Heartland

Leonard Cohen has a song called 'Suzanne' and it occurred to me that Eldritch's Suzanne is probably, among other things, a reference to that also. Anyone investigated on this before?

dei

itnAklipse wrote:Leonard Cohen has a song called 'Suzanne' and it occurred to me that Eldritch's Suzanne is probably, among other things, a reference to that also. Anyone investigated on this before?

dei

Suzanne takes you down to
her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by
You can spend the night beside her
And you know that she's half crazy
But that's why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges
That come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her
That you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer
That you've always been her lover
And you want to travel with her
And you want to travel blind
And you know that she will trust you
For you've touched her perfect body
with your mind.

And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said "All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them"
But he himself was broken
Long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone
And you want to travel with him
And you want to travel blind
And you think maybe you'll trust him
For he's touched your perfect body
with his mind.

Now Suzanne takes your hand
And she leads you to the river
She is wearing rags and feathers
From Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbour
And she shows you where to look
Among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love
And they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror
And you want to travel with her
And you want to travel blind
And you know that you can trust her
For she's touched your perfect body
with her mind.

http://www.allspirit.co.uk/suzanne.html

counting the days in the haze around you
Susanne on the wall

no pain, summer rain
I'm lost for stupid again
we are the same
give it a name Susanne

counting the days in the haze around you
Susanne let the ether fall
out of phase, I am all around you
Susanne on the wall

no pain, summer rain
I'm lost for stupid again
we are the same
give it a name Susanne

http://www.thesistersofmercy.com/lyrics/susanne.htm

Isn't it a possibly a reference to Suzanne Holst?

Taken from UTR8 :

Originally from Select Magazine - Von was asked "Which 10 people would you most like to see stranded (forever) on a desert island?"

On of the answers was :

Suzanne Holst's boyfriend

Look, I know the modern woman's not in thrall to her man. I know Suzanne would go out with me if she wanted to. But let's face it, things would be a lot simpler if the Significant Other were currently residing on a beach near...nothing much.

CellThree wrote:Isn't it a possibly a reference to Suzanne Holst?

Taken from UTR8 :

Originally from Select Magazine - Von was asked "Which 10 people would you most like to see stranded (forever) on a desert island?"

On of the answers was :

Suzanne Holst's boyfriend

Look, I know the modern woman's not in thrall to her man. I know Suzanne would go out with me if she wanted to. But let's face it, things would be a lot simpler if the Significant Other were currently residing on a beach near...nothing much.

eee... who's Suzanne Holst

From the Bangles, the once-tasty brunette, right?

MrChris wrote:From the Bangles, the once-tasty brunette, right?

thats Susanna Hoffs...

umm, how do i know that?

So who's suzanne holst?

I guess it makes more sense for her to be german...hence the alternating suzanne / suzann-er pronunciations in the song...

Oh the sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone.
They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can't go on.
And they brought me their comfort and later they brought me this song.
Oh I hope you run into them, you who've been travelling so long.
Yes you who must leave everything that you cannot control.
It begins with your family, but soon it comes around to your soul.
Well I've been where you're hanging, I think I can see how you're pinned:
When you're not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you've sinned.

Well they lay down beside me, I made my confession to them.
They touched both my eyes and I touched the dew on their hem.
If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn
they will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.

When I left they were sleeping, I hope you run into them soon.
Don't turn on the lights, you can read their address by the moon.
And you won't make me jealous if I hear that they sweetened your night:
We weren't lovers like that and besides it would still be all right,
We weren't lovers like that and besides it would still be all right.

MrChris wrote:So who's suzanne holst?

I guess it makes more sense for her to be german...hence the alternating suzanne / suzann-er pronunciations in the song...

Is this susanne

http://www.ndr.de/tv/das/susanneholst.html

Big Si wrote:

MrChris wrote:So who's suzanne holst?

I guess it makes more sense for her to be german...hence the alternating suzanne / suzann-er pronunciations in the song...

Is this susanne

http://www.ndr.de/tv/das/susanneholst.html

I know she's presenting some kind of breakfast TV in Germany, so this should be the one by the looks of it.

Have you heard, can't remember when and where, where Von talks about Suzanne. "Last night my mother, who is the most curious amongst the family, called and asked 'so, who is Suzanne?'" Or something like that. He then states that "Suzanne is ether."

I believe she was a weather girl at one time, which makes the song a lot simpler...


They are the same because she is his pin up & he is someone else's, I reckon...

M

I have issues with the use of "ether". It used to be an anestheic, but caused other problems down the line for the people it was used on (or so I've been told). When I think of it, it gives me kind of a weird old-fashioned sterile but stragely unclean hospital feeling. I think they'd put it in a mesh cup-like thing and over someone's open mouth so that it'd drip every so often and the person wouldn't feel the surgery the doctor was performing. Anyone know anything else about it? Isn't it used in another song, too?

All I can gather is that it's what's causing "no pain". Any more layers to it?

Maybe Suzanne's healing in the hospital or something and he's waiting for her to get better: "counting the days in the haze around you". Then "I'm lost for stupid again" he doesn't understand why or what happened or is happening, I don't know. "We are the same": he's as out of it mentally as she is physically. Maybe.

