Leonard Cohen on Montreal

Beware of what comes out of Montreal, especially during winter. It is a force corrosive to all human institutions. It will bring everything down. It will defeat itself. It will establish the wilderness in which the Brightness will manifest again. [The first paragraph of “Montreal”]

There is a short piece of prose, entitled “Montreal,” in the recent Everyman's Library Pocket Poets selection of Leonard Cohen's poems and songs, a book well worth owning.

The city of Montreal has been particularly important to me because I lived there for four years as a student, attending the same university that Cohen attended. It was an overwhelming experience for me, even annihilating, so I've given it a lot of thought over the fifty years since then, trying to bring bits and pieces of it together.

Now, this "Montreal" poem feels clarifying, solidifying and delightful to me. I find that it pulls together most of my experience of Montreal. I've often thought of how Cohen once said that he “realized” that “Suzanne” was a Montreal song, because I felt that it was, too, but now I see Montreal in many other places in his thought.

I believe also that what Cohen says about Montreal in this poem applies to every other gathering of people I've experienced – annihilation then a protection. Finding or developing the protection can take fifty years or more, however!

Here's the remaining paragraph of “Montreal:”

  

We who belong to this city have never left The Church. The Jews are in The Church as they are in the snow. The most violent atheist defectors from the Parti Québécois are in The Church. Every style in Montreal is the style of The Church. The winter is in The Church. The Sun Life building is in The Church. Long ago the Catholic Church became a pebble beside the rock on which The Church was founded. The Church has used the winter to break us and now that we are broken we are going to pull down your pride. The pride of Canada and the pride of Quebec, the pride of the left and the pride of the right, the pride of muscle and the pride of heart, the insane pride of your particular vision will swell and explode because you have all dared to think of killing people. The Church despises your tiny works of death and The Church declares that every man, woman, and child is protected.

Cohen recently said that his long-term depression "has lifted” but my own view is that we are, or should be, rightly very troubled at how upside down and backward the world has become, or is, and that it takes one's whole lifetime's thought-work to resolve the big questions of our unique souls with regard to the situation.

He has a new album, “Popular Problems,” coming out later this month, on his 80^th birthday.