Archive for Leonard Cohen
Coincidence or selective attention?
It’s funny how you go the longest time without thinking of someone or something, and all of a sudden it hits you at once, and it’s everywhere.I found out today that Leonard Cohen (about whom I wrote earlier this month, but hadn’t thought much about before) lived for a while in the island of Hydra (where I was earlier this month (see picture), but whose existence I didn’t know of before). I’d known Cohen was born in Montreal, but didn’t know that he’d been an undergraduate at McGill (where I too was an undergraduate back when).
Today I saw a documentary about Leonard Cohen, which wasn’t the greatest documentary I’ve ever seen. But the scene where Bono comments on “Hallellujah” really made me go, “Woah! I was just talking about that!” (the scene where Leonard Cohen himself sings “Tower of Song” with U2 as supporting band wasn’t bad either).
I also liked what Bono said about Cohen going to work on his writings as a carpenter works on his furniture. Very humbling. Not like some of us that just hope that the inspiration will hit us. Or maybe it will, if at least we keep working at it…Was it Einstein who said something about genius being 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration?Another thing I also didn’t know was that Cohen had been ordained a buddhist monk. Maybe at any other point of my life this fact might have passed unnoticed. But when I was in Greece a couple of weeks ago, I saw a friend of mine who I hadn’t seen in years, and who was ordained a buddhist monk last March… The coincidences just keep getting more and more tangled, like a brilliant, though highly implausible, short-story.
Maybe it’s just me, ready to find coincidences just because I’ve been thinking about all these things, like Freud’s story about selective attention. I don’t know. But there is something unsettling about not seeing something that is right in front of your nose, until you’re ready to see it, and then you wonder how you never saw it before. Is it that we don’t try hard enough? Or is it really 99% inspiration and 1% perspiration?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
People that know me might recall my tendency to listen to an album over and over and over again, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks (and sometimes for longer: those who don´t believe this or don´t know me might want to check see my previous post “Food for the Soul”).
Well, this week´s album was “The Essential Leonard Cohen”. I bought this disc months ago, together with another half a dozen Cd´s (one of those crazy sales that promise you each disc for $0.99 if you buy this many, and then you do, and then it ends up being considerably more than the buck/a disc they used as bait, but by this time you’ve committed to the discs already, so you go with it).
Now, I have a policy against buying more than two CD’s at the same time, precisely because I need to listen to each of them over and over and over before my brain registers them as being part of my collection. It is as if I had to brand them onto my brain, memorize the titles, the order of the tracks, the lyrics, before I could come to facts that, yes, now I do have this album, I have it in me, left and right brain, left and right ear, upper and lower lip, hands and feet.
So, for some reason I didn’t get to Leonard Cohen when I bought it, and what with other discs requiring my attention, new ones to be branded on my brain, old ones claiming they’ve been neglected, constant moves across the city, I just never got to listen to Leo.
Until this week. One other thing that people that know me may or may not know about me is that every so often I need to listen to all my Cd’s in the order they’re shelved. So if this time I go alphabetically, next time I start with Woody Allen Soundtracks and U2, and hum all my way back to Abba. If this time it’s the Brazilian shelf, then next time is the non-Brazilian shelf. And if this time it was the Beatles shelf (they have a shelf of their own) then next time maybe the Legião shelf (they also have their own). And thus it was that this week I noticed Leonard Cohen sitting beside Phil Collins all neglected.
So I played it once. I liked it. I played it again. And once more. And listened to it in bed. And when I woke up. And while getting dressed for work. And when back from work. Found chords for some of my favorite tracks online. Got to do “Hallelujah” so many times I don´t even need to look anymore (cheesy, I know, everyone loves “Hallelujah”. But there is a reason everyone loves it: it is absolutely lovable: melodically, rhythmically, lyrically, gutturally, biblically, absolutely).
And days went by. My fingers, unused to the practiced, now felt we were back in high school again. So did my throat, my guitar and my heart. But I haven´t dared to ask my neighbours´ opinions on this yet.
