Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St. Paul
I've seen the future, brother
It is murder
You remember watching David Hasselhoff dancing on the Berlin Wall, and recall there was an earlier time when John F. Kennedy stood at the same wall told the world he was a jelly donut, an urban myth you still enjoyed believing. But now there’s that moment about what’s going to happen next. It’s like the end of The Graduate, when Dustin Hoffman interrupts Katherine Ross’s wedding and they get on a city bus. A minute passes. People are staring at the girl in her wedding dress and the guy sitting by her, who is clearly not her husband. After the exhilaration, they stare into space. Cue Simon and Garfunkel. They have no idea what’s coming. The Graduate and Songs of Leonard Cohen came out in 1967, and people would sometimes comment that Leonard looked like Dustin Hoffman.
There were times Leonard Cohen was watching television. It’s hard to picture this. This guy named his daughter Lorca, not Baretta, and he seemed to be living in a poem or the I Ching or Camus. Yet there he was, like you, in front of the boob tube. You two were watching the same thing at the same time, and thinking “Now what?” Leonard thought it was good that the wall was coming down, but he also thought that what was coming would make people nostalgic for Stalin. Yeats is not a go-to for politics, but you do go to him for this.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
It was a party seeing that Berlin Wall go down. There was a dopey song by a band calling themselves Jesus Jones, who sang, “Bob Dylan didn’t have this to sing about,” even though Bob Dylan would be around to sing about many things for a long time, and Jesus Jones, the David Hasselhoffs of bands, would not. Then what? The thing that Leonard saw coming was not the 90s, even though that was coming. You are a Gen Xer. The most celebrated rock star of your generation was Kurt Cobain, the most celebrated novelist was David Foster Wallace, and they both couldn’t take it anymore. The internet began, leading up to right this second when you are reading in a venue that would have been difficult to explain when the wall came down. Leonard could see that the future was murder, and he could see it so well, he spent much of the decade at the Mount Baldy Zen Center. They called him Jikan, “The Silent One.”
Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St. Paul
Give me Christ or give me Hiroshima
Sometimes your answer is “none of the above.” But someone of the above will come along, seize power, and all you can do is hide in your poetry and music and your wacky personal life, which you hope they don’t take away from you. And Yeats had something to say about this, too.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Now that wasn’t always true, but Yeats, in the shadow of the Great War, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Irish War for Independence, saw darkness ahead.. Yeats was kind of a Fascist, but his poetry knew more than he did. And In desperate times, we cling to the unacknowledged legislators.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
How is that working out for you? Leonard, watching television, and knowing that things were coming apart, gave us an antidote.
I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can't stand the scene
And I'm neither left or right
I'm just staying home tonight
Getting lost in that hopeless little screen
But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags
That time cannot decay
I'm junk but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet
Democracy is coming to the USA
On Election Day, 2016, Leonard Cohen died after a long struggle with leukemia. He was 82, and was writing and recording every day amid excruciating pain. The morphine stopped working, and yet the muse persisted. He died the day that something new was taking over, a rough beast that no one could have imagined. He and his little wild bouquet tried to warn us.