The Partisan

I was wide awake at 4 o'clock this morning and humming the tune to 'The Partisan' by Leonard Cohen. 

I have no idea why I would be doing that. 

And to be perfectly honest, I would have much preferred to have been sleeping. 

So, I thought to myself this is an odd thing to be occupying my insomniac mind with, I should put a clip of the Cohen song on this blog. Because oddness and this blog are simpatico! 

So, I searched on You Tube and found this 

But, more interestingly, for me anyway, is that I discovered 'The Partisan' by Laughing Lenny Cohen is actually an adaption of a World War 2 French resistance song. (Actually makes sense if you think about it, but I never knew that). 

Wikipedia has a page on the original song - La Complainte du Partisan

So, anyway, in trying to find the lyrics to Cohen's adaptation I stumbled across this version of 'La Complainte du Partisan' by Anna Marly. (Thanks to this website)

I also found this website with the following comment.

 "Leonard said that the song was often sung during the youth camps he participated in." (It is worth checking the webpage out. It has some neat history on the song worth learning about).

A comparison between Cohen's adapted lyrics and how they are rendered in an ordinarily straight translation of the original song can be looked at here.  

I must admit I liked how Cohen tweaked it. 

Here are Cohen's words...

"The Partisan"

When they poured across the border
I was cautioned to surrender,
this I could not do;
I took my gun and vanished.
I have changed my name so often,
I've lost my wife and children
but I have many friends,
and some of them are with me.

An old woman gave us shelter,
kept us hidden in the garret,
then the soldiers came;
she died without a whisper.

There were three of us this morning
I'm the only one this evening
but I must go on;
the frontiers are my prison.

Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing,
through the graves the wind is blowing,
freedom soon will come;
then we'll come from the shadows.

Les Allemands étaient chez moi (The Germans were at my home)
ils m'ont dit "Résigne-toi" (They said, "Surrender,")
mais je n'ai pas pu (this I could not do)
j'ai repris mon arme (I took my weapon again)

J'ai changé cent fois de nom (I have changed names a hundred times)
j'ai perdu femme et enfants (I have lost wife and children)
mais j'ai tant d'amis (But I have so many friends)
j'ai la France entière (I have all of France)

Un vieil homme dans un grenier (An old man, in an attic)
pour la nuit nous a cachés (Hid us for the night)
les Allemands l'ont pris (The Germans captured him)
il est mort sans surprise (He died without surprise)

Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing,
through the graves the wind is blowing,
freedom soon will come;
then we'll come from the shadows.

Reflection #1

I don't know why I went to East Timor. It was more than a whim or a reckless pursuit, but at the same time it was not particularly well thought out. I don't really know what I hoped to achieve by going there or what I was seriously hoping to get out of it. 

I think in a way I was just bullshitting myself and probably just bullshitting others. It was all bullshit. And when you realise that everything is bullshit and once you accept that everything is bullshit - and I mean honestly, uncompromisingly, accept it to your very core - then something fundamental about yourself starts to change. 


I had bit of a meltdown. Nothing serious, but it was intense and heavy in that way that truly experiencing your own fragility and vulnerability becomes such an overwhelming weight until you can't bear it anymore and then you just let go. It leaves you feeling gutted, hollowed out, trampled, but that passes. And then there is a lightness that is giddy and sad but also kind of ok.   

a crumbling ruin stands next to a building

After I returned home and was going through my travel photographs I decided to title the one above 'A crumbling ruin stands next to a building'. I thought that was witty and held a wry nod to some of the things I was going through personally at the time.

The two pictures featured in this post were taken at Manatuto in 2002. 

East Timor had been trashed by the departing Indonesian armed forces. It was more than just a petulant display of vandalism, but a calculated violence designed to deprive the East Timorese of infrastructure and to have them cower.

The East Timorese will know much, much, more than I ever will about what it means to suffer. 

Some experiences take a life time to process. You'll return to certain things and find yourself deriving some new meaning from a particular moment from long ago. Past and present interwoven and all grappling to give some meaning to this fleeting life.

I have had experiences such as a car accident, other travels abroad, and aspects of my family history, that I am often discovering contain new meanings for me. It is like I have to reach a particular point in life - a particular stage - for me to be allowed clarity around some things. Sometimes it is like a jigsaw puzzle and a piece will just effortlessly, naturally, fit.  

The Weight

One of my favourite songs is 'The Weight' by The Band. It has to be played really loud.

