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

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, Leonard Cohen was foretelling the disintegration of the world, after spending much of the 1960s and 1970s chronicling his own private catastrophes. Yet even on his earliest albums, songs such as Stories of the Street, Story of Isaac, The Old Revolution, Avalanche, Diamonds in the Mine, Last Year’s Man, Field Commander Cohen and There Is a War had already glimpsed social collapse, subsuming it within personal catastrophe, at a time when people still dreamed of remaking the world. Dance Me to the End of Love in 1984, followed by First We Take Manhattan and Everybody Knows in 1988, anticipated a profound sociopolitical crisis bound up with modernity and the culture of violence. To dance to the end of love was to implore God to let us go on dancing to the very end of the horror.

Then, in 1992, as the West, still intoxicated by the collapse of Soviet communism, noisily celebrated the end of History and the arrival of a world order supposedly freed from its great contradictions, Cohen announced a future of a decidedly different kind. The fall of the Berlin Wall would not unite the world, any more than globalization would bring peace to human hearts. Beyond the promise of a reconciled humanity, Cohen sensed that the end of the bipolar order would undo balances which, monstrous as they were, had kept certain destructive impulses in check. The future would be murder, warned The Future. Things would slide in every direction. The order of the soul would be overturned. Fetuses would be destroyed, and children themselves unliked. Privacy would suddenly explode. The only tree that’s left would be stuffed up the hole in our culture. The white man would dance around the bonfires. The Clara Petaccis of this world would once again be hanging upside down, their features covered by their fallen gowns… The birth betrayed, the marriage spent, governments in widowhood, wars fought again and again, and the Holy Spirit endlessly bought and sold…

He had seen it coming.

He would probably rather have been wrong.

What is perhaps most striking today about Cohen’s apocalyptic visions is not so much the resurgence of violence, imperialism or authoritarian temptation, from which History never truly rid itself, as the progressive disintegration of the intellectual, political and moral frameworks that had made it possible to imagine a common world beyond antagonism.

Leonard Cohen’s future has been the present for twenty years now.

If not longer.

The great ideologies have disappeared. Modernity’s universalist promises have collided with their own contradictions. Globalization has drawn markets, merchandise and technologies closer together, without preventing human beings from becoming ever more alien to one another. The very possibility of living together is faltering everywhere under the blows of a return to tribal belonging. Sectarian and racist violence is becoming commonplace, in the name of the fear that differences might disappear… or triumph… Fundamentalists and populists have a free hand everywhere. Authority, legitimacy and power have been emptied of their meaning. Privacy? Satellites, smartphones, social networks, the giant companies through which our information passes by email and app, with advances in nanotechnology still to come…? Gone up in smoke. As for individual freedom, celebrated as the ultimate achievement of the human adventure, it has left behind bewildered people, stripped of the collective bearings they had learned to regard as shackles.

This disillusionment, bordering in places on nihilism, has not led to the disappearance of certainties. The more the world fragments, the more people seem to cling to their identities in an almost desperate attempt to reconstitute some supposed “lost unity.” Hope has given way to nostalgia for a mythical golden age. Fear of disappearance has come to justify the erasure, even the annihilation, of others, as though the void left by the crumbling of universalism’s great promises could only be filled by the return of the old tribal idols, often grotesque. Far from merely taking the form of indifference, nihilism has also dressed itself in the many-colored rags of fanaticism.

God Was in Everything

Leonard Cohen had never inhabited that world. Not that he lacked a sense of belonging, or had sought to free himself from his roots, of course. His Judaism was a family fidelity nourished by the Psalms, the prophets, the Song of Songs, memories of his Talmudic-scholar grandfather Solomon Klonitzky-Kline, and an extraordinary familiarity with God, in a world where, by tradition, His name was not spoken. But for Cohen, quarreling with the Creator did not mean ceasing to love Him. Quite the contrary. The relationship was intimate, as though God were the other pole in a couple, the alpha partner… God was everywhere. God was in everything. Little wonder, then, that in his songs the Demiurge and Woman became entangled in an absolute embrace.

Cohen had encountered the invisible very early, with the death of his father, Nathan, when he was only nine. Had his father’s absence opened up a universe of nothingness and a longing for the absolute, to be explored through every possible form of “correspondence”: women, drugs, spirituality, words and, later, the chanting of prayers? The question remains open.

Beyond the Talmud and Kabbalah, Cohen had, from childhood, welcomed Christ with the guilt of those who had pinned him to the cross like a butterfly to a wall; later, he would wish to travel with him and follow him with Suzanne along the St. Lawrence; sing of Joan of Arc marrying the flames at a stake of cruelty and light; make Saint Kateri Tekakwitha the object of the narrator’s mystical and erotic obsessions in Beautiful Losers; explore the Persian mystics, then retreat to a monastery under the discipline of the Zen master Roshi Sasaki, eventually being ordained a monk under the name Jikan, “the Silent One”; and finally find, in Mumbai, with the Indian sage Ramesh Balsekar, more questions in answer to his questions and, paradoxically (or perhaps not), absolute comfort in that.

Having wrestled with the paradoxes of duality under Roshi, he would now confront, with Balsekar, those of nonduality itself.

In fact, through all the different paths he traveled, Cohen was searching for God, quite simply, by every means available, without ever feeling compelled to turn those experiences into a coherent religious doctrine.

