Читать книгу Beautiful Losers - Leonard Cohen - Страница 17

The long house of the Iroquois must be clear. Length: varied from one hundred to one hundred fifty feet. Height and width: twenty-five feet. Lateral beams supporting a roof made from large pieces of bark, cedar, ash, elm, or pine. Neither window nor chimney, but a door at each extremity. Light got in and smoke got out through holes in the roof. Several fires in the cabin, four families to each fire. Families arranged so that there was a corridor running down the length of the cabin. ‘La manière dont les familles se groupent dans les cabanes n’est pas pour entraver le libertinage.’ Thus le P. Edouard Lecompte, S.J., wrote in 1930, whetting our sexual appetite in his expert Company manner. The long-house setup did little to ‘hinder licentiousness.’ What went on in the dark tunnel? Catherine Tekakwitha, what did you see with your swollen eyes? What juices mixing on the bearskin? Was it worse than a movie theater? F. said: The atmosphere of a movie theater is a nighttime marriage of a man’s prison and a woman’s prison; the prisoners know nothing about it-only the bricks and gates have combined; in the ventilation system the mystic union is consummated: the smells absorb each other. F.’s extravagant observation coincides with something a clergyman told me. He said that on Sunday morning the odor of semen hangs like a damp cloud above the men gathered for chapel at Bordeaux Jail. The modern art-cinema house, made of concrete and velvet, is a joke, which, as F. said, is nothing but the death of an emotion. No marriage in these stark confines, everybody sitting on their genitals because: silver genitals on the screen. Bring back hidden sex! Let cocks again rise and twine like ivy round the gold projector beam, and cunts yawn under gloves and white paper bags of candy, and no naked flashing breasts lure the dirty laundry of our daily lives into the movie palace, deadly as a radar signal, no neorealist patent fucking hang the impenetrable curtains of possibility between each member of the audience! In the gloomy long house of my mind let me trade wives, let me stumble upon you, Catherine Tekakwitha, three hundred years old, fragrant as a birch sapling, no matter what the priests or plague have done to you.