I have been contacted twice this week by academics asking for information about Leonard Cohen. They got in touch because of my 2020 book Leonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius, where I look at the religious and spiritual sources he used in his lyrics and poetry.
Carrying out academic research on someone, or indeed writing a biography, is an act of homage. Few of us would waste our time investigating a person we don’t respect or feel no connection to. Leonard Cohen himself paid homage to many people who influenced his career. They included his Canadian mentors and fellow poets Irving Layton, AM Klein and Louis Dudek, his Zen master Joshu Sasaki Roshi and most of all the early 20th century, Spanish poet, Federico Garciá Lorca. It was only after he discovered Lorca’s work that Leonard Cohen took the decision to develop his own poetic career. As he once put it: ‘Lorca led me into the racket of poetry’. The homage that he paid to the Spanish poet was so great that Leonard Cohen’s daughter is named Lorca.
Of all his influences, the one who most closely approaches Leonard Cohen’s own spiritual leanings is the 13th century Persian poet Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, better known just as Rumi.
Rumi is apparently the best-selling poet in the United States today. This is quite an achievement when we consider that Rumi’s published works in America are all translations. Translations are slippery things at the best of time, the decisions that translators make as to which word to use can never be guaranteed to reflect the original author’s intention. This is all the more so when translating poetry, where each word is significant and where the translated poem needs to retain the metre, structure and rhyme of the original. An even greater obstacle to translating Rumi’s works is that he occasionally inserts quotations from the Qur’an; each containing depths of meaning that can only be understood by someone familiar with the Arabic text and its interpretations. Coleman Barks, whose translations of Rumi’s works sparked the current interest in him, deserves as much praise as the poet himself.
Much of Rumi’s popularity today is due to the contemporary artists who have paid homage to his works. Leonard Cohen was not the only acolyte. Extracts from Rumi’s poetry appear in tracks by Coldplay and Madonna; he is the central character in Elif Shafak’s novel The Forty Rules of Love and he is frequently quoted in films and books. Yet the mystique of his life story would have made him a character of interest even without such celebrity interest, indeed even if he had not been one of the most talented poets to have ever lived.
Rumi was born in Vakhsh in Tajikistan. He followed in the footsteps of his father, a preacher and religious scholar, studying in Damascus and Aleppo before settling with his parents in Konya, a town in modern Turkey. When his father died he succeeded him as the teacher in a local madrassa.
The turning point in his life came when he met a wandering dervish, Shams-al-din, or Shams-i-Tabriz. (I told this story in my book on Leonard Cohen so apologies to those who are reading it for a second time.) Shams began to teach Rumi the mysteries of Sufism, the Islamic mystical tradition, thus exposing him to a completely new and entrancing way of looking at the world. The two men became very close, possibly lovers, certainly master and disciple, living and studying together, discussing the Qur’an and practising Sufi meditations and dances.
Rumi’s family were concerned by his relationship with Shams. They believed the young man had lost his way and that his relationship with an itinerant mystic was a matter of shame to the family. They tried to end the relationship, eventually forcing Shams out of town. Rumi was heartbroken and his son, unable to see his father in such a state, brought the dervish back. Soon however Shams disappeared, never to be seen again. It is thought that he was murdered by members of Rumi’s distressed family.
Rumi’s response to the loss of Shams was to throw himself into poetry. Immersing himself in the Sufi mystical tradition his poems speak of love and life, of separation, ecstasy, humour and devotion. Many people read his poetry to help them cope with the stresses and demands of their lives.
Leonard Cohen once said of Rumi that he was in the same league as King David. King David is traditionally regarded as the author of the Book of Psalms (even those psalms apparently written long after he lived). Leonard Cohen seems to have felt an affinity with the Hebrew king. They were both musicians, songwriters, players of string instruments, accomplished lovers and poets. He once described David as ‘the embodiment of our highest possibility’.
King David features frequently in Cohen’s music. His most famous song, Hallelujah, revolves around him, By the Rivers Dark is based on a Davidic psalm (albeit one written centuries after his death) and he writes about Bethlehem, birthplace of David and Jesus, in Last Year’s Man. His most revealing invocation of King David however is in the Book of Mercy, the collection of poetry that he published in 1984. He described the collection as a book of 50 psalms, ‘conversations with the absolute’, ‘a little book of prayer’.
The Book of Psalms in the Bible is also a book of prayer. But the prayers in Book of Mercy are very different to those in Psalms. Most of the biblical psalms are addressed to God and are either songs of praise, recaps of historical miracles or requests for deliverance from enemies or disasters. Cohen’s psalms are not of that nature, they are more personal, often humorous, frequently mystical. In fact they sound far more like Rumi’s poetry than anything attributed to King David.
This isn’t surprising: Leonard Cohen was a deeply religious man but not in a conventional sense. He read widely, studying many spiritual and religious disciplines. He once said that he had never found a religion that he did not love. He summed this attitude up in his song Different Sides:
We find ourselves on different sides….Though it all may be one in the higher eye, Down here where we live it is two.
Leonard saw the world through the ‘higher eye.’
Leonard Cohen’s homage to Rumi and his ecumenical approach to faith converge in a story he once told an interviewer. He had always said that his song The Guests was influenced by Rumi. Some years after writing it, he met a young woman who had studied Sufi dances in Iran and was now teaching them in America. She said that a Persian friend, also a Sufi dance teacher, had recently visited her. He told her that the Sufi groups he was teaching in Iran were dancing to a song written by a Westerner because it ‘had the spirit of Rumi in it’. The Westerner was Leonard Cohen. The song was The Guests. Paying homage doesn’t get much better than that.