Where There is Ruin, There is Hope for a Treasure -- Rumi

I have been a fervent fan of the late Canadian poet-troubadour Leonard Cohen since the 1970s. I first saw him in Vancouver in 1975 and went to one of his last concerts in Maryland a decade or so ago. Now, three years after his death, his son Adam Cohen, songwriter and singer himself, has put a collection of his father’s songs in an album titled “Thanks for the dance”

So, I went back to listen to the songs that had influenced more than one generation of wandering-eye youth. Also re-reread some of the lyrics from his later-in-life songs, like Anthem.

There, a few lines suddenly made me stop and think. Here they are:

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.

I had not thought about the imagery as intensely before, but after this reading I could not get the famous line from Rumi out of my mind:

                    The wound is the place where the Light enters you

The crack, the torn, the broken part of us, of our soul is the door to letting the light in. And a wound can happen uninvited, or it can be self inflicted. And that took me to another line from Rumi:

                     Keep breaking your heart till it opens

L. Cohen was nicknamed “the godfather of gloom” as his poetry and songs dealt with the darker side of us. The side that hurts, inflicts wounds, breaks hearts. In retrospect, did Cohen knowingly or purposefully kept breaking his heart till it opens and lets the light in?

… As a kid, when I cried I was told that the tears are the means to clear the way. I never understood it of course, but with life passing me by, I wonder if the tears, the wounds and the broken hearts were not what made us unique in our response to the pan-human experience of gloom.

And when we have no more tears to shed, is the way clear? To where? To what?

L. Cohen has always reminded me of the Austrian poet Rainer M. Rilke. And as I spent time re-listening to L. Cohen’s songs, I wondered if the common line of inquiry between these two poets, and what appeals to my own attitude as well, could be the fascination with the question, rather the answer. I know I am a “question man”—perhaps that is why the academic and research worlds filled my life for four decades.  The answer is often the death of the question’s beauty; it may also be the most anti-climactic moment we regret we have reached.

Rilke puts it most eloquently:

Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

The purist cognoscenti does not need to know. He just needs to be involved in the process of learning and sharing his experiences along the way. I believe the title of L. Cohen’s posthumous album hints to that – the “dance” is rarely carried out alone (perhaps other than the Sufi Darwishes and Zorba the Greek!) and needs the participation of one or more other dancers.

So is the journey of “living the questions” and the joy and gratitude of sharing it with others.

December 2, 2019

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2019