{"id":19116,"date":"2024-02-01T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-02-01T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/?p=19116"},"modified":"2024-01-31T22:23:34","modified_gmt":"2024-01-31T22:23:34","slug":"life-death-and-leonard-cohen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/2024\/02\/01\/life-death-and-leonard-cohen\/","title":{"rendered":"LIFE,  DEATH  AND  LEONARD  COHEN<\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Norman Warwick finds a fascinating essay.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

LIFE,  DEATH  AND  LEONARD  COHEN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jordan Hamel pens an on-line essay about how Cohen’s dry acceptance of death and the afterlife helped make playing the game of life fairer and less lonesome<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019d love to speak with Leonard, he\u2019s a sportsman and a shepherd, he\u2019s a lazy bastard living in a suit.\u201d Not many of us can get away with embodying the voice of god, but Leonard Cohen<\/a> (left)<\/em><\/strong>  did. After decades of wandering the musical wilderness, he found himself old, broke, swindled and defeated\u2014ready to become the person he was always meant to be. Despite his declarations in \u201cTower of Song,\u201d Cohen wasn\u2019t \u201cborn with the gift of a golden voice,\u201d he carved it from tongues of his failure, out of the side of Mount Baldy, the shorelines of Hydra, the breaths held by grace, the grace to lose and lose again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When I was a teenager, I obsessed over Bob Dylan, Patti Smith (right<\/strong>) and Jim Morrison\u2014all of the rock troubadours. I read biography after biography, spent lonely nights pretending I had found answers and solitude in their inscrutable, surreal and\u2014at times, terrible\u2014poetry. Half a world away, in a small New Zealand town, I wanted to touch God and his troubled flock; I wanted to sit with Kurt Cobain on his MTV bed of flowers. I mistook an unsettled existence for art and fantasized about onlookers cataloging my youthful depression as something universally valuable. I was young and sad and nearly as stupid as I still am now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the O2 Arena, in 2008, 74-year-old Leonard Cohen shuffled on stage amidst an army of aging fans, the ghosts of financially irresponsible and duplicitous managers and the orchestra of longtime collaborators and session musicians he had assembled. He recounted a recent drink he had with his 102-year-old teacher and told the eager British masses \u201cexcuse me for not dying.\u201d I watched a DVD of this concert with my former English teacher, Michelle\u2014the type of teacher who doesn\u2019t use her last name, the type who will enrich your teenage life and love of language in unthinkable ways, especially if you\u2019re one of her favorites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Like every queer-but-didn\u2019t-release-they-were-queer kid in a Catholic school, I was far too attached to my English teacher. I know many of the people reading this right now are thinking about their own Michelle, the teacher or mentor who went the extra mile for them\u2014that showed them the possibilities of other lives when their own became tight and ill-fitting. Michelle introduced me to contemporary New Zealand poetry, to Chekhov, (left)<\/em><\/strong> Camus, Dostoevsky\u2014all of the tools I needed to build an arsenal of insufferable art opinions in lieu of a personality. On the eve of college, I was determined to reinvent myself, to blossom from quiet awkward teen to time-traveling troubadour\u2014a student who\u2019s an old soul and drinks wine and strums a guitar in his dorm late into the evening and scribbles poems on the corners of scrap paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of this worked out as planned. I never learned to play guitar, my poetry was garbage and drinking Merlot in your room as an 18-year-old made people think I was off-putting, not interesting. As hard as I tried, I could not cultivate an aura of mystique. But it didn\u2019t<\/em> dampen my love for those writers or my quiet confidence that I could, one day, be recognized as \u201cNew Zealand\u2019s Bob Dylan\u201d (gross, I know, I apologize).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eventually, I grew tired of teenage Jordan crowing about Bob Dylan\u2014the surrealist carnival prince of folk\u2014and how every lyric was a new mantra for me. One day, I was delivering a sermon about Dylan\u2019s poetic mastery and Brian\u2019s patience ran thin. We finished the job, grabbed a box of terrible beer and retired to his and Michelle\u2019s home so he could introduce me to \u201ca real songwriter, not like your Bob Dylan bullshit.\u201d He put on Leonard Cohen\u2019s 2008 Live in London<\/em> recording and something bloomed in me like a trash bag opening to the morning sun. Not long after this shift, Brian would take me to see Leonard, live in Christchurch, a concert that would change me forever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite being famous for writing prayers to misery, I found joy\u2014joy I didn\u2019t know I was looking for\u2014in Cohen\u2019s songs and his onstage demeanor. I saw someone so comfortable in their own depression but not beholden to it. As Leonard once told journalist Mikal Gilmore, depression wasn\u2019t \u201cthe engine\u201d of his work, \u201cjust the sea [he] swam in.