I have an old friend who likes to go by the nom de plume, or perhaps a nom de guerre, Weasel Tracks. A very long time ago a native American shaman bestowed it on him, and it sort of stuck. He is what I like to call a dharma bum. Or, perhaps that’s the title I have bestowed upon him. For sure in my book he is a true person of the way. While he never sought the paths to leadership in any spiritual community, he has practiced deeply, particularly on the Zen way. While he has created his own path beyond names, I think of him essentially as a person of Zen, if a wild card Zen person. I haven’t asked him if he agrees, it’s not really necessary. The important thing is how along the way, always his way, he has grown deep and wise. I adore him. I think he one of the spiritual treasures of my life.
Anyway, that’s a long way around the barn to say a couple of weeks ago old Uncle Weasel sent me a long rumination on Leonard Cohen, someone we both really like.
I asked if I could share it with my Monkey Mind readers. He said sure.
So, here you go…
Leonard Cohen & Me
by Weasel Tracks
As you are obviously fond of Mr. Leonard Cohen, I thought I should write to you about what he has meant to me. Twelve years my senior, Leonard may shuffle off anytime, although that’s true of us as well. I want to record the part he has played in my life.
One thing about the Counter-Cultural Explosion was a great playfulness in the arts. In poetry, that wasn’t expressed so much in the written word, as in the sung. It’s easy to name the great lyricists who have been recognized as poets: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Robert Hunter, Smokey Robinson, Carole King, Marvin Gaye . . . to name only a few North Americans within this international social convulsion.
Leonard was a bit different. He was already a published poet. Sensibly recognizing that poets are not very likely to make comfortable money, he decided to learn how to be a folksinger. How much more probable a folksinger’s fortune may be than a poet’s, is a good question, but he made it work. Besides, as he is said to have said in his biography, by Sylvie Simmons, it helped to impress women enough for him to obtain romantic partners. That thought lurked in my mind as well whenever I fished poetry from wherever it comes. Occasionally, it worked.
I had already swum in the ocean of lyrics from the great body of American Blues and Celto-British folk music, reengineered as acid, folk, and progressive rock, soaking up words from Del Shannon and the Everly Brothers, Joan Baez, Lennon and McCartney, Phil Ochs, and so many others, for four or five years, when I heard Mr. Cohen’s first album in 1967. I took to his songs and his implicit views of the world like a sheet of cellophane to a charged balloon.
The aesthetic influences which silk the rubber of my balloon are:
The Russian Orthodox religion. I was too young to grasp its theology or spiritual technology, but the music, scents, and pageantry of the Divine Liturgy impressed me on a very deep level, whenever my parents were able to make the long, public transit journey into Boston, dragging small children. In adulthood, I came to appreciate its practices, but by then, I had lost an insider’s relationship with Christianity.
The Roman Catholic Church. Because of the inconvenience of distance to an Orthodox Church, and the presence of a small Polish Roman Catholic Church in our town, attended by many Polish immigrants whose language my parents spoke well (indeed, it was my first tongue, as I started life in a Polish refugee camp, to which my Belarusian parents were assigned after the terrible Nazi dislocation of so many people), we frequently attended Mass with Catholics. My parents rightly felt that the theological differences between the two religions were insignificant, and encouraged me to learn religion at the large, mostly Irish church uptown, which provided weekly classes to the public school students by a large staff of nuns and priest. Pieces from the great body of traditional Catholic music could, by themselves, put me in a holy place.
Folk Music. In high school, from which I graduated in 1964, the rising popularity of folk influenced my social sensibility (anti-war, civil rights, labor struggle) and my incipient political understanding, as well as giving me access to a stream of “ordinary” art much deeper than the pop music of the day. I stayed with it, listening to those earnest, passionate, and clear-minded voices as the genre morphed into a large subsection of popular culture. The spiritual and mundane insights of the stressed and suffering children of African slaves spoke to my own people’s suffering, and broadened my experience by proxy.
