Dear Leonard Cohen

13 Jan

Dear Leonard Cohen,

I had another dream about you last night. This time I was running through an old European city at night, mostly Venice but with bits of Paris nestled into it. Huge uneven flagstones in the flickering orange streetlights, and no-one else on the streets. It felt like the early hours of a Sunday morning when only the high and lonely are abroad, looking for lost loves.

Inside the abandoned palazzos we found evidence of wild parties. A tightly-buttoned chaise longue upholstered in faded green velvet, still warm from recent use, its pile just starting to rub away at the edges in a way that made me think of languid ankles, intertwined. A trail of scent in the air, composed of very expensive incense and fresh sweat on silk brocade and crumbs of cocaine on a lacquered Chinese tray.

Wherever we went, the revellers had always just left a few moments earlier. We searched on until eventually my companion, whoever he was, was gone and it was just me but a younger version of me, tiptoeing up a stone staircase to the very top. And there you were, behind a heavy oak door in an attic room, surrounded by books.

I swam towards you through the lamplight, everything sepia and softening at the edges, held in the strong-but-tender gravitational field of your unreconstructed asshole daddy vibe. The whole scene was drenched in yearning. You murmured some soothing koans at me, and the sound rumbled down my throat and warmed my chest like old brandy.

I woke up so happy, and stayed that way for at least an hour. I just wanted you to know that.

Yours sincerely,

Lucy

Dear Lucy,

Once, in a house in Montreal lit only by candles, a dark-haired girl took me by the hand and led me up onto the roof. She wept silently as I caressed her chilly limbs, murmuring scraps of French folk songs I had learned from my great aunt. The next morning she made gritty coffee on the stove and we danced wordlessly, our bare feet caressing the dirty linoleum.

Best regards,

Leonard

Dear Leonard Cohen,

Wow - I really wasn’t expecting a response. This means a lot. I’m sorry that you’re still up there (down there? I’m rusty on Buddhist afterlives), awaiting your next earthly vessel, but I’m very touched that you found time to write back.

I know a dark-haired woman with the kind of looks you would have followed onto a rooftop - and a beautiful singing voice, too. Since childhood she has loved the popular songs of the 1920s and 30s, and made a special study of them. Twenty years ago she used to earn a reasonable living touring old people’s homes to sing “We’ll Gather Lilacs” and “Button Up Your Overcoat”. But that generation all died, and pretty soon the new inmates were requesting songs by Pat Boone and Dusty Springfield, and her work dried up. She hasn’t really got the voice for “Son of a Preacher Man”.

Soon they’ll be asking for your stuff at the hospice, you know. All the boomers checking out at last, despite their bulging pension pots and their Nordic walking poles. “You win a while, and then it’s done / Your little winning streak.”

When I visit my parents’ house these days, everywhere I turn I’m faced with an arrangement of objects that once comforted me with their familiarity but now provoke a complex set of calculations about future trips to the dump and squabbles with my siblings about who should give houseroom to items too sentimental for landfill. It’s like a stormy sea that I used to watch from the window of a train, but now I’m on the beach and sand is in my eyes. Soon enough I’ll be neck-deep in salty water myself.

Well, that took a turn. I’m assuming that’s ok with you, given your career-long engagement with the human shadow. Anyway, thanks for listening.

Yours truly,

Lucy

Dear Lucy,

Weep, weep you holy dove

down chasms of forgotten love

For grey is in her hair now

and nothing wise is fair now

And in the king’s bedchamber

the shining maidens weep

The miners are all gone to sea

to sink and never sleep.

Best regards,

Leonard

Dear Leonard Cohen,

I remember exactly where I was in November 2016, the night I heard you had died. I was wide awake in bed in an Air BnB in North Oakland, Pittsburgh. It was the early hours, and I was jet-lagged and my eighteen month-old son was jet-lagged in a way that was also, inevitably, my problem, and I had to hold that problem very tight but also very delicately for fear of shattering something, so even though he was asleep, I was not.

After midnight, the tributes to you were shouldered aside to make way for the state-by-state results of the presidential election, the news unfolding like a plague of locusts, roiling over the landscape just faster than a walking pace. I listened to “Waiting for the Miracle” on repeat, trying to drown out the phlegmy rattle of the central heating system, the kind whose hot plasticky wheeze makes American homes smell of toasted dust all winter. Trying to suspend time, because even lying here forever in wide-eyed despair would be better than waking to whatever future was there to be faced, along with breakfast and nappy changes and the surreal grind of time-zone dislocation. “And me, I’m up there waiting / For the miracle to come.”

Let me describe to you what it’s like to try and think in these times. It’s like walking into a library where all the walls and shelves have fallen down. It’s like dropping your wedding ring in the sea and clumsily clutching at the glints as it falls, but the light through the water is playing tricks on your eyes and your hands won’t move fast enough to catch it. I don’t know if it’s like this for everyone, the whole mess of us losing our grip on reality, or if it’s just me lying here in the dark, spooning with Death.

Oh, Leonard. Make it rhyme.

Yours faithfully,

Lucy

Dear Lucy,

In these times we walk together down to the river, to the gathering places, our spirits in thrall to a new darkness.

O troubadours

O you lovely ghosts

When I was naked you brought me

Bending down, a cup of loneliness

A blaze of song.

Fair / hair / despair

Shame / flame / holy name

Breath / possess / death

Yours,

Leonard

Dear Leonard Cohen,

I’m sensing your time is growing shorter, so I’ll be brief.

This morning I was putting on some novelty socks that my husband bought for our son to give me on Mothers’ Day. They are pretty lame: the pattern is hearts and flowers and the words “I made a good kid” on each ankle. (I would not like to be the sort of person who bought these socks for myself.) As I straightened the elastic around my ankle, I found myself thinking about the Australian woman whose foot was blown off by a bomb on a tube train in London in 2004. I heard her on a podcast, talking about how she asked the hospital to show her the severed foot and they took her to visit it, sitting on a little pillow in the morgue. And I found myself wondering which novelty sock design would create the most pleasurable shock of pathos, if found on a single foot severed by explosive during a terrorist atrocity.

I feel like this shouldn’t happen during the routine business of getting dressed. “There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” Something is getting in, Mr Cohen, but I don’t think it’s the light.

It occurs to me there’s a big difference between, say, a crack in an eggshell through which a new chick will soon emerge, and a crack in the hull of a boat over deep ocean. Because what I see when I can bring myself to look at the crack - which is not often and even then with my fingers over my eyes - is not an aesthetic accident, an intriguing wabi-sabi hairline in the glaze. This is structural.

I know what you’re going to say. That our boat is an eggshell, and the ocean is fathomless love, and it doesn’t matter anyway because we still have that attic room in Paris (or Venice), and on a good day I think I could agree. After all I still have both of my feet, and the ugly socks that I got on Mothers’ Day.

Yours hopefully,

Lucy

Lucy Greeves