And then Holst is just another layer perhaps...just ideas, of course.

There is another meaning of ether which I think is more pertinent - it was once believed that there was a mysterious invisible element all around us which conducted energy and electricity and so on. Now I think this usage has been recycled to refer to the strange electronic medium of the internet or the television. Am I right about this? I think you could say I say Suzanne today across the ether - that is, not in the flesh, but on tv or a video or online.

Let the ether fall says two things to me:
1) Come and be with me FOR REAL, i.e. not in electronic, but in fleshy mode (not on the wall anymore, but on the couhc / bed whatever)
2) I think Von likes the fact that it can sound a bit like 'let the other fall'. You can work that one out for yourselves.

I've never heard ether used that way, but it definitely makes more sense. It connects the whole song and just not a few lines like my idea did. Thanks!

1. Any of a class of organic compounds in which two hydrocarbon groups are linked by an oxygen atom.
2.A volatile, highly flammable liquid, C2H5OC2H5, derived from the distillation of ethyl alcohol with sulfuric acid and used as a reagent and solvent. It was formerly used as an anesthetic. Also called diethyl ether, ethyl ether.
3. The regions of space beyond the earth's atmosphere; the heavens.
4. The element believed in ancient and medieval civilizations to fill all space above the sphere of the moon and to compose the stars and planets.
5. Physics. An all-pervading, infinitely elastic, massless medium formerly postulated as the medium of propagation of electromagnetic waves.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=ether

Now I definitely agree with you. God, he's clever.

God or Him?

I'm glad you agree, anyway. I love the song.

I thought we figured out a long time ago there wasn't a difference between the two...

S.urface and U.nderlying S.tructural A.nalyses of N.atural E.nglish:
SUSANNE an acronym folks!

well i agree with all of you but check this out, don't you remember how many times Andrew has mentioned Cognitive Science, or philology in interviews?:

"A central requirement for SALT (speech and language technology) progress is a comprehensive stocktaking and classification of the linguistic phenomena (word-types, grammatical constructions, etc.) that are found in real-life written and spoken usage in relevant natural languages, emphasizing comprehensive coverage and explicitness of classification rather than theoretical depth. Those of us whose native language is English think of our language as relatively thoroughly studied, yet despite the length of time during which computational linguists have addressed the task of processing English, such a classification scheme has not been available for our language. I surmise that the same holds for other European languages."

"In the case of English I have recently attempted to fill this gap by producing a parsing scheme – the "SUSANNE" scheme – which offers explicit proposals for grammatical taxonomy that the research community may adopt, alter, extend, or otherwise treat as it sees fit. The SUSANNE annotation scheme is certainly not presented as "the right scheme" for describing English grammar, and indeed one of the points I aim to make in what follows is that "correctness" is not an applicable concept in this domain. What matters is that an annotation scheme should be practical, publicly known, unambiguous, comprehensive, and explicit; it is quite possible that alternative schemes might fulfil these criteria equally well while being very different from one another in their details. The chief purpose of this paper is to explain why, at the present juncture in the development of speech and language technology, this sort of work is worth doing: why information technology needs grammatical taxonomies."

http://www.grsampson.net/Anfg.html

besides this was developed at oxford university!!

and it deals with language being obscured, and searching for the basic fundamentals of natural english...

well ether has an obscuring effect on the senses, and in the sense that he and susanne are the same, is that exactly what the program "susanne" was designed to do is what Andrew went to school for and has studied ever since...and therefore does as well...

since "susanne" is also a set of 130,000 specific words, he could easily have "susanne" on the wall....

i still agree with the other layers, but i think this angle is essential to understanding how he has been writing his lyrics since under the gun...

the entire "SUSANNE" corpus can be found at: www.grsampson.net
a gift...

aaron

you Googled for that, I'd wager?

i don't see why i could have only come up with that through google,
i happen to have spent much of my adult life studying eastern and western philosophy...

krishnamurti is my favourite 20th century guru...

derrada is funky-cool...

foucalt is over-f'n-rated...

wittgenstein flip-flopped...

nietzsche still has yet to be reckoned with...

sartre and heidegger tried really hard...

cohen is under-estimated as a philosophy...

eldritch knows how to express himself well with 21st century syntax...

maybe i used google...but the rest is mine mine mine....

"one need not remember everything, only where to find the information one seeks."-albert einstein


aaron

Ewwww get her!

And then, Andrew travels with The Doctor, like Susan Foreman.
So he is like Susan, concerning that.

toddle off noo Jums...

In German the word "äther" also has the meaning of "airwave." Or so does the Leo Dict assert:
http://dict.leo.org/ende?lp=ende&lang=en&search=%C4ther

I have never really heard it being used as a synonym for airwave, but ... 'äther' is definitely used in this context. Radio or television broadcasts are said to 'come from the ether' ('kommen aus dem Äther') for example, denoting ether as the medium through which the airwaves/broadcast travel. (Of course that's just an idiom, and hardly anybody believes in any ether anymore for waves to travel through.)

This certainly would fit quite nicely with Suzanne being Susanne Holst of German TV.

Could "Suzanne on the wall" be a reference to Suzanne Vega's Marlene On The Wall?