The Flame - Leonard Cohen

THE FLAME - LEONARD COHEN

Another day, another book of Leonard Cohen poems. See? It's not all punk rock, class war, tending goats and drinking cider down here on the East Devon coast. We too have our romantic side even if tinged with the kind of melancholia that comes with the last vestiges of light from a setting sun over the cow shed.

The Flame is a collection of the last poems and lyrics Cohen wrote before his passing in 2016 and what permeates through all of them is Cohen's awareness of him growing old and the encroachment of death. They're not, as you might imagine, a right old barrel of laughs but the dignity Cohen has carried with him throughout his life is still there. And who better than a poet to write about death at their door and to look back upon a life of music, contemplation and love? What better poet in our modern age than Leonard Cohen?

'I pray for courage,' Cohen writes 'now I'm old. To greet the sickness, and the cold. I pray for courage, in the night. To bear the burden, make it light. I pray for courage, in the time. When suffering comes and starts to climb. I pray for courage, at the end. To see death coming, as a friend.'

As it has always been throughout his whole canon, the sadness in Cohen's words is all, as is the beauty. Not that you should feel obliged to kneel at his altar or to bow in any way before him because that's the last thing he would ever have wanted. It's only right, however, to acknowledge his near-genius and the near-pinnacle he reached in crafting poetry to music.

As Patti Smith once said: 'Any musician who described himself or herself as a poet who didn't answer to the name Leonard Cohen virtually guaranteed disappointment. Too many self-styled rock poets nearly killed the phenomenon.'

Leonard Cohen wasn't a genius as Bob Dylan once said but he was near to it and a line such as 'Like a bird on a wire,  like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free' says more than most political manifestoes ever have, that's for sure. No, Leonard Cohen was more like a saint. A wounded, troubled and fallen saint but a saint all the same, and his recordings and his books including this one - The Flame - are testament to that.

John Serpico

Chaise Longue - Baxter Dury

 CHAISE LONGUE - BAXTER DURY

'They fuck you up, your mum and dad,' as Philip Larkin once observed 'They may not mean to, but they do. But they were fucked up in their turn...' All parents make mistakes but then one man's mistake is another man's momentary lapse of judgement. Where does one end and the other begin? Take Ian Dury, for example. Was leaving his son, Baxter, in the hands of someone called The Sulphate Strangler whilst he went off on tour a good idea? Well, as with anything there's always nuance.

According to Baxter Dury in his childhood memoir, Chaise Longue, The Sulphate Strangler was a six-foot-seven malodorous , drug-addled, drug-dealing, professionally violent, giant of a man. He was also Ian Dury's bodyguard and right-hand man, and one of his most committed and loyal people - depending on his state of mind. Compared to Ian Dury, however, The Strangler was arguably the more sensible one.

Anyone who knew him or has read anything about him would know that Ian Dury was a character. A very 'difficult' character, to put it mildly. According to Baxter, his dad was like a pot-soaked Fagin figure who had perfected the art of control over everyone. Volatile, unpredictable, mercurial by nature. To be around him was complicated and to be his son even more so.

Baxter was the boy famously featured stood alongside his dad on the cover of New Boots And Panties, the debut album by Ian Dury and The Blockheads. It's a brilliant photo that speaks volumes in regard to both father and son as in where they're from and what they're at though nothing, of course, about what was to come following the album's success.

Chaise Longue is the story of Baxter Dury's childhood prior to the release of New Boots And Panties and after, when fame and bursts of cash came not only laden with new problems but also an entry into other worlds that to a child is either a treat or a curse.

Was Ian Dury the best father ever, or the worst? It's an obvious question to ask but in this case it's not actually a valid one because he wasn't really a father at all, or not in the conventional meaning of the word. Then again, is the conventional father any better than the unconventional one? Who's to judge?

Baxter Dury, however, has recorded nine studio albums and written this funny, tender, and at times very insightful book that has garnered a lot of praise. In terms of creativity and the passion for art and self-expression, Ian Dury evidently did something right for his son.

John Serpico

Hallucinations - Oliver Sacks

 HALLUCINATIONS - OLIVER SACKS

Everyone has an interest in hallucinations, surely? And if not, then they probably should even if only in regard to where the boundary lies between hallucination, misperception and illusion. How can you ever possibly hope to know what the truth is about the world and anything in it if you don't know the difference between delusion and illusion? 

To bring things up to speed a bit take Trump, his Administration and all those who support him and his policies, for example. Do they all really believe they are facing-off an armed insurrection from paid agitators? Do they really believe that Antifa is being directed by some communist-led central organisation? Are they deluded? Delusional? Are they gaslit or gaslighting? Are they hallucinating? Seeing something that isn't actually there?

Oliver Sacks was a professor of neurology and in popular culture is probably best known for being the author of the book 'Awakenings' which inspired the Oscar-nominated film of the same name. His most famous book is probably 'The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat' but there is also this one: Hallucinations.

Sacks once said something along the lines of why he writes is to help gather his thoughts in a bid to understand and make sense of them, and personally, I sympathise with this. I've been writing all my life and it's certainly not been in an attempt at entertaining anyone nor even really as a way to communicate with others. All the words I've ever written is essentially me communicating with myself. To collate, to coalesce thoughts into one connected whole. This is what Sacks is doing in Hallucinations and it must be said, he makes a very good job of it.

Every potential cause of a person hallucinating is considered and though Sacks sees everything through the lens of neurology and the workings of the brain, he doesn't attempt to neatly sum it all up in any way. Instead, Hallucinations is more like a 'natural history or anthology of hallucinations', as he puts it. So, everything is covered: auditory hallucinations, hallucinating smells, hallucinations through sensory deprivation, hallucinations through Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, through migraines, epilepsy, narcolepsy, drug intoxication, and so on and so forth.

Of all the chapters in the book, the one entitled 'Altered States' is of particular interest because Sacks personalises it. He tells us that whilst most people start their experimentation with drugs as teenagers, it wasn't until he was thirty and a neurology resident at University in California that he started his. From cannabis to amphetamines, chloral hydrate, morphine, morning glory seeds to - of course - LSD, Sacks was a veritable ethnobotanist's chemistry lab.

Also of interest is the chapter entitled 'Delirious' in which Sacks writes: 'Some people feel that the hallucinations and strange thoughts of delirium may provide, or seem to provide, moments of rich emotional truth, as with some dreams or psychedelic experiences. There may also be revelations or breakthroughs of deep intellectual truth.'

Which, for me,  begs the question: are we living in an Age of Delirium?

Trump? Epstein? The rise of the Far Right? Illusion? Delusion? Misperception? Hallucination? If so, might this not be a double-edged sword? Are there not lessons to be had here?

As Antonio Gramsci put it: 'The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass'. Or to put it another way: 'The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.'

Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks is if nothing else, thought-provoking.

                                                                                                                                             John Serpico