You got me singing/even though the news is bad/you got me singing/ever since the river died/you got me thinking/of all the places we could hide – Leonard Cohen – Popular Problems 2014
This is personal. But it always is for Cohen fans, and I am one of millions across the world who collectively mourns the loss of our prophet, our secular sinner-saint, our musical saviour who slipped the scrim on November 7 into the all-embracing arms of death, travelling light but leaving behind a rich seam of sustenance for the wretched of the earth.
Leonard was my first love, Bob Marley my close second. These are men who dwell for eternity in the shapes, the bends, the breaks and the sweet spots of the private emotional architecture of those who came to know and love him (or them if you include Marley).
It was Leonard (we were on first name terms) who first pointed the way, for me, to carnal delights and it is Leonard now who, as I grew old with him, has rendered death a perfectly pedestrian and ordinary event. In so doing he has robbed death of its sting, embraced it like a lost, recovered wandering dog, an old and still cherished lover at the threshold.
Like David Bowie, who died in January, Cohen departed 2016 – this annus horribilis – dignified, resigned, discreetly triumphant and at peace, leaving behind a nervous, neurotic and bombastic world.
Ultimately Cohen’s last offering, You Want it Darker, released on October 13, a month before his death at 82, is about the dissolution of the self, a self once propped and pimped by the beautiful temptations of the world – sex, beauty, power, greed, generosity, betrayal, self-delusion, fame and riches. All those bad things that feel so good.
But even as Cohen knew himself to be receding, tiny embers of the flesh or earthly desire remained till the end.
In Let’s Keep it on the Level from You Want It Darker the old man groans in his familiar gravelly bass, “I knew that it was wrong/I didn’t have a doubt/I was dying to get back home/And you were starting out/I said I’d best be moving on/You said we have all day/You smiled at me like I was young/It took my breath away.”
You Want it Darker is Cohen’s Ars Morendi – his personal blueprint for how to grow old and die well (although he has been doing that for years now). After all, “in the midst of life we are in death”, it is written in the Common Book of Prayer, an incantation Cohen knew well.
“I’m leaving the table/I’m leaving the game,” Cohen growls on his last album. The same game, we take it, where “everybody knows the dice are loaded, everybody knows the captain lied”.
Watch: Leonard Cohen, Everybody Knows
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“If you are the dealer/I’m out of the game/If you are the healer/I’m broken and lame/if thine must be the glory/then mine must be the shame. You want it darker/we kill the flame” – are the opening lines of You Want it Darker over the divine voices of the Montreal Shaar Hashomayim Synagogue Choir.
It is a continuation of Cohen’s seemingly eternal dialogue with his maker – with God, a God, the Almighty, the One – an often hilarious, angry, rebellious and finally supplicatory monologue. God, it seems, never spoke back, even with “a million candles burning”.
The intonation of Hineni, Hebrew for “Here I am”, in You Want It Darker suggests also that Cohen was ready to meet this god, but there is always a twist: “I heard that one of us was real/and that was me”.
Finally he implores, “I wish there was a treaty between your love and mine.”
The doubt of his doubt. This one-way love which confounded him so much.
Watch: Leonard Cohen - Dance Me to the End of Love