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

Even on the threshold of death, Leonard Cohen still had scores to settle with his God.

That complicated friendship refused to mellow, despite the ravages of time.

Throughout his life, Cohen had tirelessly sought traces of a divine presence in the beauty of the world and of bodies.

The search had proved fruitful.

The search had proved barren.

The world was moving inexorably toward the Apocalypse.

Prayers remained unanswered.

“I had no trouble betting on the flood, against the Ark,” he acknowledged in Happens to the Heart, a song released posthumously.

But how could one continue to hope for repair when creation itself seemed condemned to be torn apart?

One element of an answer to this question may be found in Jewish mysticism. More precisely, in the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, as interpreted by Gershom Scholem.

For Luria, as read by Scholem, Creation bears the marks of a primordial catastrophe. The vessels intended to receive the divine light are said to have shattered, scattering their fragments and the sparks imprisoned within matter.

Exile thus ceases to be an exclusively historical condition and becomes a constitutive dimension of the cosmos. The world itself is left dislocated, deprived of its original harmony, whose remnants lie scattered.

Yet catastrophe, far from abolishing responsibility, opens its arms to it.

There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.

And this saving light must be “helped” to enter.

Tikkun, the undertaking of repair in which human beings are called upon to participate, consists precisely in gathering the scattered sparks and thereby contributing to the restoration of what has been broken.

But this is an immense task, one whose scope infinitely exceeds the possibility of individual salvation.

How could one wander through the Canadian singer’s work without thinking of those countless fragments of light, those separated lovers, those beings exiled from themselves, those prayers addressed to a God whose absence sometimes seems the most painful of presences?

And how could one fail to recognize, behind so many supplications, the stubborn desire to repair a creation whose incompleteness seems to reach its very Creator?

From Suzanne (1967) to Listen to the Hummingbird (posthumous, 2019), is it not this same movement that emerges, time and again?

The Broken Heart of Heaven

In Come Healing, from the album Old Ideas (2012), Cohen carries this intuition so far as to formulate, not without audacity, a startling theological position. Namely, that the wounded Heart beneath seems to have something to teach the heavenly Heart above, itself broken.

What a reversal!

Suffering is no longer merely that of the creature awaiting healing from God. It runs through the relationship between man and the divine, and the latter now appears to be implicated in the very repair it was supposed to bestow!

In his later years, Cohen had also become fascinated by the speculations of a self-proclaimed heir to Sabbateanism, Reb Yakov Leib HaKohain, whose project consisted precisely in “repairing” the Face of God. Eric Lerner, his friend of forty years, recounts that in 2013 Leonard introduced him to these theories, which he himself described, not without irony, as a high-class variety of “spiritual pornography.”

But what becomes of this promise when it encounters the persistence of evil? The victims continue to mount. Crimes invoke sacred justifications, while forgiveness sometimes serves as a cover for impunity. And now human beings themselves seem to have lost even the capacity for remorse.

This is the question he raises incessantly in most of the songs on his last three albums released during his lifetime.

The Insolence of Fidelity

In Leonard Cohen, there is a constant, almost physical impossibility of separating the love of God from the anger he feels toward Him.

A veritable hainamoration with the Demiurge.

Absolute fidelity to God thus excludes neither reproach nor accusation.

It is precisely the intimacy of the bond that permits an insolence which, in any other circumstances, would border on blasphemy.

Cohen adored God as he adored women.

Even to the other side of love.

Indeed, the sleight of hand is so unsettling that many songs in which he seems to be addressing a woman can also be heard as prayers to God, the celebrated Dance Me to the End of Love perhaps being the epitome of the genre.

This ambiguity also runs through Coming Back to You, The Law, If It Be Your Will, Ain’t No Cure for Love, Amen and Different Sides. The boundary between earthly passion and the quest for the divine often remains fragile, elusive.

In A Street, where the person being addressed could perfectly well be a woman, the poet seems to reproach God for having forgotten the most elementary duties of love and abandoned His creation.

The beloved (God?) has joined the militias and adopted their camouflage, leaving Man to the household chores and the raising of children. Cohen thus seems to remind the Creator of the responsibilities He has neglected in favor of human quarrels.

And with his final album released during his lifetime, You Want It Darker, this relationship reaches the very limits of endurance. Beyond mercy, the poet, at the end of his life, calls the Most High to account for the night that continues to spread over His creation, the unanswered prayers, the suffering of the innocent, and the promise of a repair whose fulfillment now appears increasingly uncertain…

And yet, even if the Treaty of peace between the two loves seems beyond reach, he still says Hineni.

“Here I am.”

“I am ready.”

The man who had questioned, in his youth, the sacrifice of Isaac thus responds, on the threshold of his own death, to the call that had once led Abraham to contemplate sacrificing Isaac on Mount Moriah…

But the old Cohen’s Hineni in no way erased the condemnation, in Story of Isaac, of sacrifices imposed upon the innocent in the name of a higher revelation…

It is entirely legitimate to doubt that Leonard Cohen ever found an answer to his accusations.

Drawing on the teachings of Ramesh Balsekar, perhaps he had even relinquished the idea that an answer might ever be given to him.

But he had said what he had to say.

Even to God.

What Remains to Be Done

And yet, perhaps Cohen found something other than the answer he had ceased to seek.

A few weeks before his death, he told David Remnick, in his final interview with The New Yorker, that the inner voice which had pursued him for so long with reproaches had finally grown compassionate.

It no longer endlessly accused him of his shortcomings and failures, but now simply reminded him that there were still a few things to do, some work to finish, and that tired body which still needed tending to.

