tag:theconversation.com,2011:/global/topics/leonard-cohen-33159/articles
Leonard Cohen – The Conversation
2023-12-13T20:53:51Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/217656
2023-12-13T20:53:51Z
2023-12-13T20:53:51Z
I’m your man: How Leonard Cohen’s life, poetry and song make him a prophet of love in a particularly dark midwinter
<iframe style="width: 100%; height: 100px; border: none; position: relative; z-index: 1;" allowtransparency="" allow="clipboard-read; clipboard-write" src="https://narrations.ad-auris.com/widget/the-conversation-canada/im-your-man-how-leonard-cohens-life-poetry-and-song-make-him-a-prophet-of-love-in-a-particularly-dark-midwinter" width="100%" height="400"></iframe>
<p>Leonard Cohen is hardly the first name that comes to mind as a spokesperson for “the true meaning of the holidays.” </p>
<p>As a religious studies scholar <a href="https://theconversation.com/life-of-brian-terry-joness-legacy-of-a-surprisingly-historical-jesus-130582">specializing in the history of earliest Christianity</a>, and a <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2279666243993">Cohen fan from a Christian background</a>, I recognize that “festivity” is simply not a word that sits with Cohen — who was always more slyly depressing than holly jolly.</p>
<p>But <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/a-conversation-with-matthew-r-anderson/id1650272494?i=1000637487270">the beloved and late Jewish poet, novelist, and singer-songwriter from Montréal does talk about light, and profoundly so</a>. His words bring a certain bitter-sweetness to the shortest, darkest days of the year in the northern hemisphere, days which coincide with religious festivals involving light. </p>
<h2>Exterior, interior darkness</h2>
<p>Despite wide differences in their celebrations and what they commemorate, <a href="https://theconversation.com/hanukkahs-true-meaning-is-about-jewish-survival-88225">Hanukkah</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/apocalypse-booze-and-christmas-an-ancient-abc-172014">Christmas</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/yule-a-celebration-of-the-return-of-light-and-warmth-218779">Yule</a> and earlier in the year, <a href="https://theconversation.com/diwali-a-celebration-of-the-goddess-lakshmi-and-her-promise-of-prosperity-and-good-fortune-191992">Diwali</a> all feature candles and twinkling lights. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-blaze-of-light-in-every-word-vale-leonard-cohen-68690">A blaze of light in every word: vale Leonard Cohen</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Whether or not these festivals were made for this purpose, they help people cope with short days, exterior darkness and even increased <em>interior</em> darkness accompanying <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/sad-science-why-winter-brings-us-down-but-won-t-for-long-1.2981920">seasonal affective disorder (SAD)</a> and other stresses as the nights get longer headed towards winter solstice.</p>
<h2>This year feels gloomier</h2>
<p>However, while violence never ceases, this year feels even gloomier, with a sharp rise in <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/hate-crime-record-levels-toronto-1.7037413">hate crimes</a>, <a href="https://www.apa.org/monitor/2021/03/controlling-misinformation">polarizing disinformation</a> — some spread by <a href="https://www.routledge.com/American-Evangelicals-for-Trump-Dominion-Spiritual-Warfare-and-the-End/Gagn/p/book/9781032415680">“Christian” nationalists who deny democracy</a> while seeking to <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-christian-rights-efforts-to-transform-society-120878">remake North American society in their image</a> — <a href="https://theconversation.com/violent-and-disturbing-war-images-from-the-mideast-can-stir-deep-emotions-a-ptsd-expert-explains-how-to-protect-yourself-and-your-kids-from-overexposure-216405">and with war</a>. (Now we’re starting to sound more like Cohen.)</p>
<p>In reaction to the Israel-Hamas war and its global effects, instead of embracing festivals of light, some are choosing to downplay them. The city of Moncton, New Brunswick <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/moncton-city-hall-menorah-hanukkah-francis-weil-1.7046813#">decided not to display their traditional menorah and nativity scene</a>. But the decision provoked a strong negative response <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/moncton-menorah-mayor-dawn-arnold-statement-1.7048461">across Canada and globally, occasioning a speedy reversal</a>. </p>
<p>Cohen’s frequent mentions of failure, regret, suffering, violence and mortality make him far more <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6WnnZRSKYs">blue, than Christmas</a>. But I can identify at least four ways Cohen’s life and poetry make <a href="https://www.mqup.ca/prophets-of-love-products-9780228018643.php">him a prophet of love</a> who illuminates these dark times, based on my recent research on religious imagery in his poetry and music.</p>
<p><strong>1. Cohen wasn’t afraid to lean into the fact that, worldwide, people are religious, and religious symbols have power.</strong> Remove religious allusions from Cohen’s writing and you’d lose most of his work. His book titles, from the first <em>Let Us Compare Mythologies</em> (1956) to final <em>The Flame</em> (2018), show just how aware of <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2016/11/leonard-cohen-the-christ-haunted">the near universal symbolic currency of religion</a> Cohen was. </p>
<p>Religion was a handy way for Cohen to talk about sex. But equally true is that sex offered a device for him to talk about religion. For him, these insights were entwined with the sense that each person reflects the Divine. He observed, “I think that everybody leads a spiritual life… in touch… <a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/Leonard_Cohen.html?id=s8RbAgAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">with their own deep pools of divine activity</a>.”</p>
<p><strong>2. Cohen never caricatured religious traditions. He pointed to the richness of many faiths while stating his own positionality.</strong> Cohen knew that understanding others starts with understanding oneself. “<a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/Leonard_Cohen.html?id=s8RbAgAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">I would never say anything else but that I am a Jew</a>,” he repeatedly insisted. Cohen’s maternal grandfather was a noted scriptural scholar and his paternal <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/9707000/shaar-hashomayim-celebrates-century-in-westmount/">great-grandfather helped found Montréal’s Congregation Shaar Hashomayim</a>. Yet as deeply rooted as he was in Judaism, Cohen’s knowledge of other faiths was both profound and wide-ranging. </p>
<p>In my research I show <a href="https://atlanticbooks.ca/stories/im-your-saint-cohen-and-st-paul-studied-in-prophets-of-love/">how important Jesus was to Cohen</a>, without making the mistake of claiming he was Christian. I explore the profound impact of Catholicism on his childhood. I also note how interwoven through Cohen’s corpus is his decades-long practice of Zen Buddhism, his readings in Sufi mysticism and his study of Hinduism. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/oct/17/how-leonard-cohen-mined-sacred-texts-for-lyrics-to-his-songs">Jewish tales from the Mishnah and Talmud</a>, <a href="https://www.heyalma.com/leonard-cohens-rabbi-reveals-the-jewish-theology-behind-the-music/">kabbalistic philosophy</a>, ancient Christian legends, poetry from Federico Garcia Lorca and Rumi, and <a href="https://www.npr.org/2016/10/21/498810429/leonard-cohen-on-poetry-music-and-why-he-left-the-zen-monastery">Zen reflections on longing</a>, attachment and nothingness all combine in his work. </p>
<p>As a poet, writer and thinker Cohen abhorred cliché, while leaning into religious complexity and diversity.</p>
<p><strong>3. Cohen respected faith and spirituality but called out religious hypocrisy.</strong> In 1984 he remarked: “<a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/Leonard_Cohen.html?id=s8RbAgAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">There’s always the possibility of mystification and manipulation</a> …. There are evil forces in the world ready to imperialize religion but I’m confident the forces of good are stronger.” </p>
<p>These words seem optimistic for the man who also wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Give me Stalin and St. Paul / I’ve seen the future, brother / It is murder” (“The Future,” from Stranger Music). </p>
</blockquote>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LYzPVKg3wyo?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Leonard Cohen’s ‘The Future.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Cohen himself was not immune to abusing the power that comes with being revered. He was fortunate in successfully transforming his <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20201211115215/https:/www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/article-leonard-cohens-tales-of-seduction-look-different-through-a-metoo/">seemingly misogynist relations with women</a> into lyrics rather than litigation, partly by the complicated and disarming ways he wrote about regret, apology and forgiveness, and partly <a href="https://sharpmagazine.com/2018/11/06/how-do-we-come-to-terms-with-leonard-cohens-legacy-in-the-metoo-era/">through age and death</a>.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/marianne-and-leonard-a-new-film-tells-us-little-about-the-woman-fixed-in-the-role-of-musicians-muse-128112">Marianne & Leonard: a new film tells us little about the woman fixed in the role of musician's muse</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>4. Most importantly, Cohen used religious stories and images to find common cause with and give courage to others in dark times.</strong> His most famous lines are perhaps from his song <em>Anthem</em>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Ring the bells that still can ring / forget your perfect offering / There is a crack in everything / that’s how the light gets in.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Harry Freedman, in <em><a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/leonard-cohen-9781472987273/">Leonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius</a></em> finds multiple Jewish religious references behind <em>Anthem</em>. I’ve discovered even more. Cohen took on the mantle (importantly, for him a <em>biblical</em> mantle) of recognizing and lifting up the light that can be discovered in, despite, and through human suffering. As I have written elsewhere, “<a href="https://www.mqup.ca/prophets-of-love-products-9780228018643.php">A crack in everything means especially a crack in human beings</a>.”</p>
<p>In his last years Cohen lived into his name <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/cohen">of cohen (priest)</a>. Friends and colleagues of mine who attended his final concerts, some religious, but many <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-does-it-mean-to-be-spiritual-87236">“spiritual but not religious,”</a> described them as sacred spaces.</p>
<p>Cohen’s lyrics dwell on human failure, regret and violence. Yet according to his musical collaborator Sharon Robinson, <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/sharon-robinson-reflects-on-touring-with-leonard-cohen-194281/">touring became “a type of meditation” for Cohen</a>, and his final concerts ended with him blessing the crowd. Typically for Cohen, who never let a line have only one meaning, the title of the album <em>You Want It Darker</em> refers to both his fans and his God. There is <a href="https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/2315/darkness-and-light-leonard-cohen-and-the-new-cantors-a-playlist-for-the-high-holidays/">both a challenge to the Divine, and acceptance of an end</a>, in it.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/v0nmHymgM7Y?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Leonard Cohen’s ‘You Want it Darker.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Cohen’s ominous passing, ongoing relevance</h2>
<p>Cohen’s 2016 death on <a href="https://lithub.com/cohen-dies-trump-wins-and-we-will-sing-about-these-dark-times/">the eve of a sharp turn toward hate politics when Donald Trump was elected</a> seems doubly ominous seven years after the passing of the <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/leonard-cohen-remembering-the-life-and-legacy-of-the-poet-of-brokenness-192994">poet of brokenness</a>. </p>
<p>Knowledgeable of many faiths, but observant above all of the human condition; daring the Divine to answer humanity’s sorrows: this is what makes Cohen an unlikely but fitting spokesperson for another dark midwinter season. </p>
<p>My own vote for a <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/douglas-todd-leonard-cohen-may-help-us-find-hope-in-today-s-holy-broken-world/ar-AA1izeLe">Cohen holiday favourite</a> might be <em>Come Healing</em>. It’s why Cohen, a man about whom surely no Hallmark festive movie will ever be made, just might be this year’s answer to the darkness: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“And let the heavens falter / Let the earth proclaim / Come healing of the altar /
Come healing of the name.”</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/217656/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Robert Anderson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Leonard Cohen, a man about whom surely no Hallmark festive movie will ever be made, dared the Divine to answer humanity’s sorrows.
