Liturgies

Tuesday, June 14th 2016

Hallelujah ;some reflections on Leonard Cohen’s song

By Robert Perrier

Once upon a time, we didn’t call art, art. There was no need to name it. The creation and passing down of stories through dance, singing and painting was as natural and vital a part of life as eating. Art was interwoven into the tapestry of community life and therefore indistinguishable from it. It was also the time when art was at its most authentic.

Over time, we unraveled art (as we did many other things) from its community context. We gave it a name. We called it Art. Then we began to break art down into smaller bits. We broke it into periods. We had classical art, renaissance art, neoclassical, romantic, modern, contemporary, postmodern, post postmodern & so on. Then we broke the periods into literally scores of movements—baroque, rococo, expressionist, impressionist, cubist, pop and so on ad infinitum. As each art product became increasingly distinguishable, it also became increasingly disconnected from its authentic community origins and values.

It’s ironic then that economists call this very same process value-adding.

In 2004, a 25cm x 20 cm painting, Young Woman Seated at the Virginals, by Johannes Vermeer, sold to a casino operator for $42 million. That’s $84,000 dollars per square centimetre of canvas—which is approximately half the size of my little fingernail.

If it seems crass of me to speak of a work of art only in terms of its value as real estate, consider this: The artist, Vermeer, died without recognition and penniless.

Of course the exploitation of artists and their work is a tradition long held and maintained in western society. But, at least, once, we had the decency to wait until the artist died before doing so.

Not anymore. Authenticity is now so rare and valuable a commodity, the moment a smidgeon of it appears in any form or context, the ubiquitous market seizes it, brands it, and turns it into property. Consequently, the authentic spark is often smothered before it can naturally grow and flourish.

This is not just a problem for art. It’s a problem for everything we cherish.

Space and time are the last frontiers of human freedom. Together, they allow us to feel and think about things that matter to us individually and collectively. Today, the market (which no one seems to be in control of any more) has colonised both. With the aid of information technology and so-called “social” media, the market has turned our every waking hour into a wasteland of ever-accumulating, self-obsessed, often regurgitated, mostly useless, disposable product.

Because so much of human experience is now mediated by and enmeshed in the market, I distrust most of what we classify as art today. Even when I like it.

Nevertheless, despite my cynicism, works of authenticity do emerge. They emerge like those gritty little plants you sometimes see growing out of the cracks in concrete.

Indeed, you could say St Mary’s-in-Exile is one such gritty little plant.

To everything a season. A time to live and a time to die. And while you live, dear friends, I have a desire to want to hold you. I want to protect you, as best I can, in all your beautiful imperfection. Whether it’s from the ravages of exploitation by others or fruitless flights into corporate fantasy.

Which brings me to the subject of this homily: Leonard Cohen’s song, Hallelujah. I have a desire to want to hold it too, like I want to hold you. I want to protect it too from what I feel is a misuse of the song when we change the author’s lyrics without his permission or consent.

A whole book has been written about that song and its author.

Leonard Cohen is a poet laureate, twice over—in his native country of Canada and in Spain. He has published three novels, multiple books of poetry and he has recorded over 150 songs. He is now eighty-two. He still writes and performs. I suspect he can’t not do it, just as the painter, Henri Matisse couldn’t stop painting. In the last decade of Matisse’s life, the artist could no longer use brushes, so he created paper-cut collages instead, like children do.

Cohen is also a painter, but he paints with words. His canvas is our mind.

As with many of Cohen’s songs, Hallelujah is full of sexually-charged lyrics. Like in these three lines:

Remember when I moved in you

And the Holy Dove she was moving too

And every breath we drew was Hallelujah.

In these lines Cohen is deliberately connecting a powerful human need and feeling (without any sense of shame) with the exulted feelings associated with the highest spiritual aspirations.

In his owns words, Cohen says he wrote the song “to push the Hallelujah deep into the secular world, into the ordinary world. The Hallelujah, the David's Hallelujah, was still a religious song. So I wanted to indicate that Hallelujah can come out of things that have nothing to do with religion."

