{"id":82916,"date":"2016-11-14T12:00:36","date_gmt":"2016-11-14T12:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=82916"},"modified":"2016-11-14T12:59:28","modified_gmt":"2016-11-14T12:59:28","slug":"there-is-a-crack-in-everything-thats-how-the-light-gets-in-leonard-cohen-on-democracy-and-its-redemptions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/11\/there-is-a-crack-in-everything-thats-how-the-light-gets-in-leonard-cohen-on-democracy-and-its-redemptions\/","title":{"rendered":"There Is a Crack in Everything, That\u2019s How the Light Gets In: Leonard Cohen on Democracy and Its Redemptions"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"songwritersonsongwriting-leonard-cohen\"<\/a>A generous reminder that we must aim for \u201ca revelation in the heart rather than a confrontation or a call-to-arms or a defense.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Trained as a poet and ordained as a Buddhist monk<\/a>, Leonard Cohen<\/strong> (21 Sep 1934\u201310 Nov 2016<\/a>) is our patron saint of sorrow and redemption. He wrote songs partway between philosophy and prayer \u2014 songs radiating the kind of prayerfulness which Simone Weil celebrated as \u201cthe rarest and purest form of generosity.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

One of his most beloved lyric lines, from the song \u201cAnthem\u201d \u2014 a song that took Cohen a decade to write \u2014 remains what is perhaps the most meaningful message for our troubled and troubling times: \u201cThere is a crack in everything, that\u2019s how the light gets in.\u201d<\/em> It springs from a central concern of Cohen\u2019s life and work, one which he revisited in various guises across various songs \u2014 including in \u201cSuzanne\u201d, where he writes \u201clook among the garbage and the flowers \/ there are heroes in the seaweed,\u201d<\/em> and in the iconic \u201cHallelujah\u201d: \u201cThere\u2019s a blaze of light \/ In every word \/ It doesn\u2019t matter which you heard \/ The holy or the broken Hallelujah\u201d<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Leonard<\/a>

Leonard Cohen<\/p><\/div>\n

Nowhere is this interplay of darkness and light more nuanced, nor more prescient, than in Cohen\u2019s song \u201cDemocracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Western world was ablaze with the euphoria of a blind faith that democracy was coming to the East. I was there \u2014 that\u2019s not what happened. Cohen, too, saw things differently. Ever the enchanter of nuance, he foresaw the complexity and darkness that this reach for light would unravel, and he captured it in this iconic and astonishingly timely song. It begins:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s coming through a hole in the air
\nFrom those nights in Tiananmen Square
\nIt\u2019s coming from the feel
\nThat this ain\u2019t exactly real
\nOr it\u2019s real, but it ain\u2019t exactly there
\nFrom the wars against disorder
\nFrom the sirens night and day
\nFrom the fires of the homeless
\nFrom the ashes of the gay
\nDemocracy is coming to the USA
\nIt\u2019s coming through a crack in the wall<\/p>\n

In his 1991 conversation with journalist Paul Zollo, found in Songwriters on Songwriting<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 the source of Cohen\u2019s wisdom on inspiration and work ethic<\/a>, and his most illuminating interview \u2014 Cohen pulls back the curtain on his creative process and discusses the nature of democracy, how he wrote the song, and why he chose to leave out certain verses, even though he considered them lyrically good.<\/p>\n

Today, as the world\u2019s greatest superpower elects a bigoted bully with fascist tendencies for president, many of the lines Cohen left out pierce with their pertinence \u2014 lines like \u201cConcentration camp behind a smile\u201d<\/em> and \u201cWho really gets to profit and who really gets to pay? \/ Who really rides the slavery ship right into Charleston Bay?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

A quarter century ago, Cohen speaks to our time with astonishing prescience \u2014 for any great artist is at bottom a seer in dialogue with eternal human problems \u2014 and tells Zollo:<\/p>\n

I think the irony of America is transcendent in the song. It\u2019s not an ironic song. It\u2019s a song of deep intimacy and affirmation of the experiment of democracy in this country. That this is really where the experiment is unfolding. This is really<\/em> where the races confront one another, where the classes, where the genders, where even the sexual orientations confront one another. This is the real laboratory of democracy. So I wanted to have that feeling in the song, too.<\/p>\n

Using songwriting itself as a laboratory for democratic discourse, Cohen wrote several verses he chose to leave out of the final song. He gives as an example a verse in which he explored the relationship between black and Jewish people:<\/p>\n

First we killed the Lord and then we stole the blues.
\nThis gutter people always in the news,
\nBut who really gets to laugh behind the black man\u2019s back
\nWhen he makes his little crack about the Jews?
\nWho really gets to profit and who really gets to pay?
\nWho really rides the slavery ship right into Charleston Bay?
\nDemocracy is coming to the U.S.A.<\/p>\n

And another:<\/p>\n

From the church where the outcasts can hide
\nOr the mosque where the blood is dignified.
\nLike the fingers on your hand,
\nLike the hourglass of sand,
\nWe can separate but not divide
\nFrom the eye above the pyramid.
\nAnd the dollar\u2019s cruel display
\nFrom the law behind the law,
\nBehind the law we still obey
\nDemocracy is coming to the U.S.A.<\/p>\n