Matthew Robert Anderson, Adjunct professor, Theological Studies, Concordia University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/151071
2020-12-21T19:14:16Z
2020-12-21T19:14:16Z
Daring reads by the first generation of Canadian Jewish women writers
<p>How do you get through the dark winter months of a pandemic? By reading exciting work by long overlooked Canadian women writers.</p>
<p>Consider the first generation of Canadian Jewish authors who wrote in English. Readers will know the poet Irving Layton — whose death <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/family-friends-mourn-poet-irving-layton-1.625973">we commemorate on Jan. 4</a> — as well as novelist <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/mordecai-richlers-homecoming">Mordecai Richler</a> and singer-songwriter <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/music/my-mom-listened-to-leonard-cohen-my-dad-loathed-him-and-i-wanted-to-be-him/article32823342/">Leonard Cohen</a>, all of them Montréalers. </p>
<p>But you may not know the women who published poems and prose alongside their more recognized male counterparts.</p>
<p>Prairie writers Miriam Waddington, Adele Wiseman and Fredelle Bruser Maynard and Torontonians Helen Weinzweig and Shirley Faessler were among the pioneering figures who produced daring work out of their own experiences as women.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.inanna.ca/product/odds-world-essays-jewish-canadian-women-writers/">My research on Canadian Jewish writers</a> has led to a deep appreciation for the work of these accomplished women who deserve recognition for their contributions to the field. </p>
<p>Who were these women and what did they publish?</p>
<h2>Miriam Waddington</h2>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="A book cover." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/376275/original/file-20201221-13-qwc712.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/376275/original/file-20201221-13-qwc712.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/376275/original/file-20201221-13-qwc712.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/376275/original/file-20201221-13-qwc712.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/376275/original/file-20201221-13-qwc712.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1206&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/376275/original/file-20201221-13-qwc712.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1206&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/376275/original/file-20201221-13-qwc712.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1206&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Driving Home,’ by Miriam Waddington.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Oxford University Press)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Winnipeg-born Waddington (1917-2004) participated in the rise of <a href="https://utorontopress.com/us/editing-modernity-3">modernist Canadian poetry</a>. </p>
<p>A prolific writer, she published 14 volumes of verse during her lifetime. Waddington’s poetry is deceptively accessible: it is personal but never private, emotional but not confessional, thoughtful but never cerebral.</p>
<p>Waddington wrote layered verse always from a gendered position, first as a social worker who saw aspects of herself in her most vulnerable clients. She detailed intoxicating romance and mature love, the pleasures of marriage and motherhood, the experience of raising two sons to adulthood and the ineffable pain of divorce.</p>
<p>As she moved <a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Glass_Trumpet.html?id=SxVWwgEACAAJ&redir_esc=y">through middle age</a>, Waddington wrote of her ancestral past, the death of her ex-husband and loss of close friends, and later <a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Last_Landscape.html?id=L_EfAQAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">of growing old</a>. Her poems of a Winnipeg childhood, modern urban life in Montréal and Toronto, visits to London, Berlin, Jerusalem and Moscow, of art and writing, probed irreconcilable differences of place and identity, politics and work.</p>
<p>At the core of Waddington’s poetry was a moral quest for knowledge and understanding. A two-volume critical <a href="https://press.uottawa.ca/the-collected-poems-of-miriam-waddington.html">edition of her collected poems was published in 2014</a>.</p>
<h2>Adele Wiseman</h2>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="Adele Wiseman seen in profile on a book cover." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/374947/original/file-20201214-19-12oe920.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/374947/original/file-20201214-19-12oe920.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=936&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374947/original/file-20201214-19-12oe920.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=936&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374947/original/file-20201214-19-12oe920.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=936&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374947/original/file-20201214-19-12oe920.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1176&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374947/original/file-20201214-19-12oe920.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1176&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374947/original/file-20201214-19-12oe920.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1176&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘The Force of Vocation: The Literary Career of Adele Wiseman’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(University of Manitoba Press)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Wiseman (1928-92) was also born and raised in <a href="https://www.jhcwc.org/origins-of-winnipegs-jewish-community/">Winnipeg’s North End</a> when it was largely Jewish.</p>
<p>She is best known for her two novels that mine the Prairie landscape and the Jewish culture that was her inheritance. Both works are set in insular communities whose practices reflect traditional Judaism.</p>
<p><em><a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/192538/the-sacrifice-by-adele-wiseman/9780735252806">The Sacrifice</a></em>, published when Wiseman was 28 in 1956, received the <a href="https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/governor-generals-literary-awards">Governor General’s Literary Award</a> that year. This tragic novel revealed her interest in characters who challenge normative behaviour and affirmed Wiseman’s belief in community. It centres on the murder of a woman by its devout protagonist Abraham who misinterprets her flirtation.</p>
<p><em><a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/192537/crackpot-by-adele-wiseman-afterword-by-margaret-laurence-afterword-by-margaret-laurence/9780771088865">Crackpot</a></em> is the epic story of Hoda, an obese Jewish sex worker, who services the boys and men of her North End community. Hoda is garrulous and outspoken, determined and resilient. Tested by fate and the son she must give up at birth, she remains one of literature’s most memorable characters — for <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Crackpot.html?id=qACuAAAACAAJ">playwrights</a>, <a href="https://www.inanna.ca/product/radiant-shards/">poets</a> and readers alike.</p>
<p>Today, <em>Crackpot</em> is universally admired, but in 1974, the year it was published, <a href="https://uofmpress.ca/books/detail/the-force-of-vocation">the Canadian audience had little taste</a> for its novelistic treatment of unconventional sexuality and incest.</p>
<h2>Fredelle Bruser Maynard</h2>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/374307/original/file-20201210-19-pcro2v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman on a couch." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/374307/original/file-20201210-19-pcro2v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/374307/original/file-20201210-19-pcro2v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=743&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374307/original/file-20201210-19-pcro2v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=743&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374307/original/file-20201210-19-pcro2v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=743&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374307/original/file-20201210-19-pcro2v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=934&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374307/original/file-20201210-19-pcro2v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=934&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374307/original/file-20201210-19-pcro2v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=934&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fredelle Bruser Maynard at her home at 25 Metcalfe St., in Cabbagetown, in Toronto, in the mid-to-late 80s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Courtesy of Rona Maynard)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Born in Foam Lake, Sask., Maynard (1922-89) spent her youth in Winnipeg. Her two memoirs, written with honesty and poignancy, foreground her experience as a Jewish woman.</p>
<p><em><a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/Raisins_and_Almonds.html?id=DdcJAQAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">Raisins and Almonds</a></em> (1972) evokes Maynard’s childhood and family life on the Prairies, where she recalls growing up feeling “Jewish and alien” in rural Western towns during the 1920s and 1930s.</p>
<p>She continues her story in <em><a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=GO15AAAAMAAJ&q=the+tree+of+life+fredelle&dq=the+tree+of+life+fredelle&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjTpuXBqMHtAhXBneAKHXmTAPQQ6AEwAHoECAIQAg">The Tree of Life</a></em> (1988) with an emphasis on relationships with her mother and sister, her artist husband <a href="http://www.robertfulford.com/2007-10-16-maynard.html#:%7E:text=His%20alcoholism%20was%20the%20family's,been%20burdened%20by%20a%20family.">Max Maynard</a> — who was an alcoholic for the duration of their 25-year marriage — and her writer <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/109850/my-mothers-daughter-by-rona-maynard/9781551991900">daughters Rona</a> <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250046444">and Joyce</a>. A brilliant student who earned a PhD in English from Radcliffe College in 1947, Maynard also exposes the gender norms of the time that prevented her from pursuing an academic career.</p>
<h2>Helen Weinzweig</h2>
<p>Born in Radom, Poland, Weinzweig (1915-2010) immigrated to Canada at the age of nine with her divorced mother. Her <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1435217987555">novels and stories</a> are dark, spare narratives that critique the institution of marriage.</p>
<p>The experimental novel <em><a href="https://houseofanansi.com/products/passing-ceremony?_pos=1&_sid=794226cb2&_ss=r">Passing Ceremony</a></em> (1973) blends surreal and gothic styles to present a sombre picture of the ritual of marriage. It communicates Weinzweig’s belief in the paradox that tragedy always lurks beneath the seemingly innocuous conventions of everyday life.</p>
<p><em><a href="https://houseofanansi.com/products/basic-black-with-pearls-digital?_pos=3&_sid=794226cb2&_ss=r">Basic Black with Pearls</a></em> (1980), which won the Toronto Book Award, is a “<a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/review-helen-weinzweigs-basic-black-with-pearls-is-a-lost-feminist-classic/article25968338/">feminist classic</a>.” Written as a highly subjective interior monologue, it too examines the vacuousness of traditional marriage. An ingenious work of puzzles, the novel’s clever use of transformations and masks sharpens the interplay of reality and illusion at its heart.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"984842205742411777"}"></div></p>
<p>“My Mother’s Luck,” another monologue included in the short story collection <em><a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/A_View_from_the_Roof.html?id=No4OAQAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y">A View from the Roof</a></em> (1989), records the difficult life of a dynamic character <a href="https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2015/08/25/helen-weinzweigs-writings-revived-five-years-after-her-death.html">based on Weinzweig’s own mother</a>. </p>
<p>Weinzweig’s fragmented, discontinuous stories propel readers toward a heightened awareness of the contradictions of contemporary life.</p>
<h2>Shirley Faessler</h2>
<p>Faessler (1921-97) was born and raised in Toronto’s <a href="https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/kensington-market">Kensington Market</a> when it was a Jewish enclave, and used this setting for her fiction. </p>
<p>The novel <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Window-New-Canadian-Library/dp/0771093020">Everything in the Window</a></em> (1979) describes the marriage of Sophie Glicksman and Billy James, a convert to Judaism. Set during the 1940s, it draws readers into a vivid world of contrasting sensibilities: the Jewish openness in Sophie’s family versus James’s gentile politeness.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="A woman on the cover of a book." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/374958/original/file-20201214-14-2goynm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/374958/original/file-20201214-14-2goynm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374958/original/file-20201214-14-2goynm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374958/original/file-20201214-14-2goynm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=914&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374958/original/file-20201214-14-2goynm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374958/original/file-20201214-14-2goynm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374958/original/file-20201214-14-2goynm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘A Basket of Apples.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Now and Then Books)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On the back cover of <em>A Basket of Apples</em> (1988), Alice Munro proclaims Faessler “a witty and uncompromising writer.” Munro admired the nine stories in the collection, six of which return to the Glicksman family. </p>
<p>In a <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21482218-a-basket-of-apples">2014 edition</a> of the six Glicksman stories, linked via chronology and a consistent first-person female narrator, a cast of lively characters of the 1930s and 1940s speak to us across time through Yiddish-inflected English.</p>
<p>Readers will enjoy the rich diversity of Canadian Jewish experience reflected in the poetry of Waddington and the prose of Wiseman, Maynard, Weinzweig and Faessler. The work of these authors remain evocative and relevant — perfect for long winter evenings.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/151071/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ruth Panofsky receives funding from SSHRC, the Canada Council for the Arts, and Ryerson University. </span></em></p>
A rich diversity of Canadian Jewish experience is reflected in the poems of Miriam Waddington and the prose of Adele Wiseman, Fredelle Bruser Maynard, Helen Weinzweig and Shirley Faessler.
Ruth Panofsky, Professor, Department of English, Toronto Metropolitan University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/142661
2020-07-28T01:50:43Z
2020-07-28T01:50:43Z
Listening to Songs of Leonard Cohen: singing sadness to sadness in these anxious times
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349064/original/file-20200723-37-1dmym53.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=13%2C6%2C2245%2C1454&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://photos-cdn.aap.com.au/Image/20090220000157016214?path=/aap_dev3/device/imagearc/2009/02-20/4c/5e/0d/aapimage-5o18xxyusbr6asu223r_layout.jpg">AP Photo/Henny Ray Abrams</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In our series <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Art+for+trying+times">Art for Trying Times</a>, authors nominate a work they turn to for solace or perspective during this pandemic.</em></p>
<p>If anyone can express the particularities of distress, it is surely the artists; and they are surely needed at times like the present – times when uncertainty, anxiety and, for too many people, bitter loss are the order of the day. </p>
<p>My first such experience was in my mid-teens, when I had to confront uncertainty, loss and grief without script or rehearsal. Initially at least, I longed <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44479/ode-to-a-nightingale">like Keats</a> “to cease upon the midnight with no pain”. But cometh the hour, cometh the art, and I found my sister’s copy of <a href="https://www.leonardcohen.com/music/songs-of-leonard-cohen">Songs of Leonard Cohen</a>.</p>
<p>In the months that followed, I played the Canadian singer-songwriter’s 1967 debut album obsessively, stretched out on the floor, listening to that lion-rumble baritone as it soothed and smoothed my wounded heart and head and self.</p>
<p>This may seem counter-intuitive. Cohen <a href="https://www.amazon.com.au/Im-Your-Man-Leonard-Cohen/dp/0061995002">told his biographer</a>, Sylvie Simmons: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>People were saying I was ‘depressing a generation’ and ‘they should give away razor blades with Leonard Cohen albums because it’s music to slit your wrists by’.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But for me it worked like homeopathy; a small dose of sadness to counter my sadness. Or maybe it worked like <a href="https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/kintsugi/">kintsugi</a>, the Japanese art of repair that transforms brokenness into beauty. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/as-a-writer-musician-leonard-cohen-was-a-one-off-68676">As a writer-musician, Leonard Cohen was a one-off</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Among the garbage and the flowers</h2>
<p>What Cohen’s album persuaded me was that there are always reasons to keep going – that there is beauty even in a broken world. </p>
<p>I think of the dignity in the character of the “half-crazy” <a href="https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/leonardcohen/suzanne.html">Suzanne</a>, she of the first song on the album. </p>
<p>I think of the pointless charm of Jesus waiting until “only drowning men could see him” before offering his truth. Of the heroes who can be seen only “among the garbage and the flowers”; or Suzanne’s own “rags and feathers”. </p>
<p>In this and other songs on the album, the world is revealed in its strange enchantment, despite the melancholy that permeates the music. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/svitEEpI07E?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘She lets the river answer, that you’ve always been her lover.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/leonardcohen/winterlady.html">Winter Lady</a>, the third track on the album, consoles too in its focus on what is not finished, not whole. The singer’s first love, that “child of snow” who has left him a gift: the image of her weaving her hair “on a loom / of smoke and gold and breathing”. The <a href="https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/leonardcohen/heythatsnowaytosaygoodbye.html">“trav’ling lady”</a> for whom he is “just a station on the road”, whose transience reflects the consolation of contingency, of not having to “talk of love or chains and things we can’t untie”. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/marianne-and-leonard-a-new-film-tells-us-little-about-the-woman-fixed-in-the-role-of-musicians-muse-128112">Marianne & Leonard: a new film tells us little about the woman fixed in the role of musician's muse</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>This sort of letting go can be such a solace. In the 2005 biopic <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt00478197/">Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man</a>, Cohen says: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win. You abandon your masterpiece and you sink into the real masterpiece. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yes; but still I’d claim that Songs of Leonard Cohen is “the real masterpiece”. A <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/readers-poll-the-10-best-leonard-cohen-songs-143602/">2014 Rolling Stone readers’ poll</a> to rank his five-decade strong back catalogue placed <a href="https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/leonardcohen/solongmarianne.html">So Long, Marianne</a> at #6 of all his songs, and Suzanne at #2. A year later, Guardian critic <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2015/may/06/leonard-cohen-10-of-the-best">Ben Hewitt’s list</a> had So Long, Marianne at #2, and Suzanne topping the charts. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DgEiDc1aXr0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘It’s time that we began to laugh. And cry and cry and laugh about it all again.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Spanning decades</h2>
<p>No doubt their enduring appeal is associated with the saturation of these songs across the decades, but for me it’s because of the exquisite crafting of the poems; the spare melodies against which they operate; and the wit that shimmers through the songs. </p>
<p>Like, <a href="https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/leonardcohen/oneofuscannotbewrong.html">for instance</a>: “I lit a thin green candle, to make you jealous of me. / But the room just filled up with mosquitos, they heard that my body was free”. Maybe it’s not laugh-out-loud funny, but it is delightfully wry.</p>
<p>An album is more than the songs; covers really matter too. Songs of Leonard Cohen looks like the album that 1960s parents would approve of – the so-not-a-rockstar portrait: the sepia, the solemn face, solemn border. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/b-bJPmasXKs?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘Your eyes are soft with sorrow. Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I spent a lot of time looking at that cover while drifting along with the music, and suspect that’s because it resembles a poetry book. Cohen’s image represented what back then I would have characterised as “mature”; and his sharp intelligence and attentive gaze spoke of “artist”, of “poet”. </p>
<p>He was, of course, always a poet, and though I did, and still do, love the musicality of his albums, it is always the words, the phrasing, their conjuring of mood and image, that work on me. </p>
<p>Which is why I still turn to this album for solace during trying times. Over the decades I have become more accomplished – more practised – at dealing with disaster, but haven’t forgotten that broken girl I was, who in the wash of this album’s music and magic and mood found a way to survive, and to thrive. </p>
<p>If I really am “locked into [my] suffering”, I know now that my “<a href="https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/leonardcohen/storiesofthestreet.html">pleasures are the seal</a>”.</p>
<p>And the seal does not keep me from immersing myself in the world and all it contains – all its wit and tenderness and beauty, all the very good reasons to carry on.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/142661/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jen Webb receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>
It may seem counter-intuitive to turn to Leonard Cohen’s ‘depressing’ songs during times of grief and uncertainty. But he shows there is always a reason to keep on keeping on.
