Lebold Leonard Cohen

The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-80425-184-3
Verlag: Luath Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 608 Seiten

Leonard Cohen has aimed high: to be all Jewish heroes at once. Like Jacob, he struggled with angels. Like David, he sang psalms and seduced women. Like Abraham, he moved from place to place and remained a stranger everywhere.  But he never ceased doing what he did best: stepping into avalanches and reviving our hearts. From Montreal and New York to the Greek island of Hydra, Leonard Cohen: The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall follows the singer's cosmopolitan life and examines his perpetual dialogues with God, with himself, and with hotel rooms. After twenty years of research, Christophe Lebold, who spent time with the poet in Los Angeles, delivers a stimulating analysis of Cohen's life and art. Gracefully blending biography and essay, he interrogates the mission the singer had set out for himself: to show us that darkness is just the flip side of light. 'The first edition of my book was published in French in late 2013 to good reviews and few readers. Then came 2014. Leonard tells me that if we must meet, it should be soon. He tells me why. A few months later, I am on a plane to Los Angeles. From the first minute, we spoke like old friends, sometimes until late at night. Although he was not well, he let me watch him live for a little. We said things to each other that I can't repeat. It is not that they are secret; they are just very delicate. Like butterflies or hummingbirds. To repeat them would destroy them. We met again in Los Angeles two months later (he seemed in much better shape). We spent a last afternoon together; we hung out; we had a laugh; smoked a cigarette. And it was time to go. We stayed in touch. We were now friends. In his emails, he always talked about his health as an amusing detail, a little whim of the body. Two weeks before his death, I got a last, humorous, loving email warning me that the 'body ferociously insists on gravitational rights.' A little nod at my theme of the fall of men and angels. And then, he left. It broke my heart, of course, but that's what hearts are for.'

CHRISTOPHE LEBOLD, an expert in American literature, holds a position as an associate professor at the University of Strasbourg, France. His doctoral research focused on the works of Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. With a deep admiration for Leonard Cohen, he has extensively journeyed in the footsteps of the poet. Alongside his academic pursuits, he is a theatre actor and practitioner of Zen, finding joy in poets, cats and, when feeling cheerful, all living things.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lebold, Christophe

Leseproben

FIRST POINT OF ENTRY

THE MAN WHO SAW THE ANGELS FALL

But love is strong as gravity

And everyone must fall

At first it’s from the apple tree

Then from the western wall.

— LEONARD COHEN, “GRAVITY”1

IVAN GIESEN | A. MANZANO COLLECTION

Leonard Cohen, Barcelona, May 1993

Leonard Cohen’s art derives from a very specific visual acuity: he sees men fall. And, with them, women, saints, and angels. Hence, a fascination for falling bodies and a career devoted to a methodical and quasi-amorous exploration of the laws of gravity. His subject: how and why we fall, from what heights, along what trajectories. His stated goal: to assert, with the required rigor, the unfathomable beauty of falling bodies and to explain why men — unremittingly — fall.

Operating first as a poet and novelist, then as an international troubadour, Cohen observed everywhere — in Montreal, on the Greek island of Hydra, in New York hotels, and the Luberon vineyards — the infinite variations of gravity at work: tragic downfalls here, jumps into inner abysses there, and in all places, slapstick slips on the banana peels of life. Armed with the visionary force that alone makes you see the world exactly as it is, he sharpened his tools along the way — a voice so deep it leaves us charred; a terse and increasingly lethal writing style; and his unique combination of angst, Jewish mysticism, and Christian and Buddhist flirtations. Along the way, he fashioned a world that is uniquely his own yet a lot like ours: the world of Leonard Cohen, where men step into avalanches and saints fall in love with Fire.

Quite predictably, the result is ferocious: songs that comfort us with little waltzes but are also spiritual weapons that aim for the heart and never miss. What do they say? What we already know — the invincible gravity of existence. That we die. That our heart cooks and sizzles like shish kebab in our breasts. That the apocalypse has begun and the Flood has already happened. That God has summoned us for a game of hide-and-seek that He clearly intends to win. That men and women are forever attracted to each other but that their embrace is a fire that leaves only ashes behind. In a word: that we hang dangerously between gravity and grace. Our fate: to fall from high. Our patron saint: Icarus. The gospel according to Leonard.

THE PROPHET OF GRAVITY

Leonard had felt the grip of gravity early on in his life and he soon discovered that he had a great talent for falling. First, for falling in love, which he did ceaselessly. Sometimes for the night, sometimes for a decade and most often with saints. With Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, a seventeenth-century Iroquois Virgin. With Saint Suzanne, to whom he wrote a famous ode. With Saint Nico of Köln, whose iciness he endured. With Joan of Arc, who was burnt at the stake. And with a thousand others. “Men have hearts of puppies,” he once told a Swedish TV sexologist interviewing him in bed; “they fall in love every second.”2

