Thinking about Leonard Cohen

What do you think of the songs of Leonard Cohen? How do you respond to them?

When I first heard Songs From A Room as a teenager, a couple of years before my first clinical diagnosis of depression, I utterly fell in love with them. The darkness, the weariness, the loneliness, the sadness and the vivid shards of everyday detail — I listened to them avidly, again and again. I sat up late playing the record (vinyl discs then, of course) borrowed from one kind friend on the record player borrowed from another, lost in my own darkness, weariness, loneliness, etc etc, listening to Leonard Cohen's. At last! Someone who understood!

Later on, as a young mother, at sea in chronic depression, isolation and the terrors of trying to look after babies, I absolutely could not listen to Leonard Cohen's songs. Even the merest snatch of a phrase precipitated the engulfing swirl of nightmare.

Then came the internet and I read more about his life, such that the man stepped out from behind the songs. I read about the struggle he had to go on stage, and the release from that in the tour he made after his big financial crash in his 70s when his money was stolen. I related to that, too — my first agent also stole my money, just I didn't have so much in the first place; so I moved to Chip MacGregor after that and things went better. I read about Cohen's buddhism, and how he involved himself in the nursing care of his buddhist master in that man's dying. I saw how the faith and compassion I'd felt so clearly in the songs was the keynote of his life, really; kindness and courage and honesty. What a lovely man.

After that, in recent years, I started listening to Leonard Cohen again, and this time it was different.

In the intervening years that I've fasted completely from all things Cohen, I've worked a lot with people who are dying and bereaved, I've made my journey into minimalism and now live the smallest simplest life imaginable, and I've worked and worked on my physical health to balance mood and encourage wellbeing. I keep a discipline of quietness and seclusion from the world, and in so doing I dodge overwhelm. So this time round, listening to Cohen's superb last album You Want It Darker, of which this is my absolute favourite — I love it — I felt so differently about the music and the man. 

From my perspective on life now, for one thing what I'm listening to is more him than me; I'm interested to note his suffering as well as his skill, and discern the core of sustaining warmth that enabled him to get through it all. As a teenager, what I wanted was someone to put into words how I felt, someone to understand. Now I find my own words, and have learned to live with being unheard and not understood — partly because (a treasure to me) there's a kindred, people who have heard me, understood me, taken the trouble from all over the world to find me and talk with me and share their lives (that's you). For another thing, I've made peace with my own needs in life, and grasped that the hunger for quietness and simplicity means I so easily go into the overwhelm that then manifests as depression. Because I so often have to stop, withdraw, I have my critics, some of them fairly savage, others just working on their own assumptions that are simply wrong, but I can live with that. I have no position to maintain. I don't need to try and please anybody. 

When I listen to Cohen's last album, sometimes I wish the stars had been differently configured and I had actually personally known him. I listen to the line "I'm angry and I'm tired all the time" in his song Treaty, and I have a feeling I could have helped with that. He tackled depression with drink and drugs and religion, all of which tend to bring temporarily the relief you grab for, but dig it in deeper in the end. There's a reason your liver got its name; my own experience has been that, cleansing and cleansing, drawing out the interminably long, long string of life experience packed and folded away in there as physical memory, it has been possible to increase peace and decrease anguish. I know he had cancer and crumbling bones and all that agonising, debilitating stuff, and he was old, but even then there are things one can do to help. And in general, in my one life without the extreme challenges he was facing, I find giving quietness and sensitivity permission, and keeping to a discipline of extreme simplicity, and eating the right things, one can end up much less angry, and tired only most of the time — in a good patch, only part of the time. I wish his courage and his humour hadn't been quite so desperately needed. I wish his faith hadn't shone alone in darkness like Venus on a clear December night.

I wonder what's happening to him now, in the light world? Has he work left to do? Is he simply free, released into the heart of all wisdom, beauty and compassion? How did he acclimatise to light? Did he find what he needed? 

My friend Pearl, who died in December, was around for a little while after that to help with her funeral, moving the energies around in her typically sweet and gracious way, but after that she was gone. I can imagine her hungry and excited for the experience of the light world which was always her real home, her soul's environment; it floated round her like a fragrance. It seems to be different with different people — my husband Bernard hung around for ages, leaving signs and wanting to watch over me. Even now that he's moved on and I've been quite fierce over the severance, I still have a little pension that came from him, that helps every month. 

And in these days (weeks . . . months . . . years . . . ), my mother is making her slow and cautious way out of this world, like an animal ambling along the track, stopping to taste every fruit and sniff every flower, no haste, no sense of urgency, just on the way. 

But I'm getting off topic now — starting to think about death instead of Leonard Cohen; an easy enough hop to make, after all!