Jen Webb, Dean, Graduate Research, University of Canberra
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/136714
2020-05-12T06:36:37Z
2020-05-12T06:36:37Z
Book review: Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson mixes real stories with romance
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/334195/original/file-20200512-66698-ce14w3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=36%2C44%2C4839%2C3201&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://image.shutterstock.com/image-photo/houses-on-ydra-hydra-island-600w-519367783.jpg">Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Ah, Hydra! This is an island possessed of “wild and naked perfection”, <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=e7uTuBoDcwIC&lpg=PA49&dq=Henry%20Miller%20after%20sailing%20into%20Hydra%20naked%20perfection&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=Henry%20Miller%20after%20sailing%20into%20Hydra%20naked%20perfection&f=false">wrote</a> American author Henry Miller after sailing into Hydra on the eve of the second world war. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/334185/original/file-20200512-66675-9p5vhc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/334185/original/file-20200512-66675-9p5vhc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/334185/original/file-20200512-66675-9p5vhc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334185/original/file-20200512-66675-9p5vhc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334185/original/file-20200512-66675-9p5vhc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334185/original/file-20200512-66675-9p5vhc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334185/original/file-20200512-66675-9p5vhc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334185/original/file-20200512-66675-9p5vhc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/theatre-for-dreamers-9781526600554/">Bloomsbury</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>With a population of around 2,500, Hydra is a small island in the Saronic Gulf only two hours from Athens. The <a href="https://www.greeka.com/saronic/hydra/villages/town/">Hydra Town</a> harbour, a natural amphitheatre with grey and white stone houses set into the hills overlooking the waterfront, has featured in many books and films – think Sophia Loren in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050208/">Boy on a Dolphin</a> (1957). </p>
<p>Polly Samson’s <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/theatre-for-dreamers-9781526600554/">A Theatre for Dreamers</a>, a fictionalised account of the summer of 1960, is the latest addition to the corpus of Hydra-inspired novels. In it we meet Australian writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston and poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen and his lover Marianne Ihlen as they all work and play in a seeming paradise. </p>
<p>While the married couple Clift and Johnston are in financial and emotional disarray, Cohen and Ihlen are young, beautiful and at the start of their now famous relationship.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-woman-ahead-of-her-time-remembering-the-australian-writer-charmian-clift-50-years-on-117322">'A woman ahead of her time': remembering the Australian writer Charmian Clift, 50 years on</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The expat dream</h2>
<p>The expatriate clique of Samson’s novel exemplifies groups attracted in the 1960s to the picturesque island where artists could live and work cheaply. The novel includes fulsome accounts of the raging arguments and creative and sexual jealousies that beset the Clift-Johnston inner circle, Cohen and Ihlen and visiting friends. </p>
<p>A Theatre for Dreamers conjures up an appealing picture of a Hydra which, at least in physical terms, has changed little since then. There are still no cars on the island and donkeys continue to do all the haulage up and down the steep streets from the port. </p>
<p>Samson has faithfully rendered the landscape of winding stone-flagged streets and white-washed houses. It is a pity therefore that the novel plays into the narrative of sexual transgression and self-indulgence that continues to dominate works about this community. The novel is narrated by a young English traveller, Erica, whose relationship with her boyfriend Jimmy predictably goes awry in this heady climate. </p>
<p>Heightened levels of drug-taking, drinking and sexual adventure were indeed a part of many expat lives at the time but the continuing focus on this discourse, which of course makes for good copy, has the unfortunate effect of undermining the impact of major work produced by foreign and Greek artists and writers in this era.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/334192/original/file-20200512-66703-1sz9cjv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/334192/original/file-20200512-66703-1sz9cjv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/334192/original/file-20200512-66703-1sz9cjv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334192/original/file-20200512-66703-1sz9cjv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334192/original/file-20200512-66703-1sz9cjv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334192/original/file-20200512-66703-1sz9cjv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334192/original/file-20200512-66703-1sz9cjv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334192/original/file-20200512-66703-1sz9cjv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4600903-peel-me-a-lotus">Goodreads</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Samson has researched the topic for some time and knows the life of this island well. Sometimes the research is a distraction as when the author’s prose mingles strangely with the original writing of one of the expatriates. </p>
<p>Readers who know Clift’s writing will recognise her voice in the dialogue. Samson acknowledges that she was given permission by Clift’s estate to quote from <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4600903-peel-me-a-lotus">Peel Me A Lotus</a> (1959), Clift’s travel memoir about her life on Hydra from one February to October. The effect is rather an odd seesaw between two genres as Clift’s lines pop up in a scene in Samson’s novel.</p>
<p>But readers who have never been to Hydra and know little about life there in the 1960s will enjoy the breezy romance and imagining the tumultuous relationship of Marianne with her then husband, writer Axel Jensen, and the adventures of the Johnston family. </p>
<h2>Hydra’s legacy</h2>
<p>Samson is an enthusiastic supporter of <a href="https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/features/essays/tag/Charmian%20Clift">Clift’s writing</a>. Channeling her in this novel, Samson makes a great contribution to Clift’s legacy as most of her work is now out of print. One hopes readers will be inspired to search out copies of Clift’s work.</p>
<p>There is of course no need to further promote Leonard Cohen’s work, which has assumed an afterlife of its own, including a renewed interest in Cohen’s life on Hydra. </p>
<p>Today many people on Hydra would not know the Clift-Johnston history but Cohen is even more firmly part of the island’s fabric. In 2015 a tribute concert to Cohen on the Hydra waterfront appeared to attract most of the town’s residents, young and old, and visiting his house in Hydra Town is part of an annual pilgrimage. By 2017 there were guided walking tours to Cohen’s island haunts. </p>
<p>Clift and Johnston are known to a smaller audience although they were once big fish in the Australian literary and journalistic cliques. Those who want to explore their story further can find an account of many of the characters in Samson’s novel in Nadia Wheatley’s meticulous biography, <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9780732269128/the-life-and-myth-of-charmian-clift/">The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift</a> (2001). In addition, <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/fiction/literary-fiction/The-Broken-Book-Susan-Johnson-9781741146646">The Broken Book</a> (2004) by Australian novelist Susan Johnson is a rewarding and imaginative recreation of Clift’s life that goes beyond the wild Hydra cliché.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-a-fresh-perspective-on-leonard-cohen-and-the-island-that-inspired-him-105392">Friday essay: a fresh perspective on Leonard Cohen and the island that inspired him</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/136714/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Susan Carson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Famous expats Charmian Clift and George Johnson, Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen provide inspiration for this heady romance. But the shifts between reality and fiction are distracting at times.
Susan Carson, Senior Lecturer, Creative Industries Faculty, QUT, Queensland University of Technology
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/128112
2019-12-11T18:56:17Z
2019-12-11T18:56:17Z
Marianne & Leonard: a new film tells us little about the woman fixed in the role of musician’s muse
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/305772/original/file-20191209-90597-o6nrpe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=23%2C5%2C1710%2C931&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Marianne Ihlen: she remains stuck in the role of the beautiful ingénue, the part-time lover, in Nick Broomfield's documentary.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Copyright Nick Broomfield</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Nick Broomfield’s latest documentary, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9358196/">Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love</a> tells the story of the fabled relationship between Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen, which unfolded after they met on the Greek island of <a href="https://publishing.monash.edu/books/hpw-9781925523096.html">Hydra</a> in 1960. </p>
<p>It was there that they lived and loved for the best part of a decade, and where Cohen wrote the poetry, novels and eventually songs, that made his reputation.</p>
<p>Their romance was captured in the 1967 song <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgEiDc1aXr0">So Long, Marianne</a> from Cohen’s debut album, and entrenched in a 1969 record sleeve image of Ihlen wrapped in a towel while seated before Cohen’s typewriter. Here, we were presented with the Norwegian muse behind the songs.</p>
<p>Cohen and Ihlen were all but separated by the end of the 1960s. But as if bringing their storied romance full circle, they both passed away within three months of each other in 2016, although not before Cohen sent an urgent <a href="https://theconversation.com/mythmaking-social-media-and-the-truth-about-leonard-cohens-last-letter-to-marianne-ihlen-108082">letter</a> to the dying Ihlen. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/mythmaking-social-media-and-the-truth-about-leonard-cohens-last-letter-to-marianne-ihlen-108082">Mythmaking, social media and the truth about Leonard Cohen's last letter to Marianne Ihlen</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>That note — heard in the film being read to Ihlen on her death bed — provides the emotional climax to Marianne & Leonard, seeming to bridge the decades its author and recipient had been apart. It asks viewers to believe they had remained in love; anticipating their reunion in the afterlife.</p>
<p>Broomfield has a particular interest in the lives of music celebrities. He has previously trained his cinematic eye on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmhM_BAqE00">Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love</a>, Whitney Houston, and Biggie and Tupac. Yet, his interest in Cohen and Ihlen is more than professional. As he recounts in voice-over, he was briefly Ihlen’s lover when he found himself on Hydra in the late 60s, while Cohen was shuttling between the island, Montreal, New York and Nashville. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LB6nIzPf9r8?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Cohen could no more contain his ambitions to Hydra than he could contain his affections to Ihlen, and <a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-a-fresh-perspective-on-leonard-cohen-and-the-island-that-inspired-him-105392">he eventually left both behind</a>. As with Cohen, Broomfield’s island romance was seemingly formative, and he kept in contact with Ihlen as she negotiated her painful break-up with the musician. Broomfield thereby became an observer of the damage done to those who find themselves caught in the slipstream of fame, a role he retains in the film.</p>
<h2>Two incompatible genres</h2>
<p>Marianne & Leonard is an intriguing meeting of two seemingly incompatible genres — the documentary, with its claims to reality; and the romance, which allows for the improbable.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/305771/original/file-20191209-90588-1bq3mez.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/305771/original/file-20191209-90588-1bq3mez.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/305771/original/file-20191209-90588-1bq3mez.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/305771/original/file-20191209-90588-1bq3mez.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/305771/original/file-20191209-90588-1bq3mez.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/305771/original/file-20191209-90588-1bq3mez.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/305771/original/file-20191209-90588-1bq3mez.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/305771/original/file-20191209-90588-1bq3mez.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A portrait of Marianne Ihlen.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Copyright Nick Broomfield</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A nod to realism early in the film, with an attribution of “the early sixties” attached to archival film footage, proves incorrect. (The age of Ihlen’s child, born in 1960, dates the footage to at least 1967). But on one level, such oversights hardly matter. The film is not so much interested in locating the specific origins of Ihlen and Cohen’s relationship, as it is in emphasising the timelessness of their romance.</p>
<p>Yet, Marianne & Leonard struggles to fill its 97 minutes of screen time. There is only a sparse amount of footage of either Cohen or Ihlen on Hydra, and only a fragment of them together in the same frame. Only by careful cinematic editing can Cohen and Ihlen be presented as a couple in this film.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/305768/original/file-20191209-90603-6v3ap8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/305768/original/file-20191209-90603-6v3ap8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/305768/original/file-20191209-90603-6v3ap8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/305768/original/file-20191209-90603-6v3ap8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/305768/original/file-20191209-90603-6v3ap8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/305768/original/file-20191209-90603-6v3ap8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/305768/original/file-20191209-90603-6v3ap8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/305768/original/file-20191209-90603-6v3ap8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The pair together.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Copyright Aviva Layton</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Broomfield then faces the narrative challenge of maintaining interest in the now-distant relationship across nearly five decades in order to reach Ihlen’s demise and the reconciling letter. The film addresses this task by detouring through Cohen’s well-documented career, supported by ex-band mates speaking to camera.</p>
<p>By contrast, Ihlen’s subsequent marriage and domestic life are quickly summed up and dispensed with. There is little of substance said about her other than how she occasionally positioned herself to support other creative types such as singer Julie Felix, and Broomfield himself.</p>
<p>So whereas Cohen is afforded limitless agency as his fame advances, Ihlen remains fixed in the role of the beautiful ingénue, the muse, the part-time lover.</p>
<p>A visual refrain running through the film is of the blazingly blonde Ihlen pictured in slow-motion, wistfully looking out across the Aegean from aboard a yacht. </p>
<p>While this time-bound imagining sets a sympathetic tone towards Ihlen, Marianne & Leonard is more admiring in its representation of Cohen as a man active in the world, singing and seducing his way across the globe while struggling with the inner demons that drive his spiritual longing and lust in equal measure.</p>
<h2>Harder truths</h2>
<p>Broomfield does not shy away from the hurt Ihlen and her son suffered while Cohen pursued his art and his “appetite” (a coy term the musician uses for his unappeasable sexual desire). But, neither does it confront the harder truths of the license taken by, and conceded to, creative men.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/305774/original/file-20191209-90588-hlb14c.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/305774/original/file-20191209-90588-hlb14c.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/305774/original/file-20191209-90588-hlb14c.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/305774/original/file-20191209-90588-hlb14c.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/305774/original/file-20191209-90588-hlb14c.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/305774/original/file-20191209-90588-hlb14c.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=497&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/305774/original/file-20191209-90588-hlb14c.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=497&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/305774/original/file-20191209-90588-hlb14c.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=497&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Leonard Cohen writing.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Copyright Axel Jensen Jr</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When applied to great artists, myth and romance are frequently more appealing than reality. </p>
<p>Accordingly Marianne & Leonard recounts a romantic ideal that audiences might wish for, and which its subjects themselves burnished over the years. And viewers familiar with the storyline will likely leave the cinema with their biases confirmed. </p>
<p>For those who think of Cohen as the finest singer-songwriter of his generation, there is plenty of material to support that claim and attest to the resulting adulation. For those who approvingly — or otherwise – regard Cohen as a “ladies’ man” (to half conjure the title of his ill-fated record with producer, Phil Spector), that judgement is also borne out. </p>
<p>For others who admire Cohen as a poetic searcher, his years in a Buddhist monastery are also accounted for, even if this section of the film has little to do with the love story at its heart.</p>
<p>And for those inclined to see Cohen and Ihlen as being blessed by eternal love, then the film will play straight to their romantic expectations.</p>
<p>Viewers will not, however, learn much about Ihlen herself, beyond her entrenched representation as Cohen’s Hydra lover and “muse”.</p>
<p><em>Marianne and Leonard opens in cinemas today.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/128112/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Nick Broomfield’s latest documentary explores the romance between Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen. But the film fails to confront the harder truths of the license taken by, and conceded to, creative men.
