When Leonard Cohen, whose legacy will probably live forever, died last week, public mourning was more withdrawn than usual. Perhaps it had to do with all the other news of that week, and how the luxury of emotional reactions seemed futile against humanity’s folly. So people shared songs without musings. And goodbyes without eulogies about when they first heard hello. But even if he had passed away in less fraught a week, these responses may have been the same. His lyrics had a way of saying everything necessary, at once personal and all-encompassing.
Leonard Cohen’s words often found us in intimate moments, or more precisely, led us to them — gently swinging the door open for intimacy to wander in and close it promisingly behind her. I thought over the songs that had imprinted themselves on the corridors of my memory and blushed. There were rooms in low light, there were roofs in moonlight, there were regrets turned rosy by what that poet’s baritone made us believe. There were reasons. And there was no reason to reveal them.
There were other kinds of poignancies too. A new friend with whom Suzanne was drunkenly sung, still demurely seated at a just-cleared lunch table in Calicut, who passed away not long after and who the song now always reminds me of.
But I can’t write about him without feeling that it would anger the old friend, who is no longer one, the one who he actually belonged to. But like songs, or like secrets, does anything ever only belong to one person alone? The answer is yes, but only that which rests on a palm, not inside a fist.
There will be many people who know only one song of Cohen’s, and they know it in someone else’s voice. They know it from Jeff Buckley’s dulcet rendition or they know it from Shrek (or one of the hundred and one TV shows or films that elevated any scene at all through Hallelujah alone). And to them, I say: there’s so much more. Begin with the ones that feel like you’ve heard them somewhere (you have), but maybe weren’t listening as intently then: Famous Blue Raincoat, Bird On A Wire, Dance Me To The End Of Love.
And then — if you’re still interested — find my rare favourite, The Gypsy’s Wife, with the wild woman, the Salome-Kali dancing with a decapitated head on the threshing floor in the liminality between light and dark. Go further — chase Cohen’s words from the audial to the page. Read his poems. Read his novel, Beautiful Losers, on the Native Canadian saint Katherine Tekatwitha, one of the last things he authored before a nervous breakdown led him to realise he needed to move towards the stage.
Go talk to someone else who loved his work so much they ruined some of his songs for themselves by giving them away, and this is what you’ll learn: still, because they are simply too beautiful to not share, they’ll give them away again. That’s Cohen for you: a spiritualist who knew that transcendence was not in renouncing the world, but in taking its hand, reading its open palm.
(The Chennai-based author writespoetry, fiction and more)