On exodus and eternity

Leonard Cohen is back from the dead

Hearing Leonard Cohen’s voice—solemn, steady, divine—is like hearing a voice you have always heard, one that you have always known, one that lives in perpetuity. It is this steadfastness that makes his music all the more jarring; it is a reminder that he is there, as he has always been, whispering some ancient secret, some primordial myth that you think— that I think—only he could know. 

Leonard Cohen is the man who seems to turn up out of the blue and—promptly, unequivocally—dazzles. But he dazzles with a pretty kind of sorrow; a sorrow half-exposed, scars and stories laid bare, the Other, wrapped up in a suit—stoic, old-world, bygone.  

Cohen is back from the dead. It’s hard to believe that he is even gone. His farewell has seemed like one long holiday, maybe to the Greek island of Hydra, as he did in the 60s, or perhaps, a return to the monastery—the Mount Baldy Zen Center—where he became a Buddhist monk 30 years later. His passing seems like an intermission of sorts, because Cohen, after all, has always tended to hide away. But he didn’t see it as hiding—on Hydra, he wrote some of his most unorthodox work; Beautiful Losers, his 1966 novel, was reviewed in the Boston Globe—they declared: “James Joyce is not dead. He is living in Montreal under the name of Cohen.” The mistake? He was living in Hydra.  

Maybe 2016, the year of his death, was only his cue to leave, so that he could turn up once more, out of the blue.  

And he has done just that. Recently, Cohen (his “people”: Columbia Records, Legacy Recordings, his producer, Adam Cohen—yes, his son) has released a new song titled “What Happens to the Heart”. It will be included in Cohen’s next album, Thanks for the Dance, scheduled for release on the 22nd of this month.  

He sings in “What Happens to the Heart”: 

Now the angel’s got a fiddle 

The devil’s got a harp 

Every soul is like a minnow 

Every mind is like a shark 

I’ve broken every window 

But the house, the house is dark 

I care but very little 

What happens to the heart 

If his last album, You Want it Darker, was a sort of farewell, imbued with religious imagery, humour, and lamentations on regret, his posthumous record is a new “hello”, not quite a continuation of his canon, but music that is largely shaped by the knowledge that it will be received once he has already said goodbye. 

I know that my love of music—Cohen’s music, above all—strays into exaltation. I can imagine some calling this a “worshipping of false gods”. They might be right. Kurt Cobain famously sang in “Pennyroyal Tea”: “Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld / So I can sigh eternally”. When I listen to the songs of Cohen, I imagine that he may be a prophet; not one of any particular religion, but a twenty-first-century prophet, whatever that means. I remember that the name “Cohen” comes from the Hebrew for “priest” and denotes a priestly lineage. I remember that Cohen has been dubbed “the high priest of pathos”. I remember that there is a Cohen mural in Montreal, a nine-story altar. There he is wearing a fedora, and his right hand is over his heart. 

In an interview about his father, Adam Cohen states, “He would often say, ‘No matter what oblique strategies I employed’– and there were many of them, from women to drugs to various schools of philosophy and religion – ‘the only thing that offered any solace was the work’. He would say that self-mockingly, as if the answer was always there. It was always the page.”  

Perhaps the modern prophet is the writer.  

I know that Cohen’s transfixing lyricism does not make him divine. If anything, it indicates his flaws, his limitations, his mistakes, his sins. His masterpiece, “Hallelujah”, is moreso about grappling with these flaws, all of which are deeply human.  

Reflecting on her performance of Cohen’s song at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, k.d. lang offers her interpretation of his lyrics. “To me it’s (about) the struggle between having human desire and searching for spiritual wisdom. It’s being caught between those two places.” She herself is also a Buddhist, and notes, beautifully: “He was a translator between the gods and humans.” All troubadours are.  

In “Tower of Song”, Cohen sings: 

But you’ll be hearing from me baby, long after I’m gone 

I’ll be speaking to you sweetly 

From a window 

In the Tower of Song

Once more—I am excited, and patiently waiting—for his return.