In my last blog, I confessed that I had set out to share a
eulogy to the great poet and song writer, Leonard Cohen, who died not long ago.
I felt moved instead to speak with my own voice. Thus came a meditation on
broken, discarded toys under the title of perhaps Cohen's most famous song,
(Broken) "Hallelujah."
I invite you now to consider the words of Cohen's close
friend, Leon Wieseltier, for a flavor of this earthy-mystic; this joyful
pilgrim on the pain-full path.
Here then, is that eulogy that moved me so. A worthy Lenten
meditation (links to music at the end):
My Friend Leonard Cohen: Darkness and Praise
By LEON WIESELTIER NOV. 14, 2016
“Dear Uncle Leonard,” the email from the boy began. “Did
anything inspire you to create ‘Hallelujah’”? Later that same winter day the
reply arrived: “I wanted to stand with those who clearly see G-d’s holy broken
world for what it is, and still find the courage or the heart to praise it. You
don’t always get what you want. You’re not always up for the challenge. But in
this case — it was given to me. For which I am deeply grateful.”
The question came from my son, who was preparing to present
the most irresistible hymn of our time to his fifth-grade class and required a
clarification about its meaning. The answer came from the author of the song,
who was for 25 years my precious friend and comrade of the spirit. Leonard
Cohen was the most beautiful man I have ever known.
His company was quickening in every way. The elegance and
the seductiveness were the least of it. The example of his poise was
overwhelming, more an achievement than a disposition, and much more than an
affair of style.
He lived in a weather of wisdom, which he created by seeking
it rather than by finding it. He swam in beauty, because in its transience he
aspired to discern a glimpse of eternity: There was always a trace of
philosophy in his sensuality. He managed to combine a sense of absurdity with a
sense of significance, a genuine feat. He was hospitable and strict, sweet and
deep, humble and grand, probing and tender, a friend of melancholy but an enemy
of gloom, a voluptuary with religion, a renegade enamored of tradition.
Leonard was, above all, in his music and in his poems and in
his tone of life, the lyrical advocate of the finite and the flawed. As he
wrote to my son, who was mercifully too young to understand, he was possessed
by a lasting sensation of brokenness. He was broken, love was broken, the world
was broken.
But “Famous Blue Raincoat” notwithstanding, this was not the
usual literary abjection, or any sort of bargain-basement Baudelaireanism.
Leonard’s reputation for bleakness is very imprecise. His work documents a long
and successful war with despair. The
shattering of love has the effect of proliferating it.
Leonard had an unusual inflection for darkness: He found in
it an occasion for uplift. His work is animated by a laudatory impulse, an
unexpected and profoundly moving hunger to praise the world in full view of it.
His attitude of acceptance was not founded on anything as cheap as happiness.
Leonard sang always as a sinner. He refused to describe sin
as a failure or a disqualification. Sin was a condition of creatureliness, and
his feeling for our creatureliness was boundless. “Even though it all went
wrong/ I’ll stand before the Lord of song/ With nothing on my tongue but
Hallelujah!”
The singer’s faults do not expel him from the divine presence.
Instead they confer a mortal integrity upon his exclamation of praise. He is
the inadequate man, the lowly man, the hurt man who has given hurt, insisting
modestly but stubbornly (except in “I’m Your Man,” when he merrily mocked
himself) upon his right to a sacred exaltation.
Leonard wrote and sung often about God, but I am not sure
what he meant by it. Whatever it was, it inspired “If It Be Your Will,” his
most exquisite song. He sought recognition for his fallenness, not rescue from
it. “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” He once
told an interviewer that those words were the closest he came to a credo. The
teaching could not be more plain: fix the crack, lose the light.
All this gave Leonard’s laughter an uncommon credibility. He
put punch lines into some of his most lugubrious songs. He delighted in
expressing serious notions in comically homely ways. (On ephemerality, from an
unreleased early version of a song: “They oughta hand the night a ticket/ for
speeding. It’s a crime.”) We laughed all the time. At the small wooden table in
his kitchen the jokes flew, usually as he prepared a meal. While he was
genuinely in earnest about the pursuit of truth, Leonard had a supremely
unsanctimonious temperament. Whether or not darkness was to be relieved by
light, it was to be relieved by lightness. Before Passover, which commemorates
the biblical exodus, he sent this: “Dear bro, happy Pesach. I miss Egypt! Love
and blessings, Eliezer.” Before Shavuot, which commemorates the giving of the
Torah in the desert, he sent this: “Dear bro, See you at Sinai. I’ll be wearing
headphones! Love and blessings, Eliezer.” The laughter of the disabused was yet
another of his gifts.
Eliezer was his Hebrew name. We sometimes read and studied
together, Lorca and midrash and Eluard and Buddhist scriptures and Cavafy. We
could get quite Talmudic, especially with wine. In Judaism there is a custom to
honor the dead by pondering a text in their memory. Here, in memory of Eliezer
ben Nisan ha’Cohen, is a passage on frivolity by a great rabbi in Prague at the
end of the 16th century. “Man was born for toil, since his perfection is always
being actualized but is never actual,” he observed in an essay on frivolity.
“And insofar as he attains perfection, something is missing in him.
In such a being, perfection is a shortcoming and a lack.”
Leonard Cohen was the poet laureate of the
the lack, the psalmist of the privation, who made
imperfection gorgeous.
- from the New York Times
(Leon Wieseltier is the Isaiah Berlin Senior Fellow in
Culture and Policy at the Brookings Institution and the author of “Kaddish.”)
