THE LOST POETS
Cohen’s death a staggering sucker punch at a time when we need our dreamers the most
Just when you thought 2016 was done breaking our heart.
Leonard Cohen leaves us when we need him most. His passing, at the age of 82, was announced Thursday night, the latest shock wave in a year of seismic sorrow for the music industry.
Could someone please check Bruce Springsteen’s vital signs? Has Paul McCartney gone for his annual checkup? Does Mick Jagger have a clean bill of health? Is everything cool with Stevie Wonder and Stevie Nicks?
We can’t afford to lose any more legends. Not this year, not after so many bid the ultimate farewell, a list that includes Prince, David Bowie, Glenn Frey, Mau- rice White, Keith Emerson, Merle Haggard and many others.
We lost fabled producers like George Martin, the visionary behind The Beatles. We experienced the anguish of mourning the living after Gord Downie, beloved frontman of the Tragically Hip, was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. And now this. Cohen was 82. In Cohen years, that could be 42 or 112.
He was always younger and older than he seemed. This timelessness, this immunity to the whims of a culture forever in flux, is why his art — poetry, music, literature — endured and found new fans, year after year, generation after generation.
It’s why his demise would always feel like a sucker punch.
No cause of death was given, as if the details did not matter in our grief. He’s gone. Period. But according to reports, including in the Washington Post, Cohen slipped away on Monday, a day before the U.S. election and three days before we were told.
He controlled the darkness even after the end.
To be in the presence of Leonard Cohen’s art — poetry, song, literature — was to be put in a trance. Time and space ceased to exist. Melodies were spells.
Words turned into vivid images that flickered to life, haunting and detached, candles glowing in an emotional labyrinth without walls.
Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic ’til I’m gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
And just when the world seems in dire need of poets and dreamers, we lose the most reliable tour guide into journeys of the heart, to the end of love.
The irony is only Leonard Cohen can make sense of losing Leonard Cohen. When asked to explain his art nearly 30 years ago, he laughed.
“I haven’t got a clue,” he said. “I think it just comes down to nudging the guy next to you and saying, ‘That’s the way, isn’t it?’ ”
This was the sacred bond between Cohen and the admirers he amassed over a half century of peerless nudging: the answers were the questions. It was just you and him, student and teacher, both searching for the way in that labyrinth.
“Hallelujah,” “Suzanne,” “So Long, Marianne,” “Everybody Knows,” “Famous Blue Raincoat,” “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye,” “The Partisan,” “Waiting for the Miracle,” “Avalanche,” “Bird on the Wire,” these were not songs so much as liturgical meditations in a solemn baritone.
Please bow your heads and face the troubadour. The service is now starting.
Cohen never really tore up the charts. He was too busy tearing up the truth. His success was always more existential than commercial. He was indie or alternative long before those labels existed. His relentless drive to create new art — his 14th studio album, You Want It Darker, was released last month — in turn created something of an oxymoron: a cult figure of mass adoration.
This was not the music you heard at dance parties, weddings, proms, malls or any other places of social interaction. This was music for individuals or couples, one or two at a time. You listened to these songs to think, to reflect, to shine a light in the darkness. The spare lyrics felt like sand falling on a catacomb of hopeful despair. So many of those songs feel a lot like this year. Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in Cohen could be funny and crude. He was drawn to the flesh as much as the heart. He could be acerbic and political, which only compounds the tragedy given the events of this week. Cohen was the antithesis to the venal blowhards in our midst.
We truly need his light more than ever.
As my colleague John Sakamoto observes about Cohen’s 1992 album The Future: “It’s set in a historically dark time. It feels like it should be ironic, but it’s not. Hell, it celebrates democracy in America while worrying about its future. Twenty-four years after its release, it could turn out to be the soundtrack for the next four years.”
So many terrible things have happened this year. And now we’ve lost the most soothing perspective on all that is terrible.
The prophetic light Cohen radiated came from his longing to understand why we feel the way we feel, why we do the things we do, why the world is the way it is.
It came from a lifetime of unflinching inquiry across borders.
Cohen was born in Montreal and died in Los Angeles. In between, he touched down in New York, England, Israel, Cuba and Greece for various durations. He travelled widely and never stopped asking questions of himself and the universe. It was a spiritual voyage rarely seen in contemporary pop. Cohen was so blind to his own material needs, he didn’t realize a manager had depleted his bank accounts, leading to litigation and, by sudden financial necessity, a triumphant world tour.
This exclusive focus on his art is why most musicians will always call Cohen the standard bearer of authenticity. As he once explained to Rolling Stone: “I always experience myself as falling apart. The place where the evaluation happens is where I write the songs, when I get in that place where I can’t be dishonest about what I’ve been doing.”
Dapper on the outside and brooding underneath, always oozing charm, Cohen self-evaluated across an imperfect life while leaving behind one of the most exquisite bodies of work. He lunged at boulders and then chipped away, grinding and buffing the detritus until his fingers bled and only a diamond of truth twinkled in the dark.
He fell apart, over and over again, helping us get back together.
And now, in a year of unprecedented loss in music, he’s like a bird on the wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir.
Leonard Cohen is free and all we can do is wave goodbye. vmenon@thestar.ca