‘High, Me, Mine’ moments with L. Cohen

Disruptive thinkers like me have a lot to hide from the world. This is because I court failures with a fatal fury. I reach out to people who are bound to use me as a ladder to climb up their ‘social store(y)s’. The fact that the ladder stays grounded while kissing the sky is hardly noticed, if not totally ignored. It is in this backdrop that I wish to make a confession. Why are there so many ‘high, me, mine’ moments with songwriter, singer, mystic poets Leonard Cohen that I am too embarrassed to share with the world?

I have finally mustered up the courage to share a few dark secrets about how Cohen impacted my life. I felt that they should escape my lips before I finish my wine glass of mortality. Questions keep propping up in my mind but I refuse to accept the fact that I longed to write a tribute to my poet-friend-singer Leonard Cohen who left this world on November 7, 2016. But I did not. Was I too conscious of the fact that I should not share my western jeans (read western genes) in this era of the saffron Kurtas.

Cohen had walked me through life whenever the going was tough, whenever life dealt me a hard blow. His songs passed through me like a ‘droning’ balm (if there could be such a term) to my weary soul and his words sent goosebumps up my spine. This is because even as I was battling failures I always saw myself as “the bird on the wire, like a drunk in a midnight quiet, who tried in his way, to be free…Like a beast with his horn, I have torn everyone who reached out to me.”

After listening to such a song mired in self-pity I would often bounce back with his” sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone…They brought me their comfort and later they brought me this song.”.

Right through my youth, right through my days of yore, when they dug up the gold, I was held in thrall by Cohen and in his absence, by that irreverent and lonesome hobo, Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan. Dylan’s nasal twang, his guitar and harmonica were part of my daily dalliances with reality. He appealed to my ‘subterranean’ senses and songs like “It’s alright ma, I am only bleeding,” kept me up past many dawns.

At that point in time, in those heady Nizamuddin days, nobody believed that I could deal with life with a poker face. And while most of my friends preferred to lead a ‘settled’ life, I hurtled down the road hardly travelled. If Cohen appealed to my senses Dylan stimulated my mind. Yes, oftentimes, I was chided and berated for looking up to western icons, but how could I explain that the heart heeds no cultural boundaries. The fact that I turned to being a lowly paid journalist kept me economically unsettled, socially outlawed but aesthetically alive. 

Cohen continued to be my partner in crime; he egged me on to keep alive the vagabond lover-boy within. As a young man, I used to forever feel the Prufrockian dilemma while talking to pretty women, women who fired my imaginations, women who made me stand on end, but I would turn to the musical outpourings of Cohen’s Suzanne to see me through the night.

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river

You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night forever

…Then she gets you on her wavelength

And she lets the river answer that you've always been her lover…

Now, why this fascination for my nocturnal bard? Well, for the uninitiated, this is what the New Yorker had to say about my musical genius: “When Leonard Cohen was twenty-five, he was living in London, sitting in cold rooms writing sad poems. This was 1960, long before he played the festival at the Isle of Wight in front of six hundred thousand people. In those days, he was a Jamesian Jew, the provincial abroad, a refugee from the Montreal literary scene. In a letter to his publisher, he said that he was out to reach “inner-directed adolescents, lovers in all degrees of anguish, disappointed Platonists, pornography-peepers, hair-handed monks and Popists.”

As he matured like old wine, he held me in wraps with his album titled ‘Various Positions. ‘His baritone voice, his mystical drones, whether from his ‘New Skin for the old ceremony’, or in his final hurrah titled ‘You want it darker’, he convinced me that my failures curled up like smoke above my shoulders. Listening to his worldview over endless cups of tea and coffee, I got this rare insight that not successes, but failures maketh the man. Success is ephemeral but my failures tempered the steel into my soul. Cohen made me feel comfortable with my idiosyncrasies. He gave me the strength to wear my inadequacies and my frailties with the ease of a troubadour

His musings were my true identity, my true calling; for they brought me his comfort, and later, they brought me his songs!

No wonder he has had me hooked for life. Even when I wanted to express my feelings to my lady love, I gave her a recorded cassette of Leonard Cohen. The songs worked like magic. The fact that she is married to me and is still by my side, is my living tribute to the man with the golden voice. He is not dead; he is only passing through.