Psychedelics. Between the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and my graduation from high school, I took my first psychedelic trip, gratitude due to the sacred morning glory. Not much/too much to say about that.
Zen Buddhism. I was aware of Buddhism since I was ten, and felt positive about it, though, of course, it wasn’t the True Religion. When I was fifteen, I read my first Alan Watts Zen book, and was fascinated. Christianity’s (or at least Catholicism’s) hold on me was weakening, but I found the Void scary and didn’t feel I understood it very well. But by 1966, in a general milieu of interest in magic, mysticism, yoga, and all the arcane and alternative spiritual trends, I came to realize that Zen was my true spiritual home and never wavered from that, however much I might study and practice other traditions. I note that, at the time of this writing, I have thus now been a Zen Buddhist for forty-nine years.
Although I first heard Mr. Cohen’s first album in the hard winter I spent in E. Lansing when I abandoned my wife and child just ahead of an impending breakdown, between the awful Democratic Convention in 1968 and the resulting trial of the Chicago 8/7, it’s hard to believe, in seeing it through the misty decades, that it wasn’t part of the earlier psychedelia, conatal with Subterranean Homesick Blues and such. My mental state was quite unstable, yet open to vast possibilities, to other worlds, to fey magic. Steeped in both ecstasy and depression, I temporarily held great power to move other people, having abandoned my defenses and standing exposed to my friends as a weak and naked node of divinity. My touch was a blessing, my insight into the soul acute and healing. That state ebbed as I could not resist refuge in the hedonistic comforts afforded by the bohemian subculture around Michigan State University. Thus, I had no trouble understanding the tones and images of the album, *Leonard Cohen*. In fact, I was surprised by how resonant I was to those lyrics, as if they were exactly what I would write, were I to access those states of inspiration.
That first album has songs that still are among his best stuff. I mean,
When your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn
They will bind you with love that’s as graceful and green as a stem.
. . . and an ape with angel glands
Erased the final wisps of pain
With the music of rubber bands. . . .
I lit a thin green candle, to make you jealous of me.
But the room just filled up with mosquitos,
they heard that my body was free.
Then I took the dust of a long sleepless night
and I put it in your little shoe.
And then I confess that I tortured the dress
that you wore for the world to look through.
An Eskimo showed me a movie
he’d recently taken of you:
the poor man could hardly stop shivering,
his lips and his fingers were blue.
I suppose that he froze when the wind took your clothes
and I guess he just never got warm.
But you stand there so nice, in your blizzard of ice,
oh please let me come into the storm.
The lyrics often echoed through the lens of LSD. I thought I recognized kin in him, but maybe it was just an impression acid gave to much of the music then, feeling like God was sending you personal messages through the radio and record player. It did seem like he had some familiarity with Buddhism and the occult, though.
Another odd thing about him was his obvious affection for Jesus. Though I was pretty ignorant of American Jewishness in high school, after graduation it seemed most of my hippy friends were Jews. I knew from reading that many American Jews were uncomfortable around Christians (for good historical reasons), and that they considered Jesus a “bad Jew.” Among my hippy friends, most Jews were pretty indifferent to traditional religion altogether. But Leonard loved Jesus, as a symbol if not a savior.
Now Jesus was a sailor when he walked across the water
And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower
With his second album, *Songs from a Room*, it was obvious Leonard was not a mere flicker in the history of song. That album contained the spectacularly spooky song, “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy.” A few years later, I lived in a commune in Berkeley. A female housemate I was just becoming interested in jumped off the Golden Gate. I typed up the lyrics to the song from memory, and put the stunningly appropriate words on the bulletin board for my grieving communards.
It seems so long ago,
Nancy was alone,
looking at the Late Late Show
through a semi-precious stone.
In the House of Honesty
her father was on trial,
in the House of Mystery
there was no one at all,
there was no one at all.
