Shreds of a bizarre world is not a diary you have to swallow newest-first. It’s an archive of scenes, satire, and arguments. Start where you’re interested:
A bottomless bottle of vintage champagne
that I want to eternally inhale and taste.
A carnivorous flower, a colorful bait
right on the fulcrum of a luscious face,
devouring my senses, my mind and my code
till my skeletal self spills out fossilized.
A prison of breath, of words, of lust,
my ecstatic fantasies behind carnal bars.
Rubber-like flesh, like a child I torment:
I bite, I press, I roll, I smack.
Hypnotized bug on an incandescent bulb,
I never get tired even after I'm charred.
I am totally doomed:
like a faint ray of light
I'm pulled by her massive
black hole of delight.
A man and a woman enter a bar.
What made them a pair is no longer there,
yet something remains, or is born anew
out of the ashes of that vanished bond.
They sit at the counter, the barman draws near,
he doesn't know who, only what and how.
He breaks the ice twice, it's ice of two types:
one needs a tool, the other a joke.
In this short treaty, Blaise Pascal - who for the most part of his life worked as a scientist - expounds his views about love and passion. He tries to point out the relation of these feelings with all the other aspects of life.
As in Let us compare mythologies, in this collection Cohen also alternates Garcia Lorca's style inspired poems - assemblies of images, sounds and loosely connected symbols - and other compositions that can be more clearly paraphrased and literally interpreted, with an explicit message. Those of the second type might be slightly more numerous, while the style of the first batch is even more mature and inspiring than in the previous book.
"Come on, come on, lovin' for the money, come on, come on, listen to the money talk"
AC/DC, "Money Talks"
"Perhaps they were right putting love into books, perhaps it could not exist anywhere else"
William Faulkner, "Light in August"
"When you mean love you mean a big lightning bolt to the heart, where you can't eat and you can't work, and you just run off and get married and make babies. The reason you haven't felt it is because it doesn't exist. What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons" Don Draper, from "Mad Men" - watch it here
In this post I'll address the readers in second person. It's a literary device as old as the history of western culture. It might happen that while you're reading it you feel as if I were accusing you. Remember this one thing: if you are happily married, engaged, matched, still in love like students on their first crush...then I'm not talking to you. Read again carefully what I've just written. I'm going to repeat it, just to make sure there are no misunderstandings: in that case I am not speaking with you! While you're going through these lines however, what I write might remind you of someone you know who strongly resembles my interlocutors.
