It’s four in the morning, the end of December…
When he appears on stage your first impression is of a somewhat frail old man, sharply dressed but of humble demeanor. The iconic features have grown even wearier with time, if such a thing is possible. He removes the microphone from its stand, cradles it close to his body, leans gently down into it.
And then that voice emerges, a deep, low rumbling, full of power. Leonard Cohen’s voice has improved over the decades. He is now seventy five, and somehow, despite all the years of too much drink and cigarettes, his voice has a newly magisterial quality.
My friends are gone and my hair is gray,
I ache in the places where I used to play…
And then, singing his great song The Future, he gets to the line “white man dancing”, and he begins to dance lightly about the stage, with a graceful lilting spring in his step, and you realize that the old man was only an illusion, you remember that he has been a Buddhist monk for these past years, and that he really is coming to us from a place where deep spiritual reflection has led him to a kind of untroubled joy.
The love from the audience that flows to this man in continual waves is unlike the mere adulation one sees at other music concerts. This audience knows each of these songs inside out, from decades of intense listening and reflection. With the very first chord of each intro comes a collective cry of pleasure. It is clear that for this joyful crowd this is well loved country. These songs are that path behind your parents’ house where you used to pick blueberries when you were a kid, that oak tree you used to climb with your brother before they chopped it down. Cohen is singing people’s own lives back to them, deeply, unhurriedly, with powerful gentleness, and the mutual energy flowing between the man and his audience is something beyond mere gratitude.
Like a bird on a wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free…
His tone remains humble, unhurried, serenely joyful, as he leads the audience to drink from one deep well after another. Hearing him sing these iconic songs, you understand how many have been his children: Jeff Buckley breaking your heart in Hallelujah, Antony lending his angelic voice to If It Be Your Will, and so many others whom Leonard Cohen has helped to find their own place in the tower of song.
While he sings, your mind goes to other songs, the vast tapestry starts connecting, the story of a long life deeply thought about, shared through the decades in poetry and verse with such unrelenting honest and generosity. This one man is an entire world, a world that connects to our own inner worlds on so many levels. I realize that in times of crisis I often hear his words running through my head, helping me to make sense of things.
And what can I tell you
My brother, my killer
What can I possibly say?
I guess that I miss you,
I guess I forgive you,
I’m glad that you stood in my way…
He never does get around to the sad personal story songs – Famous Blue Raincoat or Chelsea Hotel No 2, and I can understand why. He is no longer in that place of the vulnerable rueful lover. He’s moved to another place entirely now. When he sings I’m Your Man there is no longer any sense of complaint in his rendering of the absurdity of love and lust. There is only humor, a joyful appreciation that people are so delightfully strange in the ways they try to connect one to the other. And yet, all the songs he never sings run through your head anyway, tumbling together.
I remember you well at the Chelsea Hotel
You were famous, your heart was a legend
You told me then you preferred handsome men
But for me you would make an exception
And clenching your fist for the ones like us
Who are oppressed by the the figures of beauty
You fixed yourself, you said “Well, never mind,
We are ugly, but we have the music…”
You realize how much he has helped you to work through the emotions of loss, of transience, the way that intimacy has a way of slipping away before our eyes, and learning to accept such loss as a part of life.
He’ll say one day you caused his will
To weaken with your love and warmth and shelter
And then taking from his wallet an old schedule of trains
He’ll say I told you when I came I was a strange
I told you when I came I was a stranger…
When, quite late in the concert, he finally begins to sing Suzanne, the audience falls to a hushed, slightly stunned silence. For some (myself included), this was the starting point, the song in which we first discovered how music can describe a state of transcendence, can reveal the connection between spiritual and sexual longing. For some in the audience that journey began perhaps forty years ago or more, when the world itself was a very different place. And somehow, after such a long road, this man is still here, still able to convey his soft amazement at the intensity of his feelings for the young girl who had once lain by his side:
Now Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river
She is wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey on our Lady of the Harbor
And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror…
Well, almost everyone was sitting in hushed silence. My companion, generally a very aware and sophisticated intellectual, a professor of media arts, had the opposite reaction. She began to sing the words aloud, happily, obliviously, forgetting who or where she was, completely transformed into a gleeful five year old child. She told me afterward that she had had absolutely no idea that she was the only one singing aloud.
When the concert was over, my friend and I realized that this had been a defining moment for both of us – certainly a defining moment for our friendship. I suspect that many others had the same reaction.
There are indeed holy beings who walk among us, who have much to teach us from the wisdom of their old souls, from souls that have perhaps always been old. And every once in a while, we find ourselves fortunate enough to be in a place where we are prepared to listen. And if we are very fortunate indeed, we might even remember what we have been taught: to be humble, to really pay attention, and to be grateful for the beauty to be found in each other, not in spite of our flaws, but because of them.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
