Leonard Cohen’s world, as French writer Christophe Lebold notes in his biography of the late artist, is “uniquely his own yet a lot like ours . . . where men step into avalanches and saints fall in love with Fire.” For 435 pages, Lebold’s Leonard Cohen: The Man Who Saw Angels Fall, out now with ECW Press, will have you immersed in this world rife with spirituality, artistry, and desire.
On November 4, Lebold spoke at an event at Holy Blossom Temple paying tribute to Cohen’s legacy and celebrating the release of his book. He gave a talk that speaks of what makes Cohen’s world what it is, in all its complex and glorious flickers of light and all its shades of darkness.
The following is an excerpt from that presentation, and takes us to Leonard Cohen— a man whose flame and legacy cannot be extinguished.
Leonard Cohen attempted to be all Jewish heroes at once. Like Abraham, he has crossed the world and tried to be home everywhere and remain a stranger everywhere, like David he has written Psalms and seduced women, like Jacob he has struggled with an angel, in his case, a dark angel of depression, and like Ezekiel and Isaiah, he has reminded us that God sometimes wants it darker. You know the lines: “You want it darker/We kill the flame.” But like another Leonard and another Jewish hero called Lenny Bruce, who Leonard Cohen had seen live on stage in New York, he also reminds us that sometimes the quickest way to feel the sacredness of all things, to feel the sacredness of God, of women, of poetry, of language, is to desecrate those things. Leonard was also keen to show us that God’s world was also a place of pure comedy, and that God indeed had, as we know, a great sense of humour.
A spiritual poet is someone who writes about spiritual matters and someone who uses certain forms: prayer, confession, teaching theological speculation. But I believe a spiritual poet is also someone who fosters spiritual insight. The spiritual poet provides a spiritual landscape where the audience’s inner life, the audience’s secret life, the audience's life with the absolute can unfold and thrive.
On the cover of my book, Leonard Cohen is caught on a train that is going 150 miles an hour. Maybe he has just seen the angels fall. Anyway, he lights up a cigarette. Five minutes of his life will go up into smoke. But doing this, he offers a little Holocaust to the Lord. He offers five minutes of his own life, but he also sets fire to the world. And he sets fire to our spiritual imagination, like a spiritual poet does.
Inspired by the Torah, inspired by Isaac Luria, but also inspired by existentialism and Christianity and later by Zen Buddhism, Leonard Cohen’s vision on life is based on three ideas: We are broken and so is the world and so our societies and so is God himself. But in our case, brokenness is a holy state because it opens us to love and light. Second, we are not at home, and we cannot be. We are pilgrims and passersby who need to rebuild the hospitality of the world on a daily basis, and who need to dissolve the barriers that separates us from our hearts, from others, and from God. And you do that with a poem. You do that with an embrace. You do that with a song. Idea number three, our hearts are on fire, and like Joan of Arc, we must accept to live in the flames until we are purified and ready to give ourselves to true love, a love that connects us to everything, to a partner, to God, to a sunbeam, to a smile, or to a traffic jam.
In other words, Leonard Cohen’s vision: we are not at home, we are broken and we burn, points to the necessity of a fundamental act, the act he pursued his whole life, the great reparation, the mending of the heart, the mending of the world, the mending of God. In other words, the great Tikkun. Now, how do you repair the world? How do you repair the great brokenness that inhabits all things and that keeps coming back? Well you create something that is not broken. That’s what you do. And in the case of Leonard, it’s little nigunim, little waltz melodies that go around in circles and define a great space of consolation—that’s not broken. Or you write little poems, four-line stanzas, six-line stanzas, eight-line stanzas, little poems that say things like “It’s four in the morning, the end of December/I’m writing you now just to see if you’re better.” Or little things that say, “Everybody knows that the boat is leaking/Everybody knows that the captain lied/Everybody got this broken feeling/like their father of a dog just died.” That’s not broken. Or little things that say, “So come my friend, be not afraid/We are so lightly here/It is in love that we are made/In love, we disappear.” I mean, how beautiful can poetry become? I always tell my students, if you understand those lines, you don’t need to know much else.
Or you create concerts that are a spiritual experiment, and you reinvent the crooner as a spiritual teacher and the high priest as a troubadour. You take audiences on a journey through the dark night of a soul with a view to bring them to a space of illumination and enlightenment.
I had the privilege to spend a little time with him. I don’t mean to suggest that I loved him the best. I don’t mean to suggest in any way that I was a longtime friend (although we wrote to each other for a few years) or a member of his close entourage. But for a few days, we had a very intimate relationship, and we were best of buddies, and we were two little Buddhas trading stories and wisdom for a few days. This man took his role as a Cohen, very, very, very, very seriously. He knew his mission was to serve as an intercessor, to bring the love of the community to God, and to bring the love and blessing of God to the community. He just did it like a poet in an unconventional fashion, being also aware that the priest in him was also an unrepentant sinner and a joker who saw life as a cosmic joke and who saw the law of gravity that makes us fall as a sign of God’s sense of humour. But Cohen he was.
