Speak to Me, Leonard
Although my own musical tastes and those of my parents didn’t always match, we did respond favorably to both the majestic symphonies of Gustav Mahler and the folkish songs of the austere, gravely-voiced Canadian composer Leonard Cohen. It wasn’t just the legendary songs like “Suzanne,” “Hallelujah,” and “I’m Your Man” that caught my fancy, but the subdued and more philosophic compositions of his later years as found in spare albums like “Old Ideas” and “You Want It Darker.” Cohen always had a loyal following, but for most of us he is an acquired taste and these days the greater part of his oeuvre generally goes unheard and unheralded. As a sometime folksinger and self-taught guitarist, I find his tunes accessible and relatively easy to capture, which adds to his appeal. And of course, I’ve also turned the corner from middle- to what geriatricians euphemistically call the “young” elderly. Cohen’s late production fits my demographic like a soft, well-weathered leather glove.
But I’m not meaning for this to be a musical review. Rather, I was struck by a comment Cohen made in the course of a 2016 interview that I stumbled upon in The New Yorker. Published just before he passed away, the article quoted Cohen as saying, “I have no idea what I’m doing. As I approach the end of my life, I have even less and less interest in examining what have got to be very superficial evaluations or opinions about the significance of one’s life or one’s work.”
I thought that was a remarkably candid statement from a putatively “serious” and critically acclaimed composer/musician. One could conceivably read Cohen’s statement as that of an arrogant artist who disdains reviewers and critics alike. Cohen seems to assume a sphinx-like posture, holding fast to the secrets of his craft. But then there’s the Zen-like first line - “I have no idea what I’m doing” - that casts doubt on the forgoing interpretation. Is Cohen saying that there really isn’t anything to learn about either him or his songs other than what they’ve already said? What you see is what you get. Some of Cohen’s songs are amusing, some are ribald, some spiritual, some romantic, some uncategorizable but much of it highly personal. If one detects profundity in some of this confessional outpouring, it may have been intentional, but then again, maybe not.
I’m no Leonard Cohen. I’m neither musically gifted nor do I have a poet’s talent for using imagery and metaphor affectingly. But over my lifetime I’ve written a whole lot of stuff, mostly occasional essays and sermons with a relatively short shelf life. Like other people in the word business, I’d like to think that a small portion of this output, culled from a closet full of banker’s boxes and digital files, would perdure and outlive its author. What other species of immortality can one hope for once metaphysical options are off the table? But Leonard Cohen’s apparent reluctance to entertain even this possibility is refreshing. My father grew desperate in his last decade and, after a sixty year hiatus, began writing again (quite badly as it happens). Like the character Roquentin in Sartre’s novel Nausea, he longed to produce something enduring to validate his existence. But wouldn’t it be a relief to simply do what one must do - feels called to do - and put this fever dream of creating an enduring personal legacy out of our minds once and for all?
I don’t know. I’m probably getting Cohen all wrong, although he did possess a Buddhist sensibility and there is something very Buddhist in his nonchalance about other people’s opinions of his work. As for me, I am quite content to let the unfiltered music speak to me directly .
