I searched and searched for the best headline to celebrate today's honoree's birthday.
Then, knowing he is Jewish, I found out he was born in the 1930s. And his family was Lithuanian and Polish.
Even without his ancestors' immigration to Canada 70 years before, ... no. Too close. Too close to losing such phenomenal gifts to so crude a killer as Zyklon-B.
In so many previous diaries, that damnable, horrid loss took hold of my mind, my mind of my fingers, my fingers of these keys before me to produce yet more screeds, however thoroughly researched, against the evil that, for too many, redefined the word.
Today, borrowing from the page I wrote with Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Rev. Dr. C.T. Vivian, I celebrate not what might have been but what was.
On Sept. 21, 1934, Leonard Cohen was born.
For Dom Ambrose Wolverton, who introduced me to Leonard Cohen at almost the best and worst time, and who is and was a modest reminder of what a gift humanity can be.
And for my sister, a help to me on previous diaries (not to mention stuff offline), and today's other shining star.
I was determined to leave that school with only the things I had picked for departure.
It had broken me, and even knowing what would come, I could not defend myself without pharmaceutical help.
Father Ambrose, for four years (more active in the first and last than the forgettable middle two), saw me through so much growth and decay, so many breaks and so much scar tissue.
And when I had righted myself enough for those smoothed, eroded fragments of sanity to begin to regrow, like pig skin for a burn victim, I found myself not just in Glee Club with him for an hour or so a week and Mass on Sunday but a class called Sacred Music.
So very many men of the cloth would not have touched Leonard Cohen in a Sacred Music class. So many music teachers would not include him in a compilation of sacred music or even a year-long class.
Leonard Cohen Hallelujah
I knew Father Ambrose before I met him. My father had attended that boarding school for his second through fourth years of high school, and Father Ambrose had come thoroughly recommended. I was as if given instructions on people to seek out first chance I got.
Almost didn't happen.
See, while I will hunt online for facts until they come home, however begrudgingly, like an hourslong game of hide and seek, that doesn't involve talking to people I don't know.
Today, with my psyche not ridiculously shaken, I'd be perfectly happy not meeting anyone new ever.
Back then, it was a matter of survival. New meant unknown, and unknown usually meant bully. So when I looked for the Glee Club rehearsal on a Wednesday night in September 1995 and didn't find it, I wasn't totally disappointed. It meant fewer new faces, and thus fewer much older (and, more importantly, bigger) people to push me around.
And even after finding it, my heart sank. One of the club's leaders was a boy I had already had a falling out with a week and a half before when I pushed his brother while a bunch of us were playing ultimate frisbee.
But even if that older boy had plans for hazing or something, Father Ambrose was having no funny stuff.
And when you're in a room directing 30 teenagers with one hand and playing the piano with your other hand, and you're 6'4" and probably 230 pounds, you have or don't have pretty much whatever you want.
Oh, and I'd been told about his abilities with the piano and otherwise. How he commanded the room — any room — instantly. He was one of those teachers you want to command your attention because then that attention means something.
And finding steadfast meaning in your teenage years can be impossible.
But Father Ambrose's benevolent and beneficient grip on the Glee Club was being loosed by an imposter. She was awful — absolutely wretched — and nobody who understood this was in a position to do a goddamn thing about it. When my father came back to school for Parents Weekend, he talked to Father Ambrose about her, and he was so clearly and painfully toeing the company line ("She's just what the school needs, [my former student]").
My father didn't press the issue much because he could see how this woman had so pained him by removing him from a devotion he'd had for more than 20 years. It was as if Sen. Obama were asked to defend the most odious of President Bush's policies. How do you press someone on that when you know they've taken a vow of obedience?
Two years later, on such a whim that I am still surprised it ever happened, I was alone in the dining hall with Father Ambrose.
I was never alone with him — not in a controlled setting, anyway. He was rarely around at the beginning of Glee Club for more than a few minutes, and that evil woman was never far behind, pretending the club's dwindling numbers were because of the weather, or something, and either not knowing or not caring that she was personally driving so many people away. Since my first year at the school, only the most die-hard members remained. We were down to maybe 15 students, sometimes only seven or eight.
There Father Ambrose and I were in the dining hall, and I just couldn't take it anymore.
"Father, a lot of us miss having you around directing the Glee Club."
"Oh?" he said.
"Yeah. ... it's ... we hate [that evil woman]. Nobody comes to meetings anymore except a handful of us. And we don't like her, and we miss how things were with you."
What followed was painstakingly neutral advice for me on how to convince the then-abbot, the leader of the school, that this woman simply had to go.
And in retrospect, I should perhaps have seen it as a sign that things were indeed going to change. The woman's son, a student at the school, was set to graduate, and she would not be retained for my senior year.
Students at that school take four years of religious education. The first three are called CD (Christian Doctrine) 1, 2 and 3, and the last is the student's pick. In my senior year (which is called sixth form there, a nomenclature system I long-since abandoned out of spite for that hellhole), I was to choose between a Benedictine tutorial, a reward for students who'd done well in their three previous years of CD and was probably not happening for me; church history (or something of the sort), a class I had no interest in; and Sacred Music, which had the advantage of being about music (and thus involving less reading) and being taught by Father Ambrose.
