A Dirty Saint

I've just stumbled upon an astonishing eulogy that Leonard Cohen delivered upon David Blue's untimely death in 1982. For those of you who don't know, by the way, Blue, whom I've been listening to recently, was a folkie who came of age in the same Greenwich Village scene that spawned Bob Dylan. Though typically viewed as a mere Dylan wannabe (Blue's albums in the sixties undeniably sound like they're trying to sound like Blonde on Blonde), Blue is somewhat more complicated than that -- if Blue is indeed imitating Dylan, his peer and friend, he's after all imitating a master imitator. Regardless, for an introduction to Blue, check out the title cut from his These 23 Days in September (1968), a song that masterfully utilizes a strategically-placed sitar part to evoke in words and music an occult-reading, candle-lighting Durrellian heroine (troubled and sexy, and no doubt smelling slightly of patchouli).

Cohen's eulogy, as a eulogy, stuns me. I'll certainly be writing more about Cohen in this blog, but for now this unexpected find serves as a fitting introduction. Here is a part of it:

David Blue was the peer of any singer in this country, and he knew it, and he coveted their audiences and their power, he claimed them as his rightful due. And when he could not have them, his disappointment became so dazzling, his greed assumed such purity, his appetite such honesty, and he stretched his arms so wide, that we were all able to recognize ourselves, and we fell in love with him. And as we grew older, as something in the public realm corrupted itself into irrelevance, the integrity of his ambition, the integrity of his failure, became for those who knew him, increasingly appealing, and he moved swiftly, with effortless intimacy, into the private life of anyone who recognized him, and our private lives became for him the theaters that no one would book for him, and he sang for us in hotel rooms and kitchens, and he became that poet and that gambler, and he established a defiant style to revive those soiled archetypes.

What a thrill to read a eulogy that, rather than relying on saccharine-drenched platitudes, evokes a flesh-and-blood human being striving for a little bit of complicated transcendence. Granted, an artist is here writing about another artist (and thus inevitably also about himself), but we are all of us artists of a sort, and covetousness, disappointment, greed, appetite, ambition, failure, defiance -- this is the stuff of the human condition when looked at unflinchingly, the prima materia inseparable from purity, honesty, integrity, intimacy. (I'm getting these interrelated sets of terms straight from Cohen's words.) This is not Bill Bennett elegizing a puritanical conception of virtue that cuts the latter set of highly ethical attributes away from the former set of problematic qualities, for, in Cohen's book of virtues, greed and appetite can never be wrested away from purity and integrity. As Cohen's lyrics do so well, this little eulogy plays a serious game with language so as to open up an experience of the amoral, ever-shifting ground of human gravitas. One comes away feeling a bit more alive, which, paradoxically, also means a bit closer to death. Indeed, it is of special note that Cohen's words come in response to the death of a friend. In a culture that treats death either as a dark enemy to be exercised or medicalized away, or as a dogmatically understood otherworldly highway to eternal bliss, it's no doubt important to remember that "death is the mother of beauty," an un-deconstructable mystery much larger than any system of thought that seeks to contain it. To walk around with one's eyes and entire body and brain open to death -- one's own and the person's across the room -- may be the major means of approach to all that can be momentarily majestic about human nature. It may be, as Cohen's words imply, a significant way of falling in love, and of recognizing oneself in the process. And if we never, while alive, escape the painful struggle with the tension that Cohen finds in David Blue, perhaps an ethically responsible life manages to embrace such a complicated alchemy of human desire, an existence on the front lines of one's own life. Anyway, there's some comfort in knowing that, in death, one's own greedy, defiant purity can be seen, precisely in its reckless failure, as a kind of nobility.

Here's Cohen these days, in two pictures I've pilfered from a blog created by some young admirers wishing to memorialize an evening with the man and his current muse, the singer/songwriter Anjani (seen in the second picture). Need I mention that, where Thanatos goes, Eros is never far behind.