Tanya Dalziell, Associate Professor, English and Literary Studies, The University of Western Australia
Paul Genoni, Associate Professor, School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry, Curtin University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/123831
2019-09-25T12:12:23Z
2019-09-25T12:12:23Z
Universal ethical truths are at the core of Jewish High Holy Days
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/293877/original/file-20190924-51405-ahz2wx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Blowing the shofar during Rosh Hashana is one of the holiday's many traditions.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Associated-Press-Domestic-News-New-York-United-/307cf9193ae5da11af9f0014c2589dfb/55/0">AP Photo/Emile Wamsteker</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>My most vivid adolescent memories of the Jewish High Holy Days are the painful rumbling of my empty stomach as I fasted on Yom Kippur, and the sharp blasts of the shofar – the ram’s horn – sounding from the synagogue pulpit. </p>
<p>I was one of millions of Jews the world over who observe “Yamim Nora’im.” That’s Hebrew for “Days of Awe” or “High Holy Days.” </p>
<p>This 10-day period begins with the two-day celebration of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashana. It ends with the one-day observance of Yom Kippur, when adult Jews in good health are expected to fast.</p>
<p>What is the significance of these holy days for orthodox Jews, secular Jews and perhaps even for non-Jews?</p>
<h2>Traditional beliefs</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/rosh-hashanah-faq-all-about-the-jewish-new-year/">Rosh Hashana</a> and <a href="https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/yom-kippur-101/">Yom Kippur</a> are known, respectively, as “The Day of Judgment” and “The Day of Atonement.” In Orthodox Judaism, these combined Days of Awe embody both celebration and trepidation, renewal and repentance.</p>
<p>This is a time when Jews believe that all humankind is judged by God and inscribed either in “The Book of Life” or “The Book of Death.” Judaism doesn’t believe these are actual “books.” However, <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/9780061374982/jewish-literacy-revised-ed/">Jewish tradition tells us</a> that God writes down the names of the righteous in The Book of Life, and the names of the wicked in the Book of Death. </p>
<p>The belief is that the righteous will live through the coming year; the wicked will not. All others – neither fully wicked nor fully righteous – will have their fate decided between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. </p>
<p>The angst surrounding these holidays is captured in a liturgical poem called the “Unetanneh Tokef,” translated as “let us speak of the awesomeness.” This ancient prayer is chanted during both Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur services, and <a href="https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/2701114/jewish/Text-of-Unetaneh-Tokef-Prayer.htm">states that</a>,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“On Rosh Hashanah they are inscribed, and on the fast day of Yom Kippur they are sealed…who shall live and who shall die… who shall perish by water and who by fire; who by the sword, and who by a wild beast; who by hunger and who by thirst…” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Leonard Cohen, considered among the greatest of songwriters, was inspired by this poem and used similar words in his song, <a href="https://israelforever.org/interact/multimedia/Music/who_by_fire_leonard_cohen/">“Who By Fire.”</a> He wrote,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>And who by fire, who by water <br>
Who in the sunshine, who in the night time <br>
Who by high ordeal, who by common trial <br>
Who in your merry merry month of May<br>
Who by very slow decay<br>
And who shall I say is calling?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Given the apprehension that accompanies these stark pronouncements, it is hardly surprising that during the Days of Awe, observant Jews often <a href="http://www.learnhebrew.org.il/print/gmar.htm">greet each other with a phrase of hope</a>, “G’mar Chatimah Tovah” – roughly translated, “May you be inscribed in the Book of Life.” </p>
<p>As a psychiatrist reflecting on the High Holy Days, I have often wondered how many traditionally raised Jewish children have been frightened by the prospect of winding up in the Book of Death. I know I was. </p>
<p>As someone who has <a href="https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/articles/becoming-mensch-timeless-talmudic-ethics-everyone">written extensively</a> on Jewish ethics, I know that the High Holy Days also embody an “ethical core” that transcends religious doctrines and embodies universal ethical truths. </p>
<h2>The varieties of Jewish beliefs</h2>
<p>Judaism encompasses a wide range of beliefs. Orthodox Judaism is based on the premise that the Torah – essentially, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible –<a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/9780061374982/jewish-literacy-revised-ed/">represents God’s eternal and unchangeable rules</a> for Jewish living and religious observance. </p>
<p>But non-Orthodox branches of Judaism emphasize Jewish ethical and cultural traditions more than strict adherence to Jewish law and scripture. They seek to adapt Jewish traditions to modern needs. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/293882/original/file-20190924-51401-1uzv0xf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/293882/original/file-20190924-51401-1uzv0xf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/293882/original/file-20190924-51401-1uzv0xf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/293882/original/file-20190924-51401-1uzv0xf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/293882/original/file-20190924-51401-1uzv0xf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/293882/original/file-20190924-51401-1uzv0xf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/293882/original/file-20190924-51401-1uzv0xf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Worshippers pray during Rosh Hashana services.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Associated-Press-Domestic-News-New-York-United-/f4b078f198e5da11af9f0014c2589dfb/44/0">AP Photo/Diane Bondareff</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Judaism in all its varieties is, at heart, a religion of hope and optimism. For example, the somber warnings of the liturgical poem “Unetanneh Tokef” are softened by its reminder that <a href="https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/2701114/jewish/Text-of-Unetaneh-Tokef-Prayer.htm">one can avert</a> being inscribed in the “Book of Death” by means of repentance, prayer and charity. That is done in the interval between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. </p>
<p>Repentance, or teshuvah in Hebrew, requires taking a kind of “spiritual inventory” aimed at improving the health of our souls. True repentance during the High Holy Days also <a href="http://www.jewishlights.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=JL&Product_Code=978-1-58023-114-5&Category_Code=">requires making amends</a> to those we have sinned against or mistreated. Merely asking God to forgive such sins is not enough. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/293883/original/file-20190924-51410-b0p134.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/293883/original/file-20190924-51410-b0p134.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/293883/original/file-20190924-51410-b0p134.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/293883/original/file-20190924-51410-b0p134.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/293883/original/file-20190924-51410-b0p134.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/293883/original/file-20190924-51410-b0p134.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/293883/original/file-20190924-51410-b0p134.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jews from an ultra-Orthodox sect listen to their rabbi on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean Sea as they participate in a Tashlich ceremony in Herzeliya, Israel.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/APTOPIX-Israel-Tashlich-Yom-Kipur/a562ffc04927450c977ac399c22da027/5/0">AP Photo/Ariel Schalit</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The ethical core of the High Holy Days</h2>
<p>Secular and Humanistic Judaism are branches of non-Orthodox Judaism and are often considered together under the rubric, <a href="https://iishj.org/">“Secular Humanistic Judaism</a>.” This tradition does not invoke or accept the concept of an eternal, transcendent God. During the High Holy Days, emphasis is placed on how all people – Jews and non-Jews – <a href="http://www.shj.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/2017-Number-1.pdf">can become better human beings</a>. </p>
<p>In this secular humanist tradition, Rosh Hashana is seen as a time for <a href="https://www.shj.org/humanistic-jewish-life/about-the-holidays/rosh-hashana/">self-evaluation and self-improvement</a>, without reference to God. Instead, emphasis is placed on the cultural, historical and ethical aspects of Judaism. </p>
<p>A common ceremony in the secular humanist tradition is “Tashlikh,” which involves symbolically casting off one’s sins by throwing bread crumbs into the water. </p>
<p>Tashlikh <a href="https://www.shj.org/humanistic-jewish-life/about-the-holidays/rosh-hashana/">allows Humanistic Jews</a> “…to reflect on their behavior; to cast off behaviors they are not proud of; and to vow to be better people in the year to come.” </p>
<p>Finally, although Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur are quintessentially Jewish holidays, their ethical values transcend any one religion.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/123831/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ronald W. Pies does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur are quintessentially Jewish holidays, but an ethicist argues that their values around becoming a better human being, transcend any one religion.
Ronald W. Pies, Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry, Lecturer on Bioethics & Humanities at SUNY Upstate Medical University; and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Tufts University School of Medicine; Editor-in-Chief Emeritus, Psychiatric Times., Tufts University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/108082
2018-12-05T23:40:27Z
2018-12-05T23:40:27Z
Mythmaking, social media and the truth about Leonard Cohen’s last letter to Marianne Ihlen
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/248942/original/file-20181205-186082-cydng9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Leonard Cohen pictured in July 2008. His 2016 letter to his 'muse' Marianne Ihlen went viral after his death in the same year. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Rolf Haid/EPA</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The note Leonard Cohen wrote to his former lover <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marianne_Ihlen">Marianne Ihlen</a> as she lay upon her death bed became a viral phenomenon after they both died in 2016. But Cohen’s last letter to Ihlen was not entirely what you read.</p>
<p>Ihlen had been hospitalised with leukaemia in Norway when a friend contacted Cohen to inform him of her impending death. He responded with the letter (sent as an email) within hours. Ihlen died several days later, on July 28th, having had this farewell message read to her. For a private communication, this letter soon became very public. </p>
<p>Already it is canonised, and not only among fans of the Canadian poet, singer and songwriter. It was recently included in a collection of correspondence, <a href="https://www.hachette.com.au/simon-sebag-montefiore/written-in-history-letters-that-changed-the-world">Written in History: Letters that Changed the World</a>, edited by English historian Simon Sebag Montefiore. </p>
<p>Montefiore starts his introduction to the book with the declaration that, “Nothing beats the immediacy and authenticity of a letter.” But the history of the Cohen letter’s circulation shows how “authenticity” can be rendered questionable by those seeking to exploit its “immediacy”. It also highlights the myth-making around this writer-muse relationship that gathered fabled resonance after Cohen and Ihlen <a href="http://www.publishing.monash.edu/books/hpw-9781925523096.html">met on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960</a>, although the relationship had all but run its course by the decade’s end.</p>
<p>Ihlen’s friend who brokered this final exchange with Cohen was film-maker Jan Christian Mollestad. Within days of Ihlen’s passing, Canada’s national English-language broadcaster, CBC radio, had tracked down Mollestad. An interview with him was <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-wednesday-edition-1.3705984/so-long-marianne-leonard-cohen-s-final-letter-to-his-muse-1.3705989">posted on the station’s website</a>, along with a truncated transcription, on August 5 2016.</p>
<p>In response to a question from the interviewer, Mollestad went on to “quote” Cohen’s letter in full.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Well Marianne it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.</p>
<p>And you know that I’ve always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I don’t need to say anything more about that because you know all about that. But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The text of this letter, as Mollestad recited it, was immediately picked up by other news outlets. The Guardian and Rolling Stone both ran the story of the letter on August 7th, repeating the CBC version in full.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-a-fresh-perspective-on-leonard-cohen-and-the-island-that-inspired-him-105392">Friday essay: a fresh perspective on Leonard Cohen and the island that inspired him</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The letter’s instant notoriety was born not only of its gentle farewell to the soon-to-be departed Ihlen, but also because of the intimations of Cohen’s own demise. And its consumption was massively enabled by social media. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BMVz13ozEgs?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A YouTube tribute video created after Marianne and Leonard’s deaths.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>‘The syntax of love’</h2>
<p>A <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/08/leonard-cohen-letter-to-marianne-ihlen-was-poetic-and-candid">follow-up article</a> in the Guardian praised the letter’s “economy of words, the syntax of love, his ability to go straight to the only matter that matters – her death, his mortality, their love – is a thing of beauty and wisdom in itself.” It was a sentiment echoed by many.</p>
<p>On November 7 2016, Cohen died. The letter was immediately resurrected across multiple news and social media outlets. It was used now to focus on Cohen’s prediction that, “I will follow you very soon,” and his evocation, through the image of Ihlen’s reaching hand, of being drawn towards her in death. </p>
<p>Over the following months, the letter was read in “tributes” for the departed singer, frequently paired with a performance of So Long, Marianne from Cohen’s 1967 debut album. In November 2017, Adam Cohen, Leonard’s son, interpolated the letter into the lyrics of So Long, Marianne at a star-studded, first-anniversary tribute show in Montreal. </p>
<p>Cohen’s letter, now seemingly endorsed by his family, had become part of his canon. All good … except that the words used in it weren’t Cohen’s.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tmLMWTT5aUQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<h2>What happened?</h2>
<p>Bypassing the abbreviated transcript and listening to the recorded version of the CBC interview with Mollestad is revealing. Journalist Rosemary Barton asks: “I know you don’t have it [the letter] in front of you, but I’m sure given it was written by Leonard Cohen you can remember part of it?”</p>
<p>In response, it is clear that Mollestad is paraphrasing. He stumbles a number of times, trying several phrases over in different forms as he struggles to accurately recall Cohen’s words. As he reaches the conclusion of the letter as he recalls it, he simply mumbles, “something like that”.</p>
<p>When the interview was transcribed for the CBC website some editorial “smoothing” of Mollestad’s recalled version of the letter was undertaken to remove his justifiable hesitations. In the process, more minor changes were made.</p>
<p>In his book, Montefiore resurrects what is likely an accurate copy of Cohen’s letter, with permission to use attributed to “The estate of Leonard Cohen”. Its differences are, understandably, considerable. It reads in full:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Dearest Marianne,</p>
<p>I’m just a little behind you, close enough to take your hand. This old body has given up, just as yours has too, and the eviction notice is on its way any day now.</p>
<p>I’ve never forgotten your love and your beauty. But you know that. I don’t have to say any more. Safe travels old friend. See you down the road. Love and gratitude. Leonard</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Not only is the Mollestad/CBC version a full third longer, but in small but meaningful ways the intent of Cohen’s original was also altered.</p>
<p>Cohen’s “Dearest Marianne” strikes a different opening note to the resignation of “Well Marianne”. Mollestad has Ihlen reaching out (or back) for Cohen’s hand, whereas Cohen gives himself the possibility of reaching for hers; Mollestad’s introduced reference to Ihlen’s “wisdom” changes the inflection of the relationship between the two protagonists; and Cohen’s reference to the couple facing “eviction” from their bodies alters the constant gentleness and intimacy of Mollestad’s version. </p>
<p>Arguably Mollestad’s version is a little more pleasing in some of its phrasing, with “so close behind you” coming more easily than Cohen’s “just a little behind you”; and his reference to a “good journey” chiming more satisfactorily than Cohen’s “safe travels” with the shared closing salutation, “see you down the road”.</p>
<p>The Cohen letter’s circulation in its original form may change, ever so slightly, how the personal histories of Cohen and Ihlen are remembered. And this is a letter that has been changed by history, as journalists and social media commentators, feeding a voracious news-cycle, cast authenticity aside in the process.</p>
<p>Although the appearance of the Cohen letter in Montefiore’s volume appears to correct the record, it will be interesting to see which of the two versions survives. </p>
<p>It will likely be the one originally posted by the CBC. Not only is it far more widely known and available, but many people will probably find it more appealing and moving than the original.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/108082/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Leonard Cohen’s letter to his former girlfriend on her death bed became a viral phenomenon. But the words that circulated on social media were a paraphrased version, not his own.