When Zollo asks why he chose to take these verses out, Cohen responds:<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t want to compromise the anthemic, hymn-like quality. I didn\u2019t want it to get too punchy. I didn\u2019t want to start a fight in the song. I wanted a revelation in the heart rather than a confrontation or a call-to-arms or a defense.<\/p>\n

In these present days of outrage and confrontation, how much of even the most elegantly argued writing aims for \u201ca revelation in the heart\u201d? And what might our world look like if this is what we aimed for instead of belittling and badgering those we find at fault?<\/p>\n

\"Self-portrait<\/a>

Self-portrait by Leonard Cohen from Fifteen Poems<\/p><\/div>\n

With an eye to his core quest for light, Cohen reflects on the necessity for a creative process that includes such deliberately disposable composition:<\/p>\n

Before I can discard the verse, I have to write it\u2026 It\u2019s just as hard to write a bad verse as a good verse. I can\u2019t discard a verse before it is written because it is the writing of the verse that produces whatever delights or interests or facets that are going to catch the light. The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines.<\/p>\n

Decades before Rebecca Solnit\u2019s vital and vitalizing assertion that \u201cpower comes from the shadows and the margins,\u201d<\/a> Cohen considers the paradoxical sources of light in the dark:<\/p>\n

Most of us from the middle-class, we have a kind of old, 19th-century idea of what democracy is, which is, more or less, to over-simplify it, that the masses are going to love Shakespeare and Beethoven. That\u2019s more or less our idea of what democracy is. But that ain\u2019t it. It\u2019s going to come up in unexpected ways from the stuff that we think [is] junk: the people we think are junk, the ideas we think are junk, the television we think is junk.<\/p>\n

Among the things we discard too heedlessly, Cohen notes in another testament to his virtuosity for nuance, are the spiritual and moral mechanisms of religion. (A quarter century later, Adam Gopnik made a parallel case for how a secular reading of scripture enlarges our lives<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

\"Art<\/a>

Art by Leonard Cohen from Fifteen Poems<\/p><\/div>\n

Reflecting on the sense of sanctity and holiness in his songs \u2014 something Bob Dylan captured around the release of \u201cHallelujah\u201d in remarking that Cohen\u2019s songs are like prayers \u2014 Cohen tells Zollo:<\/p>\n

\u201cIf It Be Your Will\u201d is really a prayer. And \u201cHallelujah\u201d has that feeling. A lot of them do. \u201cDance Me to the End of Love.\u201d \u201cSuzanne.\u201d I love church music and synagogue music. Mosque music.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a line in \u201cThe Future\u201d: \u201cWhen they said repent, I wonder what they meant.\u201d I understood that they forgot how to build the arch for several hundred years. Masons forgot how to do certain kinds of arches, it was lost. So it is in our time that certain spiritual mechanisms that were very useful have been abandoned and forgot. Redemption, repentance, resurrection. All those ideas are thrown out with the bath water. People became suspicious of religion plus all these redemptive mechanisms that are very useful.<\/p>\n

The creative process itself, Cohen observe, is a spiritual channel to the miraculous. He reflects on what it takes to write a beautiful song:<\/p>\n

It is a miracle. I don\u2019t know where the good songs come from or else I\u2019d go there more often.<\/p>\n

\"Self-portrait<\/a>

Self-portrait by Leonard Cohen from Fifteen Poems<\/p><\/div>\n

Toward the end of the interview, Cohen reflects on the fuel for his own spiritual machinery as an artist. It\u2019s a sentiment of especial bittersweetness in the wake of Cohen\u2019s death, and one as true of the creative life as of the life of service (which is animated by its own kind of creativity); as true of making art as of fighting for justice:<\/p>\n

I always had a sense of being in this for keeps<\/em>, if your health lasts you. And you\u2019re fortunate enough to have the days at your disposal so you can keep on doing this. I never had the sense that there was an end. That there was a retirement or that there was a jackpot<\/em>.<\/p>\n

There is hardly a greater jackpot than a long life of light-bearing purpose. Thank you, Leonard Cohen, for everything.<\/p>\n

httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ttEMYvpoR-k<\/p>\n

If you haven\u2019t yet read David Remnick\u2019s spectacular New Yorker<\/em> profile of Cohen, quench your soul here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________<\/p>\n

Brain Pickings<\/em> is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large obsessed with combinatorial creativity who also writes for <\/em>Wired<\/em> UK and <\/em>The Atlantic<\/em>, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. She has gotten occasional help from a handful of guest contributors<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 brainpickings.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trained as a poet and ordained as a Buddhist monk, Leonard Cohen (21 Sep 1934\u201310 Nov 2016) is our patron saint of sorrow and redemption. He wrote songs partway between philosophy and prayer \u2014 songs radiating the kind of prayerfulness which Simone Weil celebrated as \u201cthe rarest and purest form of generosity.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[167],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82916\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}