\u201d My frantic consumption of all things Leonard began, and it\u2019s a funny thing to enter someone\u2019s decade-spanning discography near its end\u2014it felt like walking backwards through a man\u2019s life, watching him age in reverse. I took the role of a voyeur who was in far too deep, listening to his famed \u201cgolden voice\u201d then hearing the younger version, no baritone or timbre, just the resonant words and the ideas, the misery, the joy, the verve\u2014all of it present. It felt like listening to a younger man covering his future self.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A decade later, I can only hope that I, too, am growing into a more reasonable version of myself. Despite all that Leonard and his music have given me in my life, he has a lot to answer for. I have journal upon journal of the worst teenage poetry imaginable hidden somewhere I cannot divulge, for self-preservation reasons\u2014all of it inspired by, or dedicated to, Leonard. Pages and pages of uncomplicated, overinflated, indulgent musings on sex and death and love and god from a young boy who didn\u2019t know much about any of those things. But, Lord, I thought I had truly stumbled upon all of the answers\u2014I was jacked to the gills on hormones and anxiety; I felt alone in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In reality, I was another \u201clousy little poet[s] coming around, trying to sound like Charlie Manson,\u201d like the ones Leonard took great pleasure in deriding. But I know I wasn\u2019t the only one. If you\u2019re still reading this essay, you probably have similar journals or screeds of secret longing polluting a family basement or forgotten file cabinet. I hope, one day, we can shed our shame like a cloak in spring and celebrate our terrible beginnings. Bad poetry is easy to write and inflict upon an unwilling world, but good<\/em> bad poetry is a rare thing of unexpected exhilaration. I\u2019d like to think that Leonard looked for joy in the terrible just as much as the rest of us\u2014that he found beauty in sewers and alleyways. No, not beauty, something else. He told us all\u2014his lovers, his listeners\u2014that \u201cwe\u2019re ugly, but we have the music\u201d; a mantra I held too close throughout awkward and uncertain years of fear and adolescence. While I embraced the ugliness, I categorically did not have the music crowded spaces; I was life\u2019s unexpected protagonist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t think Leonard always had it either. His debut album Songs of Leonard Cohen<\/em> was released in 1967, when he was the ripe old age of 32. Much like today, Leonard came to be in a generation of art where youth and newness were sought out and displayed like prized livestock at county fairs. It\u2019s a well-known fable that, when asked about the possibility of signing Cohen to the Columbia label, the label head responded \u201cA 32-year-old poet? Are you crazy?\u201d (As a 31-year old poet this devastates me.) A writer friend of mine religiously believes no one should publish a book before they turn 30 (I realize the irony in using this anecdote, considering that Cohen published two books before he turned 30; however, neither of them are particularly memorable so just bear with me). My friend says that, while there is so much to say in youth, whatever you commit to permanence during that time will undoubtedly become a regret or curse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I followed her advice, not by choice but by circumstance. My first book came out in 2022\u2014not long after I drifted into a new decade. Despite making it to the magic number 30, there are still things in my work I regret\u2014things that I can\u2019t revise or erase. Even though everything I produced prior to that point would have been significantly worse, I think reflecting on anything you\u2019ve previously created and feeling completely satisfied with it is deranged and terrifying behavior. I think that\u2019s why Brian was so intent on staring me away from Dylan and into the orbit of Cohen. Where Dylan had self-assurance, Cohen had restlessness. Dylan, at times, wanted to be God or sit beside God; Cohen wanted to kill God and then resurrect him, if only so he could answer to an uncertain world. And who among us hasn\u2019t wanted to kill God? Leonard spent his life demanding those answers. From his much-publicized time spent serving at a Buddhist monastery to his reclusive sojourns to the island of Hydra, he searched. It\u2019s all there, on display in his discography: the constant genre exploration and reinvention, the unpredictable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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From his \u201cone man and a guitar\u201d beginnings to the sparse orchestral arrangements on\u00a0New Skin for the Old Ceremony<\/em>\u2014and onwards through the wall of sound and guns and booze that came with Death Of a Ladies Man, produced by Phil Spector (right)<\/em><\/strong> to the cheap Casio keyboard that carried\u00a0Various Positions<\/em>\u2014Leonard never seemed satisfied musically. 