It seems so long ago,
none of us were strong;
Nancy wore green stockings
and she slept with everyone.
She never said she’d wait for us
although she was alone,
I think she fell in love for us
in nineteen sixty one,
in nineteen sixty one.
It seems so long ago,
Nancy was alone,
a forty five beside her head,
an open telephone.
We told her she was beautiful,
we told her she was free
but none of us would meet her in
the House of Mystery,
the House of Mystery.
And now you look around you,
see her everywhere,
many use her body,
many comb her hair.
In the hollow of the night
when you are cold and numb
you hear her talking freely then,
she’s happy that you’ve come,
she’s happy that you’ve come.
Rumors about the recklessness of our musical heroes became common. Drinking, drugs, motorcycles, suicide attempts . . . many ordinary hippies had a hard time adjusting to the stresses of the time, and our successful artists had it even more difficult. *Songs of Love and Hate* exposed Leonard’s dark side with a vengeance. Hints of darkness were already present from the first, in songs like “The Master Song.” Although moodiness in a poet surprises no one, the depth of his suicidal depression startled me. The brutal self-mockery of “Dress Rehearsal Rag” said it all, and made me wonder how many more albums we would hear from him. The arrogant, ersatz self-pity of “Avalanche” warded off any easy classifications of simple pathologies with secret transcendences. The album ends with the jolly pessimism of “Diamonds in the Mine,”
And there are no letters in the mailbox,
and there are no grapes upon the vine,
and there are no chocolates in the boxes anymore,
and there are no diamonds in the mine.
which is kind of like a malevolent Heart Sutra. Also notable for what seems to be a casual reference to cunnilingus in those still repressive times:
Well, you tell me that your lover has a broken limb,
you say you’re kind of restless now and it’s on account of him.
Well, I saw the man in question, it was just the other night,
he was eating up a lady where the lions and Christians fight.
Marian, the epitome of hippy womanhood and my most primal lover, came out from Berkeley to visit me in Chicago in 1975. She spent a tumultuous week uplifting and breaking hearts, including mine. At one point, after spending many menacing hours sharpening a very sharp knife in front of a rival for her attention, I threw it into the wall, where it pierced some wiring and shorted out the power, but not before a very impressive spark leapt from the quivering handle. But by the end of her visit, we were all reconciled again, partying like friends. Someone had obtained a concert album of Leonard’s, and we danced and sang along to the *cri de coeur* of “Please Don’t Pass Me By.”
Having been rather battered by my own emotions during the previous decade, I went to seek my fortune in California shortly thereafter. After a few months, I met the lover of my dreams, my life turned around, and my mood vastly lifted. Perhaps, for that reason, I mostly lost track of Mr. Cohen’s work. I was vaguely aware that he was still putting out songs of interest that resonated with both my mystic/occult fantasies and my sexual perversities, but I was lovingly lost in a relationship, the loss of which, fifteen years later, also cost me a romantic innocence which I will never have again.
This is not to say that I stopped listening to Leonard. I still had my old records and frequently relished the poetry of his songs. Sometimes, I used his darkness to investigate my own. My dear woman said she hated it whenever she’d come home to find me drinking rum and listening to *Songs of Love and Hate*. She knew I’d be in one of *those* moods, remembering old pain.
By the time that relationship ended, I had established a daily meditation routine and both of us had quit drinking for a couple of years. That helped me survive the intense trauma of spirit that breakup entailed. At times in that sad, dreamlike decade, I wondered what Leonard was doing, but I wasn’t listening to much music actively. Then, I saw a picture of him with a stern Japanese roshi on the cover of the *Shambhala Sun*! Shucks and begone! he had become a Zen monk!
I bought the first album he made after leaving the monastery. Same old themes, but the depth was even more profound. I especially liked the pair of song poems, “A Thousand Kisses Deep” and “Boogie Street.” Some fine stanzas there:
The ponies run, the girls are young,
The odds are there to beat.