When I had published the first version of this book in French about 10 years ago (the book has changed a lot since) he had sent me a medal with a signature sign of the two intertwined hearts and on the flip side of it there was engraved the Birkat Kohanim. I still have it, of course, and it’s a very precious talisman that I cherish that gives me a lot of strength. As you know this Cohen was deeply heterodox, to say the least, he had once defined religion as his favourite hobby, and although he evidently remained a resolute and proud and unrepentant Jew to his dying day, a poem that he wrote in 1990 says, “Anyone who says/I’m not a Jew/is not a Jew/I’m very sorry/but this decision/is final.” So although he was a resolute and unrepentant Jew, he also considered that other traditions needed to be explored. He saw this as a little spiritual exile in Babylon that he had to go on, on a regular basis. And his travelling, therefore, was not just from one city to the next or one Suzanne to the next, but also from one tradition to another tradition. As you probably know, his first book of poetry was called Let Us Compare Mythologies, and he was faithful to that program his whole life. So this practicing Jew who was reading the Kabbalah to the end of his life in his living room, also had a secret shrine to the Virgin Mary in a cupboard in his kitchen, and together we offered Japanese incense to her with Buddhist salutations. And two days before, he had invited me to the opening of a Sabbath.
He just loved paradoxes. And he loved going from one tradition to the next. It was very sensual to him. I believe that each tradition enriched his relation to the absolute and his sense that every moment was sacred, but also that every moment was transient and ephemeral, and therefore beautiful beyond relief.
This was a man who, when I spent time with him in the last year of his life, had reached, evidently, a very high degree of realization, a very high degree of enlightenment, a very high degree of emancipation, a very high degree of proximity of God, whatever you want to call it. At that stage, he was looking death in his eyes. He negotiated the coming of the inevitable with grace, a sense of humour, and no fear at all. And there emanated from him an incredible warmth, a very powerful energy of love.
In the book, I say that “all it takes for me is to close my eyes and I can still feel the warmth of his presence.” And that is true. In Zen, there is allegedly a state of spiritual enlightenment where you can manifest your awakening in the smallest acts, how you lift a coffee cup, how you tell jokes, or how you recite a poem. Just by the way you move you manifest enlightenment. And I believe that there is an old Hasidic saying that says that if you don’t understand a Tzadik’s teaching, you can just watch him tie his shoelace. When I was with Leonard, he was wearing slip-on shoes, so there was no chance of that. I could not see how he tied his shoelace, but I can testify that there was a grace in everything he did, however broken he was. A beautiful master, a beautiful loser, and every moment that I spent with him was a beautiful, little Leonard Cohen moment.
Leonard Cohen’s world, as French writer Christophe Lebold notes in his biography of the late artist, is “uniquely his own yet a lot like ours . . . where men step into avalanches and saints fall in love with Fire.” For 435 pages, Lebold’s Leonard Cohen: The Man Who Saw Angels Fall, out now with ECW Press, will have you immersed in this world rife with spirituality, artistry, and desire.
On November 4, Lebold spoke at an event at Holy Blossom Temple paying tribute to Cohen’s legacy and celebrating the release of his book. He gave a talk that speaks of what makes Cohen’s world what it is, in all its complex and glorious flickers of light and all its shades of darkness.
The following is an excerpt from that presentation, and takes us to Leonard Cohen— a man whose flame and legacy cannot be extinguished.
Leonard Cohen attempted to be all Jewish heroes at once. Like Abraham, he has crossed the world and tried to be home everywhere and remain a stranger everywhere, like David he has written Psalms and seduced women, like Jacob he has struggled with an angel, in his case, a dark angel of depression, and like Ezekiel and Isaiah, he has reminded us that God sometimes wants it darker. You know the lines: “You want it darker/We kill the flame.” But like another Leonard and another Jewish hero called Lenny Bruce, who Leonard Cohen had seen live on stage in New York, he also reminds us that sometimes the quickest way to feel the sacredness of all things, to feel the sacredness of God, of women, of poetry, of language, is to desecrate those things. Leonard was also keen to show us that God’s world was also a place of pure comedy, and that God indeed had, as we know, a great sense of humour.
A spiritual poet is someone who writes about spiritual matters and someone who uses certain forms: prayer, confession, teaching theological speculation. But I believe a spiritual poet is also someone who fosters spiritual insight. The spiritual poet provides a spiritual landscape where the audience’s inner life, the audience’s secret life, the audience's life with the absolute can unfold and thrive.
On the cover of my book, Leonard Cohen is caught on a train that is going 150 miles an hour. Maybe he has just seen the angels fall. Anyway, he lights up a cigarette. Five minutes of his life will go up into smoke. But doing this, he offers a little Holocaust to the Lord. He offers five minutes of his own life, but he also sets fire to the world. And he sets fire to our spiritual imagination, like a spiritual poet does.