Tanya Dalziell, Associate Professor, English and Literary Studies, The University of Western Australia
Paul Genoni, Associate Professor, School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry, Curtin University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/107782
2018-11-28T21:56:50Z
2018-11-28T21:56:50Z
Canada’s moral negligence in Jamal Khashoggi’s murder
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/247762/original/file-20181128-32191-1m7m59u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">In this October 2018, photo, candles lit by activists protesting the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi are placed outside Saudi Arabia's Consulate in Istanbul.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>When the CIA <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2018/11/16/world/europe/16reuters-saudi-khashoggi-cia.html">announced</a> that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman likely ordered the brutal killing of <em>Washington Post</em> journalist Jamal Khashoggi, my colleagues and I published an <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-red-line-crossed-jamal-khashoggis-life-cannot-be-sacrificed-for/">opinion piece</a> in a Canadian newspaper. We were critical of our government’s response, which doubles down on its rhetoric of “human rights” while failing to take any concrete action. </p>
<p>“We will continue to stand up for Canadian values and indeed for universal values and human rights at any occasion,” Prime Minister Trudeau <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-morning-update-trudeau-says-canada-will-stand-up-for-human-rights/">said in August</a>.</p>
<p>“Continue”? And “at any occasion?” But why not now, and on this occasion?</p>
<p>Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-chrystia-freeland-says-canada-very-troubled-by-disappearance-of/">has offered an explanation</a> that she framed as morally virtuous: “When it comes to existing contracts, our government believes strongly that Canada’s word has to matter.” </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/247761/original/file-20181128-32203-1p5y62.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/247761/original/file-20181128-32203-1p5y62.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/247761/original/file-20181128-32203-1p5y62.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/247761/original/file-20181128-32203-1p5y62.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/247761/original/file-20181128-32203-1p5y62.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/247761/original/file-20181128-32203-1p5y62.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/247761/original/file-20181128-32203-1p5y62.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Trudeau and Freeland are seen at a news conference on the new North American free-trade deal in Oct. 2018.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Canada’s $14.8 billion contract to sell armoured combat vehicles to Saudi Arabia could not be jeopardized. Cancelling it would carry penalties somewhere in the range of “<a href="https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/penalty-for-cancelling-saudi-arms-contract-in-the-billions-trudeau-1.4150003">billions of dollars</a>,” the prime minister tells us. And besides, this deal will reportedly create <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/the-saudi-arms-deal-what-weve-learned-so-far/article28180299/">3,000 jobs</a> over 14 years in southwestern Ontario. This too is significant. But the trade-off is stark: the death of some in exchange for the livelihood of others. This can be none other than what we called a “sacrificial economy.” </p>
<h2>‘Everybody knows’</h2>
<p>If I could choose a soundtrack for the Jamal Khashoggi affair, it would be the ghostly voice of Leonard Cohen singing “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lin-a2lTelg">Everybody Knows</a>.” The refrain is familiar. Everybody knows about Canada’s lucrative armoured vehicle contract with the Saudi regime. Everybody knows the deal is rotten.</p>
<p>Everybody knows that these are weapons and do not serve the same humanitarian purposes as books or pharmaceuticals or grain. Everybody knows that they deliver death and destitution and that they have helped to produce what the United Nations <a href="https://news.un.org/en/focus/yemen">has called</a> the worst man-made humanitarian crisis of our time in Yemen. </p>
<p>Everybody knows that a <em>Washington Post</em> journalist is not the only victim of these economies — there are countless dead who have no voice, and it is especially tragic that someone positioned to speak on their behalf was himself assassinated.</p>
<p>Everybody knows — or should know — that in 2017 alone, Canada sold just under <a href="http://www.international.gc.ca/controls-controles/report-rapports/mil-2017.aspx?lang=eng">$500 million</a> worth of guns, training gear, imaging and countermeasure equipment, bombs, rockets, drones and unspecified chemical or biological agents to Saudi Arabia. We have also sold guided missiles to Bahrain, and different weapons to the United Arab Emirates — both of which support Saudi military action in Yemen. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/247673/original/file-20181128-32230-rtt2ss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/247673/original/file-20181128-32230-rtt2ss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/247673/original/file-20181128-32230-rtt2ss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/247673/original/file-20181128-32230-rtt2ss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/247673/original/file-20181128-32230-rtt2ss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/247673/original/file-20181128-32230-rtt2ss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/247673/original/file-20181128-32230-rtt2ss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">General Dynamics Land Systems-Canada, LAV 6.0 armoured vehicle like the ones sold to Saudi Arabia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gdlscanada.com/products/LAV/LAV-6.0.html">Sgt. Jean-Francois Lauzé, © 2016 DND-MDN Canada</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We have also sold military <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/canada-selling-helicopters-to-philippines-military-despite-human-rights-concerns/article37874305/">helicopters</a> to Rodrigo Duterte’s regime in the Philippines. The list goes on. So even if one Saudi contract is cancelled, not much is likely to change.</p>
<h2>Dice are loaded</h2>
<p>But even without these details, everybody knows that the dice are loaded. In my research, I examine the ethical relationship between the modern state’s power to “make live” and “let die” — which also means indirect killing. This is what the French philosopher <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780312422660">Michel Foucault called “biopolitics,” a deadly and differential politics</a> where life itself is both the means and the end of political power. </p>
<p>Sacrificial deaths go by many euphemisms: collateral damages (in war), opportunity costs or negative externalities (in economics). But negative “externality” is misleading here. The negation of life, or “letting die,” is <em>internal</em> to this general economy, a moral economy that silently underpins the rules of international law, diplomacy and trade. Everybody knows, but nobody knows what to do with this knowledge. </p>
<p>It is, then, as if Khashoggi’s murder — along with innumerable others less spectacular or publicized — are factored in as a tolerable threshold of death in the name of life and livelihood. This is not new, but the scale of mass destruction and its technological automation should give us pause as we contemplate the roboticization of weapons and algorithmic warfare.</p>
<p>The sacrificial economy has its own sinister principles of accounting. As British intellectual and forensic architect Eyal Weizman has documented in <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/2464-the-least-of-all-possible-evils"><em>The Least of All Possible Evils</em></a>, the U.S. military has tolerable thresholds of civilian deaths for each military death; Israeli blockades in Gaza have counted the calories of food entering Gaza, based on average per-person consumption (2,100 calories per male and 1,700 per female). </p>
<h2>Violence as virtue</h2>
<p>Violence is framed as a moral virtue, obeying “proportionality” or the “humanitarian minimum.” Outside the theatres of war, and in the Canadian context, what is the tolerable threshold of carbon emissions and climate change to sell our oil, or the tolerable threshold of First Nations communities without access to clean drinking water? More sacrifice.</p>
<p>It would be unjust to blame Trudeau or Freeland entirely for our sacrificial economy. As Cohen writes, “That’s how it goes / Everybody knows.” </p>
<p>But there is, still, the matter of Canada’s word, our collective values and the willingness of each Canadian to remain complicit or to knowingly resist. Khashoggi’s death is significant not just for its attack on the freedom of the press, but because it occasions a grave conversation on the relationship between our livelihood as Canadians and the countless deaths that this livelihood calls for and quietly condones.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/107782/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stuart J. Murray receives funding from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. </span></em></p>
Ottawa’s response to Jamal Khashoggi’s murder doubles down on “human rights” rhetoric while failing to take action. It’s a matter of the death of some in exchange for the livelihood of others.
Stuart J. Murray, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Rhetoric and Ethics, Carleton University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/105392
2018-10-25T19:17:50Z
2018-10-25T19:17:50Z
Friday essay: a fresh perspective on Leonard Cohen and the island that inspired him
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/241574/original/file-20181022-105770-1a1db7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Hydra 1960, including Leonard Cohen (bearded, left) and Redmond Wallis (centre right in cotton shirt). </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photographer unknown. Reproduced with the permission of Dorothy Wallis.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>This week sees the Australian release of Leonard Cohen’s posthumous volume <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/general-books/music/The-Flame-Leonard-Cohen-introduction-by-Adam-Cohen-9781786893130">The Flame: Poems and Selections from the Notebooks</a>. Among the song lyrics and notebook extracts that comprise the book are selections of new poetry, much of it touching on ageing and mortality, but not without characteristic humour.</p>
<p>In one, the poet wryly recounts: “In the elevator / Of the Manchester Malmaison Hotel / I have to put on reading glasses / To find the button for my floor”. </p>
<p>This elevator experience is very different from that which Cohen had in the late 1960s at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, where he encountered Janis Joplin. As legend has it, by the time the hotel’s slow-moving lift reached the fourth floor, Cohen and Joplin were destined to spend the night together.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242162/original/file-20181024-71038-1mr88qy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242162/original/file-20181024-71038-1mr88qy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242162/original/file-20181024-71038-1mr88qy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=811&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242162/original/file-20181024-71038-1mr88qy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=811&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242162/original/file-20181024-71038-1mr88qy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=811&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242162/original/file-20181024-71038-1mr88qy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1019&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242162/original/file-20181024-71038-1mr88qy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1019&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242162/original/file-20181024-71038-1mr88qy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1019&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Chelsea Hotel is one place with which Cohen is inextricably linked, thanks in large part to the song <a href="https://youtu.be/Xk7DOe5EGgM">“Chelsea Hotel no. 2”</a> wherein he gave his own version of the Joplin liaison. Another is the Greek island of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydra_(island)">Hydra</a>, where Cohen spent much of his 20s before “running for the money and the flesh” offered by New York’s singer-songwriter scene. He would also pinpoint Hydra’s erotic potential in song, with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWP7uI_ZB_o">Half the Perfect World</a> describing “The polished hill / The milky town” where “love’s unwilled, unleashed / Unbound”.</p>
<p>Cohen was working on The Flame at the very end of his life, a circumstance reflected in its contents. But his formative years on Hydra were influential in shaping his sense of self and career. The story of Cohen on Hydra in the ’60s has become central to his personal myth because it is seen as a crucial time of existential and sexual freedom, intellectual liberation and creative solidarity.</p>
<p>One version has it that, after several months in London on a Canadian government grant, a conversation with a suntanned bank teller on a gloomy spring day propelled Cohen to buy a ticket to Athens, and then take a ferry to Hydra in search of sunshine, succour and sex. He was to find all three in abundance and to start his makeover as a bohemian, cosmopolitan author and singer-songwriter.</p>
<p>The research for our book <a href="http://www.publishing.monash.edu/books/hpw-9781925523096.html">Half the Perfect World: Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra, 1955-1964</a> has uncovered and drawn on many new first-hand accounts of Hydra’s artists and writers, as well as LIFE photographer James Burke’s photographs of this postwar expatriate community. We have been particularly indebted to a little-known New Zealand-born novelist, journalist, editor and publisher, <a href="https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/antipodes/vol29/iss2/">Redmond Frankton “Bim” Wallis</a>. </p>
<p>With his wife Robyn, Wallis turned up on Hydra in mid-April 1960, only days before Cohen arrived. The Wallises eventually left Hydra for good in August 1964. In September 1960, Cohen would buy an island house where he lived for much of the next decade and to which he returned occasionally throughout his life.</p>
<p>Fortunately for us, Wallis had a camera with him and kept a diary of his time on the island. He later worked intermittently at turning his diarised observations into fiction.</p>
<p>Even more fortunately, the <a href="https://natlib.govt.nz/records/22734988?search%5Bpath%5D=items&search%5Btext%5D=redmond+wallis">National Library of New Zealand’s Turnbull Library</a> later proactively solicited from Wallis numerous personal documents, including unpublished diaries, photos, correspondence and manuscripts. These included his only adult novel, Point of Origin (1961), written on Hydra, and unpublished titles such as The Submissive Body; Bees on a String; Juan Carlos and the Bad-assed Belgian; and The Unyielding Memory.</p>
<h2>Thinly veiled autobiographical fiction</h2>
<p>Whatever the shortcomings that saw The Unyielding Memory left unfinished, it immediately commanded our attention. The manuscript was Wallis’s attempt to represent his Hydra experience as thinly veiled autobiographical fiction, and it provides many insights into life on the island in the early 1960s. These include an intriguing first-hand account of Cohen on the brink of the international renown that would make him one of the most significant literary and musical figures of the coming decades.</p>
<p>Not only did Wallis and Cohen arrive on Hydra within days of each other, but they also had a similar introduction to the island when they immediately fell within the orbit of the Australian writers, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/half-the-perfect-world:-charmian-clift-and-george-johnston-on-h/10255498">George Johnston and Charmian Clift</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242165/original/file-20181024-71038-jqgknv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242165/original/file-20181024-71038-jqgknv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242165/original/file-20181024-71038-jqgknv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=582&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242165/original/file-20181024-71038-jqgknv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=582&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242165/original/file-20181024-71038-jqgknv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=582&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242165/original/file-20181024-71038-jqgknv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=731&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242165/original/file-20181024-71038-jqgknv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=731&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242165/original/file-20181024-71038-jqgknv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=731&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hydra Port, 1960.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photograph by Redmond Wallis. Reproduced with the permission of Dorothy Wallis.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This couple had been on Hydra since 1955 and was the gravitational centre of the expatriate colony. With their shared devotion to writing piqued by the quarrelsome intensity of their relationship, Johnston and Clift — who appear in The Unyielding Memory as George and Catherine Grayson — adopted a nurturing attitude to the younger generation of would-be authors and artists who made their way to the island. They organised accommodation for the newly arrived Wallises and provided a bed in their own house for Cohen.</p>
<p>Wallis and Cohen would become close. They were of similar age, with Wallis born in September 1933 and Cohen in September 1934. They would have recognised in each other the commonalities in their conservative, upper-middle-class, religiously based backgrounds. The rabbis in Cohen’s family were matched by the ministers in Wallis’s.</p>
