Somehow, I did not even know of Leonard Cohen’s existence or his poetry or music until shortly after his death in 2016. He was born 10 years before me, in Montreal. In 2022, I watched a documentary film about him and was fascinated. Since, I’ve read a biography and found I identified with him strongly - in the realm of serious longing for meaning, for God - ultimately. Unlike me, he was a gifted artist and was able to express his longings - truly artfully and at times playfully (unlike me) - in melody and lyric. Most well-known, I think, is Hallelujah.
Another of his songs, however, moves me more deeply: The Window. I don’t think there has yet been a time I’ve listened to this song that I haven’t teared up or fought to not outright bawl. The power of a song to transport me so is cloaked in mystery, it is a kind of magic. Somehow, Leonard Cohen has distilled all my own years of complex, chaotic actual craving for a God I can understand. And that he did with a series of mere allusions. This is consistent with the ancient Hebrew belief that to name God would be to confine, to limit Him. Thus, God is referred to only as “Hashem” , “the name”.
Likewise, because I cannot do justice to this wonder - filled song with words, I invite you to listen to it. Here is a link to the lyrics, though only a few words may need to be read; most are clear to the ear.
I can’t resist pointing a clever and effective technique Cohen has used in other songs. It’s a kind of musical onomatopoeia. I first noted it in Hallelujah, where the lyrics say, “the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift”. Simultaneously, the harmony progression follows just that pattern. In “The Window”
Cohen ends one verse with “Like a rose on its ladder of thorns”.
Following a chorus, we see that the ladder image presages the next verse’s ascent according to an eternal spiritual hierarchy and its tentative culmination in flesh. Again, to me, this is pure magic. Somehow it takes me to Arthur C. Clarke’s quote “any sufficiently advanced technology …”. Here, instead, it’s the combination of elevated spiritual comprehension, which is ever constrained by the essential limitation of the human mind. It is this limit which requires us, I think, to express the pervasive longing for flesh and spirit to unite and become one - through art. However much I wish to convey the transporting power of this force, all I could do would be to bloody you with words. Here’s what Cohen wrote:
“…Like a rose on its ladder of thorns.”
“Then lay you rose on the fire
The fire give up to the sun
The sun give over to splendor
In the arms of the high Holy One.
The Holy One dreams of a letter,
Dreams of a letter’s death.
Oh, bless the continuous stutter
Of the word being made into flesh.”
At the conclusion of the 2022 biopic, Cohen is interviewed. He again, with so few words, exquisitely paints my life experience (not unique, I think):
“You look around and you see a world that is impenetrable, that cannot be made sense of. You either raise your fist or you say "Hallelujah.’ I try to do both”.
For me, 81 in July (not a given, but a reasonable probability) these words are not only accurate, but very timely. In a thoroughly unexpected way, my wife, Gigi’s incurable - but for the moment, quiescent (this kind is not described as remissions, but rather “symptom free intervals”) cancer, has strangely become a gift to me. It has taught me the next, deeper layer of “one-day-at-a-time” living I first acquired in recovery from opioid addiction in 1991.
Formerly a resentful, angry, self-centered, entitled adolescent inhabiting an aging man’s plump body, I began living the behavioral modification program of the 12 steps. I was freed from craving for substances (and behaviors like sex or eating). By misdirection really, obsessive thoughts about changing my inner discomfort (by using these old ‘tricks’ of addiction) left me. The intermediary result was that I found a way of living which allowed me to accept the knowledge that I was vulnerable (to hurt, physical and emotional) and mortal (that I would die and not necessarily in a remote future); to no longer have to anesthetize it.
I had 32 1/2 years of sober living when Gigi’s cancer revealed itself; I was (and remain) a ‘work in progress’ (“progress rather than perfection”). However, it invited me to rearrange my goals. Rather than a retirement where we planned the next trip to a beautiful place, I decided - for my part - to do for Gigi whatever I was capable of doing to reduce her pain and suffering; that includes the physical, emotional and spiritual levels. I have been about the business of doing just that since mid- January 2024 and there have been unanticipated ‘fringe benefits’ for me.
Not only have my recovery-promoted thoughts and feelings been stable or improved, but all my lifelong existential angst has faded. I no longer procrastinate! (If you don’t believe in miracles, I can attest to this one). It turns out that life’s much easier when you “see something, DO IT”; it makes for less work over all. This has been for a simple reason: I do most all the housework (we’ve been reluctant to bring in cleaners because Gigi is immunosuppressed.
The former me would have resented these new duties. Shockingly, from the get go, I discovered I was grateful to be useful in this way. I was grateful that I was capable of doing the things I do (many people my age cannot). Unlike the diffidence during many years of schooling and 50 years of medical practice, these tasks were simple, easy; absent were any ‘performance pressure’. When I think back to the overwhelming fears of failure I had endured, I’m grateful (again) that I got through it. So, that’s where I’m at today and serves to explain why I said The Window is so timely for me.
Should you choose to listen to it, I hope you may also find meaning and perhaps comfort in it. Sharing matters like this, which touch my soul, is one of life’s pure delights (delight, like gratitude, has been a late, but most welcome addition to my characterological repertoire).