The version above features The Staple Singers and is taken from Martin Scorsese's documentary 'The Last Waltz'. This version has a nice gospel quality to it. I find it rousing and uplifting. 

The lyrics to the song are fascinating. I tend not to overthink music and I don't really go looking for any deep meaning in the words to songs. The best music, such as this song or in the work of people like Leonard Cohen, tends to have a deceptively crafted simplicity to it. By that, I mean it will be really clever but still accessible. In a way you don't actually notice the cleverness, if that makes sense. 

What I find fascinating about this song is how it tells a little story - like a vignette - that I like to imagine playing out like some sort of short-movie. 

I have read that Robbie Robertson, the songwriter behind 'The Weight',* was influenced in his approach to music by the Luis Bunuel, a Spanish surrealist filmmaker. 

While I tend not to overthink music, there are many in inter-net-land who take the meaning of songs quite fanatically. A look at the weightiness of 'The Weight' can be read here and here.  (I did quite like this paragraph from the article on the second link).

Inspired by Buñuel but populated by Arkansans, the song is most simply about the burdens we all carry. The "weight" is the load that we shoulder when we take on responsibility or when we try to do good. But it's also the heaviness that presses down on us when we fall into "sin" or wrestle with "temptation." It's a song about a universally human dilemma. But, just as the writers drew from their own pasts in fleshing out their cast, it's conceivable that they also drew from their own experiences in conceptualizing the "weight." Perhaps the song refers to the very real loads shouldered by Band members, the very real burdens that resulted from the good and the bad in their own lives.  

I tend to chew up a lot of my precious monthly internet data allowance by watching music clips on You Tube. I especially like to check out different versions of the same song. 

One of my favourite homages to 'The Weight' is by the Rockwiz Orchestra featuring Vika and Linda Bull. 

  

Fortunately, for me, this combines one of my favourite songs with one of my favourite television shows. (I love those serendipitous moments of such blessed synchronicity!) 

If you have a bit of spare time and some internet data up your sleeve then I can thoroughly recommend checking out Rockwiz on You Tube.  

*There is some contention with Robbie Robertson being listed as the sole songwriter. Other band members have said they contributed ideas and words to 'The Weight' and other songs but never received credit. Among fans of Levon Helm, The Band's seminal drummer and vocalist, Robbie Robertson remains somewhat of a divisive figure. 

Once more unto the feast, dear friends, once more

I have previously referred to the Bendigo Writers Festival in terms of being some sort of feast, but is that warranted?

What do I mean by feast?

this is not a picture of me in training for the bendigo writers festival

I must admit that as a younger man I held appetites of King Henry VIII proportion. Unfortunately, not wanting to antagonise the Gods of Gout has slowed me down these days. It sucks getting old!

But surely there can be more to feasting than a corpulent, flatulent, and ultimately vomitous overindulgence.

Surely it is possible to feast in a genteel and refined manner. To savour and find nuance in subtle flavours rather than just overdose on every fucking thing that you can in some sort of orgiastic frenzy stuff into your fucking body.

In 'An Alphabet for Gourmets', MFK Fisher observes

It is a curious fact that no man likes to call himself a glutton, and yet each of us has in him a trace of gluttony, potential or actual. I cannot believe that there exists a single coherent human being who will not confess, at least to himself, that once or twice he has stuffed himself to the bursting point, on anything from quail Financiere to flapjacks, for no other reason than the beastlike satisfaction of his belly. In fact I pity anyone who has not permitted himself this sensual experience, if only to determine what his own private limitations are, and where, for himself alone, gourmandism ends and gluttony begins. 

Yes. That's it, I shall think of myself as a gourmet rather than just a bogan hedonist. I shall be discerning, subtle, and yet still retain some sort of enthusiasm for living.

I have been in training for this new attitude of moderation for some time now. I have given up meat. Although, my relinquishing of dead animals as part of my diet had more to do with outrage at the industrial practices of production that the poor beasts were subjected to than anything else.

My sense of outrage reached its zenith when I heard that there was such a thing as a chocolate sundae topped with bacon bits. That is just the most perverse trivialisation of a sentient creature I have ever heard of. That is just sick and twisted and capitalism has gone utterly fucked up when that sort of bat-shit crazy stuff starts happening.

So I gave up the pig. I must admit I felt much better for it, and not wanting to be thought of as an elitist speciest I gave up all meat over the period of 18-months.

I don't want to sound condescending to people who still eat meat, but I am a superior moral being to you!

And I am becoming a gourmet. A man of such pretentious outlooks I often find myself to be insufferable.

