The Ephemeral and the Eternal
Harry Freedman, Leonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius
Bloomsbury Continuum, 272pp, £18.99, ISBN 9781472987273
reviewed by Stuart Walton
Speaking at the outset of his recording career in 1967, Leonard Cohen told an interviewer from a Canadian student newspaper, that he regarded himself in the manner of a cantor, the hieratic official in synagogue and church who leads the faithful in singing and prayer. Etymologically, a cantor is not just a singer but a teacher, but Cohen saw himself not as participating in the established observances of one congregation or the other, but as 'the priest of a catacomb religion that is underground, just beginning, and I am one of the many singers, one of the many, many priests, not by any means a high priest, but one of the creators of the liturgy that will create the church'. It was the same sense of revolutionary mission that had led him to give an incendiary speech at the Jewish Public Library in Montreal in 1963, when he had told a discomfited audience that their spirituality was in dire need of renewal.
Despite the prognostication, popular music has not been noticeably overstaffed with 'creators of the liturgy'. Bob Dylan's dramatic encounter with Christian evangelism in the late 1970s, remarkable enough at the time, seems in the long retrospection of his career merely to have come and gone. Others have worn their religious allegiances on their sleeves, or else repurposed the iconography of particular traditions to suit the commercial innovations of the moment, most memorably perhaps in the Bernini-esque ecstasies Madonna wrought up in herself for the video to her 1989 hit 'Like A Prayer'. Boney M revived an obscure roots reggae setting of Psalm 137 by the Melodians, 'Rivers of Babylon' (1970), for a sizeable disco hit a few years later, but it was all of a piece with their ode to Rasputin and their intervention in Northern Ireland politics ('Belfast').
Nobody, however, has come as close as Cohen did over a 50-year recording career to folding religious and mystical references into lyrics without making secular, sceptical listeners run a mile. Indeed, long before Madonna, he had insisted on the close imbrication of the material and the metaphysical, the spiritual nature of sex and the arousing potential of the individual's openness to the Absolute — however the catacomb church might come to define that elusive essence. His songs were first heard during the high-water mark of the free love generation, and would only enter a final reluctant diminuendo on the brink of the Trump epoch (Cohen died the day before the presidential election that delivered that benediction to a thunderstruck world). Throughout much of that time, his most loyal devotees managed to miss the fact that many of the songs they treasured were addressed not to errant or unreachable lovers, but to the Creator of all things.
It is quite true that there were lyrics on explicit Biblical themes, such as 'Story of Isaac' on Songs from a Room (1969), and the famous verse about Jesus in 'Suzanne' (Songs of Leonard Cohen, 1967), or which contained allusions to forms of worship and prayer familiar to the Judaic and Christian traditions, as with 'Who By Fire' from New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974). Inasmuch as these songs sat side by side with sexually forthright poetry and mordant existential wit, they were very frequently seen as ironic or irreverent appropriations of religion, rather than actual invocations of it. It was probably only with the release of Various Positions (1984), the album that contains Cohen's most widely loved song, 'Hallelujah', and the closing supplication, 'If It Be Your Will', that it became impossible to overlook the sincerity with which these theological modes were being deployed. Dylan is said to have remarked on first hearing the album that Cohen's songs were drawing ever closer to prayers, but nobody in popular music has ever more gracefully amalgamated the carnal and the devotional, the ephemeral and the eternal, within the same form of address. 'If It Be Your Will' moves from absolute humility before the inscrutable divine, with its sensual frisson of willing surrender, through a convulsion of anguished bitterness, and back again in less than four minutes, none of the numerous cover versions coming anywhere near capturing the tonal agility of the original.
Harry Freedman was once driving along the London end of the A40 when 'Hallelujah' came on the radio, and he heard the secret chord that David played drop into its place in the Talmudic legendary tradition, in which the warrior-king's harp-playing became a summons to the sages to gather and study the word of the Lord. Or was it the north wind that blew in Aeolian fashion through the instrument's strings while he slept, waking him and calling him to his devotions? A flash of insight en route to the North Circular is as good a place as any to begin a meditation on the sacred sources of Leonard Cohen's art, and Freedman reserves his most sustained attentions for the song that generated it. Its lyrics may have been bleached senseless by X-Factor candidates and town-centre buskers in the years since it entered the popular canon, but are nonetheless compounded of the songwriter's precise blend of the erotic and the holy, and Freedman makes a valiant attempt to retrieve the scriptural precisions from amid the hymnic lilt that radio listeners and YouTubers mostly hear in it.
