Let Us Compare Mythologies
Saint-Leonard is a neighborhood in northeast Montreal named for a 17th century Italian missionary turned saint—Saint-Leonard de Port Maurice—and not, as I had hoped, for Montreal’s patron saint: Leonard Cohen. Cohen was never canonized, not by the Vatican, at least, but his canon has left something of a mystical mark, due in part to the steeple-filled city he came from. Themes of redemption, salvation, love, and longing run through the pages of his songbook as a sort of consecration of flesh and spirit. But Leonard Cohen is not your typical Catholic saint—because, of course, he wasn’t Catholic.
Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in the Montreal suburb of Westmount in 1934, Cohen remained religiously observant, if spiritually ambivalent, throughout his life. Yet from an early age, he also seemed to be intrinsically, hopelessly hip. Cohen’s first collection of poems, Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956) was published not long after he graduated from McGill University; then came a couple of novels and a dabbling in country music. But his path as singer-songwriter-sage wouldn’t take off for another decade, when he wandered into the Greenwich Village folk scene. Judy Collins introduced him to a wider audience with her rendition of “Suzanne” in 1966, Cohen’s paean to desire and beauty, suffused with—of all things—an image of Christ on the cross:
And Jesus was a sailor when He walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching from a lonely wooden tower
And when He knew for certain only drowning men could see Him
He said all men shall be sailors then until the sea shall free
them
But He himself was broken long before the sky would open
Forsaken almost human, He sank beneath your wisdom like a
stone
Somewhere along the way, Cohen had attended Sunday catechism.
Montreal, for all intents and purposes, is a historically Catholic society. When the French explorer Jacques Cartier first landed in the region in 1534, he had a priest on hand to hold mass. Early settlers to New France were not Parisians, but parochial peasants from Normandy; Quebec City was the only Catholic diocese north of Mexico. After Great Britain gained control of the territory, its parliament passed the Quebec Act of 1774, permitting Francophone inhabitants to maintain their allegiance to the pope, as well as the king. Quebec’s Roman Catholic bent and French-speaking population not only remained intact, it hardened into its own identité that still threatens secession every so often. Quebec quoi? Québécois.
“This is the first time I was ever in a city where you couldn’t throw a brick without breaking a church window,” Mark Twain once quipped at a Montreal banquet held in his honor. When Cohen was born half a century later, little would have changed in its skyline of church spires. Of course, the city attracted plenty of non-Catholics; Cohen’s own family had been instrumental in helping establish Montreal’s Jewish community. And by the mid-1960s—around the time Cohen showed up in Greenwich Village—Montreal had begun shifting away from the Church as a secular by-product of Vatican II. But the relics remain: a large steel cross continues to loom over the city, lighting up each night on the city’s highest point.
On my recent trip to Montreal, I attended an ecclesiastical laser light show à la Cirque du Soleil (which, incidentally, originated in Quebec) at the city’s most famed site, Basilique Notre-Dame, a Gothic Revival stunner marked by cobalt blue vaulting and a purple-hued sanctuary. I sat there in the nave, transfixed by the 30-minute production—New Age-ily named Aura—and reconsidered my own stance on the church, shoved so far down my throat as a child I learned to make myself throw up. But here, in this ornate basilica, a tableaux of symbolic figures rose before me centered on a sinewy near-naked man, suffering on a cross for the sins of the world. An abundance of imagery and idolatry for all to see in this city by simply peering into a window broken open by Twain’s brick.
I first learned of Leonard Cohen through the music of Jeff Buckley; the album Grace was on repeat in my dorm during a semester abroad in Melbourne, Australia. Buckley had been a fixture in the mid-‘90s at Sin-é in the East Village, alchemizing the space with his enigmatic voice before gaining a global cult following. After a few years of touring, he moved to Memphis to record an overdue second album, but while swimming one evening in the Mississippi with his bandmates, a wake from a tugboat took him under; a week later they pulled his body from the water. He was 30 at the time—older than his father, the folk singer Tim Buckley, had been when he had died of a drug overdose at age 28.
Six songs deep into Grace, “Hallelujah,“ begins with a single breath: a sigh, a caesura, an exhalation off a cigarette in whatever realm Buckley returned to. The guitar starts slow and a little sinister before opening up into pure reverence:
Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do you?
“That’s actually a Leonard Cohen song,” my Melbourne dorm mate, an English major from Swarthmore, announced.