<p>It was a similarity that Wallis acknowledged in The Unyielding Memory, although the character Nick Alwyn (Wallis) ruefully observes that while he and Saul Rubens (Cohen) had a shared experience of overbearing mothers, “Saul somehow managed to cope with that, [and] there was no trace of it in his work”. </p>
<p>They were also united by stepping into, and becoming part of, an intricate web of artistic, intellectual and sexual rivalries and affiliations that swirled through the expatriate community amid long days and nights in the taverns and kafenia of the dockside agora.</p>
<p>The Unyielding Memory follows closely the known relationship between Wallis and Cohen as they establish themselves among the expats. This includes Cohen’s rapidly blossoming relationship with Marianne Ihlen (Margaretha in the manuscript) and his purchase of an island house; Cohen visiting the Wallises when they spend a period in London — where he introduces them to marijuana — and the Wallises moving into Cohen’s/Rubens’s house when they return to Hydra and Cohen/Ruben is away. </p>
<h2>Letters between Cohen and Wallis</h2>
<p>During Cohen’s/Rubens’s absence, the relationship continues in the form of correspondence between the two characters. The letters in the novel are based entirely on correspondence between Wallis and Cohen. They show Cohen/Rubens focused on the reception of his work and the demands put upon him as his career moves into television and film, while Wallis/Alwyn is interested in reporting to his absent landlord island happenings and gossip, of which there are plenty.</p>
<p>The other important link between the two young men is the literary one, as their comparable upbringings in cities at the fringe of the Anglophone literary world find them equally ambitious and serious in their intention to make a living from writing. There was, however, a notable gulf in their achievements at the point when they arrived on Hydra.</p>
<p>By 1960 Cohen already had a reputation as a promising poet with support from some of Canada’s foremost writers of a previous generation. He also had a first collection, Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956), to his credit, which had been generously praised by Northrop Frye, Canada’s (and indeed North America’s) leading critic.</p>
<p>Wallis, on the other hand, had little to his literary arsenal in 1960 other than ambition. In his diaries Wallis reported his belief of Cohen: “This one is going to come very close to being a great writer.” In The Unyielding Memory, Wallis/Alwyn concedes that Cohen/Rubens not only possesses abilities that far outweigh his own, but these are also married to an intense focus that he himself is unable to match.</p>
<p>As Wallis wrote, he found in Cohen’s/Rubens’s demeanour an ironic, observational detachment that seemed necessary to a writer.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[Rubens] interested Nick, because he seemed to be so self-contained, mildly amused by what he saw around him, passionate about work, and deliberately enigmatic. His public utterances were always somewhat non-committal or pregnantly oblique … He was, to use a word coming into fashion, cool.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Wallis creates a portrait of a man who could engage in literary matters without the competitiveness that troubles others’ relationships. He also paints Cohen/Rubens at some remove from the boisterous expatriates but also willing and happy to socialise with them. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242164/original/file-20181024-71014-vjarcs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242164/original/file-20181024-71014-vjarcs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242164/original/file-20181024-71014-vjarcs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242164/original/file-20181024-71014-vjarcs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242164/original/file-20181024-71014-vjarcs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242164/original/file-20181024-71014-vjarcs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242164/original/file-20181024-71014-vjarcs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242164/original/file-20181024-71014-vjarcs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Douskos 1960, including Redmond Wallis and Leonard Cohen (second and third left). Photograph by James Burke.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photograph by James Burke, Getty images.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As photographs of Cohen strumming a guitar one September evening at the Douskos taverna in 1960 suggest, while his career as a singer-songwriter was still some years away, he had a fledgling ability to engage an audience. According to the Australian political commentator <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mungo_Wentworth_MacCallum">Mungo MacCallum</a>, another who found himself on Hydra in the early 1960s, Cohen’s <a href="http://www.laborarts.org/exhibits/laborsings/song.cfm?id=9">musical tastes in those days</a> were “union songs – <a href="http://www.balladofamerica.com/music/indexes/songs/oldpaint/index.htm">Old Paint</a>, the horse with the union label, was a speciality”. Wallis recorded Cohen/Rubens similarly:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As for Saul’s politics he was, Nick had decided, as revolutionary as the songs he sang, but an observer. Saul would never — like Malraux, like Camus — actively fight fascism. What Saul would do was look at the results of rebellion, visit Cuba, talk to radicals, observe demonstrations. He would recognise that he was not equipped to man the barricades, but was equipped to stir the emotions, to encourage.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Whereas Cohen would go on “to stir the emotions” and attract lasting international fame for his songs, books and poetry, Wallis’s future took a quieter path. </p>
<p>On leaving Hydra for good in 1964, Wallis returned to journalism and worked for Australian Associated Press on Fleet Street. He then had a long career in editing and publishing. He did not write another adult novel. He returned to New Zealand only rarely and briefly, living his last years in France. </p>
<p>Many chapters of The Unyielding Memory exist in variant drafts and reflect Wallis’s lifelong struggle to find a suitable structure for his Hydra material. As he conceded: “The problem has always been that the reality was more powerful than fiction I could invent, and turning fact into fiction has proved extraordinarily difficult.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/241574/original/file-20181022-105770-1a1db7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/241574/original/file-20181022-105770-1a1db7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241574/original/file-20181022-105770-1a1db7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241574/original/file-20181022-105770-1a1db7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241574/original/file-20181022-105770-1a1db7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=710&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241574/original/file-20181022-105770-1a1db7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=710&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241574/original/file-20181022-105770-1a1db7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=710&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In this photo taken on Hydra in 1960, Marianne Ihlen is pictured in the front left and Robyn Wallis is front centre.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photographer unknown. Reproduced with the permission of Dorothy Wallis.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Taking stock</h2>
<p>Turning his experiences into art was something Cohen was good at, as The Flame attests. There is a sense that, at the end of his life, Cohen is taking stock and putting things in order with this volume. </p>
<p>As per Cohen’s design, the book is organised into three sections, with drawings and self-portraits interspersed throughout. The first part is a collection of 63 poems, a selection from decades of work. The second section contains lyrics from recent albums. And the third part is made up of extracts from the notebooks Cohen kept since he was a teenager.</p>
<p>Among the notebook sketches is acknowledgement of the cost involved for those brought into Cohen’s creative orbit. Janis Joplin was not the only one whose encounter with Cohen was laid bare in song. Cohen writes with understanding of his Hydra lover, Marianne Ihlen (of So Long Marianne fame, a song that was started in Montreal and completed in the Chelsea Hotel):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Marianne on Aylmer Street<br>
enduring my hatred <br>
until it rusted<br>
and naming me higher and higher<br>
until my view was wide<br>
enough to love her<br></p>
</blockquote>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DgEiDc1aXr0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The poems tell of lovers and friends, and desires hardly lessened with age. They also range across contemporary politics and music culture. One pointed poem declares “Kanye West is Not Picasso”, while a notebook entry tells of a dream of Tom Waites playing his music, “so / beautiful and original and / sophisticated – so much better / than mine”. </p>
<p>The last poem in the sequence, I Pray For Courage, faces death and faith directly:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I pray for courage<br>
At the end<br>
To see death coming<br>
As a friend<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>If Cohen writes unblinkingly of his coming death, then he also looks back to his past. Tucked among the notebook extracts is a modest stanza in which he reflects on how singular and enduring his experience of Hydra is:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I could not slip away<br>
without telling you<br>
that I died in Greece<br>
was buried in that <br>
place where the donkey <br>
is tethered to the olive tree<br>
I will always be there<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>As with his chronicler, Redmond Wallis, Hydra was never far from Leonard Cohen’s mind.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/105392/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Leonard Cohen’s final (posthumous) book was released in Australia this week. Another new book sheds light on Cohen’s life on Hydra in the 1960s and the relationships he forged with Antipodeans seeking liberation there.
Tanya Dalziell, Associate Professor, English and Literary Studies, The University of Western Australia
Paul Genoni, Associate Professor, Faculty of Media, Society and Culture, Curtin University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/101117
2018-10-04T20:05:34Z
2018-10-04T20:05:34Z
Friday essay: popular music’s search for the sacred in a secular world
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/236797/original/file-20180918-158237-1yyh2cy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Nick Cave performing with The Bad Seeds in Budapest in June. His song lyrics, with those often melancholy, churchy organ chords, are dripping in references to what might be called sacredness. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Zoltan Balogh/EPA</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>One of the most rancorous, persistent and <a href="http://nma.gov.au/blogs/inside/2010/03/26/child-sex-abuse-and-the-church/">polarising dualisms today</a> is, arguably, that between the secular and the sacred. Sacred and secular are capacious categories, but in the field of lived and popular culture, such terms are being transformed kaleidoscopically, with the songs of Nick Cave, Hozier, and many others exploring the sacred embedded in very human, secular contexts. </p>
<p>So what happens if we unpack our individual relationship to that dualism? Do the safe walls we have, possibly, built around ourselves, either against religion (or more broadly, the sacred), or against atheism, stand unbudgeable, untouchable? There’s always that middle ground, agnosticism. But do we feel the need to open the gates, prepared to hear our own clichés fly: “Australia is such a modern secular nation”; religion, isn’t that an opiate?; “priests are all pedophiles”; “nothing’s sacred anymore”; “thanks to my Catholic childhood, but no thanks …” </p>
<p>Well, guess what? The enquiry into sacredness is not over, it’s just beginning for the 21st century, and in wildly, playfully, wonderfully disparate modes and places. Enter Nick Cave, that dark prince of early punk music, now striding restlessly back and forth between punk and popular. His song lyrics, with those often melancholy, churchy organ chords, are dripping in references to what might be called sacredness in a secular world. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/new-research-shows-australian-teens-have-complex-views-on-religion-and-spirituality-103233">New research shows Australian teens have complex views on religion and spirituality</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Take, for example, the wry, self-deprecating lyrics of his popular song <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnHoqHscTKE">Into my Arms</a>: “I don’t believe in an interventionist God / But I know, darling, that you do / But if I did, I would kneel down and ask Him …” </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LnHoqHscTKE?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Or the lyrics of a lesser-known song, <a href="https://genius.com/Nick-cave-and-the-bad-seeds-brompton-oratory-lyrics#note-7268620">Brompton Oratory</a>, which takes as its scene the beautiful old church in central London, where a dispirited lover sings to himself, to his absent love, and to a God who is transposed across the absent lover:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Up those stone steps I climb<br>
Hail this joyful day’s return<br>
Into its great shadowed vault I go<br>
Hail the Pentecostal morn. <br>
The reading is from Luke 24<br>
Where Christ returns to his loved ones<br>
I look at the stone apostles<br>
Think that it’s alright for some<br></p>
<p>And I wish that I was made of stone<br>
So that I would not have to see<br>
A beauty impossible to define<br>
A beauty impossible to believe<br>
A beauty impossible to endure<br>
The blood imparted in little sips<br>
The smell of you still on my hands<br>
As I bring the cup up to my lips<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The music of Brompton Oratory juxtaposes a restless, walking, syncopated rhythm and the moody tones of the church organ. In Cave’s by now famous metaphorical merging of flesh and spirit – “the smell of you still on my hands/As I bring the cup up to my lips” – the singer presses imaginatively, movingly, against the border between death and life, worldly and spiritual love. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_esUexstdbg?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Hope and belief merge too, because the sacred here does not equate with dogma, religion, or institution (though the Oratory’s steps are hard, and the apostles are made of stone), but rather with the raw, recognisable longing of one who desires rather than knows, who yearns both spiritually and in the flesh.</p>
<p>Cave’s 10th album, The Boatman’s Call (1997), where these two songs appear, is immersed in sacred and secular intertwined, two lovers knotted together, wrapped in each other’s arms in mutual need, suspicion and recognition. Have a look at the lyrics to <a href="https://www.nickcave.com/lyrics/nick-cave-bad-seeds/boatmans-call/kingdom/">There is a kingdom</a> or <a href="https://www.nickcave.com/lyrics/nick-cave-bad-seeds/boatmans-call/idiot-prayer/">Idiot Prayer </a>. The idiot in the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWi9pOw3Fak">latter poem</a> has faith, but also doubt. He hopes for heaven and yet sees hell all too viscerally:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This prayer is for you, my love<br>
Sent on the wings of a dove<br>
An idiot prayer of empty words.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Imagination is one route towards the sacred, but it so often crumbles into “empty words” in Cave’s ecstasies. This blend of lyric rapture and melancholy is familiar if you are a Leonard Cohen fan too. In Cohen’s 1984 song <a href="https://genius.com/Leonard-cohen-hallelujah-lyrics">Hallelujah</a>, so exquisitely rendered by Jeff Buckley, as well as by John Cale and many others, sacred possibilities are embedded in a lyric of high desire and doubt:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Now, I’ve heard there was a secret chord<br>
That David played, and it pleased the Lord,<br>
But you don’t really care for music, do you?<br>
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth,<br>
The minor fall, the major lift,<br>
The baffled king composing hallelujah…<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Cohen’s complicated sexual and spiritual meditation does not shy away from the entanglement of the sacred and the secular (material, sexual, bodily) urges of human life: “There is a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything)/That’s how the light gets in” (Leonard Cohen, <a>Anthem</a>). His hallelujah is “not a victory march/It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.”</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/y8AWFf7EAc4?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>“That’s muzak now, isn’t it?” my partner groaned, as I played Buckley singing his version. And it is. But read Alan Light’s 2012 book, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13547619-the-holy-or-the-broken">The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of ‘Hallelujah’</a> for a gripping account of the journey of the song into popular culture.</p>
<p>Irish singer Hozier’s <a href="https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/hozier/takemetochurch.html">Take me to Church</a>, covered by Ed Sheeran and others, sings of a he and a she enthralled with each other, making sense of what is human, clean, innocent, generous, in terms that collapse the sacred and the secular.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>No masters or kings when the ritual begins<br>
There is no sweeter innocence than our gentle sin<br>
In the madness and soil of that sad earthly scene<br>
Only then I am human<br>
Only then I am clean<br>
Amen, Amen, Amen<br></p>
<p>Take me to church<br>
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies<br>
I’ll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife<br>
Offer me that deathless death<br>