Freedman is an adept and long-established writer on aspects of Jewish history and Biblical interpretation, but the present project is a marked departure. The book is a resourceful repository of allusions that will previously have been opaque to the general listener, calling on not just the Hebrew and Christian testamentary literature, but on the rhizomatic depths of Kabbalah, especially the digest of antique mystical wisdom that surfaced in Spain in the thirteenth century, the Zohar. Cohen's interest in the Sufi scholar-poet, Rumi; the Native American Catholic martyr, Kateri Tekakwitha; Federico García Lorca's visionary poetics; the teachings of the Zen monastery in the San Gabriel mountains of California, in which he spent close to a decade: these are all tributaries of the singer's voluminous output. Freedman carries out an enterprising attempt at letting these multiple plates spin, and confesses more than once that the intrications of Cohen's lyrics often leave even an astute interpreter like him in a cloud of unknowing.
Those not particularly attuned to the exegetical examination of scriptures will find this book a rather dry exercise. While Freedman is alert to many religious nuances within the lyrics, he is on less secure ground when reflecting on the more personal matters with which they are so often aligned. Interpretation is, moreover, an eminently personal matter in itself. The analysis of the central verse of 'Suzanne', for example, seems to me to miss several important aspects. Jesus is the sailor when he walks on the Sea of Galilee, not only after he gets into the boat with the fishermen. The 'lonely wooden tower' undoubtedly refers to the wooden observation tower of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, Montreal, the so-called sailors' church on the St Lawrence riverfront, but it is also assuredly the Cross. The Saviour notes that only drowning men, those most acutely in need of him, can see him, obliquely recalling the notion that God is never more present to the mortal sufferer than in extremis: there are no atheists in an air raid, as the wartime wisdom had it. Freedman is perhaps right to invoke the notion of maritime baptism in the assurance that everybody is a sailor until the sea frees them, but the immediately preceding reference to drowning suggests that the sea, the primordial element across the face of which the Creator's spirit moves at the inception, is the medium by which every mortal being will in turn be liberated from the present life. The remainder of the verse commemorates the brokenness of the crucified teacher, who is abandoned by God before he is received into Heaven, 'almost human' in his capacity for suffering, but doomed to sink beneath earthly wisdom to a far deeper place of intuitive understanding, like a stone sinking in water.
When Cohen's son Adam lay in a coma following a car crash, his father maintained a bedside vigil, during which he read to him from the Bible. When Adam did happily regain consciousness, it was to utter a heartfelt plea to Leonard: 'Dad, can you read something else?' In an act of exemplary filial tenderness, Adam would create a recording studio at the apartment in Los Angeles, so that his 82-year-old father, increasingly frail and living with cancer, could deliver the vocals for his final album, You Want It Darker (2016), from a commodious armchair at home. The rest of us, were we able to choose the manner of our liberation from the sea of temporality, might gratefully settle at our ending for hearing the scriptures read to us by Leonard Cohen. In between repeat plays of the albums, of course.
Despite the prognostication, popular music has not been noticeably overstaffed with 'creators of the liturgy'. Bob Dylan's dramatic encounter with Christian evangelism in the late 1970s, remarkable enough at the time, seems in the long retrospection of his career merely to have come and gone. Others have worn their religious allegiances on their sleeves, or else repurposed the iconography of particular traditions to suit the commercial innovations of the moment, most memorably perhaps in the Bernini-esque ecstasies Madonna wrought up in herself for the video to her 1989 hit 'Like A Prayer'. Boney M revived an obscure roots reggae setting of Psalm 137 by the Melodians, 'Rivers of Babylon' (1970), for a sizeable disco hit a few years later, but it was all of a piece with their ode to Rasputin and their intervention in Northern Ireland politics ('Belfast').
Nobody, however, has come as close as Cohen did over a 50-year recording career to folding religious and mystical references into lyrics without making secular, sceptical listeners run a mile. Indeed, long before Madonna, he had insisted on the close imbrication of the material and the metaphysical, the spiritual nature of sex and the arousing potential of the individual's openness to the Absolute — however the catacomb church might come to define that elusive essence. His songs were first heard during the high-water mark of the free love generation, and would only enter a final reluctant diminuendo on the brink of the Trump epoch (Cohen died the day before the presidential election that delivered that benediction to a thunderstruck world). Throughout much of that time, his most loyal devotees managed to miss the fact that many of the songs they treasured were addressed not to errant or unreachable lovers, but to the Creator of all things.