I had fun in that class, which is more than I can say for about 99 percent of the rest of my time at that place. Indeed, probably half the fun I had at that school was borne of the room where the Glee Club met, which was also where Sacred Music met.
It was where Gregorian chant met Rebecca St. James and Leonard Cohen. And it was, a surprise to make the association of chant with a Jewish pop singer seem ordinary, where the almost overtly sexual "Suzanne" was presented as not dirty but beauty:
Leonard Cohen - Suzanne (video clip)
(If you ever see me refer to "the garbage and the flowers," now you know why.)
There are, to be sure, religiously overt songs, such as the previously YouTubed "Hallelujah" — which, for my money, can be done properly by Leonard Cohen and only Leonard Cohen, Wainwright, Buckley et al. be damned consigned to second place.
And then there are the religiously covert songs, like this one, which seems to me a modern rumination on the beggar's perspective on Matthew 25:31-46 (best version I could get to show up here):
There is a quality to Leonard Cohen's lyrics, as with all great lyrics, and it is that there's only so much accessible on the first listen. Commercially, this is smart; it makes the curious listener listen to the songs over and over and over. The more you listen, the more you love if you're going to love, and the more you want to buy more of his records.
Intellectually, this is also smart, as you can write layers deep and invite your listeners to discuss your meaning and wonder not only at it but at why you wouldn't just come out and say it. Part of meaning, after all, is what plane of discovery it lies on.
Such is the case with, for example, "So Long, Marianne":
Come over to the window, my little darling,
I'd like to try to read your palm.
I used to think I was some kind of Gypsy boy
Before I let you take me home.
Now so long, Marianne, it's time that we began
To laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.
Well you know that I love to live with you,
But you make me forget so very much.
I forget to pray for the angels
And then the angels forget to pray for us.
Now so long, Marianne, it's time that we began
To laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.
We met when we were almost young
Deep in the green lilac park.
You held on to me like I was a crucifix,
As we went kneeling through the dark.
Oh so long, Marianne, it's time that we began
To laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.
Your letters they all say that you're beside me now.
Then why do I feel alone?
I'm standing on a ledge and your fine spider web
Is fastening my ankle to a stone.
Now so long, Marianne, it's time that we began
To laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.
For now I need your hidden love.
I'm cold as a new razor blade.
You left when I told you I was curious,
I never said that I was brave.
Oh so long, Marianne, it's time that we began
To laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.
Oh, you are really such a pretty one.
I see you've gone and changed your name again.
And just when I climbed this whole mountainside,
To wash my eyelids in the rain
Oh so long, Marianne, it's time that we began
To laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.
And Lord, the story. Oh, this story. It would almost have been too much for my praise-starved self back in those days to encounter someone I wanted to be like the more I found out about him.
I didn't know the story until I found it while researching for this diary. It's the story of people who should have better opinions of themselves, but they don't. And those modest opinions ...
Your letters they all say that you're beside me now.
Then why do I feel alone?
I'm standing on a ledge and your fine spider web
Is fastening my ankle to a stone.
I heard this and instantly needed to be alone. This was me. The first half was my goodbye to my parents at the train station at the beginning of my second year of survival, when I could not have wanted any less to go back to that place, and the second half was my parents' delicately holding onto me, keeping me just close enough to wanting to live that I never acted on the plans I laid out so many nights for if I had this or that instrument of innocence and death. (I first interpreted the stone as keeping Cohen in place, though I later came to believe the opposite was true.)
Because I was in class, I could not react outwardly as I had inwardly. I might have said something about how "he needs her to be everywhere for him, but especially right by him so he doesn't have to try to to feel her — so she's there so he can't not feel her." But I definitely was not about to share anything with the people in that class that they could use somewhere else.
And then I played that part of that song, more so than any other part of any other song, in my head for months.
Finally someone understood. Someone big and famous and beautiful and rich and smart and connected to my father in any tangible way.
The need Leonard Cohen filled, and the avenue his music took to get to me, are more precious to me than most of my relatives. (Helps that I haven't seen most of them in more than a decade.) He almost could not have been more exactly what I needed in exactly the right amounts at exactly the right time. Had he come along when I was still suicidal, I wouldn't have had the mental clarity to understand that the reference to dying or otherwise separating himself from the world was made not as a threat or for attention but because, as the next stanza also hints at, he needs to be able to feel again, to be worthy of his own humanity.
Because this suicidal procedure is taking place, and not only is he not acting, objects outside of him are. He needs to see a reason to not only untie the stone from his ankle but to even try to. That web, see, represents as much of Marianne as he really tangibly has beyond the letter he's writing her. To remove any part of it from himself, then, becomes to divorce that much more of her from him.
That's how I see it, anyway. It's a cry not just for help, but for Marianne (a real person) to give him back to his own humanity so he can take it from there.
There is beauty in this man, in his life and words, in his actions and emotions, such that I very happily cannot tell you all about it. For if I could, there would be finality to what good there is from this man and what good there is to come.
But neither do I want to stop writing about this man, who gave me so much without ever knowing it. So this diary is not ending, and this is not its ending. It's just a door to the coat closet, where there's a famous blue raincoat you can put on. From there, first you take Manhattan, then you take Berlin.
After that, if it be your will, follow his lead and he'll be your man:
Leonard Cohen - I'm Your Man