RIP Leonard Cohen - thank you for the songs that furnish our sorrow

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I awoke this morning to a text from an old friend that started “Sad day.”  He didn’t have to elaborate, I knew what it would be.  I googled the name Leonard Cohen to see that indeed he had died.  While sad, it wasn’t exactly a surprise.  The last three albums have seem to actively anticipate this event, to be a kind of preparation.  I went on and saw the facebook tributes, quoting his lines, sharing his songs.  I thought of what song I would share, what I could say, but felt a more in depth tribute necessary for the artist that has had the most profound and lasting effect on me.

            I bought the Best of Leonard Cohen many winters ago when I was fifteen.  The first obsession was the beautiful evocation of a riverside visit to Suzanne.  The song made life sound like it could be beautiful, that our encounters with other people could have deep and lasting meaning.  I also remember the impact of the Sisters of Mercy, who “have not departed or gone, they await for me til they think that I just can’t go on, and they brought me this comfort and later they brought me this song…” I felt then that comfort only came at the bottom of the well, where the light is barely visible, that when it is almost too late for hope a soft singing comes from the darkest corner of the room.  It wasn’t until a decade later I heard that the benevolent sounding sisters were in fact prostitutes from the Cohen scored western McCabe and Mrs Miller.

            This was around the same time I got hold of a vinyl copy of Leonard Cohen’s debut.  I listened to it in the dark, sprawled out on my sofa in a flat without a bedroom, smoking cigarettes in a mood of utter despondency, but as the smoke turned in the black air and his voice climbed through it seemed to validate and beautify that despair.  I played that record a lot, and still play it sometimes.  I wrote about The Master Song in my essay ‘Is Matter Holy – the Entanglement of Flesh and the Spirit in the writing of Leonard Cohen’ that focused primarily on his novel Beautiful Losers, a transgressive, post-Joycean speed-fuelled eruption of inelegant thoughts expressed with the most perfect eloquence.  It seems madness that his poetic career had come to so little, but if it had flourished, we wouldn’t have had the canon of songs that we have.  Songs of the utmost sincerity, and the most profound poetry.  Songs to shepherd us through the tangled forest of life. 
           I feel lucky to have seen him twice in concert, and been witnessed to the most admirable humbleness, sincerity and grace you could expect to see in a popular performer.  Cohen sets an example for all performers, all people even, who if they ever get any success in life, they maintain their humanity, integrity and sensitivity.  I saw him once at Big Chill with my mum and sister; and another time in Birmingham with my friend Amy.  I was rapt throughout at the timeless music and truth of the performance. 
           Though he has left us now, though there will not be another album, we have a legacy of wonderful music that is more than any human being could hope to produce.  Knowing his music you will probably imagine that despite the spirituality that crystalized and grew later on in his career, life for Leonard was not a picnic by any stretch, that along with moments of great beauty there were times of intense difficulty and serious introspection.  I hope the God he always kept a place for accepts his ‘cold and broken hallelujah’.