The Hebrew language, with 22 letters, finds multiple uses for two or three-letter nouns. The word for hand, yad, can also mean forearm, might or monument, each usage adding a tangential nuance to the original. An eye (ayin) is also a spring, or fountain. Heart (lev) is at once chest organ and moral arbiter, courage and central point.
Cohen's lyrics hint forever at alternate meanings. His bird sits on a wire, perhaps the peaceful fence of a domestic property but also a front line, a prison camp, a place of extermination. In conditions of extreme privation and existential threat, Cohen sings of an inner liberation: "I have tried, in my way, to be free." He described the song with customary duality as "a prayer, and an anthem".
In "Story of Isaac", he is nine years old and his father is building an altar, reversing personal history in a transcendent Freudian narrative. When Suzanne "takes you down", she is performing several acts at the same time, only one of which is sexual.
"I can't keep track of each fallen robin," laments Cohen after a lucky episode of oral sex in "Chelsea Hotel #2", the robin conveying so many things a man must lose, not least his bird on the wire. In these and countless other metaphors and metonyms, he draws strength — takes a yad — from his grandfather's teachings.
Cohen's take on sexual liberation has a consistent ethical foundation. The erotic is explicit in Jewish texts, whether in the prophet Hosea's ragings at his errant wife ("let her put away her whorings from her face and her adulteries from between her breasts") or the physical duties of husband specified in the Talmudic tractate Ketubot. Cohen sees no puritan partition between sacred and profane. In "Dance Me to the End of Love", a decorous wedding song, he prays: "Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone/Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon/Show me slowly what I only know the limits of/Dance me to the end of love." The end of love is, in Cohen's apparition, God's ultimate gift to mankind.
He was first drawn to poetry through the works of Federico García Lorca. Inspired in his teens by Spanish rhythms and prohibitions, Cohen quit strumming and mastered the classical guitar. Living off a small paternal legacy, he published several volumes of poetry and a highly sexualised novel, earning some outraged reviews in Canada and a suggestion in the Boston Globe that "James Joyce is not dead: he is living in Montreal under the name of Cohen." In the Sixties revolutions, Leonard Cohen was a fringe player, a student of human nature who dropped out on a Greek island, the better to contemplate the new age dawning from afar.
Well past 30 he met the Canadian folksinger Judy Collins and told her, "I can't sing and I can't play the guitar and I don't know if this is a song." She replied: "Well, Leonard, it is a song and I'm recording it tomorrow."
"Suzanne" was an instant hit. Collins one night called Cohen on stage to perform with her. "I can't do it, Judy," he protested. "I would die from embarrassment." He got just about as far as the "tea and oranges that come all the way from China" when he turned and fled the stage. The audience, alert to an extraordinary charisma, howled for his return. A star was born.
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