Please Don’t Pass Me By (A Disgrace)
Now I know that you’re sitting there deep in your velvet seats and you’re thinking “Uh, he’s up there saying something that he thinks about, but I’ll never have to sing that song.” But I promise you friends, that you’re going to be singing this song: it may not be tonight, it may not be tomorrow, but one day you’ll be on your knees and I want you to know the words when the time comes. Because you’re going to have to sing it to yourself, or to another, or to your brother. You’re going to have to learn to sing this song.
This song — though it barely qualifies for that label; it is exactly what it’s criticized for being: Cohen, hoarse-throated, screaming at his audience — has haunted me for at least six years. Definitely since that ill-fated and dull baseball practice when I chose to spend the interminable running drills attempting to memorize the lyrics. I thought about it today, as I frequently do, when I passed the series of homeless men lined on the pavement in front of a closed Borders, and ignored them, making sure not to look at their faces. Because I’ve been taught by Levinas that it’s the only place I’ll glimpse God, and from the Rabbis that either Elijah or the Angel of Death will stare back at me.
Leonard Cohen, I’ve read, stopped performing this song because it pained him too much even without having to watch the audience completely miss the point. But reading the Sandusky Grand Jury report, and — more strikingly — watching the Penn State student body react to Paterno’s firing, I wondered whether this isn’t precisely what even those of us who haven’t spent the last two days making fools or villains of ourselves need to hear.
I find Cohen pretty hit and miss, but this is a solid song, and quite appropriate. Thanks for sharing it.
(By the way, a friend put a Cohen poem to music, with legal permission from Cohen. It might interest a Cohen fan.)Report
I’m a heartless bastard. So here goes.
One almost never becomes homeless unless one has the type of problem that spare change ain’t gonna solve.
Okay, sure, you’ve all got your anecdotes about homeless people without such problems. I’ll grant them all as being perfectly true. And still. The way to help isn’t to give spare change. If they are the true exceptions — if they are homeless and without that kind of really serious problem — then they are also the best-positioned by far to avail themselves of the charity offered to the homeless.Report
The point of the song has nothing to do with giving spare change. That’s just another form of passing them by.Report
How much can anyone know about why a songwriter writes his songs? Leonard Cohen seems to have wrestled with depression all his life. Auden said of Yeats: mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
From the same poem:
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
We curse ourselves for our faithlessness, our lack of courage, our unwillingness to stand up for what’s right. It seems to resolve to our inability to see ourselves as what Christ called shining lights in the darkness, a light the darkness can never understand.
I was molested as a child. When I took it to the authority figures at the boarding school, I was not believed. I have come to believe they didn’t want to believe it, that punishing my rapist would bring the entire school into disrepute. The fearful, faithless observers who wouldn’t take this matter to the cops, preferring to send it up the food chain, they knew what would happen if this incident got out and chose to suppress it, hoping it would simply go away and it did, for many years.
It’s easy for me to see why Leonard Cohen stopped singing this song. At first glance it seems sorta preachy and mawkish. It’s anything but. It’s an explicit statement that we shall all say “Please Don’t Pass Me By” at some time. Naked and crying and helpless we enter the world and we usually leave it the same way. We warehouse our old people and little children, the insane and the criminals. To exist is to suffer.Report
Well put, Blaise. That’s pretty much how I took the song, as well. And thanks for sharing your story.Report