Even Damnation is Poisoned With Rainbows
Leonard Cohen didn’t just save my life. He helped transform it.
On December 23, 2005, just a few months after I finished grad school and started my first adult job, my parents were killed by a drunk driver. (I have written more about this experience elsewhere.)
In the months that followed, my marriage fell apart.
For reasons I won’t elaborate on here, I felt a lot of guilt on top of grief during this time. My ex was, and will always be the person who went into my parents’ smashed van and retrieved my mother’s bloody purse.
In 2005, I had a tight-knit family and a doting partner. By the middle of 2006, I was alone. Physically, existentially, and spiritually. An Orphan in the Void with no living ancestors or descendants.
“Depression” does not begin to describe this feeling, but it’s a place to start.
Naturally, I started listening to a lot of Leonard Cohen. I had discovered Leonard as a teenager, through my friend Darla’s love of Jeff Buckley’s version of Hallelujah, but it took my newfound isolation — this experience of having been utterly cracked open and left vulnerable to an unknown future — to explore certain depths of his catalog.
Leonard was the only musician I knew about that paired perfectly with the Emptiness I was navigating. He was the poet who assured me that this pain had its own kind of value.
There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.
But there was more to it than that. Leonard also knew about the Mysteries I had encountered in the Emptiness, and had given himself over to them fully. Through Leonard, I discovered the Zohar; that magical key that activates the transcendental splendor lying dormant in the Hebrew Bible. Leonard worshipped the way I knew I wanted to worship: not just by singing hymns of praise, but by actually giving Voice to the Deity (an act that cannot be taken lightly, as it straddles blasphemy and prophecy).
You know who I am,
You’ve stared at the sun,
Well I am the one who loves
Changing from nothing to one.
Like Leonard Cohen, I found the audacity to begin calling myself a musician around the age of 30. In his twenties, Leonard was a writer and poet. In mine, I was a printmaker, a metalsmith, a math tutor.
I had some musical training — voice and piano lessons, and many years of singing in a choir under my belt — but up to that point I had never made any serious attempt at writing songs.
Writing prose comes naturally for me; songwriting is something else entirely. In order to fulfill its highest potential, a song has to be both economical and lithe. It functions like a prism, or a finely cut diamond. Every facet reflects every other part of the whole, infinitely.
“You shatter versions of the self until you get down to a line, a word you can defend, and wrap your voice around without choking,” Leonard said of this process of refinement. I had never found a sentiment I identified with so strongly in my life.
With Leonard’s advice as my guide, I began translating my lucid dreams into lyrics. I cast myself in the role of my own mother, comforting me as the voice of the Universe. My mother and I share the same voice, and through singing, I discovered that we are not the only ones. By learning to wield the power inherent in my own resonance, I was able to sing myself out of the Emptiness and back into the world.
I am no longer alone, and not just because I found a life partner I can play music with. Leonard Cohen was my gateway onto that ecstatic font of poetry from which the mystics of all ages have drunk. There is no isolation here, because of all the others who are in constant communion. It is a place, once discovered, that one can return to at will, and it’s why I’ll never mourn Leonard’s passing.
He is with us always.