After the prayers, the women, the spiritual masters, the monastic retreats, the endless journeys into the depths of consciousness, the revelation had, in the end, something almost trivial about it.

Perfectly ironic.

Entirely Cohenian.

Putting his house in order.

The wandering poet had spent his life searching for a way to dwell peacefully in a world that never ceased to fall apart.

And now, just as he was preparing to leave it, he was still tending to a few unfinished songs, to his loved ones, and to the affairs he did not wish to leave them in disarray!

But this demand he made of God had another side, a far more intimate one. Cohen, too, knew what it meant to be answerable for those one loves.

Eric Lerner also recounts that Cohen had confided to him, on several occasions, his wish to have a single word inscribed on his gravestone: “Father.”

Father.

According to Lerner, Cohen could even envy his zazen master, Roshi, for the absence of scruples and remorse he believed he recognized in him. But his own moral conscience was so deeply woven into his being that he would have had to unravel himself to be rid of it.

In his quest to dissolve the self, Cohen continued to submit to the law of the Sacred Heart.

His own.

Which went on burning like shish kebab.

After all, he was part of the abandoned creation.

And even if defeat was inevitable, he would not renounce his humanity.

The key to the enigma, then, lay in the very act of bringing his existence to completion rather than finding a meaning for it!

The catastrophes foretold by the future were nevertheless no excuse for abandoning everyday obligations.

History was going to hell? That did not relieve anyone of the duty to do their work and care for their loved ones, still less of the duty to acknowledge their faults.

The world had become irreparable? That could hardly justify abandoning to their fate those whom it was still possible to help.

This fidelity to ordinary, almost modest, “popular” problems is the fruit of a long apprenticeship.

For the Cohen of You Want It Darker, beyond the mysteries of religions and philosophies, life does not necessarily need to be understood in order to go on being lived.

Dwelling in the Tear

Three years after his death, the posthumous album Thanks for the Dance, completed under the direction of his son Adam, would shed further light on this strange wisdom of his final days.

In The Hills, a song on which Patrick Watson also collaborated, Cohen evokes the exhaustion of his body, the medication that still allows him to carry on, and the undertakings he will never bring to completion.

Yet amid this defeat, an unexpected prospect emerges.

He knows that a woman will come after him. A woman not yet born, who will take the path he had set out upon and accomplish what he will have left unfinished.

Who is she? A spiritual heir, an unknown woman to whom he would pass on his desire, a figure of the future whose face he will never see?

The ambiguity remains complete.

All the more so because an evolution in the text deserves attention. In the original poem, published in Book of Longing in 2006, this woman was to carry forward what no one had yet accomplished. In the song, she will accomplish what Cohen himself will have left undone.

Incompleteness suddenly acquires a personal dimension.

But the woman who comes will possess her own freedom. She will follow a path already traveled, without her predecessor being able to determine what she will make of it.

The unfinished, too, is passed on!

The poet dies, his work remains open, and perhaps someone else will take up the torch.

Repair may thus continue beyond every individual existence, through beings who will inherit fragments whose very origins they may sometimes never know.

The irony is all the more striking because his own son did indeed help give new life to the songs Leonard had left behind!

The transmission had already begun.

But in another song from the same album, It's Torn, Cohen seems to push this intuition to its most radical consequences.

This time, the tearing reaches even the categories that once made it possible to conceive of the world. Beauty, death and mercy come apart. Kingdoms, allegiances, oppositions and certainties are swept in turn into a fragmentation that no synthesis seems capable of overcoming.

And yet, there are still a few fragments to reunite.

In this song, Cohen himself calls for the scattered and lost pieces to be gathered together, inviting us to recognize the lie even within what’s holy, and light even within what is not.

Tikkun itself seems to have undergone the ordeal of disenchantment.

Repair no longer necessarily carries the promise of a harmony regained. Universal order may never be restored, any more than justice may ultimately be done for all the victims.

The world may well remain torn.

Loves, beliefs, nations and human beings may go on struggling with their contradictions, without reconciliation ever taking the form of a definitively reconstituted whole.

There would then remain another possibility, one Cohen had sensed long ago: living among the fragments, welcoming them without claiming to fuse them into an artificial unity.

Continuing to love, with the wounds that love may never be able to erase.

Remaining faithful, without turning fidelity into possession.

Embracing chaos, quite simply.

Reconciliation could thus begin with the acceptance of fragmentation, and continue through those acts of repair that each life performs before leaving them to others.

There is no resignation to be found in this intuition.

Acceptance of the human condition still demands resistance to the violence that disfigures it. Each person remains responsible for their actions, bound to repair what can be repaired.

This acceptance merely strips human beings of the extravagant presumption that the world must necessarily conform to their idea of it in order to deserve to be loved.

In this respect, Cohen may have taken the path furthest from the one contemporary humanity is generally following.

He had gradually stripped his own affiliations of their absolute character, at the very moment when the fear of fragmentation was awakening nostalgia for exclusive totalities.

The disappearance of certainties led some to fabricate new ones, more rigid, more aggressive, more murderous. Cohen, meanwhile, was learning to live with their incompleteness.

Amid the ruins, even in the experience of catastrophe, he continued to seek what still made it possible to enter into a relationship with the other.

And perhaps it is precisely in this fidelity to a work that can never be completed that the most singular part of his legacy lies.

For if the repair of the world remains unfinished, nothing prevents the one who departs from hoping that another will gather the fragments left behind.

And perhaps it is in this that he will live forever, as the poet of brokenness, compassion and aching love.

That love which comes at the end, at the very end, of darkness.

After the End of Love.