Dance Me to the End of Love — Leonard Cohen
#365Songs: December 10th
“I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.” — Fernando Pessao
The more I learn about my family’s history the less I seem to know. The endless secrets, hidden migrations, narrow escapes, assimilations and sideways glances. The unprocessed traumas, so so so many traumas. I learn something new each time I reopen my 23andMe results, how a new curiousity reveals a subtle contradiction.
Since learning, almost 15 years ago, that almost everything I thought I knew was untrue, after so many dead-end conversations with my father, and beyond my own meager investigative work, I’ve felt so much anger. Towards my dead mother, my vague father, the extended family that crafted a false history.
I don’t feel that way now. That’s not to say I’m beyond feeling frustrated, or that I don’t wish that I could sit my mother down once more and drill deeper into her thin facade of half answers, demanding more context and color. What I think about now is less the words she spoke and more the way she rolled her fingers together in a knot, the way she’d sigh, or play with her hair. Her body said so much more than she ever did, a lifetime of anxiety over the things she couldn’t control, the truths she couldn’t process. Same with my father, whose childhood traumas are so deep and dark it keeps me up some nights.
I know now that they, too, inherited their pain, never knew what they didn’t know and instead did whatever they could do to survive. Sometimes all we can do is simply just survive.
Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic ’til I’m gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic ’til I’m gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
That’s the thing about generational trauma. It lingers, even when we brush it aside. The ghost within, haunting us, whispering of pains beyond our time. Our histories reside inside our defenses, alongside our attachments, in how we deny, accept, and avoid our hardest moments.
What I know now that I didn’t know then is that at least one half of my family fled Eastern Europe when others weren’t so lucky. How they swapped names, assimilated in a world where such atrocities were unthinkable — at least at the time. What I know now is that the other half of my family is more complex, perhaps an odd mix of Jews, Arabs, and maybe even Nazi sympathizers—or worse.
Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic ’til I’m gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
Oh, let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon
Show me slowly what I only know the limits of
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about the Holocaust lately — between Israel’s relentless tactics in Gaza to Trump’s Fascist rhetoric, suddenly “never again” feels more like “oh please not again.”
And then today, out of the blue, I thought about Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me to the End of Love, which is a Holocaust song, after all. In an interview shortly after its mid-90’s release, he said, ‘It’s curious how songs begin because the origin of the song, every song, has a kind of grain or seed that somebody hands you or the world hands you and that’s why the process is so mysterious about writing a song. But that came from just hearing or reading or knowing that in the death camps, beside the crematoria, in certain of the death camps, a string quartet was pressed into performance while this horror was going on, those were the people whose fate was this horror also. And they would be playing classical music while their fellow prisoners were being killed and burnt. So, that music, “Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin,” meaning the beauty thereof being the consummation of life, the end of this existence and of the passionate element in that consummation. But, it is the same language that we use for surrender to the beloved, so that the song — it’s not important that anybody knows the genesis of it, because if the language comes from that passionate resource, it will be able to embrace all passionate activity.”
I feel the same about writing anything at all, whether it’s a music post, a script, or a multi-generational novel. How I wander in the dark sifting through half-baked ideas in search of a story. The world does hand us mysteries to solve, and as the future closes in on all of us all I can think to do is grab a flashlight and poke around — inside myself, into the past, connecting what’s happened with what’s yet to occur.
Dance me to the wedding now, dance me on and on
Dance me very tenderly and dance me very long
We’re both of us beneath our love, we’re both of us above
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the children who are asking to be born
Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn
Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn
Dance me to the end of love
To quote Tom Waits, again, I’m drawn to “beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.” Violins that play us to our deaths, multigenerational novels that force us to look deeper into our own histories, the art that stares straight into our broken hearts. We’re meant to learn, after all, to avoid repeating the sins of all those who came before us.
Perhaps that’s why this moment hurts as much as it does, particularly when we think of our own families. Every Nazi soldier had an extended family, some of whom knew in their bodies that what was happening was wrong, and yet did nothing to stop it. Every family who listened, left, and discovered safety elsewhere held within them the trauma of a far worse ending. Sometimes, it’s the battles we haven’t fought that hold us back from saving others, from saving ourselves from our own future fates and traumas.
That’s the thing I’m learning, perhaps, this deep into my life: when we listen, truly listen, to the stories from our pasts we’ll learn what we’ll one day need to know, and finally understand how to heal what haunts and holds us back.
Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic ’til I’m gathered safely in
Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
~
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