Curious Notions
This is not a good period for the world and it’s surely an hideous year1 for music. Today Leonard Cohen died, leaving us all lonelier and sadder.
I held my individual wake for him at home, turned off the phone, opened the windows and put a record on. Suzanne… Sisters Of Mercy… So Long, Marianne… On the back of the record sleeve there are, for each song, few lines about how, where and with whom it was born that creature that now wanders alone around the world. The Partisan’s one hits me. The song is an adaptation from La Complainte du Partisan, the text was written by Emmanuel d’Astier de La Vigerie, alias Bernard dans la Résistance, the music by Anna Marly.
I learned this from a friend when I was 15. He was 17. His father was a union organiser. We were working at a camp in Ste. Marguerite, Quebec. We sang together every morning going through The People’s Song Book from cover to cover. I developed the curious notion that the Nazis were overthrown by music.
“The curious notion that the Nazis were overthrown by music”.
I feel an aching nostalgia about a world where a fifteen-year-old, (although exceptional) thought that the villains, the most evil of the villains, could be defeated by music. Not by weapons, by spies, by technologies, by hunger or bombs. None of these: overthrown by music. On the records there wasn’t one of his most famous songs, Hallelujah; I looked for it on the internet and found the live concert in London in 2008. He was seventy-four years old. He moved on that stage hopping, elegant, long hands and his inevitable hat, movements were broken, probably by arthritis: a dandy if ever there was one. As I was listening, I developed a curious consoling notion too: I’m certain that he has never recovered from that notion, has never normalised, the pettiness of this world has never corrupted him. I can see in the eighty-year old man that boy: he sings as if his life depended on it, as if OUR lives depended on it.
Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah
I’ve done my best I know it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel so I learned to touch
I’ve told the truth
I didn’t come here to London just to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand right here before the lord of song
With nothing nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah
Perhaps that’s enough, who knows? Have a safe journey home, old friend. There will be a concert in your honour, as soon as you arrive.
- In 2016, as Brexit and Trump’s election weren’t enough, the list of the artists who left us seems endless: David Bowie, Prince, Leonard Cohen, George Michael, Alan Rickman, Bud Spencer, Carrie Fisher, Umberto Eco, Dario Fo and Anna Marchesini; and surely I forgot someone. [↩]
Who owns whom?
