Gifts of Light from
The Warrior of Love
By David Whiteis
Irony flows like a bittersweet river though the poetry and
music of Leonard Cohen. The self-styled "patron saint of envy and
grocer of despair", so often satirized as a gloomy merchant of
suicidal visions and apocalyptic self-pity, reveals himself on
closer inspection to be the harbinger of a strange but vibrant
faith. At the heart of Cohen's vision is redemption and the
conviction that it's truly attainable only for one who has
experienced the void.
Cohen looks like one who has experienced the void. He stands
onstage, gaunt and pale, enveloped in isolation and a darkness that
seems to surround him even when the stage lights are on. His voice
has lost some of the acidic bite it had during the late 60s and
early 70s, but it's still the only instrument that does justice to
his songs. Hollow and sepulchral, it seems to emanate from the
depths of the haunted spiritual malaise that informs Cohen's unique
poetic landscapes, landscapes peopled by doomed lovers, wounded
heroines, madmen and saints.
Although his latest album, I'm Your Man, has been hailed as a
departure from the bleakness of his earlier work, his recent
appearance at Park West showed him to be in full command of his
entire range, from darkly cynical commentaries on the state of the
world ("Everybody Knows") through absurdist forays into slapstick
comedy ("The Jazz Police") to surrealist mythology ("Take This
Waltz"). For those who may have summarily dismissed Cohen after
enduring too many misty-eyed versions of "Suzanne" in late-60s
coffeehouses, the depth and breadth of his vision come as a welcome
surprise.
Part of that surprise is due to the musical sophistication of
his current show. Cohen's music has always had a subtlety that
many of his critics have missed; his first recordings, with their
country violins and mandolin accompaniments laid like lace over the
drone of a distant accordion, harked back to Cohen's early days on
the Montreal folk scene. Since then his music has become more
cosmopolitan, gaining a weary sophistication that sometimes evokes
the edge-of-apocalypse gaiety of Cabaret and at other times the ennui
of Jacques Brel's cafe society as filtered through the smokey
resignation of a male Marlene Dietrich.
 His current band, comprised of solid session musicians with
substantial track records in both pop and jazz, can do justice to
all these facets of Cohen's musical personality. Even the
inevitable pair of women singers (currently Julie Christensen and
Perla Batalla), formerly relegated to ethereal moans and angelic
"la-la-la" accompaniments, are given the opportunity to stretch
out. They make the most of it, complementing Cohen's world-weary
moan with a life-affirming, bluesy grit. Most impressive, though,
is John Bilezikjian. He doubles on mandolin and oud with
extraordinary facility; his solos, which both echo and elaborate
upon Cohen's trademark single-chord arpeggios, provide some of the
most musically satisfying moments to be found in any current pop
context.
At the heart of the show, though, is the musical and spiritual
force that has imbued Cohen's work since Songs of Leonard Cohen,
his groundbreaking debut album in 1968. He approaches performance
with a reverent dedication that might seem grandiose or just plain
silly coming from anyone else, but which provides a clue to his
appeal. In his poetry Cohen has described himself as a priest, and
his performances are laced with sacramental overtones. He used to
begin every show with "Bird On The Wire", he said, because it was
a penitent song that returned him to his sense of duty to his
audience, his muse, and himself. The sincerity with which he
acknowledges his importance to his fans, and the dutiful humility
with which he bestows his gifts, allow him to express ideas that
might endanger the career of a lesser artist.
Consider, for instance, the role played by women in Cohen's
world. When he's not idolizing them as havens of pleasure and
sanctuary for wounded seekers and gallant soldiers ("Nancy", "Joan
Of Arc", "Sisters Of Mercy") he's either leaving them ("The
Stranger Song") or cravenly lusting after them ("Take This
Longing", "I'm Your Man"). Yet his legendary sex appeal remains
intact, even among women listeners whom one might otherwise expect
to be offended by his carefully-crafted musical persona as a sexual
adventurer.
