Yours for a Song

Friday night I took a trip down the Leonard Cohen Highway on Youtube and encountered "Lover Lover Lover" for the first time even though it was originally recorded in '74 (I was 7), and I've been listening to Cohen now for over 15 years. I really don't know everything there is to know, do I? That fact still surprises me sometimes. But what a song. It's had me spellbound, and I'm almost sick of listening to it now.

Much has already been written about the way Cohen meshes the sacred and the profane in his lyrics--sex with spirit and all. You can see that in the album cover alone shown in this 'Tube clip. In this original recording his young voice is unambiguous, and that archetypal longing--that one where you want a life do-over, where you want back what you've lost, where you want original ecstasy said to be available both in epiphany and in orgasm--rings out loud and painfully clear. Wanting is not having by definition, and it's wanting, not having, that inspires the best in poetry and music. How many ways can you sing the blues?

The song is sublime. Cohen sings the "father's" reply to all this desire:

"I never turned aside," he said,

"I never walked away.

It was you who built the temple,

It was you who covered up my face."

The yearned for has always been here a whisper away. You've been wearing the ruby slippers all along, right? How maddening and perfectly ironic. We create our own suffering. We shield ourselves from the divine face with which we crave union because we can't really live with it day in, day out. This idea also plays out in Cohen's "Night Comes On." Listen:



We have to go back to the world--and that's all right.