“Who?” I asked.
The fascination with Cohen was instant. First, with the early albums, then the later ones. When he made an unlikely comeback in the aughts, I went and saw him live: from the back row of Madison Square Garden to better seats at the Barclays Center and an intimate performance at Joe’s Pub, where I caught a glimpse of him behind the stage, seated, cross-legged in meditation. I went to the Film Forum twice in one weekend to watch his documentary I’m Your Man. I visited the island of Hydra in Greece, where a shop owner gave me directions to his old house hidden in plain sight. Once, while in Los Angeles for a wedding, I walked around Wilshire hoping to see him seated on his lawn, cross-legged in meditation.
When Cohen died in 2016 at the age of 82, one month after the release of his final album, I was somehow surprised. He had fallen in the middle of the night, and had passed away in his sleep—the kind of vague report that makes it seem like there might be more to the story. His death was announced the day he was buried in a Montreal cemetery next to his parents’ graves.
It would be unfair to overdo the Catholic influence on Cohen’s music—for all the references to Christ and crucifixes, miracles and mercy, there is a surfeit of sex, erotica, Judaica, and Zen. Cohen’s eventual relocation to California seems to have hastened his Buddhist enlightenment; at one point he retreated to Mt. Baldy Zen Center outside LA, became an ordained monk, and supposedly spent five years sweeping the steps.
His 1992 song “Anthem,” off the album The Future, co-produced by his then-girlfriend, actress Rebecca De Mournay, speaks to the wabi-sabi of human experience. Its refrain is ascetically humble in its assurance:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
On a drizzly Montreal afternoon, I made my way up Mont Royal, the city’s main park, designed by Frederick Law Olmstead. Unlike Olmstead’s Central Park in New York, it remains a wild forest with trails barely discernible in some spots. I walked beyond the lonely cross overlooking the city a hundred feet high toward a quiet hillside lined with stars carved in stone. As I made my way through the main entrance of Shaar Hashomayim Cemetery, a pair of gardeners off in the distance pointed in unison past my shoulder. There, under a tree, was Cohen’s grave, stacked with rocks and books and bright pink flowers.
Magnified, sanctified
Be the holy name
Vilified, crucified
In the human frame
Cohen wrote these lines for the title song of his final album You Want It Darker, an album that brought it all together before he poetically bowed out.
Hineni, hineni
Hineni, hineni
I’m ready, my Lord
Hineni, Hebrew for “here I am,” sung in eternity by Saint Leonard.
Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in the Montreal suburb of Westmount in 1934, Cohen remained religiously observant, if spiritually ambivalent, throughout his life. Yet from an early age, he also seemed to be intrinsically, hopelessly hip. Cohen’s first collection of poems, Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956) was published not long after he graduated from McGill University; then came a couple of novels and a dabbling in country music. But his path as singer-songwriter-sage wouldn’t take off for another decade, when he wandered into the Greenwich Village folk scene. Judy Collins introduced him to a wider audience with her rendition of “Suzanne” in 1966, Cohen’s paean to desire and beauty, suffused with—of all things—an image of Christ on the cross:
And Jesus was a sailor when He walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching from a lonely wooden tower
And when He knew for certain only drowning men could see Him
He said all men shall be sailors then until the sea shall free
them
But He himself was broken long before the sky would open
Forsaken almost human, He sank beneath your wisdom like a
stone
Somewhere along the way, Cohen had attended Sunday catechism.
Montreal, for all intents and purposes, is a historically Catholic society. When the French explorer Jacques Cartier first landed in the region in 1534, he had a priest on hand to hold mass. Early settlers to New France were not Parisians, but parochial peasants from Normandy; Quebec City was the only Catholic diocese north of Mexico. After Great Britain gained control of the territory, its parliament passed the Quebec Act of 1774, permitting Francophone inhabitants to maintain their allegiance to the pope, as well as the king. Quebec’s Roman Catholic bent and French-speaking population not only remained intact, it hardened into its own identité that still threatens secession every so often. Quebec quoi? Québécois.
“This is the first time I was ever in a city where you couldn’t throw a brick without breaking a church window,” Mark Twain once quipped at a Montreal banquet held in his honor. When Cohen was born half a century later, little would have changed in its skyline of church spires. Of course, the city attracted plenty of non-Catholics; Cohen’s own family had been instrumental in helping establish Montreal’s Jewish community. And by the mid-1960s—around the time Cohen showed up in Greenwich Village—Montreal had begun shifting away from the Church as a secular by-product of Vatican II. But the relics remain: a large steel cross continues to loom over the city, lighting up each night on the city’s highest point.
