Crazy Has Places To Hide In

Another verse from by Leonard Cohen has been going through my mind often since my last post on Leonard Cohen. It comes from his Crazy to Love You:

Crazy has places to hide in that are deeper than saying goodbye.

Over and over again, it just speaks to so much that I have seen during my seventy years. People going crazy, for example, because they were willing to lie because they didn't want to be “alone,” then forgetting or losing the thread within themselves back to the place where the lie was made.

I think now especially of various people who have “made,” “earned,” absurd amounts of money and allowed themselves to believe they “deserved” all that money, losing the thread within themselves back to the place where the lie was made.

Further, for some reason, I can't help thinking of Elias Cannetti's line in Auto-da-Fe that goes:

Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad. Whom men would destroy, they first make sane.

Finally, there is a speech Cohen made to the Prince of Asturias that is just so wise and beautiful that I consider it essential for anyone who has joys and tears about the world, for anyone who is not crazy. He says in this speech that he owes all his songs to a young Spanish man who taught him six chords on the guitar and who suicided. Perhaps this touched me so deeply because I myself was once a young man in Montreal seeing what he saw.

Cohen once said in an interview that he did not consider himself “one of the big boys,” meaning that he does not consider himself one of the great poets. Some of his lines, such as “Crazy has places to hide in that are deeper than saying goodbye,” seem to me certainly to be on Shakespeare's level. To me, that young man who taught Cohen those six chords was true, deep, great.