We all have our struggles. And we all have our ways of dealing with those struggles. Some people don’t handle this life well, end up killing themselves or drugging themselves.
Other people adopt a more constructive approach to dealing with life’s challenges.
Some people use their time building empires, building institutions and/or families. Some strive to understand this mystery of Life, delving into the realms of history, or science, or mathematics, or religion, or art. Some are content to just to raise a garden or a household.
Vincent van Gogh was infamous for making use of his life struggle to create art. His struggle was so intense that he--I'll never figure it out-- cut an ear off.
The creative life is indeed a struggle.
Beethoven struggled with a music Establishment founded by Haydn and Mozart. But his life work, especially his last masterpiece, the 9th Symphony, was a masterpiece. In that end, he came around to an exhortation to praise God.
In ancient times, Jacob wrestled with God.
Several millennia later, many other Hebrews came along who made a life of wrestling with God.
Leonard Cohen’s struggle brought forth a legacy of, like Beethoven, music. Brotha Leonard’s tribute to Yahweh did not summon vast choirs, nor grandiose orchestration.
No, Leonard’s struggle was raw and rugged, very personal, and in that sense very modern. Leonard's was, some might even say, tragic. Not really tragic in the way he ended it, but tragic in the sense of . . . his melancholy demeanour.
Brother Leonard showed us that there is a place for sadness in this life, and that such melancholy can produce, when creatively directed, profound musical, poetical artistry.
In Leonard's popular “Hallelujah” lament, a musing about his forebear, the ancient Jew King, David, the composer's song begins with his fascination in a “secret chord that David played, that pleased the Lord. . .” In his song, Leonard ponders the structure and the mysterious content of the chord.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrLk4vdY28Q
In the song, he ends the chord speculation with a question, no real answers, then moves on through the next phase of his (and ostensibly King David’s) identity crisis, which serves as a tribute to “the baffled king composing hallelujah.”
Leonard speculates on the ancient king's unsettled search for fulfillment: “Your faith was strong, but you needed proof; you saw her bathing on the roof . . .”
Leonard moves carefully through his royal musical trauma, arriving at a “broken” hallelujah. . .then plodding onward through the emotional pain and the need to redeem it all, all the struggle, through the “cold” . . . with a “very lonely hallelujah.”
Here's my author's note about the woman David saw, " bathing on the roof": Her name was Bathsheba. David's taking advantage of her, as another man's wife, was a grievous, wicked sin in the eyes of the Lord, for which David necessarily repented. But the belated praise report in that forbidden entanglement is that the illegitimate child, Solomon, later ascended the throne of Israel as the king who would follow David (and not only that) but later build the Temple after David's death.
So go figure. All we can say is, with the Lord, there is our repentance from sin which leads to the Lord's forgiveness, which leads to mercy, which provokes our "Hallelujah!"
But I digress. Leonard continues his song:
Soaring toward a pensive conclusion, the “lonely dove” of divine inspiration inspires him, in the end, to flights of musical reverence. . .
“and even though it all went wrong, I’ll stand here before the Lord of Song, with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”
Leonard’s final statement is thus . . . Praise to you, God! It's all I know to do.
In that respect, he is within the lineage of his ancient Cohen forebears, the Hebrew Priests.
My hope for Leonard is that I will meet up with him in the eternal tabernacle where the sacrificial Lamb Yeshua was welcomed as the eternally victorious Lion of the tribe of Judah.
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