In adolescence, Cohen also started falling into abysses, with the bouts of depression that initiated him into what is blackest in life and later earned him his reputation as a great poet of personal doom. A few times also, he simply fell down, quite literally. In Tony Palmer’s documentary Bird on a Wire, he can be seen lying flat on the stage of Frankfurt’s Jahrhunderthalle on April 7, 1972, huddled in the arms of spectators in the first row. It was the last day of Passover, as Jews around the world were celebrating the parting of the Red Sea, a parting that had obviously not happened for him. His filmed comment the next day was eloquent: “I disgraced myself.” In other words, “I fell from grace.”3 Another fall occurred to the audience’s great panic almost four decades later, during a concert in Valencia, Spain, on September 18, 2009, three days before the singer’s seventy-fifth birthday. The footage is painful to watch: a few minutes into the show, Leonard Cohen collapses. First on his knees, then flat on his face — defeated by gravity.4 And, seven years later, when the poet died peacefully in his sleep, it was after a fall in his apartment, his last taste of gravity.

So, at some point, in a life spent collecting and studying falls, as he wrote book after book about the fall of man (like Beautiful Losers) or impossible elevations (like Parasites of Heaven) or songs that say, “I fell with my angel down the chain of command,”5 things — necessarily — must have gotten clearer. At some unspecified point, Leonard Cohen must have understood — maybe after observing once more through his hotel room window what was falling from the sky (rain, snow, or angels) — that essential truth: that gravity is the absolute law that rules our lives, but also the only place where those lives can truly be lived. That it is only in our falls that we can truly enjoy having a weight.

Hence an improbable wager — arguably more dangerous than Pascal’s — the great Cohenian wager: that frivolity bores us and eventually cheapens life but that a great joy awaits us in the heart of gravity. In other words, he bets that gravity is grace.

It is impossible, of course, to tell when that wager was made: like all conversions, that type of event happens silently and deep in the soul. But at some point, his mission as a poet must have stood clear in front of him: to take our falls seriously.

We don’t want a frivolous life. We don’t want a superficial life. […] Seriousness is something voluptuous that we are deeply hungry for, and very few people allow themselves the luxury of it. So life becomes shallow and the heart tends to shut down in a kind of despair that is intolerable.6

In other words, frivolity sucks; gravity heals. Hence the poet’s mission: to be the prophet and pedagogue of gravity, to write “manuals for living with defeat” that will help us locate in ourselves a centre of gravity that will sanctify our lives. Now, what better place for that than four-minute pop songs?

THE ART OF FALLING FROM HIGH

Late 1968. Arpeggios on a Spanish guitar, a waltz melody, discreet strings, and female voices that rise like angels: Leonard Cohen kicks off his singing career with “Suzanne,” a song whose celestial beauty seems to launch an assault on Heaven. The lyrics, however, are about falling angels and how poignant and beautiful all things — an afternoon, a sunbeam, a lover — become when they disappear.

We know the story: Suzanne is half-crazy; she feeds you tea and oranges and sees heroes in the seaweed. You want to travel with her but eventually you won’t, and Jesus sinks beneath your wisdom like a stone. In the context of LSD, student rebellion, and Jimi Hendrix’s guitar solos, Leonard Cohen uses “Suzanne” as a triple reminder to the youth of 1968: sainthood, he warns, has a price; it can be attained only through falling; and the laws of gravity are not negotiable. In the next decade, most of his songs will be concerned in some way with the art of falling, and in one of them a choir of children asks:

Wasn’t it a long way down?

Wasn’t it a strange way down?7

This is the first phase of the singer’s career, a phase of diagnosis. Its metaphysical conclusion is Leonard’s first teaching: no one escapes gravity. We are not Homo sapiens, but Homo cadens — falling men.

Fifteen years later, the setting has changed: Leonard had relocated to Los Angeles — the City of Angels, where else? — and he wore double-breasted pinstriped suits, mafioso style. His idea of fantasy: charcoal grey. His favourite leisure: to quit smoking. His idea of a prophet’s job: to sing deeper every year. The year was 1992. After twenty years of Zen practice, the singer has gained in humour and vocal depth. In a voice now so low it can cause minor seismic incidents, he dispensed instructions on the proper conduct after falling on the highway, namely: stay put, don’t complain, and wait “for the miracle.”8 That’s his second lesson in metaphysics: our falls must be fully accepted and even loved — and with good reason: they are the doorways to our true lives.

It’s still 1992: against a backdrop of gospel singers, Leonard announced that he has seen the future, that the future is murder and that this improbable Christian concept — repentance — was actually never clear to him. In the video that comes with the song (aptly named “The Future”), the deadpan prophet can be seen to improvise a few ironic dance steps — a funky little boogie — in the hall of a luxury hotel, where (strangely enough) it has started to rain. Behind him, images of falling bodies in slow motion: elegant women drowning in water, men in dinner jackets with their heads upside down, some pulled down by the weight of a suitcase, others grabbing a passing ankle, all of them sinking, drawn to the bottom, drowning in the Flood. The beauty of falling bodies once more.9

Of course, this may remind some readers of the philosophical parable that closed Cohen’s first novel, The Favourite Game, in 1963. The page in question describes a winter game that the narrator, Lawrence Breavman, used to play as a child. A friend clutches your arm, you spin him fast until he’s lifted from the ground and, at the crucial...