Beautiful Losers

Twice I have begun to write about Leonard Cohen, and twice I have failed . . . 

In 1992 I had just graduated from college and was working at a bookstore in Cambridge.  I go back to that year a lot, because it was really the beginning for me.  Around that time, Leonard Cohen published Stranger Music, his collection of poems and lyrics.  He was scheduled to give a reading at the Brattle Theater nearby, and guess which employee was to be there with him?  Me!  Yes!  Like any Leonard Cohen poem, we just missed each other, the reading was canceled, I never met him.  And through all of these nights of sleeplessness, longing, dreaming, and sheer persistence, I've pondered his music and especially his poems.  At the beginning, I wanted to be Suzanne, but gradually I began to understand the quietest of phrases, and these hold the most wonder for me now.  In a way, Leonard Cohen does what the greatest poets of all time have always done, and that is work as spiritual guides, as fathers and mothers, as teachers of the heart.  The landscape he inhabits is  composed of subtle & complex eternal incantations of love.  In a very visceral way, I love his honey voice from the early songs, the erotic scenes he always seems to create, the intricacy of his experiences.  More than all these things, I love the expansiveness of his heart, even when he's expressing terrible truths, I love that he confesses, that he writes from the first person, that this poetry holds infinite mystery, that he sees deep within his lovers, that he describes them without us ever really knowing what happened, and how he feels everything that he writes. 

Comments

[girish]

What a nice homage you've created, J.
I think I began with discovering the music of his later period (the synth-glazed albums "I'm Your Man" and "The Future"), loved them, and went backwards in time to eventually meet up with Suzanne.

[jmac]

Thanks for reading this, G. And I've noticed all the writing on Showgirls as of late. :)

[Zach]

OK, not only is this one of the most fascinating blogs I've discovered in months, but you top it off with a Leonard Cohen appreciation post. Wow.

I love Cohen, thinks he's close to being popular music's greatest lyricist. "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy" is like a quiet, sad explosion ...

[jmac]

Elusive Lucidity, I meant to tell you that you have the best blog title! You & Girish are my favorites, and I'm very picky. :) Okay, I don't know the song, "Seems So long ago . . ." Is this from a later album? I'm still so occupied with the early works and the poetry . . .

[Zach]

"Seems So Long Ago, Nancy" isn't a later one, it's on Songs from a Room. "Nancy" (I dunno, I guess I prefer her to "Suzanne"!) epitomizes all that is fascinating about the wit and earnestness that make L. Cohen so great ...

[jmac]

I'm going to download it!

[jmac]

Looking at the late, late show through a semi-precious stone . . . so beautiful, so much longing in this song. I kind of sense that maybe Nancy isn't a real person. I don't know I could be wrong. It's just that L.C. is so able to write about the poetic force that pulls him out there away from what he loves, the journey, the departing trains, and how painful that is. To me Nancy seems to be everything he took for granted, discarded, regretted . . . not at all like Suzanne. :)

[Zach]

Hmm, I don't know anything about Nancy/"Nancy." Given Cohen's erotic and sensual predilections I sometimes like to think that the final line of the song is a puerile double entendre ... which to me makes it even more heartbreaking, for some reason.

My favorite phrase in "Suzanne" is probably "and she feeds you tea and oranges / that come all the way from China." Maybe I should do a Cohen blog entry soon ...

[jmac]

The last line . . . that didn't occur to me, but now, it makes perfect sense. I have a feeling that we will never know exactly what this song describes. . . you totally should write a Leonard Cohen blog post!