Leonard Cohen - Beautiful Losers

That’s what sitting on your ass does to your face. I’ve come after you, Catherine Tekakwitha. I want to know what goes on under that rosy blanket. Do I have any right? I fell in love with a religious picture of you. You were standing among birch trees, my favorite trees. God knows how far up your moccasins were laced. There was a river behind you, no doubt the Mohawk River. Two birds in the left foreground would be delighted if you tickled their white throats or even if you used them as an example of something or other in a parable. Do I have any right to come after you with my dusty mind full of the junk of maybe five thousand books? I hardly even get out to the country very often. Could you teach me about leaves? Do you know anything about narcotic mushrooms? Lady Marilyn just died a few years ago. May I say that some old scholar four hundred years from now, maybe of my own blood, will come after her in the way I come after you? But right now you must know more about heaven. Does it look like one of these little plastic altars that glow in the dark? I swear I won’t mind if it does. Are the stars tiny, after all? Can an old scholar find love at last and stop having to pull himself off every night so he can get to sleep? I don’t even hate books any more. I’ve forgotten most of what I’ve read and, frankly, it never seemed very important to me or to the world. My friend F. used to say in his hopped-up fashion: We’ve got to learn to stop bravely at the surface. We’ve got to learn to love appearances. F. died in a padded cell, his brain rotted from too much dirty sex. His face turned black, this I saw with my own eyes, and they say there wasn’t much left of his prick. A nurse told me it looked like the inside of a worm. Salut F., old and loud friend! I wonder if your memory will persist. And you, Catherine Tekakwitha, if you must know, I am so human as to suffer from constipation, the rewards of a sedentary life. Is it any wonder I have sent my heart out into the birch trees? Is it any wonder that an old scholar who never made much money wants to climb into your Technicolor postcard?

I am a well-known folklorist, an authority on the A——s, a tribe I have no intention of disgracing by my interest. There are, perhaps, ten full-blooded A—-s left, four of them teen-age girls. I will add that F. took full advantage of my anthropological status to fuck all four of them. Old friend, you paid your dues. The A——s seem to have made their appearance in the fifteenth century, or rather, a sizable remnant of the tribe. Their brief history is characterized by incessant defeat. The very name of the tribe, A——, is the word for corpse in the language of all the neighboring tribes. There is no record that this unfortunate people ever won a single battle, while the songs and legends of its enemies are virtually nothing but a sustained howl of triumph. My interest in this pack of failures betrays my character. Borrowing money from me, F. often said: Thanks, you old A——! Catherine Tekakwitha, do you listen?

Catherine Tekakwitha, I have come to rescue you from the Jesuits. Yes, an old scholar dares to think big. I don’t know what they are saying about you these days because my Latin is almost defunct. ‘Que le succès couronne nos espérances, et nous verrons sur les autels, auprès des Martyrs canadiens, une Vierge iroquoise-près des roses du martyre le his de la virginité.’ A note by one Ed. L., S.J., written in August 1926. But what does it matter? I don’t want to carry my old belligerent life on my journey up the Mohawk River. Pace, Company of Jesus! F. said: A strong man cannot but love the Church. Catherine Tekakwitha, what care we if they cast you in plaster? I am at present studying the plans of a birchbark canoe. Your brethren have forgotten how to build them. And what if there is a plastic reproduction of your little body on the dashboard of every Montréal taxi? It can’t be a bad thing. Love cannot be hoarded. Is there a part of Jesus in every stamped-out crucifix? I think there is. Desire changes the world! What makes the mountainside of maple turn red? Peace, you manufacturers of religious trinkets! You handle sacred material! Catherine Tekakwitha, do you see how I get carried away? How I want the world to be mystical and good? Are the stars tiny, after all? Who will put us to sleep? Should I save my fingernails? Is matter holy? I want the barber to bury my hair. Catherine Tekakwitha, are you at work on me already?

Marie de l’Incarnation, Marguerite Bourgeoys, Marie-Marguerite d’Youville, maybe you could arouse me if I could move out of myself. I want to get as much as I can. F. said that he’d never once heard of a female saint he wouldn’t like to have screwed. What did he mean? F., don’t tell me that at last you are becoming profound. F. once said: At sixteen I stopped fucking faces. I had occasioned the remark by expressing disgust at his latest conquest, a young hunchback he had met while touring an orphanage. F. spoke to me that day as if I were truly one of the underprivileged; or perhaps he was not speaking to me at all when he muttered: Who am I to refuse the universe?

The French gave the Iroquois their name. Naming food is one thing, naming a people is another, not that the people in question seem to care today. If they never cared, so much the worse for me: I’m far too willing to shoulder the alleged humiliations of harmless peoples, as evidenced by my life work with the A——s. Why do I feel so lousy when I wake up every morning? Wondering if I’m going to be able to shit or not. Is my body going to work? Will my bowels churn? Has the old machine turned the food brown? Is it surprising that I’ve tunneled through libraries after news about victims? Fictional victims! All the victims we ourselves do not murder or imprison are fictional victims. I live in a small apartment building. The bottom of the elevator shaft is accessible through the sub-basement. While I sat downtown preparing a paper on lemmings she crawled into the elevator shaft and sat there with her arms around her drawn-up knees (or so the police determined from the mess). I came home every night at twenty to eleven, regular as Kant. She was going to teach me a lesson, my old wife. You and your fictional victims, she used to say. Her life had become gray by imperceptible degrees, for I swear, that very night, probably at the exact moment when she was squeezing into the shaft, I looked up from the lemming research and closed my eyes, remembering her as young and bright, the sun dancing in her hair as she sucked me off in a canoe on Lake Orford. We were the only ones who lived in the sub-basement, we were the only ones who commanded the little elevator into those depths. But she taught no one a lesson, not the kind of lesson she meant. A delivery boy from the Bar-B-Q did the dirty work by misreading the numbers on a warm brown paper bag. Edith! F. spent the night with me. He confessed at 4 a.m. that he’d slept with Edith five or six times in the twenty years he’d known her. Irony! We ordered chicken from the same place and we talked about my poor squashed wife, our fingers greasy, barbecue-sauce drops on the linoleum. Five or six times, a mere friendship. Could I stand on some holy mountain of experience, a long way off, and sweetly nod my Chinese head over their little love? What harm had been done to the stars? You lousy fucker, I said, how many times, five or six? Ah, F. smiled, grief makes us precise! So let it be known that the Iroquois, the brethren of Catherine Tekakwitha, were given the name Iroquois by the French. They called themselves Hodenosaunee, which means People of the Long House. They had developed a new dimension to conversation. They ended every speech with the word hiro, which means: like I said. Thus each man took full responsibility for intruding into the inarticulate murmur of the spheres. To hiro they added the word koué, a cry of joy or distress, according to whether it was sung or howled. Thus they essayed to pierce the mysterious curtain which hangs between all talking men: at the end of every utterance a man stepped back, so to speak, and attempted to interpret his words to the listener, attempted to subvert the beguiling intellect with the noise of true emotion. Catherine Tekakwitha, speak to me in Hiro-Koué. I have no right to mind what the Jesuits say to the slaves, but on that cool Laurentian night which I work toward, when we are wrapped in our birch-bark rocket, joined in the ancient enduring way, flesh to spirit, and I ask you my old question: are the stars tiny, after all, O Catherine Tekakwitha, answer me in Hiro-Koué. That other night F. and I quarreled for hours. We didn’t know when morning arrived because the only window of that miserable apartment faced into the ventilation shaft.

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