This idea is reinforced in another part of the song with the lines:

It’s not a cry that you hear tonight

And it’s not some pilgrim who claims to have seen the light

No, it’s a cold and it’s a very broken Hallelujah.

The version we sometimes include at SMX is by a US Christian Revivalist Group, Cloverton. They use two of the author’s original lines, the melody, and that powerful chorus and replace everything else to tell the story of the Nativity. Ignoring the author’s intention they plonk the song right back into the heart of the religious.

In my view, it’s the equivalent of smashing up the furniture. Cohen’s record company and management may have thought the same way. They withdrew the band’s right to broadcast their version the moment it hit the web and the airwaves.

I can understand why people want to use the melody. It’s powerful. It has so much feeling.

But the song did not come about by providence or luck. Cohen used his labour to create it. The song was written over a period of six years and he honed the current lyrics from over eighty verses. There is so much thoughtfulness in it. So much craftsmanship.

Make no mistake, Hallelujah is Leonard Cohen’s song and, unlike the authorship of the bible, there can be no dispute about that. At the same time, the song also belongs to all of us, because to make it, Cohen has reached into the literary and musical canons.

That’s one of the things genuine artists do, by the way. That’s why we have them. The deeper the roots, the greater the fruit. We may not like what they produce. The work may not be to our personal tastes. We may not identify with the content. But as rare a commodity as authentic artists are these days, when they come along, I think we should do everything we can to honour their labour by presenting their work as they intended it.

Sometimes people ask me how long it takes to write a particular song. Whatever the song, I give the same answer. A lifetime, I say. The remark is not meant to be flippant. For me making a song is as mysterious a process as insight. It’s a kind of spiritual alchemy. A curious dance between thinking and feeling, between the conscious and the unconscious, between the past and the present.

To illustrate, let me finish by telling you a story of how I once made a song. A song, which would not exist, were it not for the coalescence of chance events, specific circumstances, and a lifetime of shared experience. For reasons which I think will become clear, it is also a song I wouldn’t want others to mess with without my knowledge or consent.

As some of you are already aware, my growing up was steeped in domestic violence.

I am the youngest of three boys. Amongst us boys, my eldest brother, Phil, got the worst of my father’s abuse. My response was to push down the anger I felt. Phil’s response was to rage with it. He was intolerant of those who couldn’t agree with him and aggressively belligerent to those he considered enemies. To me he was always scary angry and, consequently, I avoided spending a lot of time with him. When I moved south neither of us maintained regular contact. After a while there was none at all. I returned to Brisbane over 20 years later. One day, I ran into Phil on the street. He looked ill. Later, he was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer. He was dying and only had a short time to live.

Despite my fear, and as long as he consented to it, I decided I would spend significant time every day with him until his passing. During this period we shared stories. We talked a lot about the past and we began to hold each other to account in sometimes uneasy and sometimes beautiful ways.

Death comes in an instant. There’s breath. Then there is no breath.

When, a few months later, my brother’s spirit finally left him, I needed to be sure. I gently placed one hand on his arm and the other on his forehead. And, for sure, it was his body, but it was no longer him, because, he was no longer there.

He had left the room. He had gone.

During those last months, Phil never once cried. He saw it as weakness. It was a conscious decision—a defiant refusal. Yet, at the moment life left him, a solitary tear formed in the corner of his eye.

Everything we had been through was in that tear.

I realised then the gift of my brother and how deeply I loved him.

A week after his funeral I remembered this moment. But this time the remembering came in a scrap of melody from I know not where and a simple idea in the form of a phrase:

You never were so near to me as when you were gone.

Soon after there was a song.

You never were so near to me
As when you were gone
You never were so clear my dear
I never was so wrong

River’s rise and river’s run
Clouds they come and go
You never know when your work is done
As we reap and as we sow

Every mountain an earthy wound
Cast up for to be climbed
And every life is but a tune
Sung in and out of time

You suffered long on borrowed breath
You were your father's son
In every life a bit of death
And in every tear an ocean