Leonard Cohen, Yesterday's Tomorrow by Marc Hendrickx

Author:Marc Hendrickx [Hendrickx, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781916410367
Publisher: Bookline & Thinker
Published: 2019-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

ASHES OF EXPERIENCE

One could postulate that every religion is the creation of man and thus says nothing about the truth. Going further, you know that the one truth does not exist, at least not so that we can comprehend it. Life then should be about sincerity. Truthfulness in what our heart tells us to strive for, and in what we choose to be. Anything less than this is a weak bid, to be written on the debit side in the balance sheet of our spirit, that purveyor of words and deeds, in charge of and responsible for how we stand in the world.

This vision is purest during adolescence. The big fabrications are over. At the threshold of adulthood, a pregnant will drowns out everybody and everything. Dilettantism and professionalism are involved in a rearguard action.

The winner will be the one who makes our wishes come true or approximates them the closest. When talking about the years of his adolescence. Leonard Cohen remarks that his main sensation was a continuous longing. A comment that seconds the observation made in The Favorite Game that deprivation is the mother of all poetry. Being isolated induces dreams. Every person looks for some sort of compensation for his or her shortcomings. Combined with a linguistically strong education, this longing will soon manifest itself. A starting base that’s aimed at self-determination and drawing on one’s own forces and possibilities will be equally influential.

When hardly sixteen, seventeen years old, I was the editor and publisher of a commercially available magazine. At the same age Cohen wrote his first poems. Of course, we later forget how and who we were at that age. We forget that something like fifteen-year-old wisdom exists, that it has its value just as much as every age’s wisdom. As long as we stay true to our points of departure, that does not need to be a fundamental problem. Unfortunately, many of us plunge into puerile flight routes as soon as the great longing seems to be veering off course. Not so the protagonists of this book. However young, vulnerable and even fragile, life and the road we chose demanded an unconditional loyalty to our choices, averse to every ‘but’ or ‘maybe’.

Notwithstanding his seeming non-conformism, not taking on the priesthood and his refusal to take up a place in the family business, Cohen in his own way would fulfil an important role. In Hebrew literature, the writer who is willing to defend his own people or go against them is imputed with a sheer Messianic dimension. Hand in hand with the development of his poetry, the young poet learned to play the piano, and, with the emergence of rhythm and blues, also the guitar, the instrument of the new music. Side by side, poetry and popular music grew up with him, a situation that is further reinforced with the introduction of LPs in 1948.

Just like my partner in crime a few decades earlier, I have built up a record collection since my childhood. Eclectic and honest, these records had a lasting influence.

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