Singer-songwriter. Man of letters. Canadian. Jewish. Ordained Zen Buddhist monk. Died of pneumonia at age 82, the day before the 2016 presidential election.
It is 2021. I am a summer intern for The Contemporary Jewish Museum (The CJM), although—because of the COVID-19 pandemic—I am living not in San Francisco, but at home, in Appalachia. I tell my grandmother that my work involves a Cohen-inspired symposium, an offshoot of The Museum’s fall exhibition series Experience Leonard Cohen. I will be researching potential presenters and unconventional event ideas. I tell my friends. They—unlike me—have all heard of the musician; they rattle off their favorite songs. My father plays “Chelsea Hotel #2” one evening after dinner. My sister plays “Everybody Knows.” I go to the public library, pull from the shelves Sylvie Simmons’ I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen and Cohen’s posthumously published The Flame: Poems, Notebooks, Lyrics, Drawings. In the afternoons, I search for his music on YouTube, put on my headphones, settle into my desk chair, let my eyelids fall.
The subject of the symposium: Cohen and spirituality. What have people written about this topic? my advisor at The CJM asks. What symposia have already happened, and how did they happen? I spend six to seven hours a day sitting at my computer, searching. I find a 2015 song symposium at the University of Pennsylvania, a conference in Ireland, a Cohen birthday waltz in Tennessee. My favorite: audio recordings of a 1964 panel featuring Jewish writers, including a thirty-year-old Cohen, who speaks to me in a distant and tinny voice: Before we begin, we must face that despair that none of us dares articulate—that we no longer feel we are holy.
The facts.
A difficult period. The remedies: exercise, meditation, and Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat,” which I play on repeat. It’s the second line, really, that I listen for, the second line—I’m writing you now just to see if you’re better—that is so typically Cohen: the hand outstretched, open. The hand there, here. Waiting.
My advisor dislikes the word symposium. It isn’t accessible, she says. A colleague suggests festival. I like that, my advisor says, but there’s already a San Francisco Leonard Cohen Festival.
I send her an email with other words—gala, jamboree, jubilee. She says: I’m just going to keep calling it a symposium until we come up with something else.
My mother and I listen to him in the car. We listen to “You Want It Darker,” and then we listen to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ interpretation of the song—a song that is isomorphic with, of the same shape as, the biblical narrative [of Abraham and Isaac].
Did you know that it took him five years to write “Hallelujah,” I ask my mother.
No wonder, she says.
There are things I wonder. For instance: was Cohen a clairvoyant of some kind, a man capable of dipping a toe into the future? Is it possible that he could sense, as one might sharp stones among worn pebbles in a riverbed, the outcome of the impending 2016 election? Did he dream—at night, at the end of his life, lying awake in bed—of this virus? Two lines in “Everybody Knows” give me pause: Everybody knows that the plague is coming / Everybody knows that it’s moving fast. How fast, Leonard? According to some estimates, the COVID-19 delta variant can be passed from one person to another in one second. That fast?
Covers. I come across them on YouTube. On Apple Music. Regina Spektor’s “Chelsea Hotel #2.” Sting’s “Dance Me to the End of Love.” Nina Simone’s “Suzanne.” John Cale’s “Hallelujah,” which I heard for the first time as a child, watching Shrek on my living room floor. Do any of them compare to the originals? I come to believe that no “Hallelujah” is quite so moving as Cohen’s. I get into the habit of listening to the song while running. Why? Even sweat-drenched and flushed I feel a chill go through me when the chorus comes—that tremendous, swelling chorus.
I want you to realize that the work you’ve done has not been in vain, my advisor tells me. For there will be no symposium. A few conversations on Cohen and spirituality, spaced out over the course of a month—yes. A yoga class, a drawing session, both incorporating Cohen’s music—yes. But no symposium; no festival, gala, jubilee. Oh, that’s alright, I say. My advisor appreciates my understanding. We will, after this, meet one last time: a debrief of the summer. I am to speak about my research; I am to write a blog post—and yet what, I wonder, is there to say? Only that I will soon find myself as I have been before: my back pressed hard against a desk chair, my ears stopped up with headphones, Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” playing over and over, until I am mouthing the words or softly speaking them, like a mantra, maybe, or a prayer.
Through his poetry, novels, songs, and lyrics, Leonard Cohen expressed the complexities and desires of body and soul—a compelling metaphor for the twenty-first century Jewish experience. An observant Jew, Cohen also deeply explored Buddhism and various other worldviews. His commitment to questions of spirituality and existence shines through in songs such as “Suzanne,” “Bird on a Wire,” and “Hallelujah,” which masterfully combine mystery and universality with sacred and profane, and are now imprinted on our collective memory. Experience Cohen’s legacy like never before—through the eyes of contemporary artists George Fok, Judy Chicago, Candice Breitz, and Marshall Trammell.
Header image: Courtesy Old Ideas, LLC
Body image: Judy Chicago, Famous Blue Raincoat, 2018
Exhibition image: George Fok, Passing Through, 2017. Multi-channel video installation, black and white and color, sound, 56 min 15 s, looped, dimensions variable. Exhibition view of Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything presented at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 2017–2018. Courtesy the artist. Photo: George Fok