"Dance Me To The End Of Love..."

Various Positions

Leonard Cohen

(Image from Wikipedia)

In 1986, I flew out of the States on a low-budget one-way flight courtesy of People's Express Airlines and a ne'er-do-well Berkeley landlord who'd skipped town and left me without having to pay rent for six months.

The unexpected financial windfall took me to Europe in late October, where I ended up in the still Medieval town of Fribourg, Switzerland staying with a friend from my undergrad university who was working on archaeological digs from the Bronze Age and had a spare room with an old skull to keep me company.

I hung out once with a half-Czech, half-Jewish, half-Polish, half-crazy multilingual woman named Ana Prazak and watched huge flakes of wet snow waft past an expatriate window to slip wistfully down and melt into the ground as we listened to Leonard Cohen sing "Dance Me To The End Of Love."

Ana wasn't the one, but we shared that fine moment over fine chocolate.

Some twenty-one years later -- or just the other day -- I found the perfected film-noir moment in this Cohen video as Sun-Ae and I sang along to its lyrics and remembered how our time together first unfolded in Europe:

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

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

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic till 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

First heard by my half-Europeanized self in 1986, but already sung and copyrighted in 1984 by Leonard Cohen, who could masterfully combine "Lift me like an olive branch" with "be my homeward dove" to suggest a subtle biblical image of postdiluvian peace, if only even for a brief moment in God's metronomic timing of our lives...