It is quite true that there were lyrics on explicit Biblical themes, such as 'Story of Isaac' on Songs from a Room (1969), and the famous verse about Jesus in 'Suzanne' (Songs of Leonard Cohen, 1967), or which contained allusions to forms of worship and prayer familiar to the Judaic and Christian traditions, as with 'Who By Fire' from New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974). Inasmuch as these songs sat side by side with sexually forthright poetry and mordant existential wit, they were very frequently seen as ironic or irreverent appropriations of religion, rather than actual invocations of it. It was probably only with the release of Various Positions (1984), the album that contains Cohen's most widely loved song, 'Hallelujah', and the closing supplication, 'If It Be Your Will', that it became impossible to overlook the sincerity with which these theological modes were being deployed. Dylan is said to have remarked on first hearing the album that Cohen's songs were drawing ever closer to prayers, but nobody in popular music has ever more gracefully amalgamated the carnal and the devotional, the ephemeral and the eternal, within the same form of address. 'If It Be Your Will' moves from absolute humility before the inscrutable divine, with its sensual frisson of willing surrender, through a convulsion of anguished bitterness, and back again in less than four minutes, none of the numerous cover versions coming anywhere near capturing the tonal agility of the original.
Harry Freedman was once driving along the London end of the A40 when 'Hallelujah' came on the radio, and he heard the secret chord that David played drop into its place in the Talmudic legendary tradition, in which the warrior-king's harp-playing became a summons to the sages to gather and study the word of the Lord. Or was it the north wind that blew in Aeolian fashion through the instrument's strings while he slept, waking him and calling him to his devotions? A flash of insight en route to the North Circular is as good a place as any to begin a meditation on the sacred sources of Leonard Cohen's art, and Freedman reserves his most sustained attentions for the song that generated it. Its lyrics may have been bleached senseless by X-Factor candidates and town-centre buskers in the years since it entered the popular canon, but are nonetheless compounded of the songwriter's precise blend of the erotic and the holy, and Freedman makes a valiant attempt to retrieve the scriptural precisions from amid the hymnic lilt that radio listeners and YouTubers mostly hear in it.
Freedman is an adept and long-established writer on aspects of Jewish history and Biblical interpretation, but the present project is a marked departure. The book is a resourceful repository of allusions that will previously have been opaque to the general listener, calling on not just the Hebrew and Christian testamentary literature, but on the rhizomatic depths of Kabbalah, especially the digest of antique mystical wisdom that surfaced in Spain in the thirteenth century, the Zohar. Cohen's interest in the Sufi scholar-poet, Rumi; the Native American Catholic martyr, Kateri Tekakwitha; Federico García Lorca's visionary poetics; the teachings of the Zen monastery in the San Gabriel mountains of California, in which he spent close to a decade: these are all tributaries of the singer's voluminous output. Freedman carries out an enterprising attempt at letting these multiple plates spin, and confesses more than once that the intrications of Cohen's lyrics often leave even an astute interpreter like him in a cloud of unknowing.
Those not particularly attuned to the exegetical examination of scriptures will find this book a rather dry exercise. While Freedman is alert to many religious nuances within the lyrics, he is on less secure ground when reflecting on the more personal matters with which they are so often aligned. Interpretation is, moreover, an eminently personal matter in itself. The analysis of the central verse of 'Suzanne', for example, seems to me to miss several important aspects. Jesus is the sailor when he walks on the Sea of Galilee, not only after he gets into the boat with the fishermen. The 'lonely wooden tower' undoubtedly refers to the wooden observation tower of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, Montreal, the so-called sailors' church on the St Lawrence riverfront, but it is also assuredly the Cross. The Saviour notes that only drowning men, those most acutely in need of him, can see him, obliquely recalling the notion that God is never more present to the mortal sufferer than in extremis: there are no atheists in an air raid, as the wartime wisdom had it. Freedman is perhaps right to invoke the notion of maritime baptism in the assurance that everybody is a sailor until the sea frees them, but the immediately preceding reference to drowning suggests that the sea, the primordial element across the face of which the Creator's spirit moves at the inception, is the medium by which every mortal being will in turn be liberated from the present life. The remainder of the verse commemorates the brokenness of the crucified teacher, who is abandoned by God before he is received into Heaven, 'almost human' in his capacity for suffering, but doomed to sink beneath earthly wisdom to a far deeper place of intuitive understanding, like a stone sinking in water.
When Cohen's son Adam lay in a coma following a car crash, his father maintained a bedside vigil, during which he read to him from the Bible. When Adam did happily regain consciousness, it was to utter a heartfelt plea to Leonard: 'Dad, can you read something else?' In an act of exemplary filial tenderness, Adam would create a recording studio at the apartment in Los Angeles, so that his 82-year-old father, increasingly frail and living with cancer, could deliver the vocals for his final album, You Want It Darker (2016), from a commodious armchair at home. The rest of us, were we able to choose the manner of our liberation from the sea of temporality, might gratefully settle at our ending for hearing the scriptures read to us by Leonard Cohen. In between repeat plays of the albums, of course.