LEONARD COHEN - You Want It Darker

We're all waiting for the moment when we can abdicate, shed these kingly robes, abandon the throne of these lives.

Nobody wants the robes of the king. We all want to be naked to one another, because that's the best way to give yourself.

(Leonard Cohen, 1992)

Hinneni, hinneni. Ancient words, words that come from afar. From the lips of Abraham, from the scrolls of the Torah. From a voice roughened by the seasons, worn down by the labor of living.

When he was not yet forty, Leonard Cohen had told the story of the sacrifice of Isaac through the eyes of the son, of the predestined victim. "Story Of Isaac", the song was called, and it had the air of a prophecy of the violence to come. On the threshold of the great mystery, his gaze has become that of Abraham. That of the father who entrusts himself completely: hinneni, here I am.

A consonance of fate: around that very word, another author has in these same months built his most ambitious literary fresco. He could be Cohen's son, and yet it would be hard to imagine a deeper affinity. In his "Here I Am", Jonathan Safran Foer writes about being fathers and being sons, about belonging to a people and belonging to a family. And, at the center of it all, there is always Abraham's answer. "He doesn't say: 'What do you want?' He doesn't say: 'Yes?' He answers with a statement: 'Here I am'. Whatever God wants, Abraham is completely present for him, without conditions or reservations or the need for explanations."

"I'm ready, my Lord", Cohen murmurs on the opening track of his final album. On a grey autumn morning, that whisper became a farewell. The truth of the news that eyes stared at in disbelief on a screen. But it wouldn't do justice to those words to consider them merely a goodbye. Saying "Here I am" is much more than that, Safran Foer reminds us: it's what most of all defines our identity. It's being completely present in the face of reality, even when its question eludes understanding. Because "you can't stop things from happening, you can only choose not to be there".

Leonard Cohen chose to be there until the end. The living room of his Los Angeles home filled up with acoustic guitars, keyboards, laptops. And, at the center, an old Neumann microphone, to capture every breath of the old master. Up at first light, working without distractions. The comfort of the spirit, the toil of the body. Even back at the time of "Popular Problems" he had a batch of new songs in the drawer. He worked on them intensively for a year together with Patrick Leonard, then his condition suddenly took a turn for the worse. "The situation was bleak, the suffering acute, the project was abandoned", the new album's liner notes recall. And it was then that his son Adam stepped in.

They had never worked together before: the shadow of such a father loomed too large for a son determined to follow in his footsteps along the arduous path of songwriting. But this time things were different. "He understood that my recovery, if not my very survival, depended on the chance to get back to work." When he was seventeen, Adam had spent months in a coma after a terrible car accident. His father spent his days at his bedside, reading him verses from the Bible. Life sometimes plays at reversing roles: "Adam took charge of the project, set me up in an orthopedic chair so I could sing, and brought these unfinished songs to completion."

The track chosen to give its title to Cohen's fourteenth album, "You Want It Darker", opens with the voices of a choir. Not the usual female counter-vocal, but the choir of the Shaar Hashomayim congregation, Canada's oldest Ashkenazi synagogue. His family's synagogue. And here comes the pulsing groove of the bass, laying down the carpet for that unmistakable baritone. It comes from lands of shadow and solitude, from times of silence and desire.

There are prisoners led to execution, there's a flame left to die out in the night. The anguish of a lifetime seems like nothing before the travail of the world: "I struggled with some demons/ They were middle-class and tame". The dark tomorrow of "The Future" has, by now, become the present. But where does the evil that poisons history come from, if not from the depths of the human heart? "If thine is the glory/ Then mine must be the shame". The synagogue's voices join him in intoning the opening of the Kaddish: "Magnified and sanctified/ Be Thy Holy Name". The prayer of praise, the prayer of mourning. A funeral hymn to himself, or perhaps to all humanity. "I'm ready, my Lord".

It took a son's love to restore to Cohen the rigor of a classic. And that "You Want It Darker" is destined to take its place among the classics is already clear from the bare essentiality of the cover art, from that play of black-and-white contrasts that directly summons up the past. The final chapter of a trilogy that sets aside the residual trimmings of "Popular Problems" to achieve a sobriety even more measured than that of "Old Ideas". The only setting truly fitting for Cohen's voice: "My arrangements have to contain something wrong, something defenseless, defeated, broken, simple, humble. Otherwise I find there's no room left for me, I can't breathe".

From the piano of "Treaty" rises a tremor of strings that anticipates the orchestral reprise placed at the close of the album. "I wish there was a treaty/ Between your love and mine", Cohen invokes. Not with the resignation of compromise, but with the pained awareness that the other can never be reduced to any conquest. The collaboration with Patrick Leonard bequeaths the album's most elaborate musical touches, from the organ that introduces the chiaroscuro gospel of "If I Didn't Have Your Love" to the gypsy lyricism of "It Seemed The Better Way", while the only track co-written with Sharon Robinson, "On The Level", helps lighten the album's fabric with its soul tones.

"You Want It Darker" is an album made of farewells. It's impossible to listen to it without bearing in mind that it contains Leonard Cohen's last words. Impossible above all because there isn't a single line that isn't steeped in the intimate awareness of the end. It is the testament of a man ready to step back from the pull of passion ("I turned my back on the devil/ Turned my back on the angel too", he confesses in "On The Level"), a step back from the daily battle ("I do not care who takes this bloody hill", he proclaims in "Treaty"). A step back to finally contemplate the design of things, not to give up possessing them. Amid nostalgic twangy reverb and pedal-steel embroidery, "Leaving The Table" sums it all up with the plain force of an image ("I'm leaving the table/ I'm out of the game"), as Cohen finds himself observing the game of the human comedy with detachment.

One by one, all the useless burdens fall away. Shadows of women and ruins of shopping malls, scars of old wounds and worn-out certainties. Over the chamber arrangements of "Steer Your Way", the old chansonnier passes through them as if they were relics of another time, of another life. “Year by year/ Month by month/ Day by day/ Thought by thought”. What remains, more than anything, is the need to see through to the end what one has begun. And this, in the end, is precisely the essence of "You Want It Darker".

"I'm traveling light/ It's au revoir". The journey is long, the baggage light. The choir of "Traveling Light" resounds like the distant song of the women of a shtetl, like the memory of a klezmer dance on violin strings, a "Dance Me To The End Of Love" offered as a gift to Matt Elliott. Only the essentials remain in the suitcase, while that crooning, grave as time itself, pronounces the final goodbye.

A few weeks before his passing, Cohen confided to David Remnick of The New Yorker the lines he was still working on. Eyes closed, in a whisper. "Listen to the mind of God, which doesn't need to be". Jewish tradition calls it bat kol, the voice from heaven: "Another reality that is always singing in your ear from deep within, even if most of the time you're unable to decipher it". Sometimes, being present means nothing more than listening. And there is no voice greater than that of one who has learned to listen. "Listen to the mind of God/ Don't listen to me".

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14/11/2016