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

What is remarkable about Leonard Cohen’s gradual process of deconstruction is that it was not confined to religion or politics.

The same dynamic ran through his romantic relationships, that secret life into which Cohen had poured all his fervor and desire. Perhaps it also encompassed his longing for a miracle that would finally allow him to make a relationship work according to his own conception of what it should be: no doubt a place that might at last escape inevitable defeat.

Naturally, writing was the scalpel with which he ceaselessly performed surgery on himself. “Have I carved enough my Lord? …Child, you are a bone,” he was already singing in 1967, in Teachers, on his first album, setting the tone. His poems, transformed into songs, thus became the privileged ground for this almost merciless deconstruction of the images he had fashioned of the women he loved, their beauty, their promises, and the power he had granted them over his own existence.

His earliest albums certainly recounted the misfortunes of his emotional and romantic apprenticeship with the Other, the Buberian “Thou,” an apprenticeship that sometimes led to love triangles, conscious or unconscious (as in the magnificent Master Song and Famous Blue Raincoat). Human relationships, especially with women, were sometimes lighthearted, sometimes tragic, and often both at once. In any case, they opened a door to the possibility of reaching what was essential.

For Buber, the “Thou” designates the other in their irreducible singularity; for Cohen, the deconstruction of the images fashioned by desire gradually opened the way to encountering the woman he loved in all her otherness, beyond the representations in which he had wrapped her.

The Ghosts of Desire

And then, in 1978, something broke in Cohen. Had his separation from his first muse, Marianne Ihlen, toward the end of the 1960s or the beginning of the 1970s, been heartbreaking? There is nonetheless light, tenderness, even optimism, in the images and melodies that speak of this blond beauty who, like him, came from the frozen North. And even in the songs of the dying Cohen that her sunlit shadow still inhabits, Traveling Light or Moving On, for instance, the memory is gentle and serene. Indeed, when Marianne attended his last concerts, he would sing “her” song, So Long, Marianne, on his knees, almost overcome, almost looking her straight in the eye.

The purpose of this article is certainly not to pry into the private life of a man who disclosed only what he chose to reveal, most often with modesty and grace. But his divorce from the woman he never married, the mother of his two children, Adam and Lorca, Suzanne Elrod Bétancourt, left deep scars in Cohen’s work. Signs of them are already perceptible as early as 1973, on the album New Skin for the Old Ceremony (I Tried to Leave You… I close the book on us at least a hundred times…), and especially on Recent Songs (1979), where the breakup takes on the character of a spiritual crisis steeped in the world of Rumi and Attar. The Gypsy’s Wife and The Smokey Life evoke a woman forever fleeing, forever elusive, and bitterly mourn, behind the tragic and deceptive mask of a certain fatalism, a relationship gone up in smoke.

“And now we are wounded…/so deep and so well/that no one can hurt us/except Death itself,” he writes about her in a poignant poem, Slowly I Married Her, published in Death of a Lady’s Man (1978). And decades later, Cohen would return to notes from The Gypsy’s Wife to close his song Crazy to Love You (first sung in 2006 by his partner at the time, Anjani, then recorded by the singer himself on Old Ideas in 2012): “Had to go crazy to love you/Had to let everything fall/Had to be people I hated/Had to be no one at all.”

Deconstruction carried far beyond this threshold heralding nothingness, against which Emil Cioran warned in “Obsession with the Essential,” in A Short History of Decay (1949).

Toward complete disintegration.

Toward the annihilation of the self.

The Other, Behind the Images

The point, of course, was not for Leonard Cohen to deny, through this inner process, what he had felt, still less to cast blame on those to whom he had entrusted his hopes.

He had simply, in a moment of extreme, raw lucidity, come to glimpse how deeply the beloved could be buried beneath images, projections, and fictions. Driven by desire, the beast within him refused to lie down.

Indeed, it would do so only at the very end.

“I don’t need a lover (…)/The wretched beast is tame/I don't need a lover/So blow out the flame,” he thus admits in Leaving the Table, on his final album, You Want It Darker (2016). And already, in Crazy to Love You, that “blessed fatigue” had become a source of salvation.

Be that as it may, beyond disillusionment, surely that was no reason to stop loving! Cohen knew that better than anyone. Lucidity itself could become another ruse of desire. Declarations of detachment could be nothing but a delicious mirage, an especially elegant way of remaining captive to the very thing from which he claimed to have freed himself.

But something really had changed. The older Cohen grew, the more it seemed possible to love without continuing to believe all the stories he had told himself about love. The age of ferocity was fading. Cohen was seeking a measure of peace.

Beauty was changing its face and, without losing any of its intensity, taking on a different radiance.

And above all, even if beauty retained a certain power of redemption, woman was becoming less and less its sole splendid gateway.

After all, every heart would eventually come to love, humbly, “like a refugee.”

He would continue to adore, but the dialectical patterns that had governed romantic relationships were gradually being reconciled and fading away.

That was what the “various positions” were about.

Dualism had ceased to dictate the terms of reconciliation.

Cohen tirelessly sought to attain the One, but a One that would safeguard the Many rather than abolish them.

When the Heart Has Unlearned Everything…

This same personal undertaking of stripping away illusions would gradually extend to intellectual constructions, religious beliefs, cosmic representations, and finally to that tenacious notion that man is master of his own will and keeper of the meaning of his own history.

Steer Your Way (2016), he sang at the very end. All that mattered now was finding one's way by sight alone, “year by year, day by day, thought by thought,” while going about the most ordinary daily tasks, without trying to control what was, in any event, beyond reach.

Anxiety was futile, because it rested on an illusion of control.

Sometimes, after all, everything went in every direction, despite the greatest efforts to keep it contained. And at such moments, he said, one simply had to accept the helplessness that is part of existence. What mattered, in the end, was what happens to the heart when it has unlearned everything.

One simply had to look up at the heavens, smile, admit defeat… and say one’s Hallelujah…

But what, really, was left once all those certainties had been shaken…?