Indians a-coming: Even the Beautiful Losers get lucky sometimes

Says Jezebel: "During an elaborate ceremony at the Vatican's Saint Peter's Square that involved a lot of fancy costumes, bejeweled bibles, Latin liturgies and probably some bored, sleep-weary children, clandestine Sith lord Pope Benedict XVI canonized Kateri Tekakwitha, making her the first Native American saint."

Catherine Tekakwitha, an ancient Mohawk Indian whose encounter with the European invasion led to grisly tragedy yet gave her "immortality," becomes an alluring metaphor at the heart of Beautiful Losers, the novel by Leonard Cohen, better known of course for his music. The book meant a great deal to me in my 20s, when I lived for a time at 25th Street and Florida Avenue in San Francisco and imposed the prose on as many friends as would borrow it.

"Gorgeously written … one comes out of it having seen
terrible and beautiful visions" says the
New York Times of Cohen's book

In an astounding coincidence, there was a mural at the end of my block at 24th Street in the barrio neighborhood that featured classic American Indian and Mestizo imagery -- corn fields, pueblo pastel colors and proud brown faces looking stoically ahead. And one of the people beatified in the work, alongside Cesar Chavez and the like, was none other than Tekakwitha, shown in a deerskin tunic and with beads and feathers dangling from a badge in her straight black hair, her sharp features etching a picture of lasting beauty in my mind. Or so I envision it now.

The Leonard Cohen Files shows him
getting it done back in the day

By contrast, as Cohen memorably writes, Tekakwitha "was not pretty," bearing the scars of some facial skin torment. For all this Chicago expat blogger knows, the grueling winters in Iroquois country that became upstate New York and Quebec helped to do her complexion in. Yet the iconic La Raza-style rendition of the Native lass was impossible not to fall in love with, in a fashion, just as the central character of the book falls in love with her culture-spanning story.

The book is considered an "experimental" work of the '60s, with its split narratives and time shifting and wordplay as I recall. Despite its genuine warmth and scathing honesty, it reads a bit sophomoric to me now. Cohen said he typed the whole thing on speed.

But as a seeker living at the edge of the world, looking for adventure or whatever comes our way, it felt like a heavenly blast of Truth and Art and Transcendence and all those restless romantic intellectual spiritual passionate Manichean-dichotomy-resolving, trauma-healing, angst-abating ideals that make a man do strange crazy things in pursuit of himself, of meaning, of happiness, of peace or enlightenment, pleasure or pain, whatever.

So often it all leads instead to chaos, doubt, angst, pitying -- and back to the beginning. I'd summon the image of a serpent eating its own tail at this point, but that seems a bohemian indulgence too far.

Christ. Writers. They try to get away with murder.

Tekakwitha recently became a saint in the Roman Catholic Church, or so I read. Much more important, she is used to stirring effect in Cohen's piercing novel. 

//SPOILER// I will never forget the brilliant, astonishing, koan-like insight at the philosophic "climax" -- the dramatic apex of a piece of prose, or so a schoolmarm taught me, to some use at least, in my formative years -- of the story, as I recall: "I change! I remain the same!" It still wells up feeling in me to think and write and read those words.

As an aside, eventually a gay couple bought the house I was living in and tossed us scrabbling renters out. One was a scab news photographer filling in for the AP during a strike; one was a barmaid from Montreal, Cohen's hometown; another was a girl I loved and lost who ascended to some kind of museum conservation expertise. 

Fog City offers a litany of noirish indulgences,
then as now

I think I was office temping or doing something like that when not becoming one with grunge or pining for literary inspiration in my room, lurking at arthouse cinemas or orbiting the city's phantom French Quarter for noir ambiances, mingling with the demimonde or engaging in other scurrilous and unseemly actitivies in the wild '90s. A friend at the time called my job "pretty Beat," which felt beyond redeeming to a would-be creative trapped in a tiring gray suit and tie workaday world. 

Yeah. That. My side point being, such are the downs and ups of "blight" and "gentrification" in a city, where perchance an Irish neighborhood might transubstantiate into a Latino one, enticing pioneering hipsters to move in, only to attract higher-class homeowners (huh huh) and reincarnate the 'hood as a respectablish locale. The humanity.

A fine feature review of the novel is here if you want to immerse your soft warm brain in a deeper vat of literary ponderingness.

And hey, here's a whole latterday Cohen concert if you're interested. His lyrics appeal to the Bukowski in me. Plus he wears a bad fedora.



On that note, here's that guy who sang of a Leonard Cohen afterworld and now resides On a Plane of his own. Why not.



// ENTREATY // I am stymied, by the by, that I cannot find the mural shown online anywhere, despite no dearth of documentation on "Mission District murals." To wit. 

The painting in question is on a diocese building or something like that. Maybe the Church put a hex on those who would steal the soul of the souls so depicted? Perhaps someone in San Fran will elevate the mural to the digital plane. 

Once upon a time I took pics myself to slide inside the cover of the book, but those bygone media of the era have proved far less digitally shareable with their disappearing into boxes and such than what the kids do today with their fancy doowhacky devices with the thingamabobs and the ganeckdagazoinks and so on. Kids.