‘Another hotel’:
That’s just another line, if there ever was one.
It’s true, though. I’m at the window of another hotel, street surveying, unsleepy. Scaley clouds sweep just above the penthouses and the boardrooms. It’s sometime before midnight. Some bit of light comes and goes there behind the sky. There are the sirens you’d expect, the street accelerants, the battle cries of broken, baying humans with the fentanyl bends, or those let off the chain for the evening, or for good behaviour. There in the city below, the calendar of sorrows by which we mark our lingering here, and our little lives. All of it overseen by Our Lady of the Harbour.
I’ve eaten a melatonin gummy – a slippery slope, since anything goes when you’re influencing yourself. Sleeping unaided is not a given on the road. Whatever vial of moderate assistance is on the shelf is a contender once you hit midnight in a strange place, unwelcomely wide awake. The night threatens to be very long. There’s a recollection asking for its moment. I’ll try to get it down before I submit to the medicine.
Maybe it’s fourteen years ago now. I’m centre stage, fourteen rows from the front in a Jesus big arena in a field, the last concert I might ever go to. Curtain rises on a simple set, an old man in a white spotlight bows his head, hat on heart, his allies half-circled around him. He is the philosopher king of a young person’s game. A tumult breaks, adoration raining down before he’s made a sound. All manner of men are dressed and hatted in his image, and women come yet again to an understanding And for two incantatory hours Leonard Cohen, patron saint of my Orphan Wisdom School unpetitioned and unawares, strikes up the band.
It is already, in that very moment, the mark by which anything live will be understood, this spectacle. It is the beautiful defeat of easy ambition by the amber alchemy of discipline. If the heart has genius, this is it. One unconquerable song at a time, we climb Mount Cohen with the old man.
When the real thing is at hand, best listen and attend. It won’t happen like that again. Not ever.
When there seems for a while to be a better way at hand, goodness and mercy might be rustling in the wings, yes. And yes, you’d want to amortize that across the acreage of your days, even tell your neighbours that you’ve seen the real thing. You want it above all to endure the simple passing of time. When we speak our way towards the unspoken, we tend to say not what a thing was, but what is was like. Tempting as it is to extrapolate, elaborate and compare incarnations though, to extend their lives in facsimile, you know it’s better to let them stand alone, just as the maker made them.
You want the songs to carry on. But each song worthy of singing tends towards the silence that is its due and its beginning and its fate. So you do your part: you hold your breath, until hallelujah is the only sound left to you.
I’ve just tonight seen Cohen fils, rendering down an homage to his old man. ‘Everybody Knows‘, he called the presentation. A good little band, maybe fifteen songs (how did he decide ‘no’ to the rest?), an unrehearsed audience request even (the only musically uneven moment of the evening). He may have done the show in dedication, he may have done it on a dare. And there are those pesky perennial legal troubles with the estate. It’s a nervy thing for a grown man to do, what he’s done. It’s a mighty legacy to court. It’s ten years since Leonard left us, almost to the day – probably reason enough.
Out the younger Cohen came, to reasonable, measured, hopeful applause from the hometown crowd. Dance Me to the End of Love was first up. Everybody held their breath. Could this thing stand? All of that first verse he sang in the higher register, and then came the truth telling: could he hit the bottom notes of the title? You heard sighs of relief all over the house when he did. And then, showing remarkable stones for someone in his position, he began thoughtfully and affectionately and agilely to alter bits of the hallowed legacy. Not the DNA, but details, arrangements, voicings. There were elements that weren’t imagined in the original, that belonged without being carbon copies. The old man’s generosity was there, in his boy. And in the audience, which forgave the intervening years.
Was it the same as fourteen years ago? No, thank God. Does the whole thing beg for that comparison? Of course it does. The oud player’s melancholic flourishes, the two women and their beautiful doo/wops, the inside jokes and acoustic guitars, the baritone, the very sound, and the resemblance: they all ask over and over whether this can’t just go on forever. Must he be gone? It’s an AI world now. Can’t we have it all?
I sat there, maybe fifteen rows back, on the aisle this time. I slowed my excitement until I could keep time with those beautiful songs, knowing there’d be nothing like this again for me.
Though, Godwilling, something deeply of the lineage for somebody else.
I sit here now, deeper into the magic of this evening, the window and the mystery book open wide, the hurt and the holy making their way below, the city giving up its day for night, a bit of light still there behind the scudding November clouds of Montréal.
Stephen Jenkinson
Founder of Orphan Wisdom
