Flesh, spirit and politics: the obsessions of Leonard Cohen – the Public.en

When Leonard Cohen was 15 years old, he met a professor of flamenco in a park in Montreal and this not only offered him the first guitar but also taught him the first chords and first songs. Cohen knew nothing about the man, and one day this did not give him a lesson because he had committed suicide, an event that had a great impact on it (on it, Cohen; but thinking about it, also had a large impact on the teacher): the songs and the death began to walk hand in hand in the life of a canadian, who in his last album he sang "I’m ready, my Lord", accepting for the song to death, and thus completing the circle.

The death was not a theme foreign to Cohen, who for so dating the shadows has been dubbed the godfather of gloom. But it was also not the only theme, and it will be up to exaggeration to consider that the author of Songs of Love and Hate not pondered just times in the beauty that hides in the hope of the next morning. Which leads us to the docket: that left us Cohen? What are your themes?

The mental universe of the Cohen is not simple: it is jewish and has a particular appreciation for the scriptures, the jewish, being that this does not prevent it from being a master of zen buddhism of the Rinzai school – in the 1990s he spent five years in a zen monastery to the output of Los Angeles and became a friend of the master, Joshu Sasaki Roshi, who will already in 105 years, and taught him how to make a good Bloody Mary. More recently became interested in hindu mysticism which also has a particular interest in sufism.

This is not trivial and is not fully understood by a good part of your audience. The demand to the spiritual, as well as the self admitted several times, is an attempt of understanding the ontological that it seems, sometimes, to wage a battle against the endogenous depression that he suffered throughout life – and that trademark themes such as The darkness ( Old Ideas) or the tremendous Avalanche, Songs of Love and Hate. The Guardian, in 2012, Cohen spoke of this depression "while the backdrop of anguish and anxiety, the sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is impossible, and that all our strategies will culminate in ruin". Already near the end freed her: the victim of a cambalacho that you took all the money, threw it on the road, and this practical world of survival, brought him the peace that both sought (such as more than once stated) in drugs, in alcohol, in women, in songs, in reading and in religion, in writing (cha racters and songs).

And yet he was the possessor of a humor and refined chasing women. The love was not only love: it was the path that led him up to the muses (and overcame them). Marianne and Suzanne are not only women – are the muses, the inducing of love. Maybe no one has written so much about love: a night on Chelsea Hotel no 2, harmony, I’m your man, irrepressible and convicted in Let’s sing another song, boys (the most beautiful of songs), simply devasso in Don’t go home with your hard on (the title is self-explanatory) or without the adjective that qualifies in the Famous blue raincoat (the most beautiful of songs).

it’s Not worth hiding that the more the spiritual and the carnal are in the songs of Cohen, in life, were often irreconcilable. If the betrayal and abandonment are part of your menu of love, the despair arises not infrequently as inevitability – the Cohen of the first three discs is a lot, to the point of singing "One hand on my suicide/ one hand on the rose", in Stories of the street.

But this is the price to pay for freedom, and the freedom of Cohen is not only the foreign policy, that we find in the second phase of his career, the synthesizers from the 1980′s – as in Democracy, for example, or First we take Manhattan. It is also and above all inner freedom of those who know that each of the ark the weight of their actions and a choice implies a loss – this is what is in Bird on the wire. The policy, the "simple" policy that is made of the relationships between a community came later, when Cohen learned the use of irony to reflect the contradictions of the eternal that are rife throughout the ages and that we find – we find it implicit or explicit in There is a war or Everybody knows.