http://book.co.za/blog/2010/09/22/book- ... en-watson/
The Music in the Ice
This October Penguin Books will launch The Music in the Ice: On Writers, Writing and Other Things, a collection of essays by Stephen Watson. Watson, dubbed “South Africa’s foremost essayist” by fellow writer Justin Cartwright, is also an acclaimed poet. His latest collection, The Light Echo And Other Poems, was published by Penguin Books in 2007.
In the following essay from The Music in the Ice, Watson describes a love-affair with singer and songwriter, Leonard Cohen.
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IV
I saw him once in a context which had its own kind of improbability. It was on the Australasian leg of his 2008-2009 world tour, at a concert out amidst the hills of the southern highlands of New South Wales. For someone whose music had always been largely urban, autumnal, its landscapes more inner than external, the venue had its own brand of unlikelihood. You found your way to it along the gravel of farm roads, through vineyards thick in dust, across paddocks mown to stubble to make impromptu car-parks. The stage was at the back of a wine-farm, at the bottom of a sloping paddock populated by tall gum-trees, besieged by flies until the sun died. It was an evening in early February, at the beginning of a heat-wave which was to prove one of the longest and most destructive of human life in Australian history.
The audience that night had come from far afield – as far as Sydney and Canberra – though doubtless there were several, like me, who had travelled a good deal further. They had come in sufficient numbers to remind one that if, as any criminologist might say, human beings will do almost anything for money or sex, they will also, in the end, go very far – perhaps still further – for the experience of beauty. These were people who did not, it soon became apparent, regard other singers as they did Leonard Cohen. There were even some amongst them – so a few brief conversations revealed – who did not take those others seriously. Who else, one told me, could sing: ‘If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn’? Or come up with the weight of implication carried by lines like ‘Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn’? Maybe Dylan, once; but that was long ago. As for heirs, apparent or otherwise, they were still under or over the horizon.
They had for the most part travelled here individually, but they also formed a type of collective, even a fellowship. It was not that they could be corralled, one and all, by that phrase Cohen had once used to define his particular audience – ‘you could roughly call those people the broken-hearted’. But they were human beings, nonetheless, who had lived the life of the heart; they had known what it is to lose, as well as the manifold difficulties involved in mastering the art of losing. If few would have owned to his self-description as ‘the grocer of despair’, they themselves had known something of the despair of groceries – and much else besides. They were, in short, people, adults, whose lives had had their own seriousness. And they were about to listen to someone whose work, taking that seriousness seriously, was the very opposite of an insult to the intelligence, emotional and otherwise, of such adult lives.
Soon there would appear, down on the stage, a man who, acknowledging all this, would once again establish his own especial intimacy, even solidarity, with them. But they had additional reasons for attendance. Leonard Cohen was the author of songs – one thinks of ‘If It Be Your Will’, ‘Anthem’ and ‘Love Itself’, and most recently perhaps ‘The Faith’ (from Dear Heather) – which are still among the few authentically religious songs of our time. They are such not primarily because of the traces of any particular faith which might inform them. Rather, they carry us back to the anthropological roots of religion and perhaps all spirituality: namely, our species-awareness of what ‘If It Be Your Will’ calls ‘the broken hill’ of this world and thus our need – our very great need. At the same time, whatever their point of origin in that broken place – however much Cohen himself had been, like others, a lifelong prisoner of that place – these songs rise to attain a note that is absolutely pure. And recognised or not, it is this note alone which, in the realm of artistic expression, constitutes the authentically religious. It is only purity of this order which confers a blessing.
Doubtless the singer had paid dearly for these notes. Søren Kierkegaard had people other than artists in mind when articulating one of his famous paradoxes: ‘It belongs to the imperfection of everything human than man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite’. But there must have been occasions when Cohen was forced to reflect on what he had passed through on his way to achieving those notes absolutely pure. He himself could have enumerated the deformities of a life, occasions of emotional squalor, the trench warfare between the sexes that had fuelled the high, pure moments which are the apex of his gifts as a songwriter. But this paradox of so many an artist’s life was now to the side. Tonight we were, like him, enlisted on another front.
