Beginning Sunday, April 2nd, 8 pm CET, 2 pm ET, I will start a monthly Zoom conversation series with Marc Gafni entitled Love or Die. You are all warmly invited. Links below.
RSVP here: https://parallax-media.eu/parallax-academy-calendar/og-rose-zb6ts-tmm2f
Marc suggested the title Love or Die for the series and asked me to include my song of the same name in the invitation. So I thought I would tell the song's story and how it resonates with Gafni's work here.
In 2019, I took a trip to Kyiv, Ukraine, for a festival called Emerge. Here is something I wrote for the emerge website about Kyiv:
“There is something dreamlike and cinematic about Kyiv… a resonant decay, a war between vegetation and concrete, multiple worlds and histories co-existing—an atmosphere that is both mournful and electric. Kyiv is caught in a dialectic between its rotting past and the shiny future it leans into.
The beauty of Kyiv is in the haphazard rather than the intentional—anachronisms abound. In Kyiv, you can walk through every epoch imaginatively: the pastoral, the imperial, the industrial, the nuclear, the utopian, the nihilistic, and the futuristic ….”
Fast forward to Covid and the war in Ukraine. As unbearable images from the suburbs of Kyiv came pouring in, I started to do what I have been doing since I was 18 to process my feelings—I wrote a song.
The song went through several iterations before I got it right. Songwriting is like digging a well—you dig until you find water—a good song is not a record of facts and opinions but a poetic gestalt. Bob Dylan transcended the protest song by making it biblical and symbolic rather than journalistic. That’s always been my approach to songwriting—to be intimate and mythical at the same time. In any case, I kept digging, but it took me about a year to write something I was happy with. Marc’s statement Love or Die finally gave me the key to the song.
Love or Die is a good frame because it demands a heroic attitude, no matter what. In some sense, Love or die is our choice in every moment: the choice between Eros and Thanatos, between the red and the blue pill, between the fog of war and the blessings of peace, Et Cetera. I dare to say this song is about what Gafni calls “outrageous love”, which is not a sentimental but a radical injunction. We need outrageous love and outrageous activism—which means being tuned to the life force, or eros. To Love or to Die is the same thing as saying: ‘To be or not to be’. Gafni tells us we must choose to be, which means to love-to-be, which is fundamentally an act of eros.
My song is a protest song or anthemic commentary on the war (God forbid!), but it is rather a song of erotic affirmation. It is not “Pro-Ukraine”or “pro-Russian”—it raises a glass to both the Russian bear and the Ukrainian lion both. At the end of the song, I put forward an image of Ukraine as the new Jerusalem—but not as a geographical location but as an existential one. I allude to the flag of Ukraine and talk about ‘the blue and the violet’—violet contains the blue but is more like a bruise.
Leonard Cohen is my most significant influence as a songwriter. And Cohen was my slum landlord for a short time when I practised Zen in his old house in Montreal. The strength of his greatest song Hallelujah—a song about outrageous love—is that it is both a religious hymn and an erotic movie; it combines the high and the low, the sublime and the pornographic—it is fundamentally a great affirmation of unity. We all know the “broken Hallelujah.”
Love or Die is sung with a broken voice, poor production, and limited sound quality—it definitely needs an orchestra and a choir of back singers! In any case, I hope the song—and our upcoming conversation—gives us some of the outrageous humour, outrageous love, and real hutzpah—that are needed in this world of outrageous pain. (Outrageous is one of Marc’s favourite words, and it is an excellent tantric word as well.)
In the series, I will ask Marc about his theory of “Cosmoerotic humanism”, “unique self”, and “Hebrew Tantra”, among other things. Marc’s work reminds me of my own tantric tradition, combining the high and the low, the mystical and the human passions. Tantra is an intensely erotic and earthly form of mysticism.
And like Leonard Cohen, Marc is trying to bring the erotic back into the mystical—to reinstate the cherubins on the Temple of Solomon—another of Marc’s images I used in the song. He is doing something he calls Hebrew tantra, and in my view, Tantric religion is precisely what we need in the present existential moment.
In any case, don’t forget to join Marc Gafni and me on Sunday, April 2nd, for a series of conversations that aspires to be a lot more than a podcast and might be something like a prayer to bring light into the crack in everything. And now. Love or die.
Links:
Free Weekly Broadcast with Dr. Marc Gafni: https://bit.ly/3Z3sNWX
Website Dr. Marc Gafni: http://www.marcgafni.com
Short biography of Dr. Marc Gafni:
Dr. Marc Gafni is a visionary thinker, social activist, and passionate philosopher. He is known for his “source code teachings,” including Unique Self theory, the Five Selves, the Amorous Cosmos, A Politics of Evolutionary Love, A Return to Eros and Digital Intimacy. He is author of over twenty-five books, including the award-winning Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment. He holds a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University, as well as Orthodox rabbinic ordination.
He teaches on the cutting edge of philosophy and spirit in the West, with the aim of participating in the articulation of what Dr. Gafni together with Dr. Zak Stein and colleagues are calling CosmoErotic Humanism. At the core of CosmoErotic Humanism is what Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein are calling ‘First Principles and First Values,’ Anthro-Ontology and a “Universal Grammar of Value.” This shared story rooted in First Principles and First Values can then serve as the matrix for a global ethos for a global civilization.
Dr. Gafni is the Co-Founder and Co-President of the Office for the Future, the Center for World Religion and Philosophy and the Foundation for Conscious Evolution. At the core of their shared missions is the articulation and delivery into culture of a Great Library - in multiple forms - which participates in evolving the source code of consciousness and culture in response to the Meta Crisis.