Part of Cohen's appeal may be found in his willingness
to transform macho demands into expressions of need and
vulnerability. The extent to which he'll prostrate himself in song to
win a woman's favors sometimes crosses the line from cravenness to
outright self-degradation. In "I'm Your Man", he sings:
I'd crawl to you baby and I'd fall at your feet
and I'd howl at your beauty like a dog in heat
and I'd claw at your heart and I'd tear at your sheet
I'd say please, please, I'm your man...
Nonetheless, Cohen's vision of love is, at its heart, one of liberation --
even transcendence. He performs these rituals of humility at the feet
of his goddess-like women in a spirit of mortification, as self-
immolation meant to induce salvation and vision. One thinks here of
William Burroughs' literary forays into sexual humiliation and addiction,
as well as the connection between parts of Cohen's novel The Favorite Game
and Burroughs's writing.
Also essential to Cohen's symbology of love is the political
defiance that often suffuses his erotic imagery. His greatest love
songs, such as "Joan of Arc" (a highlight at Park West), are
peopled with soldiers, warriors, and heroic women seeking solace
from the loneliness of their calling; these are love songs filled
with raging fires and a sense of looming oppression. In this dark
and frightening landscape, lovers meet and try to create a
sanctuary against the oppressors of the spirit to whom power,
greed, and glory are brutal and petty games played out on battlefields
or in offices of high authority.
To Cohen, however, the power, the greed, and the glory are
contained within the mutual and sacred struggle
fought by lovers, who must both peel away their own
preconceived notions of eros (When we fell together, all our flesh
was like a veil / I had to draw aside to see the serpent
eat its tail) and find a haven in a world where the
supreme role of love is denied, and where those who seek
it above all are persecuted.
This idea, that lovers are warriors in a holy battle against
an oppression that chains the spirit, lies at the heart of Cohen's
vision; it's here that his key to redemption is found. Even
"Suzanne", for all its misty romanticism, tells of finding
perfection in a companion who's "half-crazy" -- a direct challenge
to conventional notions of propriety and accepted bounds of romantic longing.
In "Chelsea Hotel #2", written in the 70s about Janis Joplin,
Cohen again finds something subversive and heroic in lovers coming
together bent on finding new beauty in bodies, attitudes, and
situations denounced or shunned by conventional society. The
song's most memorable scene, in which Janis shoots up after some
playful sexual bantering, is Cohen at his most tender and
revolutionary:
And clenching your fist for the ones like us
who are oppressed by the figures of beauty
You fixed yourself, you said, "well, never mind,
we are ugly, but we have the music...
(In light of this, one fervently hopes that the obscene "No
Fat Chicks" sticker affixed to Cohen's tour bus was someone else's
idea of a joke and had nothing to do with Cohen himself).
This is not to say that Cohen sees light at the end of every
tunnel. When he ventures beyond the mystical spirit quest of
sexual union, his vision can be relentlessly bleak. His sense of
spiritual burden has lightened up a bit since the wracked "The
Butcher" (I came upon a butcher who was slaughtering a lamb / I
accused him there, with his tortured lamb / He said listen to me,
son, I am what I am / and you are my only child...) on 1969's
Songs From A Room, but his view of the world remains dark.
Outside the realm of love, redemption can be a cruel mistress.
"Everybody Knows", one of the most memorable outings on I'm
Your Man and another Park West highlight, is Cohen's commentary on
the current state of the world -- it's a relentless litany of
failed political promises, betrayal, and onrushing destruction,
a doomed panorama in which the night is dark and there is no morning.
The only redemption here is in the gut-wrenching laugh of the cynic
who finds his sole amusement in ridiculing those poor innocents who
believed in hope while living in a world past salvation, and who
must now be punished. The subversiveness of despair has seldom
been expressed so powerfully.
"Who By Fire" is a chilling role call at the gates of death,
as sung by a grim chanter who categorizes the victims by their mode
of demise. Cohen moans the lyrics in a macabre, dry-timbred
nursery-rhyme lilt:
Who by fire, who by water...
Who in your merry merry month of May
Who by very slow decay
And who shall I say is calling?