You win a while, and then it’s done –
Your little winning streak.
And summoned now to deal
With your invincible defeat,
You live your life as if it’s real,
A Thousand Kisses Deep.
So come, my friends, be not afraid.
We are so lightly here.
It is in love that we are made;
In love we disappear.
Though all the maps of blood and flesh
Are posted on the door,
There’s no one who has told us yet
What Boogie Street is for.
Why, it was almost like old Leonard had reached satori! In fact, the song “Love Itself” seemed to suggest that. And not confined to merely Buddhist enlightenment, as indicated by “By the Rivers Dark,” with its Cabalistic tone. To be fair, he shared credit for songwriting with Sharon Robinson, but the songs sound completely at home with his voice and soul.
From then on, I bought his albums, um, religiously. *Dear Heather* somewhat disappointed me, until I listened again a few years later. Driving along a quiet highway in upstate New York, I paid total attention to “Undertow,” and realized what a gem of an understated work it is. So I began to listen to the album again. “The Letters,” again with cowriting credit going to Sharon, is a poetic dark piece about undescribed, almost unmentioned, tragedies and reaching out to each other. Quite the masterful storytelling with almost no explication. “Morning Glory” is more a recited poem overdubbed to suggest “a transcendental moment.” “Because Of” is a humbly grateful paean to women who still pay sexual attention to Cohen in his old age.
When *Old Ideas* came along, I bought it immediately. It seemed to me particularly marked with non-dual Judaism. Leonard seems to have become a wise old Jew, ever mindful of his approaching death and his relationship with Whatever gave him his poetry and his religion. People quibble about whether an Abrahamic monotheism can be spiritually congruent with Buddhism (I have spent many years considering the matter), but Mr. Cohen seems comfortable with both, swimming through either with no effort or violation. Or maybe I just see it that way because I’ve swum the same waters? Whatever the case, “Going Home” epitomizes the Jewish side, and “Show Me the Place” even more so. Not so much explicit Zen in this album, but it feels saturated with it, like a high water table just below the surface.
His humor and poetry are in high form in “Amen”:
Tell me again
When the day has been ransomed
& night has no right to begin
Try me again
When the angels are panting
And scratching the door to come in
Tell me again
When I’ve been to the river
And I’ve taken the edge off my thirst
Tell me again
We’re alone & I’m listening
I’m listening so hard that it hurts
Tell me again
When I’m clean and I’m sober
Tell me again
When I’ve seen through the horror
Tell me again
Tell me over and over
Tell me you want me then
Amen
Only someone who both experienced severe depression and got past it could have produced something like “The Darkness”:
I caught the darkness
Drinking from your cup
I caught the darkness
Drinking from your cup
I said: Is this contagious?
You said: Just drink it up
I got no future
I know my days are few
The present’s not that pleasant
Just a lot of things to do
I thought the past would last me
But the darkness got that too
I should have seen it coming
It was right behind your eyes
You were young and it was summer
I just had to take a dive
Winning you was easy
But darkness was the prize
I don’t smoke no cigarette
I don’t drink no alcohol
I ain’t had much loving yet
But that’s always been your call
Hey I don’t miss it baby
I got no taste for anything at all
I used to love the rainbow
I used to love the view
I loved the early morning
I’d pretend that it was new
But I caught the darkness baby
And I got it worse than you
I caught the darkness…
The notes say that “The Unified Heart Touring Band performed Darkness”
[By the way, have you noticed that Ed Sanders, presumably the Fug, produces a lot of Leonard’s songs lately?]
As one who has definitely entered the last stage of life, I love the attitude Cohen presents in the line from “Crazy to Love You”:
I’m old and the mirrors don’t lie
No hedging, no kvetching, it’s just what it is. *Although* . . . the next two lines hint at something further:
But crazy has places to hide in
Deeper than saying goodbye
Then Leonard gives us this remarkable quatrain:
I’m tired of choosing desire
Been saved by a blessed fatigue
The gates of commitment unwired
And nobody trying to leave
Seems like an answer to the purpose of Boogie St., eh?
