The end of love

Leonard Cohen hated the time that it leaves

Once upon a time, at the fifth o’clock in the morning of time immemorial, Leonard Cohen stood with a guitar on the stage of the festival of the island of White and sang in the predawn darkness of a million wanderers sitting on a moist grass, throwing blankets over his shoulders. This was the last meeting of the generation before parting. Now all of them had to disperse through the streets, floors, alleys, dead ends of endless life and live alone at their own peril and risk, with bitterness in the soul and memory of the lost paradise. And he, a poet with a romantic Hair to his shoulders, thin and vulnerable, first set off.

Since then, his whole life has been a long, long, long journey. I followed his journey from the other end of the Earth and, like many people, felt kinship with him. For such kinship, there is no need for common nephews or at the intersection of genealogical ancients; This human kinship is over geography and outside of times, which are well known to those who live in the world of vague images, rhyme and uniforms and magical sounds. Cohen was never a hero of the noisy advanced and the first stripes of newspapers, but in a dense stream of events, in the exciting Czech of phenomena, in a tiring whirlpool of days he appeared suddenly in unexpected places in his hippy jacket, dotted with pockets, and in a beetle's sneakers.

In 1973, during the Judgment Day war, this pacifist, infinitely far from the militaristic nonsense with its cult of strength and idiocy of heroism, stood in the middle of the Sinai desert surrounded by Israeli military. Behind him were armored personnel carriers and jeeps with machine guns, and Ariel Sharon crossed his hands on his chest. Cohen from the Koenov clan sang his songs about love to people who were to sit for the levers of tanks and force the Suez. In 1976, when several hundred of Viennese students occupied the cultural center intended for demolition and refused to leave it, he came to them directly from the station and sang a song to Yiddish, and when he finished, he raised his left hand with a clenched fist. Above the scene, in that stuffed hall of the early “occupying”, the homemade poster hung “All that remains for us is solidarity!”. Cohen believed in this.

A romantic poet with hair to his shoulders turned into a traveler in life in a jacket and cap. He wore a gray tweed cap and a sweater under a jacket. His species meant that it became cold in the world. And he was looking for himself in a new cold world, not in the banal sense that involves the search for a cell in a society where you will have a chair and a sofa and you will live comfortably, and something completely different ... fleeting and transparent ... The feeling of yourself, walking along the street and suddenly feeling that longing and bitterness disappeared. Yes, Cohen was looking for all the time, he was looking for those Sunny Aegean islands, where he experienced happiness in his youth, he was looking for Marianne , with whom it was so cool to laugh together, searched for what he called Hidden Love, that is, secret, hidden love, love, piercing life, like sunlight, love, aggravating vision and returning paradise.

Jew Cohen, who grew up in a family, where everyone always remembered well that they were Jews, became a Buddhist, because only Buddhism could give him a removal from the world with his noise and absurdity. The robe of the Buddhist monk, a shaved skull, unshaven cheekbones, life at the top of a mountain in a Buddhist monastery - he lived in silence for five years. The one who from childhood knew the charm and joy of rhyming lines, the one who stood thousands of times on the stage with a guitar in his hands, was silent, knowing the depth of silence, was silent, measuring the silence in himself and around himself. After such an experience, the words acquired a completely different weight and sound for him, and life received another dimension. But she also bifurcated: in one dimension, he was a sage who knew the silence, grunting his hand, putting it on the back of his faithful cat, and in the other he was forced to remain a touring artist, who suddenly lost all his savings. Cohen was robbed by his manager.

The sound that an experienced Buddhist created in his albums and at the same time a Jewish helmet was permeated by that inescapable, always bitter bitterness, from which he could never get rid of life. A bitter sense of parting entered every day. He hated the time that it was leaving. He drowned and died in the bitterness of the past time, as in paralysis, but the singer Sharon Robertson pulled him out onto the stage and forced him to start again. And he, already gray -haired, in a black hat with narrow fields and with a gold chain on his wrist, set off along with his little orchestra of sadness and love. There was something incredible, impossible in this gray-haired gentleman in all the black, who once stood on White island on the same stage with Morrison, drank coffee with Dylan in night eatery, collected pebbles on the shore where Homer was once sitting, and now became a poor concert artist who earned himself in old age.

The icy cold of the era, but at the same time the threat of this era with all its banks and Trumps - I Don 'Like Your Fashion Business Mister! - There were in his radical song that we would first capture Manhattan, and then take Berlin, a song that Andreas Baader could sing to ourselves and which Bernadett Dorn would really like. The horror and the disgust that he experienced for the present was inextricably linked in his soul and in his sound with tenderness, which he experienced for the women he loved. How he sang with his girls from the back of the vocal song-Molba and a song-gang of love. He sang her, taking off his hat with narrow fields and pressing it to his chest, sang in a voice, which so strikingly changed from him from those times when he was a young poet with a thin inspired face framed by thick tangled strands. Cohen's voice, once formerly transparent and clean, sank down, a hoarse man appeared in him who drinks a lot of whiskey, does not expect much from life, but still believes in the romantic fairy tale of love.

Notes
Marianne from the song by Long Marianne - Marianna Ilen, Norwegian, whom Cohen met in the early sixties. Muse Cohen, several of his songs are dedicated to her. After breaking up with Cohen, she married, lived for 32 years in a happy marriage, worked in the oil industry, and was engaged in painting. Like Cohen, she studied Buddhism. She died in July this year, in the last letter to her, Cohen wrote: “ ... I think, I will soon follow you ... Goodbye, old friend. Endless love, see you along the way . ”

Andreas Baader is the left radical, in 1968 one of the founders of RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion, the Red Army faction), city partisans, participant in attacks, terrorist attacks, abductions. In 1977, he committed suicide in the prison of Steamheim.

Bernardina Dorn is the leader of the American underground group Weather Underground, who in 1969 declared war on the US government. She participated in the days of anger in Chicago and other protests. She arrested several times. From 1970 to 1973 she was included in the list of ten of the most wanted FBI persons. In the nineties and later-a professor of law at the Center for Children's and Family Law of the North-Western University. In 2012, she participated in the “Occupy” movement.