of KATERINA DIMA
A song against the horrors of Nazism.
It is a song that many of those who heard it fell in love with, perhaps even more than the man who dedicated it. The mystique of the melody, the sensuality of the voices, the vividness of the emotions, the vibration of the senses, take you so far away from logic, so deep into the center of the universe of human "wholeness", that sense of the eternal, the untouchable, of the undefiled, the immortal, that love promises you, so much so that it makes you feel that no one has ever discovered or will discover, has tasted or will taste, has not shed or will shed, has not dissolved or will dissolve for love like you. How no one has felt this eerie caress, which sometimes looks like sky sometimes breath of the abyss, sometimes fire of the senses sometimes death's spark, as strongly as you, as strongly as this song makes you feel on your skin as it exorcises death, since every love, every orgasm of the senses, is a small death – and that is why love, this "androgynous" entity, is the only living immortality, the only magician who can always do the same, with this one and only spell, to defeat the perishable.
And that's why the love and death that overflow from this unearthly beauty song captivate you immediately, throwing you into the arms of this eternal tango, the rhythm that emerged from the brothels of Argentina to conquer, to completely beat, her body West.
But in this love song, death is much more present, more nightmarishly relentless, than anyone would ever imagine... Its cold breath is everywhere. His truth freezes the hot kiss of lovers, dehydrates the moisture of the senses, darkens the colors of passion and stops the revelry of touches.
Why the "Dance me to the end of love» is not a song written for lovers as those who hear it think it is...
This song is literally a death spell. A true antidote to agony to the poison of man-to-man brutality. A balm of memory to the torment of horror experienced by millions of people, all those exterminated in Nazi crematoria.
It is a song full of death cries of a senseless martyrdom, haunted by the cries of children, by the screams of the scarred, by the whispers of the skeletons who no longer had a voice, by the chilling crawl of the undead who waited day after day, hour after hour. hour, in their misery, agony, torment, their end.
It is imbued with that horrible smell of burning flesh, with the absurdity of Nazism – the Nazism that is reviving today, because history repeats itself no longer as a farce but as a theater of the absurd.
This song is the horror of being demanded to play music, the dead themselves, in the corridors of the camps, while others passed in front of them in its queue Auschwitz, of Dachau, going from the tail of horror, to be killed and burned in the crematoria. They are all the last glances that looked at each Jewish musician and his "flaming violin", with the story of life, pain, that each of them carried, as they marched towards death, and at the same time that the prisoner the musician was forced by the Nazis to play classical music in the hallways of this hell on earth.
Because "Dance me to the end of love" is not a dance to the end of love, but a dance to the end of existence, which, springing from the generative source of passion for life, can finally embrace tightly, carrying along as the death even love itself. That is why while it is a song born of death, it can embrace, vibrate love and life...
Because, according to its creator Leonard Cohen as he once characteristically said of it "It's a strange way a song is born, every song has some kind of seed, that someone puts in your hand or the world itself puts in your hand, and that's why the process is so mysterious to how to write a song But this particular one came to me simply because I knew or heard that next to the crematoriums, in some death camps there was a group of musicians, consisting of a string quartet, who were obliged to play every time the process of this horror unfolded. And these people who played, the same terrifying fate awaited them. And they were forced to play classical music while their fellow prisoners were being killed and burned. So this music "dance me to your beauty with a burning violin" symbolically means as beauty the end of existence, and the element of passion that governs all completion. But this is the same language we use for absolute surrender to our beloved, so that in a song it is not important to know the beginning of its genesis, because if the language itself comes from it the generative source of passion, can embrace any passionate energy.'
Today, therefore, on the occasion of "Kristallnacht" - the Pogrom against the Jews on November 9, 1938 from nazi Germany...
...today "dance me in your beauty, with a flaming fiddle," a note, a sound, a melody, a vision to burn at last the horrors of this world, to ashes its asceticism, its absurdity, its futility and pointless pain, the lament for humanity lost again and again in the twilight of its shame humanity…
Dance me to the end of love...
[SOURCE: collectnews.org, 9.11.2015]
View HERE the video clip of the song
