The year end holidays are supposed to be a time of joy and giving. No matter what happens through the year, no matter who you are, Christmas/New Year’s/Hanukkah etc.. always come around and we pause to acknowledge them. John Lennon’s “So This Is Christmas” is not the typical holiday song. Rather it is an observation of what millions of children around the world deal with to this day. Not much has changed since Lennon recorded this song. Yes, perhaps the children are in other third world countries today, but they are still hungry and lacking the basic necessities of life. I think John Lennon would have been dismayed to know that fact. Yet there are those who continue to work for bettering the lives of these children and to them I say thank you. Let us hope that the New Year will truly be one where change will be possible and children will have a chance to live better than they do now. For those suffering this holiday season, you are in my thoughts. For those who have something to share, there are many many ways of helping some of these children make it to another New Year, give to The Red Cross, The Children’s Charities of America, and/or any charity of your choosing.
I named my blog Who Knew? almost exactly one year ago. I had no idea how aptly I had titled the blog and as a year passes it reinforces within me a certain innate ability to honestly say “I have no idea what the future holds.”
I am someone who lives in the day, which has it’s distinct positives i.e. I am very spontaneous and most of my travels have occurred very spur of the moment, and it’s devastating drawbacks. It is who I am however and I make no apologies or excuses, it is how I live.
Things tend to come full circle in life so this post features a song called Everybody Knows by a legendary performer Leonard Cohen.
Cohen rose to the opportunity this audience represented by releasing two consecutive albums, I’m Your Man (1988) and The Future (1992), that not only rank among the finest of his career, but that perfectly capture the texture of particularly complicated times. Cohen had long documented the high rate of casualties in the love wars, so the profound anxieties generated by the AIDS crisis were no news to him. Songs like “Ain’t No Cure for Love,” the wryly titled “I’m Your Man” and, most explicitly, “Everybody Knows” (“Everybody knows that the Plague is coming/Everybody knows that it’s moving fast/Everybody knows that the naked man and woman – just a shining artifact of the past”) depict Cohen surveying the contemporary erotic battleground and reporting on it with characteristic perspective, insight and wisdom.
I first heard the song in a movie called “Pump Up The Volume” in 1990 and it was performed by the band Concrete Blonde. Later I learned it’s origins and became a Leonard Cohen fan. It came at a time when everything was changing, I was going off to college and my senior year in high school was marked by a clinical depression which almost prevented me from going off to University. Thankfully I was able to get through it and I remember listening to this song on repeat in my car almost compulsively. I think it quite fits the brooding and scared teen I had become for the song is not very hopeful, and in many ways very true.
So here I am 17 years and half a lifetime later posting my first post-hiatus entry into this blog. Who Knew? the poem I wrote asks many questions. Everybody Knows offers many answers, some all too true and others can be debated. I know though that it evokes for me a great deal of truth, some fear and it does so in a very poetic fashion. Leonard Cohen wrote what he knew. I say who knows?
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that you’ve been faithful
Ah give or take a night or two
Everybody knows you’ve been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet