not for loss of self but for a description of all the selves in play in the predicament of longing for relationship and flight from it. Both God and the human subject (I) may at the same time be the object (you) of someone elseâs desire or abandonment. One may desire or be desired by one person and, at the same time, rejected by another. There is no fixed identity in this sad game.
Importantly, as our commitments to God and persons are of a piece, dedication to âyouââor Thou, in Martin Buberâs wordsâmay well be to God at one moment, to persons/lover at another, or to both at once. And breaches of commitmentâto the âfaceâ of the other in Levinasâs termsâmay too abandon both.
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