Weep not for Leonard Cohen, for he does not have to witness the ascension of Donald Trump to the most powerful position in the world.
And yet, in July this year, it was Cohen’s 2014 album Popular Problems that kickstarted development of my #Trumpocalypse #mixtape.
Sally Baxter, Girl Reporter is a fictional character and the persona for this blog until I decided to come out under my own name. These days she’s Editor-at-Large, contributing notes on music, gardening and whatever else she can get away with.
I said it then, and I say it again now: “If we’re going down in the #Trumpocalypse, I’m going down with Leonard Cohen.”
The ‘popular problems’ Cohen addressed in his penultimate work included past and present horrors of human suffering, entwining the geopolitical with the deeply personal as his best work always does.
From the comfort of my bathtub it sounded almost like the blues and a perfect soundtrack for our times.
Come November, and Your Girl Reporter was on special assignment in Queensland’s Wild North as the extraordinary US election played out. Still in some shock at the result, I was expecting a catch-up on its aftermath when we emerged from the rainforest for lunch the next day, not the news that Cohen too had left us.
Just a day earlier another poet, Jeet Thayil – well known here in Brisbane as Arts Queensland’s recent poet-in-residence – had christened the new era the Age of Indecency. It’s a fitting moniker for our changed circumstance and it’s no place for Leonard Cohen, the world’s last gentleman.
But if we are to go down in the #Trumpocalypse I was going down with you… I was too far from home for such news.
Most formal tributes focused on two of his songs, Hallelujah and Suzanne, but the depth and breadth of favourite lines which flooded Twitter and Facebook were a full funeral feast of wonder at the extent of Cohen’s body of work.
If another songwriter was in with a chance for next year’s Nobel, surely it would have been Cohen.
I said I was going down with Len, and it was his last three albums I started with, on the flight back to Brisbane. After Popular Problems, I steered my way – through the ruins of the altar and the mall – with the help of You Want It Darker, released just weeks before his death in October 2016.
Cohen is reported to have regarded his last album as his finest and I’m happy to give him that. The musical arrangements are exquisite, perfect grace notes to the low down depths of his bass.
You want it darker. It’s not a question, but a final weary observation from His Dark Eminence.
Cohen, who always gave it to us dark, seems to be shaking his head at humanity on the eve of our destruction. If I’m sounding biblical, it’s because I’m going down with Leonard Cohen.
Cohen’s Jewish heritage suffused his poetry, with of course Hallelujah the best known example of how effortlessly he could weave the liturgical into his work.
But it wasn’t just the language, it was the theme of so many of his songs, including the wonderfully romantic Dance Me to the End of Love (Various Positions, 1984). Its cruel inspiration was the musicians, forced to play in the death camps of the Holocaust.
It is painful to recall a past intensity, to estimate your distance from the Belsen heap, to make your peace with numbers. Just to get up each morning is to make a kind of peace - Lines from my grandfather’s journal, The Spice-Box of Earth, Leonard Cohen 1961
History is forgotten by all but the scholars within a generation or two. If we are truly to remember we need the poets and the artists of pitiless eye and bleeding heart and Cohen possessed both.
And he expressed them in phrases “deep and truthful as ever and multidimensional,” as Bob Dylan told David Remnick for The New Yorker.
In You Want It Darker, Cohen deals himself out of the game and leaves the table, raising a glass to when it’s over as he goes. But if we need a candle to guide us, he left a few.
Cohen was asked during a press preview of his 2012 album Old Ideas where the light came in to a track like Darkness, a reference to another great Cohen couplet – there’s a crack in everything/that’s how the light gets through (Anthem, The Future 1992).
“It’s just the song that allows the light to come in,” he is said to have responded.
“It’s the position of the man standing up in the face of something that is irrevocable and unyielding and singing about it.
“It’s the sort of position Zorba the Greek took; that when things get really bad, you just raise your glass and stamp your feet and do a little jig and that’s about all you can do.”
For that, and all the reasons, I’m going down with Leonard Cohen. We’ll be travelling light, like we used to do.
© Maria Spackman 2106
Further reading:
Want more Leonard Cohen? Try this:
Leonard Cohen, dead at 82 – Richard Gehr, Rolling Stone
Leonard Cohen, Popular Problems, review: ‘a masterpiece’ – Neil McCormick, The Telegraph
Leonard Cohen turns 80 – Lincoln Mitchell, The Observer
Leonard Cohen makes it darker – David Remnick, The New Yorker
Want more Baxter? Here you go:
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