Characteristically, though, he saves his most burning vitriol
for failed lovers. "Avalanche", a twisted spew of bitterness
filled with cripples, hunchbacks, money-grubbing liars, and trapped
souls, culminates in one of Cohen's most vicious declarations of rage and
anguish:
You who wish to conquer pain
You must learn what makes me kind
The crumbs of love that you offer me
are the crumbs I've left behind
Your pain is no credential here
It's just the shadow, the shadow of my wound...
Yet even here, the spirit of redemption makes itself felt.
Before the song is over the singer has spent his venom and he
relents, admitting his underlying vulnerability:
I have begun to long for you
I, who have no need
I have begun to beg for you
I, who have no greed
You say you've gone away from me
But I can feel you, feel you when you breathe...
But ultimately, Cohen's message of salvation transcends
music. His vision is redeemed most purely and simply by the sincere
nature of his giving. He still highlights "Bird On The Wire", with its
message of penitence and duty; by all accounts, it was written
during a particularly bleak period in Cohen's life, and he sings it
with the subdued strength of the survivor, a man staring wide-eyed
and trembling into the hell he has just escaped. Although the Park
West appearance was in the middle of a grueling tour of over 60
concerts, many of them one-nighters, he eagerly returned for
three encores, each consisting of several songs.
The seriousness with which Cohen takes his priestly role is
mercifully tempered by an unwillingness to take himself too
seriously, as exemplified by the gently self-deprecating monologue
he uses as his onstage intro to "Chelsea Hotel", as well as by
lyrics like "I was born with the gift of a golden voice", from "The
Tower Of Song" on I'm Your Man. Yet an aura of devoted
purposefulness extends to his offstage demeanor: he speaks in
measured tones, weighing each word carefully, often giving even the
most mundane conversation a poetic eloquence that recalls the meditation
from his prose poem "Lines From My Grandfather's Journal": Prayer makes
every speech a ceremony. To observe this ritual in the absence of
altars, arks, a listening sky; this is a rich discipline.
That this ability to meld poetry with everyday speech is an
essential component of Cohen's aesthetic, as well as his spiritual
vision, is evidenced in another prose poem, "How To Speak Poetry".
Originally an entry in his 1978 book Death Of A Lady's Man, it's
printed in the souvenir program of the current tour. In it, Cohen
outlines his conviction that the most profound and wrenching
poetic sentiments are the ones that must be expressed most matter-of-
factly, without demonstrativeness or histrionics -- otherwise,
he suggests, one runs the risk of sullying the material with
cheap emotionalism and bathos:
There is nothing you can show on your face that can
match the horror of this time. Do not even try. You
will only hold yourself up to the scorn of those who have
felt things deeply... Speak the words, convey the
data, step aside. Be by yourself. Be in your own room.
Do not put yourself on.
Both Cohen and his audience have matured; he's sure
of himself onstage these days, as he shouts out instructions to his
band in a crisp, authoritative voice and breaks into hearty
laughter as he banters with the crowd. The fans --although the
crowd at Park West still included a number of ethereal women in
rainbow garb who looked as if they'd just left Suzanne at her place
by the river--no longer gaze in misty-eyed adoration. The Park
West gig was as much a happy and informal get-together among old
friends as it was a religious experience.
Nonetheless, Cohen still bestows his songs and poems like a
benediction. "If It Be Your Will", for instance, is almost Blakean
in its childlike yet elegant lyric simplicity, its determination to seek
salvation and solace amid the terrors of the modern world,
and its visionary depiction of sinners and sufferers
as inheritors of glory:
And draw us near
And bind us tight
All your children here
in their rags of light
In our rags of light
all dressed to kill
And end this night
if it be your will
Leonard Cohen and his listeners may stumble through a
burnt and dying land, wounded and raging at the chaining of the
human soul; but they brave the dark, fending off despair with the
hope that the spirit of their own giving may provide enough light
to make it possible--if only barely--to believe in the coming of
the dawn.
Copyright © 1999 David G. Whiteis.
All rights reserved.
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