Good God, let me give you my life</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But Hozier’s video for the song (one of two videos, the other a balletic production) is of a he and a he, a gay relationship, which presents another twist to our understanding about why the dualisms of right and wrong, embedded in heteronormativity, must be questioned. The video presents a confronting narrative of persecution and violence against gay sexuality. At the same time, it is a lover’s paean.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PVjiKRfKpPI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The chorus’ “Amen, Amen, Amen” is sung against the visual images of brute hatred and destruction, producing a complex response to the injustice of “the madness and soil of that sad earthly scene”. </p>
<p>Yes, the dualisms of sacred and secular, right and wrong, which fuel homophobia still motivate many cultures, with their need to hierarchise, dominate, or exterminate the other.</p>
<p>But Hozier’s song holds on, through images of total violence, to the beauty and rapture of lovers finding the ground for a love which “dares not speak its name”, still, in many places.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-quran-the-bible-and-homosexuality-in-islam-61012">Friday essay: The Qur’an, the Bible and homosexuality in Islam</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Relating to difference</h2>
<p>How far have we come from the rigid linguistic and lived dichotomies that shape people’s identities, that police who they can love, that dictate what we should find sacred? Perhaps it’s not a question of “how far have we come”, but of the fecundity of our processes that seek to understand and learn from difference. </p>
<p>Cultures seek sameness, likeness, but more and more, globally, we need to relate to difference, to keep trying to comprehend how different skins, different histories, different sexualities, different beliefs might find openness in living together. That quest for enlightened attitudes to difference speaks into what is at the root of both sacred and secular approaches to living on the earth.</p>
<p>It is a continuing conundrum that in this so-called secular nation of Australia we cannot find fuller and richer ways – politically, religiously - of acknowledging past violence and failure, of moving forward into places where differences are proudly enunciated, rather than nourishing the roots of hatred and dismissal of the other. This conundrum is highlighted when we consider relations between white and Aboriginal Australia. </p>
<p>How often have I heard (white) academics making welcome to country pronouncements, acknowledging Aboriginal sacred relations to place and country, but then in more ways than one eschewing, for themselves, the category of the sacred?</p>
<p>What is it that makes one people declare its sacred relation to ancestors and country, and another people so committed to a modern, secular existence – the material, or hyper-capitalist, or individualistic – while cohabiting the same country? </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/236788/original/file-20180918-158246-1ls8p67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/236788/original/file-20180918-158246-1ls8p67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/236788/original/file-20180918-158246-1ls8p67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/236788/original/file-20180918-158246-1ls8p67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/236788/original/file-20180918-158246-1ls8p67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/236788/original/file-20180918-158246-1ls8p67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/236788/original/file-20180918-158246-1ls8p67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/236788/original/file-20180918-158246-1ls8p67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Queensland’s Innovation Minister Kate Jones (centre right) and entrepreneurs watch an Indigenous welcome to country performance on arrival at the 2018 Myriad Festival in Brisbane in May.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Dan Peled/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It was good, therefore, to hear recently of Australian academic David Newheiser’s current research project, Atheism and Christianity: Moving Beyond Polemic, emerging from a team at the Australian Catholic University’s Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry. </p>
<p>Yes, the Catholic institutional context of ACU might raise some immediate questions about the nature of real debate in this evaluation of atheism. But listening to the reach and openness of this project is fascinating and uplifting (for more, go to ABC Radio National’s <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/spiritofthings/should-christians-and-atheists-get-along/10040020">The Spirit of Things</a> podcast). Old, cold dualisms are tumbling in this piece of research into the interrelatedness of belief in both atheism and Christianity.</p>
<p>And in relation to our joint life in Australia, racially and spiritually, Aboriginal people today are addressing the present Prime Minister, asking that he hear their claims to sovereignty and deep, historical, sacred relations to culture, country and language. The words of that enormously popular 1991 Yothu Yindi song <a href="https://genius.com/Yothu-yindi-treaty-lyrics">Treaty</a> still ring out.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Now two rivers run their course<br>
Separated for so long<br>
I’m dreaming of a brighter day<br>
When the waters will be one<br></p>
<p>Treaty Yeh Treaty Now Treaty Yeh Treaty Now<br>
Treaty Yeh Treaty Now Treaty Yeh Treaty Now<br></p>
<p>Nhima djatpangarri nhima walangwalang<br>
Nhe djatpayatpa nhima gaya’ nhe marrtjini yakarray<br>
Nhe djatpa nhe walang gumurrt jararrk gutjuk</p>
</blockquote>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Jf-jHCdafZY?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>With its wonderful, 1980s guitar riffs, the song still holds up, still provokes dreams of “a brighter day/When the waters will be one.”</p>
<p>Of course “one” here doesn’t suggest homogenization, a cloaking of all difference, a refusal to acknowledge racial distinctions, languages and cultures. There are two rivers, different languages, the need for a treaty between different worldviews; but there is, equally, a dream of harmony and respect, a hearing of the others’ voices, a reflective displacing of the dichotomy “us and them”.</p>
<p>In political reality there is, of course, still a great divide, a hierarchy of black and white, of them and us, pre-modern and modern, colonised and coloniser. But there is also lyrical, even utopian, hope. A moving beyond dualisms listened to by many in the music of Yothu Yindi, Archie Roach, Ruby Hunter, and the transcendent Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/x8-YMpYbRqY?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-dr-g-yunupinu-took-yolnu-culture-to-the-world-81676">How Dr G.Yunupiŋu took Yolŋu culture to the world</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>In his monumental and widely influential 2007 work <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/824412.A_Secular_Age?from_search=true">A Secular Age</a>, theologian Charles Taylor wrote of the West’s history of belief and secularism, up to the current moment where, in what he describes as the secular wasteland: “… young people will begin again to explore beyond the boundaries”, eschewing the disembodying of spiritual, celebrating “the integrity of different ways of life”. </p>
<p>Today, flesh and spirit are in new forms of exploration, popular music soaring in the updraught.</p>
<p><em>For an extended discussion of Cave’s lyrics see <a href="http://dro.deakin.edu.au/view/DU:30101010">Lyn McCreddin’s essays</a> in Lovely Creatures: The Best of Nick Cave, and the Bad Seeds (1984-2014) or in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6304923-cultural-seeds">Cultural Seeds: Essays on the Work of Nick Cave,</a> (2009). eds. Karen Welberry and Tanya Dalziell.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/101117/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lyn McCredden does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The enquiry into sacredness is not over, it’s just beginning for the 21st century, and in wildly disparate modes and places. In music, Nick Cave, Hozier and Dr G. Yunupingu have led the way.
Lyn McCredden, Personal Chair, Literary Studies, Deakin University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/71031
2017-01-10T10:52:19Z
2017-01-10T10:52:19Z
David Bowie’s late revival belongs to a grand tradition dating back to Beethoven
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152237/original/image-20170110-29041-17godvu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'Look up here I'm in heaven'. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/drust/2736892055/in/photolist-5aRhE4-aq29ku-3NYPfc-CWju5G-59DMQh-CjkW-e9hNjw-fjiPEw-9jrUa9-HcLiXB-qEEisz-eosGCw-pXiqni-cXgCC1-C6YXhr-5Zn12H-pXjTmK-fgYVQV-fhV3JJ-fhV3uS-fhELx4-fheapo-fhV3xd-fhV3N9-4c6avV-4domSo-H9QssJ-aNqfsn-qLdjTq-6bjWsp-qxXMFe-CVX2ED-CYSGZU-7oa2Zh-akUvsS-9ezBjR-896foR-Cw9MhP-31oxo-agqhCR-H9TRd-xpQ171-4PupDP-4PupkD-avEdjq-EeyJ-4Q3Ct5-EeyK-4SrXMh-apGmfo">Derek Rust</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It’s now already a year since the death of David Bowie. Combined with the <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/lists/in-memoriam-2016-artists-entertainers-athletes-who-died-w457321/arnold-palmer-w457369">recent deaths</a> of other musical greats like Prince, Leonard Cohen and George Michael, we have now reached the stage where we are witnessing the decline of the mass culture of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. </p>
<p>The consolation is that we could be in for a very rich creative period as a result. Francis Whately’s <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b088ktm6/david-bowie-the-last-five-years">new documentary</a> David Bowie: The Last Five Years, which premiered on UK television just ahead of the anniversary, pays tribute to Bowie’s late creative renaissance. </p>
<p>He produced two acclaimed albums, The Next Day and, particularly, Blackstar, as well as a Broadway musical, Lazarus – an EP of the tracks written specially for the musical has just <a href="http://www.nme.com/news/music/new-david-bowie-no-plan-ep-video-released-mark-birthday-1937158">been released</a>. The quality of this output was remarkable, but also in line with what happens to many great artists in their final years. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4p1HFGT9SNw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<h2>You want it darker</h2>
<p>Bowie was looking back on his career in this material. Blackstar was a self-composed epitaph, written as he faced his mortality head-on. Leonard Cohen’s <a href="http://www.leonardcohen.com/music/you-want-it-darker">You Want it Darker</a> is very much in the same vein. Also released shortly before his death last November, it sees Cohen facing death in his signature style, combining maudlin piano melodies with his distinctive vocals and wit. Like Bowie, he approached his art with more urgency towards the end, releasing three albums in four years after a long period of wide gaps between new material. </p>
<p>In 2010, Gil Scott-Heron issued I’m New Here, his first new album in 16 years. It received <a href="http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13893-im-new-here/">great reviews</a> for its themes of regret and redemption. It generated much excitement about the prospect of a new prolific period for the American singer/poet following years of addiction, but this was cut short when he died the following year. </p>
<p>Johnny Cash may not have been releasing new material at the time of his death in 2003, but he had recently returned to prominence with similarly reflective subject matter. His 2002 single <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9IfHDi-2EA">The Man Comes Around</a>, which he had written a few years earlier and re-recorded for the <a href="http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1331-american-iv-the-man-comes-around/">America IV</a> album, is all about judgement and the Book of Revelation. Then came the double A-side <a href="https://www.discogs.com/Johnny-Cash-Hurt-Personal-Jesus/release/652597">Hurt/Personal Jesus</a>, which highlighted his failing health, devout Christianity and reconciled him to death. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FywSzjRq0e4?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Bowie and these other examples echo what happened to Ludvig van Beethoven, whose late period was famously examined by the German thinker <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/831019?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">Theodor W Adorno</a>. His ideas were developed more recently by the American literary professor and critic <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n15/edward-said/thoughts-on-late-style">Edward Said</a>. </p>
<p>Adorno thought there was something distinct about the late style of artistic geniuses like Beethoven (and the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe). He identified two common moods: either resolution and reconciliation or anger and dissonance. Adorno sees Beethoven’s 1823 mass <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGNthTj3Hzk">Missa Solemnis</a> as an “alienated masterpiece”, in which the internal struggle of the artist’s impending death and need for creative resolution results in a work riddled with contradictions and intrigue. </p>
<h2>I’m a Blackstar</h2>
<p>In a similar way, Bowie alludes to his past works in Blackstar while continuing to develop, alongside composition that incorporates both convention and dissonance. Bowie was of course a master of reinvention – as suggested by the title of the 2013 Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition <a href="http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/david-bowie-is/">David Bowie Is</a>. He made a career of changing personas, with the likes of Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke and the “Serious Moonlight” Bowie of the Let’s Dance era. </p>
<p>There was even reinvention within his 2010s renaissance, with Blackstar <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/what-to-listen-to/david-bowie-blackstar-first-listen-extraordinary/">a departure</a> from the rockier The Next Day. Yet by looking back over his career in this material, Bowie’s many reinventions were also one more thing he reappraised. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152182/original/image-20170109-23473-oz0ask.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152182/original/image-20170109-23473-oz0ask.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152182/original/image-20170109-23473-oz0ask.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=610&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152182/original/image-20170109-23473-oz0ask.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=610&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152182/original/image-20170109-23473-oz0ask.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=610&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152182/original/image-20170109-23473-oz0ask.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152182/original/image-20170109-23473-oz0ask.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152182/original/image-20170109-23473-oz0ask.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2013 album cover.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Whately’s film showed Bowie and his design partner experimenting with subverting various iconic pictures of the singer for the cover of The Next Day – including a black star obscuring the Aladdin Sane cover – before settling on the Heroes lead image from 1977. </p>
<p>The strongly jazz-influenced Blackstar followed in 2016 and was <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/03/16/david-bowies-last-release-lazarus-was-parting-gift-for-fans-in-c/">viewed by many</a> as a final poetic gesture and parting gift when he died two days later. The Whately film suggested Bowie did not know his illness was terminal when he made the record, though the pattern of reckoning with mortality and life lived was clear enough. The voice emerges from the spectral, quasi-devotional title track, but its range is restricted – producer Tony Visconti talks in the Whately film about a shared desire to “mangle the voice”. </p>
<p>But it is the third track, Lazarus, that provides the greatest insight into Bowie’s vision. The song’s lyrical content seems to speak from beyond the grave: “Look up here, I’m in heaven”, he sings. The video shows a hospitalised Bowie bandaged and with button eyes. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/y-JqH1M4Ya8?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>It toys with the very possibility of closure, as Bowie retreats into a wardrobe – dressed in the diagonally striped black body suit seen on the <a href="https://www.discogs.com/David-Bowie-Station-To-Station/release/1033850">1991 CD reissue</a> of Station to Station. But then it stops with the door ajar, speaking to the permanence of art. </p>
<h2>Changes</h2>
<p>The same motif continues in the final track of the album, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZscv36UUHo">I Can’t Give Everything Away</a>. It reads as a summary of Bowie’s artistic principles, indicating his need to retain something of himself behind his personas. The track reuses the harmonica from the sinister yet optimistic instrumental <a href="https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/a-new-career-in-a-new-town/">A New Career in a New Town</a>, which concludes side one of his seminal 1977 album Low. </p>
<p>This returns us to his creative peak, while suggesting the apprehension that accompanies new experiences. And despite being one of the smoothest tracks on the album, it avoids the conventional stability of the chord resolution of the title track in favour of Lazarus’s more unsettled tonality, concluding with a minor sixth. This suggests a trailing off; something to be continued.</p>
<p>With this immense final statement, David Bowie has set the tone for a period in which major rock artists are conspicuously and consciously producing late works. In death as in life he set a benchmark. As many other contemporary artists reach the end of their lives, it is to Bowie’s works that their own late output will be compared.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/71031/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The great polymath’s late output reads like a manual for artists saying goodbye.
