Sincerely, L. Cohen
personal ·My first car was a late ’80s Toyota Tercel that was the color of a jug of supermarket eggnog. In my older brother’s younger years, he briefly (and unsuccessfully) got into fixing up and reselling used cars, which is how this car came to end up in the back lot of my parents’ house and, later, into my possession. The only visible sign of refurbishment I can remember was a new stereo system; in all other respects, from the perpetually damp floor mat to the brittle plastic dashboard to the cracked vinyl upholstery, it looked like (and was) a worn-out vehicle with little life left, save for giving me some measure of independence my last two years of high school.
I grew up in the country, so having a car was a necessity for any kind of a social life. I’d drive to school, winding my way through Route 17 and Pete Wiles Road and watching out for sheriff’s deputies eager to bag a speeding teenager, and more often than not I’d put a CD of songs from Leonard Cohen’s early period (up to 1975) into that singularly new audio system. In my memory the sepia-tinged album cover, with Cohen dressing in front of a mirror, blends so well with the beige and brown of that Tercel it’s as if they were a set, like a matching scarf and gloves.
Cohen came to me by way of R.E.M. (my first musical crush), which had at that time put out an album that included a track that sampled “Suzanne”. It intrigued me, and soon enough I was learning how to do flamenco-style finger-picking like you hear on “The Partisan” and “Famous Blue Raincoat”. But above all, the words were beautiful enough to drown in, over and over again. There may not be a more perfect, more deftly constructed lyric than “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye”:
I loved you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm
Your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm
Yes, many loved before us, I know that we are not new
In city and in forest they smiled like me and you
But let’s not talk of love or chains and things we can’t untie
Your eyes are soft with sorrow
Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye
My senior year, I entered to play “Suzanne” at a musical showcase, but the choir director, citing the eroticism of the lyrics, nixed it. I bristled at the misreading (he only touches her perfect body with his mind, come on!) and gave up in a fit of adolescence. She wasn’t wrong, though: Cohen’s playing of sex and religion off one another is everywhere in his work, and I couldn’t help but find it to be seductive. Not that either subject was at all tangible for me then, other than as notions to entertain on those winding trips to school and back. But as the years passed and my enthusiasm for Cohen receded into the background, I have been surprised to find that he was doing something right and true–but less in the sense of teenage titillation or some pseudo-tantric union of sexuality and the sacred, and more in the sense of the deeply Jewish conviction that the things of this world, even our bodies and how we use them, are charged with divine significance. There’s no clean line between the pleasure (and pain) in our lives and our apprehension of the numinous–which is not necessarily comforting.
Case in point: how I felt after the election, when I could barely sleep or unclench my chest for more than a few minutes at a time, and I was reaching for Lamentations and the imprecatory psalms, and at some point in the midst of that time I had learned that Cohen had died. It was too real, as it were, to have both moments so closely linked. I had tweeted a line from “Democracy” the morning of Election Day, and I still have the coda to that song (“I’m junk, but I’m still holding up this little wild bouquet”) in my Twitter bio for inspiration. Indeed, this is how Cohen’s work has come to inhabit my life: the words are sturdy enough that you could plausibly “bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” (Deut. 6:8-9). And now, I cross into 2017 hoping to help preserve what we as a people have treasured–our bodies, our beliefs, what we have bound and fixed and written–against further loss.
Ben Dueholm wrote an astute essay on the political and eschatological elements of Cohen’s work, to which I would add into the mix the late, late entry of “You Want It Darker” from his last album. Many of Cohen’s songs, especially from I’m Your Man and The Future, have apocalyptic overtones, but only in “You Want It Darker” do you feel the collapse of boundaries between self and civilization, and the immanent demise of both. Put another way: “The Future” is Old Testament prophecy–a vision of things that will happen, though whether it will take decades or centuries or millennia is unclear. “You Want It Darker” is New Testament prophecy–a revelation of that which has already started; what was, and is, and is to come.
Happy new year, everyone.