On my recent trip to Montreal, I attended an ecclesiastical laser light show à la Cirque du Soleil (which, incidentally, originated in Quebec) at the city’s most famed site, Basilique Notre-Dame, a Gothic Revival stunner marked by cobalt blue vaulting and a purple-hued sanctuary. I sat there in the nave, transfixed by the 30-minute production—New Age-ily named Aura—and reconsidered my own stance on the church, shoved so far down my throat as a child I learned to make myself throw up. But here, in this ornate basilica, a tableaux of symbolic figures rose before me centered on a sinewy near-naked man, suffering on a cross for the sins of the world. An abundance of imagery and idolatry for all to see in this city by simply peering into a window broken open by Twain’s brick.
I first learned of Leonard Cohen through the music of Jeff Buckley; the album Grace was on repeat in my dorm during a semester abroad in Melbourne, Australia. Buckley had been a fixture in the mid-‘90s at Sin-é in the East Village, alchemizing the space with his enigmatic voice before gaining a global cult following. After a few years of touring, he moved to Memphis to record an overdue second album, but while swimming one evening in the Mississippi with his bandmates, a wake from a tugboat took him under; a week later they pulled his body from the water. He was 30 at the time—older than his father, the folk singer Tim Buckley, had been when he had died of a drug overdose at age 28.
Six songs deep into Grace, “Hallelujah,“ begins with a single breath: a sigh, a caesura, an exhalation off a cigarette in whatever realm Buckley returned to. The guitar starts slow and a little sinister before opening up into pure reverence:
Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do you?
“That’s actually a Leonard Cohen song,” my Melbourne dorm mate, an English major from Swarthmore, announced.
“Who?” I asked.
The fascination with Cohen was instant. First, with the early albums, then the later ones. When he made an unlikely comeback in the aughts, I went and saw him live: from the back row of Madison Square Garden to better seats at the Barclays Center and an intimate performance at Joe’s Pub, where I caught a glimpse of him behind the stage, seated, cross-legged in meditation. I went to the Film Forum twice in one weekend to watch his documentary I’m Your Man. I visited the island of Hydra in Greece, where a shop owner gave me directions to his old house hidden in plain sight. Once, while in Los Angeles for a wedding, I walked around Wilshire hoping to see him seated on his lawn, cross-legged in meditation.
When Cohen died in 2016 at the age of 82, one month after the release of his final album, I was somehow surprised. He had fallen in the middle of the night, and had passed away in his sleep—the kind of vague report that makes it seem like there might be more to the story. His death was announced the day he was buried in a Montreal cemetery next to his parents’ graves.
It would be unfair to overdo the Catholic influence on Cohen’s music—for all the references to Christ and crucifixes, miracles and mercy, there is a surfeit of sex, erotica, Judaica, and Zen. Cohen’s eventual relocation to California seems to have hastened his Buddhist enlightenment; at one point he retreated to Mt. Baldy Zen Center outside LA, became an ordained monk, and supposedly spent five years sweeping the steps.
His 1992 song “Anthem,” off the album The Future, co-produced by his then-girlfriend, actress Rebecca De Mournay, speaks to the wabi-sabi of human experience. Its refrain is ascetically humble in its assurance:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
On a drizzly Montreal afternoon, I made my way up Mont Royal, the city’s main park, designed by Frederick Law Olmstead. Unlike Olmstead’s Central Park in New York, it remains a wild forest with trails barely discernible in some spots. I walked beyond the lonely cross overlooking the city a hundred feet high toward a quiet hillside lined with stars carved in stone. As I made my way through the main entrance of Shaar Hashomayim Cemetery, a pair of gardeners off in the distance pointed in unison past my shoulder. There, under a tree, was Cohen’s grave, stacked with rocks and books and bright pink flowers.
Magnified, sanctified
Be the holy name
Vilified, crucified
In the human frame
Cohen wrote these lines for the title song of his final album You Want It Darker, an album that brought it all together before he poetically bowed out.
Hineni, hineni
Hineni, hineni
I’m ready, my Lord
Hineni, Hebrew for “here I am,” sung in eternity by Saint Leonard.