At the end of that album, the Old Man throws the mantle of certain but flexible authority into the description of some kind of argument that isn’t, and finishes it off with the very humorous
C’mon baby give me a kiss
Stop writing everything down
— Way to stop a war!
I reflected on Mr. Cohen’s substantial influence on me. At first, I think it was because of many common perceptions and attitudes, and even missteps and confusions. We shared a worship of beauty, and a hope for enlightened redemption. We held a reverence for the written, spoken, and sung Word. In age, Leonard made peace with his demons, and I am getting a glimmer of that, too.
What was his output before he left the monastery? I bought some albums from that time, most notably *The Future*. The title song is depressingly prescient, however well-written:
Give me back my broken night
my mirrored room, my secret life
it’s lonely here,
there’s no one left to torture
Give me absolute control
over every living soul
And lie beside me, baby,
that’s an order!
Give me crack and anal sex
Take the only tree that’s left
and stuff it up the hole
in your culture
Give me back the Berlin wall
give me Stalin and St Paul
I’ve seen the future, brother:
it is murder.
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won’t be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant
You don’t know me from the wind
you never will, you never did
I’m the little jew
who wrote the Bible
I’ve seen the nations rise and fall
I’ve heard their stories, heard them all
but love’s the only engine of survival
Your servant here, he has been told
to say it clear, to say it cold:
It’s over, it ain’t going
any further
And now the wheels of heaven stop
you feel the devil’s riding crop
Get ready for the future:
it is murder
Things are going to slide …
There’ll be the breaking of the ancient
western code
Your private life will suddenly explode
There’ll be phantoms
There’ll be fires on the road
and the white man dancing
You’ll see a woman
hanging upside down
her features covered by her fallen gown
and all the lousy little poets
coming round
tryin’ to sound like Charlie Manson
and the white man dancin’
Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St Paul
Give me Christ
or give me Hiroshima
Destroy another fetus now
We don’t like children anyhow
I’ve seen the future, baby:
it is murder
Unfortunately, this is too coherent with my own darkest, perhaps truest, visions. It would be nice to hear someone credible tell me I’m wrong. But if it indeed is “Closing Time,” we might as well step lively about it.
Leonard Cohen is a realist, not a pessimist. Though things don’t look so good, they’ve often looked that way before. Though I think it might be we’ve gone past the tipping point, the point of no return, for the survival of modern civilization, or maybe any advanced human culture, or even the ability of the planet’s environment to sustain human life . . . well, I’ve been wrong before. If I were a policy maker, I wouldn’t count on it, though. In the song “In My Secret Life” from *Ten New Songs*, LC says
Looked through the paper.
Makes you want to cry.
Nobody cares if the people
Live or die.
The ability to disbelieve objective evidence in favor of one’s personal interests is incredibly strong, even in the face of personal extinction, like the cancer killing the body on which it depends. Perhaps there is an inkling in everybody’s deeper psyche that many people, especially those with any power, do their best to ignore. Cohen doesn’t ignore it:
Everybody Knows
(co-written by Sharon Robinson)
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that you’ve been faithful
Ah give or take a night or two
Everybody knows you’ve been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes
And everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
And everybody knows that it’s now or never
Everybody knows that it’s me or you
And everybody knows that you live forever
Ah when you’ve done a line or two
Everybody knows the deal is rotten
Old Black Joe’s still pickin’ cotton
For your ribbons and bows
And everybody knows
And everybody knows that the Plague is coming
Everybody knows that it’s moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past
Everybody knows the scene is dead
But there’s gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows
And everybody knows that you’re in trouble
Everybody knows what you’ve been through
From the bloody cross on top of Calvary
To the beach of Malibu
Everybody knows it’s coming apart
Take one last look at this Sacred Heart
Before it blows
And everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Oh everybody knows, everybody knows
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows
I note that Leonard’s albums are selling very well in the entire English-speaking world, except for the USA. Perhaps he makes Americans too uneasy? I hope so.
