Leonard Cohen is not a regular member of the company of dead poets

Leonard Cohen passed away on November 7, 2016 at the age of 82.picture: Charles Sykes

Leonard Cohen once told him, when he was in his fifties, that he and his friends used to meet a colleague in Montreal to talk about his latest productions. They were maybe sixteen or seventeen and thought that whenever they would meet, they would be considered something that deserves to be mentioned.

Then none of them had already debuted.

Long, much later, in Sicily, Cohen wrote in his inverted image:

And now that I'm kneeling

At the edge of my years

Let me fall through the mirror of love

Here he takes what is lost and adds to what is heated, look what he has written and what he can erase.

Yes, there is a decomposition of the leaves by the wind in Leonard Cohen's "The Flame", the book in which he worked in the last book and which now appears almost two years after his death. This collection is a journey from an era that can no longer be changed, through a world where one is perfect and the other consists mainly of joining someone in the night and where one concludes a kind summary:

I was your favorite alcoholic

Good for a laugh over

Then we both missed luck

Luck was all we had ever had "

In many places, it's like he thought of us reading it and hearing his songs ("do not listen to me") and himself ("it's time to leave" ). He stubbornly whispers that he must die from a dark melody among all black ideas – and in many poems, there are lyrics that make the lyrics of the lyrics of the latest albums, with slight variations. Nothing is etched in stone, everything is – after that it was at first a pure poem – always a new song. Everything is always a new blues. Or a fair. Or a promise to look for love where it exists.

And no matter, it's so hard to say that he starts to hesitate about how old he is and how it does not depend on the life he's been living, but he's always wanted to do it slowly. But, like a kind of PS, he also denies it: he takes it even more slowly, it does not matter to him that he can come out last. It's even what he wants, "so baby, let me go."

The order has never been so reduced, while they mean more and more.

It's a Cohen who walks in both new streets and climbs new mountains, and feels reinvented. The order has never been so reduced, while they mean more and more. I discover time and time again that he rarely mentions the places where he is. They are pure states that integrate everywhere. He may leave someone, but he does not leave us. He simply draws new limits. As if the hard work was not to get rid of it, it was hard to stop. Yes, as if you fall in love with someone, do not fall in love with yourself, but meet yourself from time to time without kissing yourself, as if you were trying to be in the flawless neighborhood of the city. 39; another.

All of this requires courage, and Cohen does not intend to take the plane, even if he dons the preacher's clothes while he so charmingly asks for the powers he needs to see death as a friend:

I pray for courage

In the night

Bear the burden

Make it light

Leonard Cohens' son, Adam, writes in the preface that his father was a poet before he was anything else and that, when he was young and that he was asking for money for candy, the father told him that he would fall into the pocket of the jacket, maybe there would be a coin or a note. The son rarely found was a notebook, and these notebooks appeared here and there. Yes, again in the freezer.

And it is clear that I can say something about words like tinar shortly after twinkling small crystals before finally becoming "The Flame", but this collection is anything but words: it testifies that even if you the wrong choice, you do not want to be crucified. And: sometimes you do not know why you are allowed to be assigned.

But Cohen is not romantic, he is not a regular member of the company of dead poets. No, more than anything Cohen has come up with, it 's also a very clear picture of the man who searches until he finds the right words. After all the songs, novels, news and poems that he has given us, we also receive the drawings that he signs and, as extragodis, he also gives pictures of all Kinds of faces, as if the clock was still four in the morning to the end of December and he wrote a few lines to hear how we feel.

And all ends with a thank you for the first time, the Cohen with very small letters tells the story of the Spanish man who taught him to play the guitar. The Spaniards came every day and taught him new chords. Until the day he did not show up because he had committed suicide.

All that Cohen has created, he tells himself, is inspired by the young man.

Then, the last celestial reflexes of Cohens and the consonants of hell seem to go beyond the frame of the role play. Yes, they bend over unhurt in front of the dance of love that wants to be perpetual, but that will stand in the hallway and never return, the one that Cohen constantly invites and finally thanks for – "Thank you for the dance / It was hell, it was hell "- before he took the picture you still want wherever you are, that tells us that I was so much / and you were so much you ".

And I can not help but wonder if Cohen wrote anything about it when he came in eight years ago and took a cup of David's pastry in Malmö.