1988\u2019s\u00a0I\u2019m Your Man<\/em>\u00a0felt like a culmination of the first phase of his artistry. His voice was lowered into the ground like a casket filled with velvet and gravel; his deadpan humor and wryness shone through, amidst the heavy subject matter of fascism, betrayal and the AIDs crisis\u2014all backed by his propulsive Yamaha synthesizer. Listening to that album made me feel like I was in a nightclub floating along the Styx. Where to, exactly? It\u2019s unclear, which made me\u2014and Cohen\u2014want to go there even more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like fathers and sons across the world, sports have always been a primary bonding mechanism for Dad and I. It didn\u2019t even matter what sport, it could have been rugby, cricket, basketball, tennis or boxing. There could be a particularly engaging game of snooker on TV\u2014we\u2019d still sit down with a beer and dissect everyone\u2019s techniques. No rivalry or contest was too insignificant for us to invest in. However, as I started to inch towards adulthood, music became another unexpected source of connection for us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It started with classics: mid-2000s arena rock like the Red Hot Chili Peppers (left)<\/strong><\/em> and Pearl Jam, Dad sharing music from his youth, watching DVDs of famous Supertramp and Springsteen concerts on a Friday night. As I started developing something that resembled my own music taste, I grew braver with my suggestions and, to his credit, Dad was surprisingly receptive. Before I knew it, New Zealand indie darlings like The Veils and The Beths were on heavy rotation on Dad\u2019s iPod shuffle gym mix.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second time I saw Leonard live was with my Dad. Same venue, same city\u2014only two years later. I had talked about my first time in his presence as a near-spiritual encounter, but I don\u2019t think Dad was looking for a spiritual experience. I think he just wanted to spend time with his son. Maybe he felt left out that I\u2019d had such a formative musical experience with Brian and not him. I don\u2019t think he expected a near-octogenarian to put on the show of a lifetime. As before, Leonard\u2019s charisma and generosity radiated from the stage. He spoke and sang like a man who wanted<\/em> to be there, beyond all things. He treated the audience like old friends catching up at a funeral. Musically, he was the perfect amalgam of his various eras\u2014having taken the best parts from his past Leonards and displaying a balance of risk and care that only comes with years of experimentation in the face of complacency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Upon reflection, I think it was when I first started to get any modicum of \u201csuccess\u201d\u2014or whatever you want to call it\u2014with my writing that I started tipping the scales heavily in favor of risk over care. I just wanted to push without necessarily knowing what I was pushing towards or against. A few years later, I\u2019m still not certain I know. I thought risk was synonymous with growth. Instead, it\u2019s often a hindrance\u2014preservation is as important as innovation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a man as comfortable in defeat as he was in a black Stetson\u2014and with no interest in conquering Father Time\u2014I would argue Leonard got closer to conquering him than anyone. His 2008 London rejuvenation was just the beginning of a long and fruitful third act; his final trilogy of Old Ideas, <\/em>Popular Problems<\/em><\/a> and You Want it Darker<\/em> was, possibly, the most consistent period of his career\u2014in addition to his most prolific. Having fully grown into his voice, those albums represented reflection and confession, not rumination and regret. The instrumentation is sparse\u2014some strings here, an organ there\u2014as Leonard allows himself the time and space deserved after spending a life taming a beast that wouldn\u2019t go to sleep. \u201c\u2018I like it slow, slow is in my blood,\u201d he once sang.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Truth be told, I don\u2019t remember exactly where I was the day Leonard died. Probably in Wellington, a city an ocean apart from Dad and Brian. Maybe I put on his Live in London<\/em> album and reminisced about the contagious warmth he\u2019d filled the arena with. Maybe I told one of my friends\u2014whom I usually take for granted\u2014that I loved them. Knowing me, I almost certainly panicked about my own mortality, stared deeply into some paisley wallpaper and told myself I wasn\u2019t going to waste another minute avoiding writing or creating the things I wanted to see in this life\u2014and then I, probably, proceeded to do very little about it. I remember asking Brian, one late night at his house\u2014after several red wine bottles and mushroom risotto\u2014if he feared death. He put down his glass and told me that, when you\u2019ve lived as much as he has, there\u2019s not much left to fear. I\u2019m not sure if he was at peace with it or if, with age, he had just become better at ignoring his own ending.