Leonard Cohen: The Beauty of Brokenness

A wordsmith, a thinker. Words wear silence the moment he dons his performance space. The singer-songwriter in focus is Leonard Cohen, the wonder boy of Alessandria, who speaks the language of love in his ambiguous ever-deepening baritone. Probably, he longed to meet Death face to face. Probably, he wanted to whisper the universal anxiety of Gen Y, “Did you ever go clear?”

What makes a writer modern? Is it the minimal effective lyrics underlying the acceptance of universal grief or is it the aura of self-immolation an artist requires for his art? What makes a writer modern, is still a question of ambiguity, rather a study of individual curiosity. But when someone talks about the discomfort and disharmony of human life with such jaw-dropping ease, when someone writes Man’s impending obituary with heart-wrenching prayers, we as the audience are left spellbound. He writes,

” If I am dumb beside your body while silence blossoms like tumours on our lips…

it is because I hear a man climb stairs and clear his throat outside the door. “

Blinded by grief, riddled with conflicts and saddled with sorrow, Cohen is as cold as a new razor blade. A songwriter, poet, novelist and the doyen who treats love as “a memory that betrays faster than friends,” Cohen is the manifestation of human collective consciousness. One moment, he seems deadpan, the next moment he turns dapper. He is unique in the sense that he aces the mundane heartaches with a sense of beauty to fill the void. Or, maybe, as an artist, he likes to think a little more about the philosophy of emptiness, which we all have felt somewhere in our lives,

  “like a bird on the wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir,” he has sung his ways to be free.

His watershed album Songs of Leonard Cohen, followed by Songs from a Room, Songs of Love and Hate, and New Skin for the Old Ceremony deserves special mention.

Cohen’s relevance lies in the fact that his literary works explore common but deep themes including faith and morality, isolation and depression, betrayal and redemption, social and political conflict, sexual and romantic love, desire, regret and loss. I, too, have grown up with a black and white poster of a 25-year-old Cohen sitting in cold rooms, walking past the streets of London, writing sad poems. He was a Bohemian whose first purchases in London were an Olivetti typewriter and a blue raincoat at Burberry.

The song “Blue Raincoat” he wrote in 1971 is a perfect mix of the various themes explored by Leonard Cohen. One of the predominant themes is, “To forgive or not to forgive?” The emotional conflict experienced by Mr. Cohen is concisely packed into one line –

“I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you.”

The stinging feeling of betrayal, from both his best friend and wife and the love he has for them, all came apart, little by little, “falling like ashes”.

The theme and feeling of isolation is perfectly expressed in his song “So Long, Marianne” when he writes,

“Then why do I feel alone? I’m standing on a ledge and your fine spider web Is fastening my ankle to a stone”.

This song expresses the longing the reputed singer-songwriter feels for his lady love Marianne and how he wishes for her to come back and for them to start afresh – a desire that remains unreciprocated, an eternal sadness drools from his eyes and he writes,

“I see you’ve gone and changed your name again

And just when I climbed this whole mountainside

To wash my eyelids in the rain.”

Suzanne, popular as one of Cohen’s best works, is reflective of the immense and boundless love humans feel for each other, as he writes,

“And you want to travel with her And you want to travel blind.”

Reflecting the influence of depression on his writing, Leonard Cohen, in his 1992 song Anthem, wrote,

“My feeling is that whatever I did was despite that, not because of it. It wasn’t the depression that was the engine of my work. . . .  That was just the sea I swam in.”

One need not look into any of Cohen’s songs to understand regret and loss in life. His songs are rather an inspiration that helps the sleepless fight their own silent battles. He pens down in one of his autobiographical entries,

“I suppose I will never lead the ordered life my father led, and I’ll never live in the kind of house he lived in, with its rituals, its dignity, the smell of polish.”

A short goodbye. A few sentences. But words of such clarity, simplicity and beauty are bound to stay with us. Before we conclude, let’s embark on a small personal anecdote:

“He heard that Marianne was dying and two hours later he wrote to her that he too was old and his body failing. He had, of course, written for her before, with the lyrics of So Long, Marianne and Bird on the Wire. This time he told her:

“Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.”

Waiting Rooms. Four bottles of wine a day. Buddhist Monasteries. I wonder how one can compose songs on one’s favourite loss. In “So Long, Marianne”, he writes: “It’s time that we began to laugh/ and cry and cry and laugh about it/ all again.”

Unmatched in his creativity and insight, Leonard Cohen was a true visionary whose voice will be sorely missed. A critic once wrote in a separate statement. “I was blessed to call him a friend, and for me to serve that bold artistic spirit firsthand, was a privilege and great gift. He leaves behind a legacy of work that will bring insight, inspiration and healing for generations to come.”