For example I am now going to shamelessly name drop Elizabeth David.

Elizabeth fucking who I hear the less civilised among us wail in unimaginative unison.

elizabeth david 

Elizabeth David was a food writer extraordinaire. (There's a neat bio-pic on her worth checking out if you can track it down).

And she wrote 

And that is the sort of feast that I imagine myself having at this Bendigo Writers Festival. A smug celebration of simplicity (aka poverty) that may or may not (it bloody well won't) have the occasional infusion of truffle. 

People I find interesting #1 - Lee Miller

lee miller by man ray

Lee Miller, 1907-1977, was a model, a muse, a photographer, a writer, and a one-of-a-kind original.

She was friends with influential 20th century artists such as Man Ray and Pablo Picasso.

She was one of the first journalists to enter Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp, after it was liberated by US forces in April 1945. 

Her war photography is confronting - obviously - but worth experiencing, as a reminder of what all citizens of the world are obligated to ensure never happens again.  

Like many of her generation, the horrors of World War 2 would haunt the rest of her life. 

I have a framed print of one of her photographs - 'Picnic' - that I occasionally look at and day dream of being a bohemian.

Picnic - Lee Miller - Mougins, Cote d'Azur, France 1937

'Picnic' is a pre-war picture taken in 1937. The way my daydreams experience the photograph are to feel it celebrating a relaxed, carefree freedom and gentle decadence, a certain type of sophisticated maturity, a way of accepting life and its unconventional creative possibilities.  

My Life in Scribbles

this is not a picture of me working diligently to craft this blog entry

I am more of a reader than a writer. When I was younger I enjoyed mystery stories. I liked the Alfred Hitchcock 'The Three Investigators' series. The 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books were also good fun.

i read this book 

 I liked who-dunnit sort of stuff. The intrigue and scheming and double crossing. Especially the double crossing. I probably should have pursued a career in espionage...

it was the 1970s and with an elvis-inspired-helmet-head haircut
i took to puzzle solving without much success or any real aptitude

I liked music more than anything else. It was through music that I sought out writers. Van Morrison sang about Jack Kerouac and James Joyce and I felt somehow obligated to check them out.

I take a lot of comfort from song lyrics. At the moment Bob Dylan is resonating for me.

When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose 

You're invisible now, you've got no secrets to conceal 

When I was younger I dabbled with inventing stuff. I had a wacky sense of the world and enjoyed the whimsical. But I can also be organised . I am bit of a list maker. At different times throughout my life I have kept diaries and journals. I have found keeping a journal to be a useful way to give structure and meaning to my thoughts. In writing things down they become a tangible something to work with and reflect on, disagree with, debate, challenge, and craft into some sort of action to take. Journals can provide an opportunity to develop insights. 

I have no burning ambition to be a professional writer or to cultivate a readership. 

What I want to do with my writing is to work on a few personal projects. I have some ideas regarding my family history that I would like to develop for my own sense of accomplishment. And to perhaps leave something of my handiwork behind that somebody at some future point in time might find useful. 

Things that inspire me

This is Ann Lee Patterson. Or Anne Lee Peterson. Or Ann Lee Paterson... Or... there are so many variations of her name on the internet that it becomes bit of a mystery to determine exactly what her name was. 

Doing my best Phillip Marlowe I have been able to pin her name down to Anne Lee Patterson. 

She was Miss United States in 1931.

She was a performer with the fabulous Ziegfeld Follies. 

I am smitten with her exquisiteness. 

I have recently started to get into 'old' photographs. The above picture is "An allotment holder at work on his plot of ground by the Albert Hall Memorial in Kensington Gardens May 1942". 

The gentlemen is tending to his 'Dig for Victory' garden. 

I have a growing collection of these sort of photographs on Pinterest. My Pinterest is a fun way to explore moods and evocations. It is a way for me to take some sort of visual stimulation and incorporate it at some later point into some form of creative endeavor. Whatever that may be. 

I enjoy gardening. It has an elemental quality to it. It allows me to feel connected to life, the sacred and profane, the practical and spiritual. Having your hands covered in shit from a solid afternoon's toil in the garden can provide surprisingly pleasant moments of transcendence.

Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grapelli doing 'Minor Swing'.

This is so fucking cool. 

I am a guitar player. Nothing professional, just muck about in my spare time. It's a fun past-time. You can become quite absorbed into it. It becomes like a meditation. You can be focused yet free, disciplined and at the same time spontaneous. You just have to find a groove and go for it.