As advertised, he came on stage at precisely 7.30pm, just as the sun set over the hills west of Bowral. Opening with ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’, he played all the old songs, including ‘Sisters of Mercy’, ‘Who by Fire’, ‘Suzanne’. Not far from his seventy-fifth birthday, we were in the presence of someone who was already an old man. But there was no trace left of the smart but sometimes overly facetious, sententious youth he had once been. His years of Buddhist practice – that most radical of cures for the narcissistically inclined – had seen to that. In his bearing on stage there was that gaiety which is often the mark of a certain spiritual maturity. When he moved, it was with the kind of assurance, the deep inner self-possession so evident in the songs themselves, particularly the later ones he also sang or recited that night – ‘In My Secret Life’, ‘A Thousand Kisses Deep’ – in which each word is placed with a kind of meditated deliberateness, its edges cleaned by the silence that his delivery would allow to eddy momentarily around each syllable.
Each of us had long had our own inner relation to the songs. We knew the words and thus heard them in haunting stereo: they came from within, from memory, even as they issued from the speakers flanking the stage. As with all things known by heart, those songs had been a central plank in the education of our sentiments. And if, in retrospect, aspects of their contribution might have seemed questionable – his songs would all too readily entangle women in a set of impossible expectations whose flip-side was no less predictable – one could even be oddly grateful nowadays for his old tendency to idealisation. It no longer seemed an unfortunate anachronism that his songs could address a woman as ‘thee’ or ‘thou’, forging again and again a continuum rather than divorce between the carnal and the spiritual. One was all too aware, not least by this stage, the twenty-first century, of the alternatives.
I, for my part, had first listened to Leonard Cohen when barely out of childhood. Acolyte though I was, I did not know that I was following the same path that had brought him, decades earlier, to poetry. It was his prior interest in folk music that had led Cohen to a more formal study of literature. I, in my turn, would come to poetry largely through listening to music from the folk revival in the 1960s, his first two albums above all, but others like Dylan and Joni Mitchell as well.
What I knew of poetry at that age was mostly confined to the boredoms of the school curriculum, the tedium of prosodic exercises, poetically dead (i.e. prose) translations from Book IV of Virgil’s The Aeneid. As yet I knew nothing of that machining of the language that makes for a line of poetry. Even later, when I first heard Cohen sing ‘Show me slowly what I only know the limits of’ (from ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’), the function of that internal rhyme – that audible but all but invisible web of sounds that, like the rigging that holds a yacht’s mast in place, adds echo to echo, binding the lyric to itself – was probably lost on me. I simply did not hear it. Likewise that complex mediation of traditions – the Bible, the English ballad, and Yeats among them – that would make of Cohen’s best stanzas something at once very old and very new:
As the mist leaves no scar
On the dark green hill
So my body leaves no scar
On you, nor ever will.
I was years away from understanding how the movement of a verse, its rhythm, could weave, apparently from thin air, an architecture which structures one’s inner world. (It was the double helix that defined Crick and Watson’s model of DNA that would later strike me as the nearest spatial equivalent of this effect.) It is something which is, of course, central to the pleasure that the art of poetry offers. But by listening to Leonard Cohen, I was absorbing by aural osmosis, I like to think, something of this knowledge.
He was on stage for close on three hours. By the time he reached his fifth and last encore, he had given us something else besides. He had given us, as certain artists do, a kind of courage: the courage to go back to one’s own tiny life, its importance, its irrelevance, its times of dearth, rare moments of completion, but above all its reality, its there-ness. His own raw material had always been raw; but not much more than anyone else’s. Unlike most, though, he had never lost it; he had not allowed it to be lost. Whatever his moments of inattention, he had protected that tiny domain, his own life, with his art – and this even if at times it must have seemed a thing of failure, even abjection, fit only to be thrown away. He had made of the bone of his heart (as a late poem would call it) a treasure and gifted it to us that night.
Nor had it been received in the conventional way. Unlike so many concerts, there had been no dancing in the aisles, standing on chairs, people singing along or swaying, drunk, lost in the autism of their own ecstasy. The audience had listened in absolute silence, applauding only when a song was completed. And people were mostly quiet, too, as they filed out into the night, back along those dusty vineyard roads, beneath a heat-wave moon.
Theirs was not only the silence that arises when people meet with something that arouses unusual devotion, even veneration. It was, rather, one which it had been the unique capacity of Leonard Cohen’s songs to instill for more than forty years. It was the silence that takes possession of human lives – so, by this stage of the night, all of us had reason to believe – when we are suddenly returned, perhaps even in spite of our ourselves, to a space that is ordinarily forgotten, collapsed in on itself, otherwise non-existent: the place that is our longing.
