"from chaos to art"

Desiring to live the creative life is one thing. Actually living as an artist is quite another. Leonard Cohen's, Book of Longing, contains a lyric that maps the psychic terrain that many artists have to navigate:

I followed the course
From chaos to art
Desire the horse
Depression the cart

My page too white
My ink too thin
The day wouldn't write
What the night penciled in

Here are the trademarks of Cohen's oeuvre: desire, depression, and absence. But there is an ambiguous optimism in the second stanza. Is it possible that the day wouldn't write what the night penciled in because of the illuminating perspective that daylight provides? It's easy to go the other way, that the scrutiny of daylight destroys the creativity of the evening, but the rest of his book bears out the previous, positive interpretation. - edited from a book review by Gerry Donaghy




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