Inspired by the Torah, inspired by Isaac Luria, but also inspired by existentialism and Christianity and later by Zen Buddhism, Leonard Cohen’s vision on life is based on three ideas: We are broken and so is the world and so our societies and so is God himself. But in our case, brokenness is a holy state because it opens us to love and light. Second, we are not at home, and we cannot be. We are pilgrims and passersby who need to rebuild the hospitality of the world on a daily basis, and who need to dissolve the barriers that separates us from our hearts, from others, and from God. And you do that with a poem. You do that with an embrace. You do that with a song. Idea number three, our hearts are on fire, and like Joan of Arc, we must accept to live in the flames until we are purified and ready to give ourselves to true love, a love that connects us to everything, to a partner, to God, to a sunbeam, to a smile, or to a traffic jam.
In other words, Leonard Cohen’s vision: we are not at home, we are broken and we burn, points to the necessity of a fundamental act, the act he pursued his whole life, the great reparation, the mending of the heart, the mending of the world, the mending of God. In other words, the great Tikkun. Now, how do you repair the world? How do you repair the great brokenness that inhabits all things and that keeps coming back? Well you create something that is not broken. That’s what you do. And in the case of Leonard, it’s little nigunim, little waltz melodies that go around in circles and define a great space of consolation—that’s not broken. Or you write little poems, four-line stanzas, six-line stanzas, eight-line stanzas, little poems that say things like “It’s four in the morning, the end of December/I’m writing you now just to see if you’re better.” Or little things that say, “Everybody knows that the boat is leaking/Everybody knows that the captain lied/Everybody got this broken feeling/like their father of a dog just died.” That’s not broken. Or little things that say, “So come my friend, be not afraid/We are so lightly here/It is in love that we are made/In love, we disappear.” I mean, how beautiful can poetry become? I always tell my students, if you understand those lines, you don’t need to know much else.
Or you create concerts that are a spiritual experiment, and you reinvent the crooner as a spiritual teacher and the high priest as a troubadour. You take audiences on a journey through the dark night of a soul with a view to bring them to a space of illumination and enlightenment.
I had the privilege to spend a little time with him. I don’t mean to suggest that I loved him the best. I don’t mean to suggest in any way that I was a longtime friend (although we wrote to each other for a few years) or a member of his close entourage. But for a few days, we had a very intimate relationship, and we were best of buddies, and we were two little Buddhas trading stories and wisdom for a few days. This man took his role as a Cohen, very, very, very, very seriously. He knew his mission was to serve as an intercessor, to bring the love of the community to God, and to bring the love and blessing of God to the community. He just did it like a poet in an unconventional fashion, being also aware that the priest in him was also an unrepentant sinner and a joker who saw life as a cosmic joke and who saw the law of gravity that makes us fall as a sign of God’s sense of humour. But Cohen he was.
When I had published the first version of this book in French about 10 years ago (the book has changed a lot since) he had sent me a medal with a signature sign of the two intertwined hearts and on the flip side of it there was engraved the Birkat Kohanim. I still have it, of course, and it’s a very precious talisman that I cherish that gives me a lot of strength. As you know this Cohen was deeply heterodox, to say the least, he had once defined religion as his favourite hobby, and although he evidently remained a resolute and proud and unrepentant Jew to his dying day, a poem that he wrote in 1990 says, “Anyone who says/I’m not a Jew/is not a Jew/I’m very sorry/but this decision/is final.” So although he was a resolute and unrepentant Jew, he also considered that other traditions needed to be explored. He saw this as a little spiritual exile in Babylon that he had to go on, on a regular basis. And his travelling, therefore, was not just from one city to the next or one Suzanne to the next, but also from one tradition to another tradition. As you probably know, his first book of poetry was called Let Us Compare Mythologies, and he was faithful to that program his whole life. So this practicing Jew who was reading the Kabbalah to the end of his life in his living room, also had a secret shrine to the Virgin Mary in a cupboard in his kitchen, and together we offered Japanese incense to her with Buddhist salutations. And two days before, he had invited me to the opening of a Sabbath.
He just loved paradoxes. And he loved going from one tradition to the next. It was very sensual to him. I believe that each tradition enriched his relation to the absolute and his sense that every moment was sacred, but also that every moment was transient and ephemeral, and therefore beautiful beyond relief.
This was a man who, when I spent time with him in the last year of his life, had reached, evidently, a very high degree of realization, a very high degree of enlightenment, a very high degree of emancipation, a very high degree of proximity of God, whatever you want to call it. At that stage, he was looking death in his eyes. He negotiated the coming of the inevitable with grace, a sense of humour, and no fear at all. And there emanated from him an incredible warmth, a very powerful energy of love.
In the book, I say that “all it takes for me is to close my eyes and I can still feel the warmth of his presence.” And that is true. In Zen, there is allegedly a state of spiritual enlightenment where you can manifest your awakening in the smallest acts, how you lift a coffee cup, how you tell jokes, or how you recite a poem. Just by the way you move you manifest enlightenment. And I believe that there is an old Hasidic saying that says that if you don’t understand a Tzadik’s teaching, you can just watch him tie his shoelace. When I was with Leonard, he was wearing slip-on shoes, so there was no chance of that. I could not see how he tied his shoelace, but I can testify that there was a grace in everything he did, however broken he was. A beautiful master, a beautiful loser, and every moment that I spent with him was a beautiful, little Leonard Cohen moment.