We have spent ten thousand years degrading our home planet, and it’s beginning to show.
Do we have guardian angels? Are the Space Brothers going to come down in their UFOs to save our bacon? Is White Buffalo Calf Woman more than a foundation legend? Is Jesus really coming back in this dimension to make a New Heaven and a New Earth? That would be nice, but, again, we can’t count on it. What we have is what we can still do, if we have the will and wisdom to do it.
Yet in my own life, I fault myself for a lack of diligence. I’ve known one can engage in the Great Matter since my late teens, but I’ve gambled on living to at least this long. I have regrets for not practicing harder, for making some wrong choices, for falling into a few addictions, but choice is really an illusion — we do what we can and what we must, in mind of causation and karma and the laws of our own person (just as God must). Although I would wish to have the decades of deep practice that I could have had, I am grateful for the unfolding I have experienced. I hope I feel it’s enough, when I die. So, I can’t condemn the blindness of society in rushing over the cliff, from a stance of my own virtue. Leonard, also, does what he can; in his case, it’s putting this awareness of crisis into song. As I said, he is less popular in America than Australia, Britain, or Canada, or much of the rest of the world.
The latest album (if indeed it is the last, and he hasn’t come out with a new one yet — haven’t checked in a while) is both magnificent and dark. Times have not gotten better; “The Future” is closer. Death is nearer for both of us. The suffering of unseen multitudes impinges on our perceptions more, daily. Leonard presents us with two distinct faces. In one, he is an aloof sage. What concern of his is it that human stupidity proceeds apace, and we drown in our waste or kill ourselves in self-defeating wars? [I picture the humor with which such a person would witness an arrogantly ignorant congregation demanding of their deity that they be rewarded as they deserve.] Yet he is also the uncle who is concerned for the decisions his family has made. He stands by, ready with soft suggestions about how to weather the storm, how to embrace the opportunity yet available to avoid the worst, knowing the signs are that he, like any prophet, will likely be ignored. But what else can one do?
There is yet a third face: the one completely participating in all the bad choosing, servant of dark desires and agent of the demon ego. He can’t fully condemn the philistines of this world, for all their despicable destructiveness of self and other, because he understands the history of their choices by understanding his own self.
Are the faces kept neatly distinct? I admire very much the poet’s ability to form, juggle, and meld his personae with clarity and deft ambiguity, as far as I can understand him.
Here he is being a prophet, actually a Judge from that time of Israelite history before they had Kings:
You said that you were with me
You said you were my friend
Did you really love the city
Or did you just pretend
You said you loved her secrets
And her freedoms hid away
She was better than America
That’s what I heard you say
[With mild remonstrance, he challenges someone about their professed values, witnessing to the betrayal by indifference of those in greatest need.]
You said how could this happen
You said how can this be
The remnant all dishonored
On the bridge of misery
And we who cried for mercy
From the bottom of the pit
Was our prayer so damn unworthy
The Son rejected it?
So gather up the killers
Get everyone in town
Stand me by those pillars
Let me take this temple down
[Ever feel like that? Sometimes, righteous indignation is appropriate, but, you know, you may have to be prepared to offer up your own life in its cause.]
The king so kind and solemn
He wears a bloody crown
So stand me by that column
Let me take this temple down
[We may think we know who this is, but it’s really all kings who are more concerned with themselves than the kingdom. I suspect that the particular manifestation doesn’t yet know just why things went wrong, or how it’s his responsibility, though maybe he has an inkling.]
