Leonard Cohen: mystical roots of his music

Everyone in Australia knows I've always been a Leonard Cohen fan, and last year my best birthday present was the new book Leonard Cohen The Mystical Roots of Genius by Harry Freedman (Bloomsbury). Good choice, spouse.

Leonard's (1934–2016) maternal family were Lithuanian rabbis. His paternal grandfather left Poland for Ontario in 1869, where he too was a rabbi (as the surname Cohen often suggests) and founder of the Can­adian Jewish Times. In Montreal young Leonard attended Sunday school, learn­ing Hebrew and relig­ious sour­ces. And given he was born into a scholarly fam­ily, he hoped to become a poet, then a song writ­er and event­ually a comp­oser. But by 1963, he was clear in public about his different beliefs. Cohen imag­ined himself as part of an underground crypt-religion of poets.

Sadly Leonard’s father died when he was just 9; his mother suffer­ed from depressions and the lad too. His song Dan­ce Me to the End of Love has a line about burn­ing violins in the Nazi concen­t­­rat­ion camps, inspired by camp photos that he saw after dad died.

Who By Fire, sung by Cohen to soldiers

during the Sinai War 1972

Photo credit: Times of Israel

In time Cohen had published 2 volumes of poetry that had a limited audience, and one unusual novel. Cohen himself planned to “go into exile” from his faith, to think up other possibilities for spir­itual life like love and sex and drugs and song, not seen in any synagogue.

Leonard was also learned in Christianity, the other sp­irit­ual tradition that he used to make sense of the world eg the four Gospels of the New Testament appear­ed in his songs, as did scenes of Jesus be­ing baptised and crucified; the Spirit of God was a dove descending to earth.

In fact Cohen's music was scattered with allusions to Jewish, Christian and Zen trad­ition. But even then, his Christian and Zen Buddhist in­fl­uences appeared via the lens of Kabbalah myst­ic­ism. Freed­man traced every Kabb­al­istic source that stressed the mys­tic­al value of sex, and their infl­uen­ce on Cohen’s art.

Leonard Cohen The Mystical Roots of Genius 

by Harry Freedman, 2022

 

Freedman showed the spiritual journey that took Cohen through lovers and drugs. His knowledge of the Bible and rel­igion was deep: nearly every­thing he wrote touched on a relig­ious idea, even if the song itself was not rel­ig­ious. Freedman noted pop music had long explored the sh­ifting borders of sacred and profane devot­ion!

Cohen found how reconcile his lifelong obsess­ion with earthly and mystical love.. when he met the modern danc­er Suz­anne Verdal. She took Cohen to her flat in a poor waterfront warehouse. She served him jasmine tea and mandarin oranges from Chinatown, and they walked along the river past sailors’ Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours. Cohen used their shared activities in his first huge song, Suzanne (1967); it became a unique pattern for lyrics that mov­ed between convers­at­ion with a lover or with God.

Hallelujah (1984) opened: 'Now I've heard there was a secret chord, that David played, and it pleased the Lord... the baffled king compos­ing Hal­­l­elujah'. As Cohen moved through the Old Testament, he sang of Samson having his hair cut by Delilah. Coh­en’s sex­ual im­agery best showed his belief in sex as a div­ine act­ivity: 'I remember when I moved in you, and the Holy Dove she was mov­ing too’. And note modern incantations that rival the Lord’s Pray­er. The centre­piece of Cohen’s album, The Future (1992), provided the key line “there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”.

How did Freedman know that Cohen spent 5 years writing Hallelujah, fil­l­ing booklets with 80 ver­ses, before he found the six that might best please the Lord, and his concert audience? And how did Free­d­man know Cohen identified him­self with King David, “the embodiment of our higher possib­il­ity” in synthesising the sensual and the divine. In part Cohen’s own life over the decades displayed this identity.

Freedman wrote that we also hear a powerful sense of mission accomp­lished. Late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks g­reed: 'Leonard Cohen taught us that even in the midst of darkness there is light, in the midst of hat­red there is love, with our dying breath we can still sing Hallelujah.'

Later in life, Cohen was engrossed in Zen Buddhism, living from 1990 in a Zen priory on Mt Baldy near Los Angeles. Learning from Master Joshu Sasaki Roshi, Cohen was ordained as a Zen monk in 1996. The Zen in Cohen’s art was the sil­ence and the ready willingness to question everything, perhaps leading to enlightenment.

Cohen trained as a Zen monk

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Having forged his own spiritual path, Cohen en­joyed the irony that the album he released 45 years into his career, Old Ideas (2012), almost topped the charts. That final hallel­ujah was a dark joke by his Gods. Cohen died 2016, after his final album came out: You Want it Darker! From his classic Who by Fire, to his final challenge to the divinity, his spirituality inspir­ed him.

This great book looked deeply into the soul of the best singer and lyricist, to see how Cohen re­worked myths, prayers and legends. It gave us a better pereption of Cohen's soul. And thanks to Tim Adams for helping Freedman’s task. For a different review of Cohen's importance, read Beth Dwoskin's review of Cohen's concert for soldiers in the Sinai War.