Leonard Cohen, the Poet Who Wanted to Embrace the Cracks (I)

In an interview with The New Yorker published on October 10, 2016, just weeks before his death, Leonard Cohen solemnly declared that he was "ready to die." "I hope it's not too uncomfortable. That's about it for me," he added.

Sarcastic and disenchanted, Cohen had always been both. His audience knew what to expect. So they saw his words as just another quip from an 82-year-old man. The very same man who, during his most recent tours, would apologize to his audiences for "not being dead yet." He had been forced back onto the stage in 2008 after being financially ruined by his manager while secluded in spiritual retreat at the Mount Baldy Buddhist monastery, overlooking Los Angeles.

What the world did not know in 2016 was that Cohen had already been ravaged by leukemia for two years, the same disease that had claimed his mother, Masha, and that he knew his days were numbered. He was therefore rushing to "put his house in order" and "finish his work," making the most of whatever turns of the clock the Grim Reaper was still willing to grant him.

For once, the joke was no joke.

Faced with the alarm his words had nevertheless provoked, particularly since the interview with David Remnick had carried something at once peaceful, luminous, exhausted and funereal, an unmistakable sense of the final curtain, Cohen offered a clarification a few days later. At the press conference marking the release of what would become his swan-song album, You Want It Darker, he appeared with that unmistakably Cohen-esque smile, his face gaunt but serene, his tone playful.

"I said I was ready to die recently, and I think I was exaggerating. One is given to self-dramatization from time to time. I intend to live forever."

Cohen smiled, irreverent to the very end. But it was clear that the die had been cast. His body could barely support him, and he needed a cane to walk. Only his elegance remained untouched. And, naturally, that warm, cavernous voice of his. Even as his body was breaking down, his spirit was still struggling to let the light in!

It was October 13, 2016.

Less than a month later, on November 7, 2016, he breathed his last at his home in Los Angeles.

Following a fall.

A fall!

The ultimate irony for a man whose entire body of work had revolved around accepting what he called "the invincible defeat"...

And yet, a promise kept.

Leonard Cohen had not lied.

Ten years later, he is indeed still alive.

Not least through the seemingly endless covers of his songs, particularly Hallelujah, which became a cult classic after his record label, Columbia, had rejected it along with the entire album Various Positions upon its release in 1984. Cohen lives on. On streaming platforms, through the long succession of documentaries, books, exhibitions and musical tributes continually devoted to him around the world, in every language. And on the walls of Montreal's skyscrapers, in the city where he was born...

Suddenly, that "eternity" no longer seems quite so unattainable.

Cohen has gone "home," without "his burden and the costume that he wore," to the Father's house... and yet he is still here.

Everywhere.

A Prophet, but No False One

A "prophet of gloom," they had called him since his debut in 1967, because his music was supposedly enough to make you slit your wrists. An utterly foolish assertion, yet one that only grew more entrenched over the decades. "Leonard Cohen? Good God, no! Far too depressing." But to refuse to listen to Cohen is, in some sense, to reject the very idea that music, and art more generally, might reflect human emotions, with all their melancholy, disillusionment and defeats. It is to refuse to confront one's own emotions through art. Why is sodade so frightening in the twenty-first century, in this liquid world held hostage by immediacy and virtuality? Why should art be confined to serving as an outlet for celebration and joy, rather than a philosophical meditation on existence? And who decided that darkness could not give birth to the greatest source of light...? Especially in Cohen's work, where darkness is constantly confronted with the light of compassion and love...?

Never mind. To each their own...

His avant-garde 1966 novel, Beautiful Losers, had been dismissed by critics as "porn trash"... although some more perceptive commentators compared it to James Joyce.

So was Leonard Cohen a prophet?

In many respects, yes. Though he belongs far more among the anguished than among the megalomaniacs.

The proof lies in the world the Canadian poet and singer left behind, a world that bears an all-too-disturbing resemblance to the one he had glimpsed some thirty-four years earlier, with that languid, gnawing, almost lethal lucidity of his, forever haunted by the ghosts of the past.

Indeed, the day after his death, in November 2016, Donald Trump won the American presidential election, fulfilling a prediction with which the dying old poet had amused those around him just days earlier. The anecdote is enough to raise a smile. His friends and family had laughed it off, attributing his conviction to the effects of the medical cannabis he was using to relieve his pain. Not only had Leonard been right. It was almost as though he had chosen precisely the right moment to take his final bow. In a supreme twist of irony, Trump's election prompted his family to delay announcing his death. Even from beyond the grave, Cohen was quietly embracing the humility of ultimate defeat. And had he been given the chance to witness the spectacle, and all the absurdity that would unfold over the following decade, he would probably have smiled, amused by the sheer scale of the appalling masquerade.

And perhaps even sung the blues.

As the tenth anniversary of his death is commemorated in November 2026, Trumpism has just suffered a crushing defeat in the midterm elections.

Should this be seen as Leonard Cohen's posthumous snub to the man who, despite his family's objections, had been determined to appropriate Hallelujah for his political rallies at any cost?

Probably not.

If the United States, swept up in the euphoria of de-Trumpification, is now rediscovering the meaning of "Democracy is coming to the USA," written by the singer in the early 1990s and brought to prominence during Bill Clinton's inauguration in 1993, then invoked by some commentators upon Barack Obama's election in 2008, Cohen, more down-to-earth, knows perfectly well that the world moves in ebbs and flows, and that History, far from following any particular direction, merely reproduces humanity's own wanderings. It is simply that America, the "cradle of the best and of the worst," possesses the "machinery for change" and, as he put it, the necessary "spiritual thirst."

As for him, lost in front of his little screen, he would still be humbly holding up "his little wild bouquet," hoping for the best... while inevitably expecting the worst to return.

Without, however, surrendering to it as though it were inevitable.