Famous Blue Raincoat

[Placid Dingo]

There's uncertainty with things now, because of time and space and opportunity and possibility. I'm not happy about it but I'm not sad. I'm not indifferent either, but I'm not fighting for the impossible. And you love one person and then you love another and it's always different but it's always kind of the same. And whatever you fear you find there are others out there, as willing and deserving of your love, and there always will be.

I've been listening to Leonard Cohen's Famous Blue Raincoat.

The next time I saw you, you looked so much older. Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder.

Cohen writes these words to the 'other man', but he's describing his own raincoat. He's not just hinting that he is the other man in a Shaymalanic twist either; he's describing a deeper, more pervasive almost secret infidelity, the infidelity of being left, rejected, unwanted. The sense of being discarded for somebody else, for a shadow without a face, without a past or a job, with no attributes to focus your loathing on, except that they 'might be better.' You can destroy a real man in your mind a hundred times, and tell yourself you're better looking, bigger, smarter, more creative, more interesting, but it doesn't matter what he is, because everything that comprises his character only features as a mask on your true enemy, the one she wants; someone else. Someone else who might be better.

And you're with someone else, and they might be better and things might go well and they might not. And somewhere you're 'somebody else' to somebody else, a face to their phantom.

We disappoint, we disappear, we die but we don't.

We're imperfect. We get jealous, we get nasty, we ride our ego. We do damage and we get damaged. We pick up shrapnel, and it stays in us, and our skin grows over and soon we can't tell where our past ends and our self begins.

Cohen asks the other man 'did you ever go clear?' The Scientology interpretation of this seems not to be his own but in a sense I prefer it. To go clear means to rid yourself of the painful emotions and traumas that lie below the surface. To spit out the shrapnel. Did you ever go clear? Of course not. The question is rhetorical. You left to try to take away the damage you've done, to take away the damage done to you, but it's like a rock, like a bone, a pound of damaged flesh, and you can't take the blood too. Every lover is a thief and Don Luis Perenna is still Lupin.

The famous blue raincoat was stolen from Cohen while travelling. Our narrator seems to sense loss, of Jane in the song, but possibly also of the part of himself he gave to her. Of lost potential, and maybe of his own delusion; the other man, the thin gypsy thief has removed the hurt from her eyes, something he never tried to do, something he thought could not be done.

We disappoint, we disappear, we die but we don't.

We stand in each other's shadows and we jump around and wave our hands incoherently. And we knock each other over and we get up and we fall down and sometimes it works and sometimes is doesn't but we're full of love and full of shrapnel and we wander around shooting all of it into each other, and it stays and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I missed this when you posted it, but I kind of love it.

[Placid Dingo]

Thanks