Songs and Dreams

I’m reading a book, “The Holy or the Broken” by Alan Light, about the Leonard Cohen song “Hallelujah” and I have discovered something about myself. My dreams, particularly the recurring ones that seem to want to tell me something about my inner life, are like songs that tug at us mysteriously, seemingly representing meanings—not ideas, for those are cerebral, these are gut feelings—that go deep inside us, perhaps even culturally.

The book describes how that particular song has become mythic, having been used in venues as separate as weddings, funerals, even in the MVI program observing the 9/11 disaster. It’s played every Saturday by the Israeli armed forces radio network. And it’s been sung by countless artists over the years. It’s been described as spiritual, even though some of the lyrics are decidedly sexual and romantic. The word hallelujah itself, repeated as the entire chorus, is both celebratory and despairing.

We like to think that our dreams mean something, at least to us. And yet often their meaning eludes us. We dream situations that we can seldom identify precisely, mostly that they affect us on some gut level. I’ve awakened from dreams feeling euphoric or despairing without knowing why. The details of my dreams usually fade from my mind in the minutes I’m trying to remember them, while the feelings linger. I have several recurring dreams; that is, the resulting feelings are the same or similar while the details vary. Rarely do I get more than a glimpse of understanding.

The poetry of songs often seems like that. We get feelings from some songs that we can’t explain adequately. “Hallelujah” is one of those. In the book, Alan Light quotes a number of people who attempt to explain the power of the lyrics, from religious figures to musicians. One, ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro, instead referred to the waltz rhythm and the “ascending notes that lift us”—more non-verbal, gut responses. From its inauspicious beginnings (the album was rejected by CBS Records), it grew in popularity until in 2012 Leonard Cohen was honored for “Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence” by Poets/Playwrights, Essayists/Editors, Novelists (PEN) judges.

The singer-songwriter Paul Simon compared his “Bridge over Troubled Waters” to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” in its mysterious popularity. Yet the two songs are quite different in their relative meanings. “Bridge” is a comfort song, a reassurance that the one being sung to is held, somehow, in embrace by the singer. The lyrics, while poetic, are clear. The Carole King song, “You’ve Got a Friend,” and Bill Withers’s “Lean on Me” are much the same kind of songs.

The lyrics of “Hallelujah” refer to the irony of sexual desire and loss, yet they suggest some inner strength that can enable us to endure. One can read them in different ways, different contexts, as they refer to a “broken hallelujah” that feels like life. The listener is comforted, perhaps, by the deep knowledge that life endures, even without the external comfort offered by “Lean on Me.” Cohen himself said, “The world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled, but there are moments when we can transcend the dualistic system and reconcile and embrace the whole mess.” Hallelujah.

As I think about my recurring dreams—about feeling lost and confused in the midst of semi-familiar surroundings, of inadequacy, even “if they really knew me” kinds of doubts—I’m aware of those feelings mostly suppressed in my waking life. I’m probably not alone in these feelings. That I dream them tells me that my doubts are, for me, universal in the sense that they are a deep part of my psyche. They are not some misunderstanding I have of myself. They are basic to me. And yet they permeate everything I do.

And they are as mysterious as the feelings I have when I hear “Hallelujah,” or Leonard Cohen’s equally mythic “Suzanne.” A way to “embrace the whole mess.”

Joyce Kilmer Was a Man

There are two kinds of people: male and female.

Yesterday we watched a documentary film on CNN, "Lady Valor," about a retired Navy Seal who changed his gender to female. It showed how complicated such a decision becomes socially; those among his/her family and friends who could accommodate to the change in his identity accepted it with varying comfort (his father and his older brother recovered from initial shock to an acceptance; his youngest sister seemed unbothered; his mother and two other sisters declined to appear in the film). Strangers often seemed mystified. Because he took upon himself a task to publicize his decision, author a book about it and appear in various gatherings and media events, people had sometimes strong reactions to him, positive or negative.

To me, Kristen Beck came across in the film as a man in women's clothing. His behavior was male-typically forthright and deliberate. (Okay, you don’t have to say it.) His voice was deep: a man's voice. With makeup, under the right conditions (much of the interview with him in the studio showed an attractive middle‐aged woman in a classy dress), she became unambiguously female. Shown romping around in a government free‐fire reserve with military firearms and high-heeled boots, she became something else.

All of which left me curious. What was this peculiar person? Intellectually, I have no problem with anyone choosing how to dress or behave, within the limits of civility. I'm okay with ambiguity regarding the norms of sexuality. My own inclinations are clearly heterosexual. The fact that I recently discovered that Joyce Kilmer, who wrote "I think that I shall never see / a poem lovely as a tree" was a man left me "recalculating" my GPS of what the world looks like, or that Evelyn Waugh (whom I knew only through literary references) was not female, never shook me to any extent. I've been mostly comfortable with how the human race is divided. If Christopher/Kristen Beck were my own brother/sister, I might feel differently.

A lot of the world's polarities are little more than conveniences in categorization‐‐we all look for such regularities to keep our balance in life. It seems unfortunate, at best, that many people get riled by "them vs. us" issues. I suppose that I'm simply lucky to live in a pretty liberal and predictable environment.

I know people whose sexual preference runs to their own kind, and yet their identity appears to coincide with their physiology. It might be personally disconcerting to know that cute Ellen Page is not “available” to me in the sense that other attractive females might be. (Set aside for the sake of this discussion the enormous logistics implied in that statement.) Someone like Kristen Beck, who claims to be, in essence, a woman in a man's body, leaves up in the air the question of sexual preference. That was my main question after watching the film: where does she fit in my typography? My reading in Wikipedia that Kristen Beck “never really felt gay” left me scratching my head.

Someone who has had a sex‐change operation and clearly is attracted to the newly‐opposite sex is understandable to me. I've discovered that my biggest problem seems to be with those whose preferences are indeterminate. They leave me to question my own vulnerability. The sexual drive seems so ubiquitous among people; I'm at a loss how to think about those who seem to have no such drive, as though there must be something pathological going on, perhaps in me. Bisexuality is not the problem for me; asexuality is. Even at my age, well beyond a state of sexual competence, I'm invested in the bifurcation of people into "objects of desire" and "erotically uninteresting." The attention that has accrued to LGBT recently gives me much to ponder, particularly when I’m confronted with particular examples.

Many years ago, I experienced a similar nudge to my world view when I discovered that a young folk singer who had agreed to my making a documentary film about her, turned out to be lesbian. Up to that time I had never personally known anyone who was gay. The following weeks were, indeed, eye opening for me.

It’s a big and complicated world out there. My “bifurcation” of human beings is getting foggier and foggier. There are not just two kinds of people.