Drive, He Said

Miles to Go with Leonard Cohen

Have you ever sung along to the lyrics you thought you knew, then realized that had been getting something wrong all along?  It happened to me recently.  There is a song that goes so deep, I keep going back there to find more.  And it’s not just because “deep” is in the title.  It is because it is a place so beautiful and terrifying, you can get lost, confused, and needing to press play again.  I’m talking about Leonard Cohen, and I’m talking about “A Thousand Kisses Deep.”  There is a documentary out right now about “Hallelujah,” filled with archival miracles (the stuff that you can’t find on YouTube is always exotic) and a dive into a song that is so deep, we struggle to be its contemporary.  It is remarkable how, in our culture, there is room for “Hallelujah.”  People connect with the idea of life falling short, about, as Kafka put it, the words of the wise tell us the incomprehensible is incomprehensible and we know that already.  If we truly followed the parables, we would become them, he told us, but do we?  “Your faith was strong, but you needed proof,” Leonard told us.  When millions buy your record with its many, many covers, they may not be such sticklers.  It took a long way to get to “Hallelujah,” and we live in a short cut world.

“Hallelujah” is part of the culture, not that the culture deserves it.  Most Leonard Cohen songs are for the people devoted to Leonard Cohen, and the numbers get considerably smaller.  If I was busking and played “Hallelujah” well, I could get a few bucks, even in this economy.  But busking to “Dress Rehearsal Rag” or “Death of a Ladies’ Man” or “You Want it Darker” would probably not buy me dinner, maybe not even subway fare.  “A Thousand Kisses Deep” is in that category.  They loved it when he played it to stadiums between 2008-2012, but the ones who really filled the halls really came to see the “Hallelujah” guy.  Some of them must have been devoutly religious, and others weren’t, but still felt compelled to gather.  They were witnessing what it was to try to live a life that meant something.  “You live your life as if it’s real,” he told us, and that was not in “Hallelujah,” but “A Thousand Kisses Deep.”

And that brings me to my misapprehension while I was singing along to my Leonard Cohen playlist.  Singing along to that playlist is not like singing along to, say, The Beatles, or The Stones or even Dylan or The Velvet Underground or Neil Young.  There is a joy to singing along to rock and roll.  I want to weep every time I hear CCR’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain.”  The words are simple, but if you have tenderness, it will tug at it.  Leonard began as a hypnotist, then a neurotic country singer, last year’s man, the grocer of despair, a dead lady’s man, and, finally, the prophet of the broken, and crooner of the holy. As he got older, he settled into something that sounded wise.  Keep listening and be instructed.  It’s comforting, but in a cold, distant way.

I was driving along with that voice, the one on Ten New Songs from 2001, the post-Mount Baldy album where he found himself back on Boogie Street, and this came on:

And maybe I had miles to drive
And promises to keep
You ditch it all to stay alive
A thousand kisses deep

For the longest time, I thought it was “miles to go.”  I thought that he was invoking Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”  In the abyss that was 8th grade, I had an English teacher, Mrs. Brown, that told us she was teaching college level grammar, whatever that meant.  (I have been teaching college for over 25 years and the only college grammar I know is part of marking papers.). I had no interest.  I was, at a certain point, failing everything, even English.  I really didn’t see the point in a single thing they were trying to teach me.  I was doing plenty of non-required reading on my own.  But finally, Mrs. Brown told us to read “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”  I didn’t just read it.  I inhaled it.  I memorized it.  I recited it for the class.  It was the first time that I was given an assignment, and I didn’t just do it.  I took it further than anyone asked me to take it.   And I did all this even though I had no experience with snow, or responsibility, or seriously reckoning with death.  

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep,   

And miles to go before I sleep.

It’s a lovely place, Earth, at least parts of it, certainly New England.  But we can’t be here forever.   But Leonard sings “miles to drive” and rhymes it with “you ditch it all to stay alive.”  Frost is still in this song, but it’s a more casual allusion, and the whisper of Frost is all you need before you go down a thousand kisses deep.  But the deeper you go and the lovelier it is, the more you know that there will come a day when you can never go back.

Getting away from 8th Grade was one of the most amazing things that ever happened to me.  I realized that there was a place for me, after all.  And I kept going with Robert Frost and discovered a place of loss and regret that no indulgence can ever fix.  I discovered it in real life, too.  Leonard loved Edith Piaf singing “Je Ne Regrette Rien,” but “Directive” is a regrets only destination.  You don’t want to go there, but if you’ve been there, you will understand it.

There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,

You keep going and it is your past.  You wanted things.   There was a time when your life did not seem broken, even if there is a brokenness built in eventually. 

This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny's
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring and yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.

Just hearing that correct lyric in the voice of Leonard Cohen brought all of this back.  We gather up our brokenness, we live our lives as if it’s real.  Bob Dylan called him the Kafka of the Blues.  Another track is coming on your playlist.  You still have somewhere to go, and another song to get wrong and laugh and cry about it all again.  Kafka wrote that one person starts singing along and another joins in, it’s like being drawn in on a fishhook. Eventually.  But we are still being drawn in.  Miles to drive. 

And summoned now to deal
With your invincible defeat
You live your life as if it's real
A thousand kisses deep

Live it like it’s real.  Surprises could await.  “Hallelujah” means “praise God,” and he meant it with a fist in the other hand.  There is still an absence that will be filled by your poem. The open road is unfolding. You have read about this, but you haven’t lived it yet. It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth. Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.