You said how could this happen
You said how can this be
The chains are gone from heaven
The storms are wild and free
There’s other ways to answer
That certainly is true
Me, I’m blind with death and anger
And that’s no place for you
There’s a woman in the window
And a bed in Tinsel Town
I’ll write you when it’s over
Let me take this temple down
[Leave me to my dark emotions, which sometimes must just do their job. But, oh, my people . . . do you not fear the Vengeance hanging over you?]
[Then there’s the cynicism of “The Street”]:
I used to be your favorite drunk
Good for one more laugh
Then we both ran out of luck
Luck was all we ever had
You put on a uniform
To fight the Civil War
You looked so good I didn’t care
What side you’re fighting for
[Whatever the uniform, whatever the armor, you all look the same when you’re trying to kill me. At such a time, I could care less about the justice of your cause.]
It wasn’t all that easy
When you up and walked away
But I’ll save that little story
For another rainy day
I know the burden’s heavy
As you wheel it through the night
Some people say it’s empty
But that don’t mean it’s light
[He understands your ransoms and your causes. Just don’t think forgiveness gives you carte blanche from here on.]
You left me with the dishes
And a baby in the bath
You’re tight with the militias
You wear their camouflage
You always said we’re equal
So let me march with you
Just an extra in the sequel
To the old red white and blue
[We are deep in that sequel now. “Do you miss me yet?” How can I miss you if you won’t go away?]
Baby don’t ignore me
We were smokers we were friends
Forget that tired story
Of betrayal and revenge
I see the Ghost of Culture
With numbers on his wrist
Salute some new conclusion
Which all of us have missed
[Our old ways of doing things haven’t worked out very well. But the echo of this failure implies some new solutions.]
I cried for you this morning
And I’ll cry for you again
But I’m not in charge of sorrow
So please don’t ask me when
There may be wine and roses
And magnums of champagne
But we’ll never no we’ll never
Ever be that drunk again
[Some things are gone for good, like the climate of the last interglacial period when humans had enough respite from the weather to create a culture. Suck it up and accept it.]
The party’s over
But I’ve landed on my feet
I’ll be standing on this corner
Where there used to be a street
[“The Dude abides”? If so, it is as symbol of himself and all of us. Is anyone left out? Hope not — they might become the barbarian at the door! Better to pick up the pieces and ration them out to everyone, than to do the same old self-interested rackets that give some gain against a mountain of future debt.]
Is it pessimism if it’s an honest assessment? There are some lighter songs on that album, but overall it’s pretty dark. I note the song “Never Mind” was chosen for the theme of the second season of *True Detective*. But I feel that Cohen indicates some optimism, perhaps weak in material hope, perhaps seeking refuge in some sort of transcendent dimension, but definitely neither denying nor desperate, as in the song “You Got Me Singing.”
You got me singing
Even tho’ the news is bad
You got me singing
The only song I ever had
You got me singing
Ever since the river died
You got me thinking
Of the places we could hide
You got me singing
Even though the world is gone
You got me thinking
I’d like to carry on
You got me singing
Even tho’ it all looks grim
You got me singing
The Hallelujah hymn
You got me singing
Like a prisoner in a jail
You got me singing
Like my pardon’s in the mail
You got me wishing
Our little love would last
You got me thinking
Like those people of the past
Well, I’ve been writing this on and off for over a year. I hear there’s a sample song available online from a new album that’s coming out. I keep wondering if he will show signs of artistic dotage with each new album, but he keeps up my interest. Sure would be nice to share a bottle of wine with him some time.
I believe the one greatest factor of my appreciation for Leonard is the ease with which I can identify with his attitudes and proclivities. So it was with great interest and satisfaction that I read in his biography about the dispersal of his depression. Interestingly, it didn’t happen at the monastery, but after he fled from there in an acute panic attack and went to see Ramesh Balsekar, heir to the Maharaj Nisargadata, in India. After all, if the author of “Dress Rehearsal Rag” can resolve his life, there’s hope for such as me. Likewise, as I am days from my 70th birthday, he is the model for neglecting to worry about the decline rumored to come with age.
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