Admittedly, his concerts, particularly toward the end of his career, had begun to resemble religious ceremonies reserved for initiates. The reverent silence in those enormous arenas was astonishing. Perhaps Cohen had become aware of being entrusted with a kind of mission, or with a tradition of passing on knowledge, light and peace. After all, was he not a Cohen, a kohen, a priest?

And yet, despite the wisdom accumulated through spiritual experiences and voracious reading, he had never tried to assemble a spirituality à la carte, or to set himself up as a philosopher. Too humble for that. He was only a poet. A bard. An instrument in the hands of a higher power, channeling through him a divine breath whose source or workings he did not always necessarily understand. The correspondence was invisible to the mind and the intellect, but not to the heart.

For Cohen, there could be no question of erasing the differences between traditions whose understandings of God, salvation and humanity were sometimes radically incompatible. Rather, over the course of his many disappointments, he seemed to have learned to distrust the temptation to possess a final truth, even at the cost of mutilating everything that resisted it.

An Intimate Apocalypse

That distrust was not confined to the world of ideas. Its roots lay elsewhere. For decades, until the end of his sixties, Cohen lived in the grip of a depression that stubbornly resisted everything: medication, therapy, spiritual experiences, music… even the pleasures of the flesh, which he had explored with considerable generosity. He was therefore painfully familiar with those inward collapses that make the simplest daily gestures all but impossible; those moments when the mind, turned into its own jailer, no longer allows the slightest prospect of escape… When the low and heavy sky presses down like a lid… Then there is the fragility of every respite, the fleeting consolations, the strange vulnerability of those psychic structures to which everyone entrusts, almost without thinking, the continuity of their existence…

All this he knew only too well.

In Fear of Breakdown, Donald Winnicott proposed the intuition that the catastrophe an individual dreads may sometimes be one that has already taken place, but has never been fully experienced. Cohen himself seemed to recognize in the disintegration of the world an experience he knew intimately. “What’s happening to me is going to happen to everyone,” he said in his monk’s robes at Mount Baldy, in Beautiful Losers, a documentary by Diethard Küster broadcast on ARTE in 1997. There was no euphoria in those words, no sense of superiority. Rather, the dismay of someone who knows, from personal experience, the scale of the disaster to come.

Perhaps, for him, the Apocalypse was less the projection of some future terror than the echo of a collapse long familiar. He had been on familiar terms with it for years. Why should it impress him? On the contrary, perhaps it could even become, paradoxically, a source of comfort to his stubborn melancholy: the reassurance of having been right after years of being tormented by the thought that he alone was lost in darkness. Rather like the character played by Kirsten Dunst at the end of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia: after a lifetime of floundering in anxiety, depression and an inability to perform the most elementary daily tasks, she becomes calm and assured at the announcement of the end of the world, containing the terror and panic of those who treated her as an outsider, and even becoming a source of comfort to her sister during the final cataclysm.

The Man of Paradoxes

Be that as it may, Cohen never turned his suffering into a claim to moral authority. He had no doubt spent enough time in the company of his demons, even if he would admit at the very end that they were merely “middle-ranking and tame,” and dismantled himself so rigorously, through every conceivable level of dualism, that he could hardly believe pain necessarily made anyone wiser. Besides, he possessed more than enough self-deprecating humor to distrust the flattering postures of the accursed poet. His spiritual quest came with an occasionally disarming sensuality, an unabashed fondness for women, improper jokes, elegant clothes and the small vanities of existence. Bottles of 1982 Château Latour. Pinball. Cheetos. Armani suits and fedoras. Smoked-meat sandwiches from Montreal’s Main Deli Steak House. The list goes on.

Neither the island experience of Hydra, almost entirely cut off from the rest of the world in the 1960s, nor the monastic austerities of Mount Baldy had entirely cured him of human weaknesses. He would probably have found it suspicious if they had. Asked about his life as a monk at Mount Baldy, he spoke less about spiritual illumination than about the cognac he had enjoyed there, the cooking skills he had developed to Roshi’s great delight, and the glasses of cognac he shared with his Zen master.

This irony also enabled him not to turn his contradictions into problems demanding immediate resolution. He did not seek to resolve duality, at least not in a coercive or oppressive fashion. Nor did he evade it. He could love God and accuse Him, desire a woman and distrust his own desire, remain attached to his people while challenging acts of violence committed in the name of belonging, or seek inner peace while remaining deeply troubled by the sufferings of the world.

That was Leonard Cohen: a man of paradoxes, yet one.

Take October 1973. When the singer joined Israeli soldiers during the Yom Kippur War, he did not suddenly discover himself estranged from his roots. On the contrary, the desert, the fear and the proximity of death had revived his sense of belonging. Yet he soon perceived how inadequate such solidarity was in the face of war’s human reality. In early versions of Lover, Lover, Lover, his brothers become children, before the explicit reference to the conflict disappears altogether. Loyalty to one’s own people can never be an excuse for denying others their humanity! And in Who by Fire, he even questions divine sovereignty over the fate of human beings, turning prayer into protest.

Returning disillusioned from the experience, Cohen would later joke, with the same sarcasm, that it had merely been a way of “escaping family obligations.” His relationship was already faltering. Thereafter, he would be wary of taking one side against another in political conflicts, maintaining a critical distance from abuses of every kind, even those associated with his own former commitments. Even Lover, Lover, Lover would become a song “for both the Israelis and the Egyptians.”

Broken, the heart opened to everyone, beyond ideology.

And over the years, his message would become ever more openly an appeal for understanding, reconciliation and peace.

Solemn.

Contrite.

Almost priestly.