You Live Your Life As If It's Real — My Appreciation of Leonard Cohen, Canadian Singer & Songwriter

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In 1994, the great, now-deceased artist, Leonard Cohen, retreated to a Zen Buddhist monastery in California (Mt. Baldy) for some five years. When he came back down from the mountain, he brought with him a luminous new album, simply titled 10 New Songs. (Asked why he left the monastery in an interview, he quipped: ‘I’d washed enough dishes.’) Whatever the other benefits may have been, however, the retreat did wonders for his work. As an album, '10' is perhaps more overtly spiritual than previous albums.

On one song, Love Itself, he meditates on the light coming through the window:

In streams of light I clearly saw
The dust you seldom see
Out of which the Nameless makes
A Name for one like me.”

Later in that same song, the rays of Love that plunged into his room leave him spellbound:

All busy in the sunlight
The flecks did float and dance
And I was tumbled up with them
In formless circumstance.”

Nonetheless, these ten new songs are suffused with this-world’s charms, too. Back on Boogie Street Cohen shares with us this piece of secular spirituality:

So come, my friends, be not afraid
We are so lightly here
It is in love that we are made
In love we disappear.

Yet on another track with metaphysical accents, That Don’t Make It Junk, Cohen huskily confides this discomfiting truth: “I don’t trust my inner feelings – Inner feelings come and go.”

With previous albums such as New Skin for the Old Ceremony and Death of a Ladies’ Man, it is abundantly clear that Leonard Cohen never assumed the impossible position of celibacy. His love songs are addressed as much to the body as to the mind, and frequently depict him worshiping at the altar of Woman.

Yet it seems the surfeit of Cohen’s relations leave him feeling marooned, as he whispers hoarsely on one of the new songs, A Thousand Kisses Deep:

You win a while, and then it’s done –
Your little winning streak
And summoned now to deal
With your invincible defeat,

This from the same man who named one of his books Beautiful Losers. The title of Cohen’s last volume of poetry, The Book of Longing, may well apply to his entire oeuvre.

Eccentricities aside, this unclassifiable artist has come to be regarded as National Treasure, in Cohen’s Canada. Over the decades, he has garnered international respect and recognition - with doctoral dissertations and university courses discussing his work, including a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2008 - all of which he has accepted with both humility and grace. Leonard Cohen's followers are not just leftovers from his 70’s heyday but a whole new generation of young adults, with two recent tribute albums by contemporary musicians: I’m Your Fan (1991) and Tower of Song (1995).

Inhabiting an Intensity

Cohen’s position of authority stems from more than the sum of their introspective lyrics and singing voices. In spite of the numerous books of verse and prose Cohen has published over the past few decades, it is not strictly as a poet or novelist that he has made his mark. Delivered in his trademark, cigarette-ravaged, reassuring growl, Cohen’s words acquire another force altogether on his albums. Gloomy-doomy on the page, they take on new life when sung.

To hear the passion with which he stakes his claim, we should be mean to begrudge him. Ultimately, he moves us and matters because of an intensity that he inhabits, an emotional profundity, and the earthly mysticism born of living in close proximity to suffering and solitude. Or, in the words of another spiritual warrior, philosopher Nietzsche, Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

In that sense, Cohen was not merely a despairing artist but an artist of despair and salvation, returned from the underground to share with us what they’ve seen. Cohen coos in an old classic, Anthem.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in.

That light is all the more powerful on account of the darkness he's shared with us, and we come to realize our lives are richer thanks to this brave witness and his poignant threnodies.

In closing, I invite you to listen to yet another shudderingly beautiful, prayer-of-a-poem by Cohen, There for You. I admire this devotional song so deeply (and secretly wish I'd written it) that I attempted a reading, here, in order to try and know it better.

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Image of Cohen: http://www.leonardcohen.com/photos