Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song

I’ve been meaning to watch this documentary for over a year. I kept a poster I saw about a showing in New York on my desktop to remind me.

So… here are things I loved so much I stopped the documentary to write them down. There was a lot more that I didn’t write down. And yes, I cried.

“I think the borders have faded between a lot of endeavors. Like the poet, or the singer… It’s just a matter of what your hand falls on. And if you can make what your hand falls on sing, then you can just do it.”

“Sometimes I would go with the old Beat philosophy: ‘First thought, best thought,’ but it never worked for me. There hardly is a first thought. It’s all sweat… The experience is the experience of work. And of failure. You’re just trying to lay it out as accurately as you can.”

“I visited the Chief Executive of Columbia Records… First of all, he reviewed my suit. Then he said, ‘Leonard, we know you’re great. But we don’t know if you’re any good.'”

“I feel as if I have huge posthumous career ahead of me.”

“If I knew where songs came from, I would go there more often.”

“It’s a rigorous life. It’s designed to overthrow you… It’s a very careful and precise investigation into the self that was urgent for me. If you’re sitting in a meditation hall for four or five hours a day you kinda get straight with yourself. So this is not on the level of a religious conversion. It’s closer to science than religion.”

“You keep discarding the stuff that is too easy, or too much of a slogan.”

“But I really am a writer, and a writer is deeply conflicted. And it’s in his work that his reconciles those deep conflicts. And it doesn’t set the world in order. It doesn’t really change anything. It just is a kind of harbor.”

“One is always trying to write a good song. Like everything else, you put in your best effort, but you can’t command the consequences.”

“Nothing’s over till it’s over, but I find myself in a graceful moment… It’s not so much that I got what I was looking for, but the search itself dissolved.”

“70 is indisputably not youth. I don’t say that it’s extreme old age, but it’s the foothills of old age, and that urgent invitation to complete one’s work is very much in my life.”

– Are you gonna tour?
– I may. Because, you know, it’s a good solution to old age and death. Just play till you drop.

“The only way you can sell a concert is if you put yourself at risk. And if you don’t do that, people know. And they go home with the feeling that, well, they like the songs, but you know, they prefer to listen to them at home. But if you can really stand at the center of your song, if you can inhabit that space, and really stand for the complexity of your own emotions, then everybody feels good. The musicians feel good, and you feel good, and the people who’ve come feel good.”

His text to his frend at the end:

“Ducking away to write and write feverishly, if two words a day constitutes a fever. Many pressing concerns, but ignoring most of them in favor of a finished lyric. Not interested in anything else, and this interest fairly fragile also. Another beautiful day.”

“You look around and you see a world that is impenetrable, that cannot be made sense of. You either raise your fist, or you say Hallelujah. I try to do both.”

Other raw emotions besides awe:

I got the angriest at the artist’s assholery (at least assholery as I perceived it from the outside, out of context, knowing nothing but what I was told) was during the John Lissauer narrative. The cultivation, collaboration, and then abandonment of a younger artist. And eight years later, a new call for collaboration, after complete silence–and the forgiveness Cohen received. Just… shocking. How understanding Lissauer was… how relieved, even grateful at the warmth. And then, how they went on to keep working together. I loved that in the credits, we were shown Lissauer inducted into the Hall of Fame for his work on the original Hallelujah.

Also, the whole part when the rabbi talks about the bat kol! I wish I’d written everything down. But then, there’s always Wikipeida.

AND THE WHOLE TOWER OF SONG SEQUENCE TOWARDS THE END! When the audience member yells, “Leonard Cohen, I love your voice!” And he smiles and says, “You’re the only one that does,” before launching into that verse, “I was born like this, I had no choice/ I was born with the gift of a golden voice,” with such irony, and appreciation, and camp, and sinking into his own septuagenarian sexiness, all to please the audience. And they lapped it up.

I loved how, in the beginning of the documentary, he announces that really wants to be an Elder. And by the end, we see exactly that that is what he became. Globally.