Andrew Frayn, Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature and Culture, Edinburgh Napier University
Rachael Durkin, Lecturer in Music, Edinburgh Napier University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/68704
2016-11-12T17:26:33Z
2016-11-12T17:26:33Z
Hallelujah: how an ignored Leonard Cohen song became a modern legend
<p>The final few bars of Leonard Cohen’s life song have been played out. He was the elder statesman of a trio of iconic male North American singer-songwriters that included Bob Dylan and Tom Waits. This group of musical malcontents laid bare the American male psyche in a way that hadn’t been heard before. Their singing was the flip side to the American Dream, a jarring contrast to the seductively beautiful voices of Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, each using an idiosyncratic vocal tone to channel the anger, joy and pain of their songs.</p>
<p>Cohen’s voice seemed to sink into the depths as he got older and by the time he recorded Hallelujah in 1984 at the age of 50 it had morphed into a mournful “basso profundo”. Astonishingly, despite containing a song that has now inspired over 300 versions, Cohen’s American label declined to release the album <a href="https://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/album8.html">Various Positions</a>. This may account for the way the song has gradually seeped into the public consciousness. It was other artists’ takes on Cohen’s song, rather than the original, that built a wave of interest in it and made Hallelujah into the modern hymn it is today.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YrLk4vdY28Q?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>First out of the blocks was John Cale in 1991 with a piano and vocal version on the Cohen tribute album I’m Your Fan. It brought a more obvious passion to the song than Cohen’s more emotionally guarded reading. The recording was picked up to be used in the 2001 film <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh13m8Uuc1M">Shrek</a>, starting a long sequence of placements in movies and TV shows.</p>
<p>But the most critically acclaimed version was recorded in 1994 by the late American singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley on his album <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/album/grace-mw0000624110">Grace</a>. Opening with a complex solo guitar exploration of the song’s chords, Buckley brought a quasi-classical fragility to his performance that cemented his position as the romantic electric troubadour par excellence. The album is now regarded as a classic, with Buckley’s version of Hallelujah being ranked in the Rolling Stone Magazine’s <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/the-500-greatest-songs-of-all-time-20110407/jeff-buckley-hallelujah-20110526">500 Greatest Songs Of All Time</a>.</p>
<iframe src="https://embed.spotify.com/?uri=spotify%3Atrack%3A74X1epeRufHckhuX1KFD04" width="100%" height="380" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true"></iframe>
<p>So what makes the song so powerful – and why has it reached out to so many people?</p>
<p>Its chords are simple, mostly coming from the notes of the major scale of the song’s key. Rhythmically it has the type of rolling 12/8 feel you find in much gospel and folk music – again nothing special. But this is where the songwriter’s craft comes in. In the greatest songs there is a combination of lyric, melody, rhythm and harmony that come together in an alchemic fusion of craft, inspiration and perspiration. Cohen is one of the great songwriters and wrote as many as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/dec/19/leonard-cohen-hallelujah-christmas">80 verses</a> of Hallelujah before cutting it down to a final four. </p>
<p>That commitment to the craft is evident in the melodic construction, which is as organised as a Mozart melody or Miles Davis improvisation. The verse begins with a simple questioning melodic figure that moves stepwise in tones between the fifth and sixth degrees of the scale. It is the second half of the verse where the magic begins. Again the melody ascends from the fifth but this time keeps driving on up until it has climbed up a sixth to the major third. This passage is central to the song’s emotional core, driving the listener into a state of near ecstasy. Cohen combines the melodic journey with a knowing lyric that lays bare the song’s harmonic construction:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Well it goes like this:<br>
The fourth, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift<br>
The baffled king composing Hallelujah</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Managing the internal rhymes as well as getting the chords to match the lyric is a feat of songwriting on a par with Cole Porter, one of the greatest writers of The Great American Songbook era, who similarly marks a change “from major to minor” in the song “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GdwZL2Bx8c">Every Time we Say Goodbye</a>”. The chorus of Hallelujah is simpler, beginning with an ascending three note motif that then descends again, highlighting the fifth and sixth degrees of the scale. The use of these intervals may be a nod to Handel’s “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usfiAsWR4qU">Hallelujah Chorus</a>” from the oratorio “The Messiah”, which also emphasises the same pitches.</p>
<p>But in addition to the nerdiness of my musicological deconstruction I wanted to try to understand the spirituality and religious references in the song. For this I turned to <a href="http://www.felicitybuirski.com">Felicity Buirski</a>, a singer-songwriter, psychotherapist and close friend of Leonard Cohen. She explained:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Most singer songwriters don’t like their songs torn apart and mauled by the thinking brain when so much poetry is about articulating often frozen inarticulate feelings, and Leonard was no exception. He once told me that he didn’t have to explain away his songs when I pressed him on a certain lyric’s meaning. </p>
<p>As a songwriter myself I now know that the best poetry is often written just prior to understanding. To me Leonard’s exceptionally beautiful song Hallelujah has touched the hearts, minds and souls of millions of people because it expresses a profound ambivalence that many of us have felt and endured … a deep yearning for connection and unconditional love.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In a world where the notion of love has been commodified and devalued, where division and hate are exploited for personal and political gain, Cohen’s voice is more important than ever before. He provides us with a mirror to our souls, where we see ourselves with a loving but unsentimental if not brutal clarity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/68704/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adrian York does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Cohen’s label declined to release the album containing Hallelujah, a song that has now inspired over 300 versions.
Adrian York, Senior Lecturer in Commercial Music Performance, University of Westminster
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/68676
2016-11-11T06:59:47Z
2016-11-11T06:59:47Z
As a writer-musician, Leonard Cohen was a one-off
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145541/original/image-20161111-25058-171xmzg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Leonard Cohen in 2008, just before he was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lucas Jackson/Reuters</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Just weeks after Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, that other great literary songwriter, Leonard Cohen, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/au">has died at the age of 82</a>. When Dylan’s Nobel was announced, a number of commentators claimed that Cohen would have been a more appropriate choice. One can see why.</p>
<p>Cohen’s long career has shown him to be a master songwriter, producing wry, literate, and melancholy lyrics for 50 years. Cohen also began in the literary field, producing four collections of poems and two novels before his debut album, The Songs of Leonard Cohen, in 1967.</p>
<p>In fact, Cohen’s literary career made him an unlikely success in the music scene of the late 1960s, as did other factors. He had an haute-bourgeois background (being the son of a well-off, well-connected Jewish business family in Montreal); he had wanted as a child to attend a military school; and he had a BA from McGill, and had begun a higher degree at Columbia (the university, not the record label). </p>
<p>Most of all, he was not young. When Songs of Leonard Cohen was released, Cohen was 33 years old, having spent the previous decade building, with mixed success, his literary reputation.</p>
<p>While Cohen continued sporadically to produce books after 1967, his musical career is what he is best known for. But there is a notable continuity between Cohen’s poems and his song lyrics. </p>
<p>The themes, tone, and style of Cohen’s songs were already largely in place in his early poetry. His poems, like his songs, eschew complexity when it comes to form and word choice, and they focus — like the songs — on eroticism, death and loss, and redemption.</p>
<p>Cohen’s early albums, Songs of Leonard Cohen, Songs from a Room (1969), and Songs of Love and Hate (1970) — the latter arguably his most realised album — are no doubt the basis for the idea that Cohen wrote depressing songs. However, while a melancholy tone can be found throughout his career, Cohen is surprisingly mercurial. </p>
<p>In a number of his songs, there is self-mockery and a dark, dry sense of humour. This sense of humour is also seen in his surprisingly funny live persona, observable in two important documentaries: <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126376/">Ladies and Gentleman … Leonard Cohen</a> (1965), and Tony Palmer’s more emotional <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0251613/?ref_=tt_rec_tti">Bird on a Wire</a> (1972). </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Pz3lJX92ly0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>At a lyrical level, the note of self-mockery comes out in songs such as Dress Rehearsal Rag (from Songs of Love and Hate), in which the poet views himself in the following terms:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Just take a look at your body now,<br>
There’s nothing much to save.<br>
And a bitter voice in the mirror cries,<br>
‘Hey, Prince, you need a shave.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Outwardly, Cohen’s lyrics were more straightforward than Dylan’s (certainly the Dylan of the mid 60s). Yet within his apparently simple words lies a profound sense of playfulness and enigma, apparent in the song that arguably became his most famous, Hallelujah. </p>
<p>A religious language was never far from the surface in Cohen’s songs, and one of the more unlikely developments in Cohen’s long career was his becoming a Buddhist monk. So it is appropriate, then, that the abiding sense that comes from his songs and his style of singing is that of a cloistered voice coming out of the dark, offering words that bring together the spiritual and material worlds.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145544/original/image-20161111-25090-f8webf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145544/original/image-20161111-25090-f8webf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145544/original/image-20161111-25090-f8webf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145544/original/image-20161111-25090-f8webf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145544/original/image-20161111-25090-f8webf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145544/original/image-20161111-25090-f8webf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145544/original/image-20161111-25090-f8webf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145544/original/image-20161111-25090-f8webf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As detailed in the recent biography by Sylvie Simmons, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10876733-i-m-your-man">I’m Your Man</a> (2012), Cohen had a youthful interest in hypnotism. In his early teens he bought a book called 25 Lessons in Hypnotism: How to Become an Expert Operator. After success with animals, Cohen hypnotised the family’s maid and told her to undress.</p>
<p>Unable to wake the naked woman from her trance, the young Cohen began to panic, fearing his mother’s imminent return. As Simmons notes, the mix of eroticism, impending doom, and loss is “exquisitely Leonard Cohenesque”. And as Simmons also suggests, Cohen’s powers as a singer and performer have always been notably mesmeric.</p>
<p>This mesmeric sense is key to Cohen’s musical and literary success. Famously, when he appeared at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival, Cohen transfixed and calmed his unruly audience of over 600, 000 with his down-beat songs and between-song patter.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145542/original/image-20161111-21844-11pz62i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145542/original/image-20161111-21844-11pz62i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145542/original/image-20161111-21844-11pz62i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=831&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145542/original/image-20161111-21844-11pz62i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=831&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145542/original/image-20161111-21844-11pz62i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=831&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145542/original/image-20161111-21844-11pz62i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1044&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145542/original/image-20161111-21844-11pz62i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1044&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145542/original/image-20161111-21844-11pz62i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1044&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cohen performing in 2013.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Valentin Flauraud/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>To be mesmeric one has to be consistent, and consistency was a key feature of Cohen’s career. Unlike Dylan, he didn’t try to reinvent himself, and while his musical accompaniment changed a little in terms of the technology used, it remained the same in spirit: simple, repetitive, and basically traditional accompaniment to Cohen’s mesmerising baritone. </p>
<p>Thematically, too, Cohen was remarkably consistent, concerned repeatedly with love, mortality, loss, and redemption. And Cohen’s skill for the memorable phrase was also a consistent feature, as seen in a line like “the rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor”, from Tower of Song (I’m Your Man, 1988).</p>
<p>As a writer-musician, Cohen was a one-off. And in songs such as Chelsea Hotel # 2, The Stranger Song, First We Take Manhattan, and countless others, he has left a remarkable legacy. </p>
<p>It is one that shows, perhaps more clearly than Dylan, that songwriting can indeed be a literary art.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/68676/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David McCooey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Perhaps more clearly than Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen showed that songwriting can be a literary art. Within his apparently simple words lies a profound sense of playfulness and enigma.
David McCooey, Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/68674
2016-11-11T05:52:13Z
2016-11-11T05:52:13Z
Goodbye Leonard, you brought us so much light
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145531/original/image-20161111-25070-2d5usv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Leonard Cohen in 2012 accepting an award for his song lyrics.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jessica Rinaldi/Reuters</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Leonard Cohen <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-11/leonard-cohen-dead-at-82/8017496">has died</a>, and the lights have gone out all around the world. His death shouldn’t have come as any surprise: as <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/leonard-cohen-pens-final-letter-to-so-long-marianne-muse-w433144">he wrote to his muse Marianne</a>, just weeks ago, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But I didn’t think he meant quite that soon. I thought “well, 80 is the new 60”, and that for years yet he would be helping me see the world through his unique gaze.</p>
<p>Readers and listeners and fans often speak about the celebrities who captivate them as though they have a relationship with them; as in some ways they do. Of course it is synthetic, but it can feel remarkably real, as does my not-actually-there relationship with Leonard Cohen. </p>
<p>I never met him, never spent time drinking and talking with him. And yet listening to him or reading his work feels like sharing a conversation with someone I know.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tIssqxixYp0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>And I have known him most of my life. Like many people my age, I first ran across his work in early adolescence. That is perfect timing because adolescence, at least for arty nerdy kids, is a weird and lonely place, where one feels alien in an alien land. </p>
<p>His music — the dark lyrics, the dark voice — perfectly suited my longing for a warm bath and a sharp knife; but also kept me from acting on that longing. I had to hear the end of one song, the beginning of the next one, so he Scheherazade’d me through the ennui till I came out the other end of sadness.</p>
<p>Back then, it was his perspective on attachments and loss that captured me: So Long Marianne, with its forlorn vision of a love not quite attained (“You left when I told you I was curious,/
I never said that I was brave”); Famous Blue Raincoat, with the calm awareness of just how impossible love can be (“you treated my woman to a flake of your life/ And when she came back she was nobody’s wife”); or Teachers, where the persona of the song can simply never get things right (“Have I carved enough my Lord? /Child, you are a bone.”)</p>
<p>They moved me then; they move me still.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"796911851841929216"}"></div></p>
<p>A few years later, I struggled through his Beautiful Losers; and then came across his printed (as opposed to sung) poetry: books like Death of a Lady’s Man; Stranger Music; The Book of Longing. </p>
<p>And the older I grew, the more I realised that his work wasn’t bleak after all; Cohen’s “tragic vision” is in fact warm and funny and closely observant, his writing without schmaltz or sentimentality.</p>
<p>First We Take Manhattan cracks me up even today, with its wry/dry humour (“Ah, you loved me as a loser /But now you’re worried that I just might win”).</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JTTC_fD598A?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Dance Me To The End of Love is both wry and tender (“let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone/ Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon”); and The Stranger Song: I can’t put my finger on why it makes me smile, but I think it’s the way he plays the rhythm and the rhyme (“I know that kind of man /It’s hard to hold the hand of anyone / who is reaching for the sky just to surrender”). </p>
<p>He extracts the numinous from the ridiculous; the ridiculous from the pompous. His language suits my ear; his words and his ways of seeing and saying and doing are in my bones.</p>
<p>But more than his poetry, his fiction and his songs, I fell in love with his observations on creativity and the creative life.</p>
<p>If you can be mentored by someone you’ve never met, I have been mentored by Cohen. He knows what it is to wrestle with intractable poems; he knows that ideas can be obdurate or, worse, banal.</p>
<p>He knows that the creative life is a long haul, and hard work, and mystery; that there are “no prizes … no rewards other than the work itself”. </p>
<p>All we can do, as writers and artists, is keep going, keep working, hope to find moments of grace, hope to retain our integrity. He knows too that it is about human society, when he writes, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Songs don’t dignify human activity. Human activity dignifies the song.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/v0nmHymgM7Y?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Just weeks ago, Cohen produced <a href="https://www.leonardcohen.com/music/you-want-it-darker>">You Want It Darker</a>, an album whose title teases those of us who have read despair in his creative outputs; whose lyrics circle around the numinous, reflecting on what it is to be elderly, and to know that death is not far away, but not any more an enemy. </p>
<p>He has, after all, been watching death approach for a long time now, as his writings suggest, but apparently not with dread.</p>
<p>His death seems such a loss in a year of so many losses. Still, there is a small consolation in the fact that, as his own writings remind us, death simply is. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>There’s a crack in everything;/ that’s how the light gets in.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/68674/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jen Webb receives funding from the Australian Research Council</span></em></p>
Leonard Cohen, who has died at 82, had both a tragic vision and a voice that was warm, funny and closely observant. His unique gaze helped fans see the world anew.
Jen Webb, Director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, University of Canberra
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.