That’s how the light gets in – Leonard Cohen

Suzanne

From hearing Suzanne as I worked an early summer job in Bradford’s John Street market, now sadly demolished, to listening to this final album only a few days ago, Leonard Cohen has been a solace and an inspiration. Unlike Dylan, who started out as a troubadour and emerged as a poet, Cohen started life as a feted literary figure and became a troubadour.  I was hooked from early days, wrote an argument for his poetry, despite a sceptical English teacher, as part of my English S level paper, read his books and bought bis albums.

Now he is gone, in a year when we have lost much talent and in a week where the world seems to be spinning out of control. The protests in US cities make the wry and cynical ‘First we take Manhattan’ eerily prophetic but his own concerns tended to be with love, loss, myth and faith. The Judaeo Christian tradition was central to much of his work. In Suzanne he sang ‘ Jesus was a sailor went he walked upon the water/and he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower/ and when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him/he said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them’. This week it feels like we’re all drowning. Out of control. Which leads to ‘The Sisters of Mercy’ –‘You who leave everything that you cannot control/it begins with your family but soon it comes round to your soul’.

Marianne

Marianne was dying when he reached out to her from their joint past and wrote a loving, kind letter which touched many people. In it he intimated that he might not be far behind -‘Our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you soon’. His parting song to her on Hydra had said ‘So long Marianne, its about time we began to laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again’ and referred to holding on to him ‘like a crucifix’. A deeply spiritual man, he spent many years as a Buddhist monk in the Zen tradition before returning to writing and touring.

Touring

He toured constantly, in latter years referring to himself in his 50s and 60s as ‘just a kid with a crazy dream’. One thing he wasn’t was how he portrayed himself in Going Home – ‘a lazy bastard living in a suit’, though the suits were his trademark along with the fedora. A poet with style.

So long

So now it’s time to say ‘So long, Leonard’ and thank him for the magic. And to finish with some lyrics…

‘Going home without my sorrow; Going home sometime tomorrow; Going home to where it’s better than before.’