From This Broken Hill I Sing to You by Marcia Pally

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, “you,” whose advice to turn the other cheek the narrator, “I,” can’t follow. Yet later in the song, Cohen writes,

But I have to deal with envy

When you choose the precious few

Who’ve left their pride on the other side of

Coming back to you.

This “you” 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 “not fully reliable first-person position” in Cohen’s work (2017: 8). Just who is that “I” and, consequently, the “you”? More intriguingly, Siemerling (1994a) finds that the “I”s that “never stay where we expect them to” (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 commitments—to be free for some ecstatic, extra-worldly something-or-other (Siemerling 1994a). This recalls Jiri Měsíc and Stephen Scobie’s idea that Cohen sought a means to leave the body for—well, for some ecstatic something-or-other. But perhaps more importantly, Cohen’s mobile “I”s and “you”s recall Judith Butler’s 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 Butler’s classic example, we are not “male” or “female” but assemblages of practices and self-presentations that either construct/reinforce the “male” and “female” of our cultures or challenge these conventions.

On this view, understanding Cohen’s mobile “I”s and “you”s involves looking at the assemblage of what each does and what identity each presents in any line of Cohen’s work. It entails a readiness for multiple possibilities in which an “I” or “you” 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 relationship—love of God as distinct from love of person—it suggests a fluidity among them.

Cohen’s mobile pronouns may thus be understood not as an “unreliable narrator” or a yearning to be released from the body. They may be Cohen’s 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 else’s 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 “you”—or Thou, in Martin Buber’s words—may well be to God at one moment, to persons/lover at another, or to both at once. And breaches of commitment—to the “face” of the other in Levinas’s terms—may too abandon both.



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