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had more or less grown out of the suicidal ideation that washed like a flood from a petty God over the young men of our small town\u2014a luxury many others were not afforded. Death still terrified me, though; it still does. I doubt I\u2019ll ever come to terms with it, but maybe that\u2019s the remnants of youth still alive within me. Leonard once joked that he was \u201ctoo old for suicide,\u201d he said it would be \u201cunbecoming.\u201d In my darker moments, I\u2019ve found solace in his gallows humor\u2014how it permeated across his writing and his music. It met the outrageous conceit of living on its own terms in a way I find incredibly soothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I find myself a little too tempted by the gallows, I always wonder what parts of ourselves we inherit and what parts are of our own making. I never told my dad I had thought about killing myself, never asked him if he felt the same way as a teenager. I never even asked him if he\u2019s scared of dying, like I had with Brian. The prospect of speaking a question like that into the world feels too much like the manifestation of a reality I\u2019m definitely not ready to face, even if he is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On his last album, a month before he died, Leonard seemed as ready as anyone could be. He littered his songs with a dry acceptance of the inevitable, \u201cclos[e]ing the bar,\u201d \u201cleaving the table,\u201d being \u201cout of the game.\u201d I imagine very few of us get the chance to publicly declare our own demise or, as Leonard did so often in his music, argue with himself about what, if anything, comes next. I\u2019m writing this essay half a world away from my home. My writing has given me opportunities to chase dreams and futures I never saw as catchable all those years ago\u2014listening to Leonard, writing atrocious poetry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I still know nothing about sex or love or God. But, every day away from those I care about most still feels like a day lost. Maybe Leonard was right, that the rent we all pay in our towers of song is loneliness in a time we could have spent elsewhere. Deep down, I think I know we all leave the game someday; for now, we\u2019re still at the table, still at the bar\u2014and it\u2019s a blessing to still be here. It was never a curse, and I pray I get plenty of time for midnight arguments with Brian and quiet moments with Dad while the drinks are still being served.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jordan Hamel is a New Zealand writer and performer. He is currently at the University of Michigan on a Fulbright Scholarship. His debut poetry collection,<\/em> Everyone is Everyone Except You, was published in New Zealand by Dead Bird Books in 2022 and will be published by Broken Sleep Books in the UK in 2024. He is also the co-editor of<\/em>  No Other Place to Stand, an anthology of New Zealand and Pacific climate change poetry from Auckland University Press (2022). His recent work can be found, or is forthcoming, in<\/em> POETRY, Sonora Review, Gulf Coast and Best New Zealand Poems 2022.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paste on line is a wonderful site supported by a large handful of excellent staff writers. Their coverage of the popular arts is second to none and frequently includes thought-provoking, and answer-providing  articles such as this above. We are confident this will encourage you to check out Paste on Line, and we are similarly confident that many of you will then subscribe, (and still be happy to get lost down our Sidetracks And Detours, of course).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On his last album, a month before he died, Leonard seemed as ready as anyone could be. He littered his songs with a dry acceptance of the inevitable, \u201cclos[e]ing the bar,\u201d \u201cleaving the table,\u201d being \u201cout of the game.\u201d I imagine very few of us get the chance to publicly declare our own demise or, as Leonard did so often in his music, argue with himself about what, if anything, comes next. I\u2019m writing this essay half a world away from my home. My writing has given me opportunities to chase dreams and futures I never saw as catchable all those years ago\u2014listening to Leonard, writing atrocious poetry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19124,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,45,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-literary","category-music","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19116"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19172,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19116\/revisions\/19172"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}

I think about the sports broadcasters discussing an athlete in their 30s who is still in their prime. Whether it\u2019s LeBron James, Tom Brady, Megan Rapinoe or Richie McCaw\u2014it\u2019s always the same conversation: They marvel at their longevity and their guile and their mastery of the game, all before gently predicting their inevitable demise because, as we all know, finality is unavoidable. As Dorian Lynskey said in his Guardian<\/em> piece shortly after Leonard\u2019s death<\/a>: \u201cFor Cohen, defeat was the truth of things; the source of all the best jokes; the reason to make art; the crack where the light gets in.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n