In our lonesomeness, we are not alone: Why Leonard Cohen was grandmother music — but also mine
Leonard Cohen came to me from my grandmother. Something about the plainness of those early albums fit her house. They came out of a record player so big it counted as a piece of furniture, rumbling around the room while she cut up apples in the leather recliner her husband used to sit in. Leonard Cohen was grandmother music.
I thought it was funny, although Cohen’s sense of humour wouldn’t really make sense until years later. His creaky, broken-up voice was amusing enough to warrant an impression when I was 10; years later, impersonating him would be my first great attempt at forming a personality. The funny part of the joke is that I’m no Leonard Cohen; the crueler part is that it took some suave poet with a guitar to make me realize my grandmother was anything more than my grandmother.
Not that she would have put it in these terms, but my grandmother definitely found Leonard Cohen sexy. Rural Albertan Ukrainian farm wives weren’t immune to Cohen’s charms. I have to assume I speak for both of us when I say it’s a shame that Leonard Cohen never slept with my grandmother. It wasn’t until I was using him for my own purposes that I even came to wonder about what she saw in him.
There are only so many times you can put “So Long, Marianne” on a mix CD before you begin to wonder how many other times that song was long-game foreplay. He had more melancholy uses too – far more, although I’m not sure if that’s my temperament or his (or mine steered by his). Wandering home on dark, empty streets, in some state of intoxication, his voice fit in the earbuds even better than it did in that farmhouse. Sometimes it was for reformulating minor regrets into badges of identity, sometimes turning over loneliness like a stone in a stream, burnishing it until it was hard and enveloping and lucid. It really wasn’t until after Cohen’s songs were over that their echoes through the world occurred to me. The first connection was always into some part of me, maybe one reserved just for those moments, the next was into something bigger.
I think Cohen wanted to connect us to a lot of things. His subjects were almost always eternal ones, as eternal as humans will prove to be, anyway. Love and sex and longing, appeals to powers beyond us, ineffable pleasures and high cosmic jokes, the way all those things swirl around inside us, emerging as laughter and regrets and grasps at understanding. Those kinds of things can’t help but connect us to each other, insomuch as possible, insomuch as imperfect beasts at the beautiful mess of another person and see anything that makes sense.
My grandmother’s favourite song of any description was “Bird on the Wire.” There is a hell of a lot of hope in that song, although as the years add up, it’s the pain of it that weighs on me, heavy enough to stop my breath sometimes: “Like a baby, stillborn / Like a beast with his horn / I have torn everyone who reached out for me.”
I don’t really know how you get over the amount of hurt you can inflict on another person, and in truth, Cohen’s appeal to grace (“But I swear by this song / And by all that I have done wrong / I will make it all up to thee”) seems less important to me than acknowledging what you’ve ripped through. I did not know my grandmother to hurt anyone, but listening to a song of penitence, over and over, tells me that she would have understood a lot more of my life than I ever really allowed her to.
This has been a bad week in a terrible year. Part of me hopes Cohen might not have been lucid in his last days, although the thought of it seems against Leonard Cohen, in both sense and spirit. He was not one to turn from the ****, after all, but to poke through it.
There was no sense of escape in his work that I could ever detect. It was about feeling everything, wherever that led.
That it always leads back to each other is, again, maybe more my disposition than his. He was a singular figure and also a solitary one, and his songs ache with a sense of being one, if not against the world than just in it. But he knew that in our lonesomeness we are not alone. That from a cold, empty street in the dead of night it is still possible to see, across years and mortalities, into the window of a farmhouse, some song echoing in remembrance and repentance.
Everything goes away. Everything stays with us.
In our lonesomeness, we are not alone: Why Leonard Cohen was grandmother music — but also mine | National Post
- By David Berry, news.nationalpost.com
- November 11th, 2016
I thought it was funny, although Cohen’s sense of humour wouldn’t really make sense until years later. His creaky, broken-up voice was amusing enough to warrant an impression when I was 10; years later, impersonating him would be my first great attempt at forming a personality. The funny part of the joke is that I’m no Leonard Cohen; the crueler part is that it took some suave poet with a guitar to make me realize my grandmother was anything more than my grandmother.
Not that she would have put it in these terms, but my grandmother definitely found Leonard Cohen sexy. Rural Albertan Ukrainian farm wives weren’t immune to Cohen’s charms. I have to assume I speak for both of us when I say it’s a shame that Leonard Cohen never slept with my grandmother. It wasn’t until I was using him for my own purposes that I even came to wonder about what she saw in him.
There are only so many times you can put “So Long, Marianne” on a mix CD before you begin to wonder how many other times that song was long-game foreplay. He had more melancholy uses too – far more, although I’m not sure if that’s my temperament or his (or mine steered by his). Wandering home on dark, empty streets, in some state of intoxication, his voice fit in the earbuds even better than it did in that farmhouse. Sometimes it was for reformulating minor regrets into badges of identity, sometimes turning over loneliness like a stone in a stream, burnishing it until it was hard and enveloping and lucid. It really wasn’t until after Cohen’s songs were over that their echoes through the world occurred to me. The first connection was always into some part of me, maybe one reserved just for those moments, the next was into something bigger.
I think Cohen wanted to connect us to a lot of things. His subjects were almost always eternal ones, as eternal as humans will prove to be, anyway. Love and sex and longing, appeals to powers beyond us, ineffable pleasures and high cosmic jokes, the way all those things swirl around inside us, emerging as laughter and regrets and grasps at understanding. Those kinds of things can’t help but connect us to each other, insomuch as possible, insomuch as imperfect beasts at the beautiful mess of another person and see anything that makes sense.
My grandmother’s favourite song of any description was “Bird on the Wire.” There is a hell of a lot of hope in that song, although as the years add up, it’s the pain of it that weighs on me, heavy enough to stop my breath sometimes: “Like a baby, stillborn / Like a beast with his horn / I have torn everyone who reached out for me.”
I don’t really know how you get over the amount of hurt you can inflict on another person, and in truth, Cohen’s appeal to grace (“But I swear by this song / And by all that I have done wrong / I will make it all up to thee”) seems less important to me than acknowledging what you’ve ripped through. I did not know my grandmother to hurt anyone, but listening to a song of penitence, over and over, tells me that she would have understood a lot more of my life than I ever really allowed her to.
This has been a bad week in a terrible year. Part of me hopes Cohen might not have been lucid in his last days, although the thought of it seems against Leonard Cohen, in both sense and spirit. He was not one to turn from the ****, after all, but to poke through it.
There was no sense of escape in his work that I could ever detect. It was about feeling everything, wherever that led.
That it always leads back to each other is, again, maybe more my disposition than his. He was a singular figure and also a solitary one, and his songs ache with a sense of being one, if not against the world than just in it. But he knew that in our lonesomeness we are not alone. That from a cold, empty street in the dead of night it is still possible to see, across years and mortalities, into the window of a farmhouse, some song echoing in remembrance and repentance.
Everything goes away. Everything stays with us.
In our lonesomeness, we are not alone: Why Leonard Cohen was grandmother music — but also mine | National Post
