AVALANCHE
LEONARD Cohen has said he can find seriousness relaxing and Avalanche is a very serious song. The old line about Cohen (“. . .music to slit your wrists by . . .”) was supposed to joke that he made death music, depressing music, terrible music. Terrible in the sense that it evoked terror.
But no one uses that line about him anymore and if they do they don’t know him properly, despite him being a man well known for suffering in his own mind. Last time he toured it was affirming, people said. Life-affirming. Not death any more, if it ever was, but life. That’s where I have sometimes seemed to hover or believed that I have been hovering during my own depression, lost in black terrors somewhere between the fear of death and the fear of life, being pushed and pulled, not knowing, unsure and unaffirmed.
I don’t rely on Leonard Cohen like some people do. There’s others for me. But I think Suzanne is maybe one of the best love songs out floating through the world. I grew up around incredible rivers and they scared and amazed me and held me on their banks and in Suzanne he wants to tell her things but she knows better and hushes him and “lets the river answer”. Then when they first commune it is only that “you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind”.
That was on his first and finest record, The Songs of Leonard Cohen, in 1967. Great singers immediately dropped their own songs and took up his because they were raw, complex, more interesting and true and strange on levels unimagined.
The second album was called Songs from a Room and the title is the image of a man alone telling secrets with some inbuilt terror about them; by now Cohen was clearly examining the probability of a second life and also the problem of how to get through to the end of the first one. How to make a life, perhaps, by sensing the worst of it and glimmers of the best. These are not easy things but they are real things and no one or at least not many had yet figured out how to talk about them like this.
Then came Songs of Love and Hate, and Avalanche. He made this third album in Nashville. It was 1971. Amazingly, it reached No. 8 in Australia despite being like a kind of omen; a desperate yet heightened, high-stakes record of portent and seriousness. Cohen’s own personal breakdown — through depression — began to cripple him shortly after. It would plague him for two decades or more, then lift. He is now 76 years old. Avalanche seems to me to be his whole world in one song: everything he has feared and everything he has seen both through his eyes and through visions.
In some ways it’s a genesis. Cohen famously wrote his first poem at age nine; his father, Nathan, died young and Cohen found one of his dead father’s bow ties in a bedroom drawer, slit it open and placed the poem inside and then sewed it up and buried it in the Montreal snow. Fifty years later he said he was still looking for that note in his songs. Trying to finish the note, better the note. Erase the note.
Avalanche — what does it do? Submerge the man’s grief and yearning forever? Bury him deep in love and pain? “I stepped into an avalanche, it covered up my soul. When I am not this hunchback that you see I sleep beneath the Golden Hill.”
There’s everything here, everything of his and everything we own. I would call this song “fundamental”. In a way it is its own little bible; Cohen using rich allusions from his twin religious pillars of Judaism and Buddhism to confront his own latent feelings of worthlessness and guilt, a cripple kneeling grotesque and bare and Bruegel-like in the eyes of a redeemer who remains elusive and distant but clear and good and pure.
“You say you’ve gone away from me but I can feel you when you breathe.” That’s salvation he’s talking about there. Hope. Nick Cave covered it on the Bad Seeds’ first album From Her to Eternity. Which made sense, for he was another literate singer swimming around in his own disgust. Yet where Cave played with such imagery, pulling it apart to see what it was made of, fingering its entrails and spitting it out to make a mess, Cohen in 1971 was a man on the verge of the great void he wanted more than anything to contain gifts.
It’s all about hope. That’s what I’m learning from illness and also music like this. Hope can be there; it breathes.
First published in The Age in November 2010.