While I was preparing dinner tonight I decided to listen to one of my favourite CDs, Leonard Cohen: Greatest Hits. This carries with it layer after layer of reminiscence, going back to my days as a student in Leicester. Later, when I learned to play the guitar, quite a few of these songs figured in my repertoire …. especially “Bird on the wire” and “Suzanne”.
To cite another of his titles, “sometimes I find I get to thinking of the past,” and there is nothing like a Cohen song to get me doing just that, and tonight was no exception. It was a strange experience, because I realised that for so much of my life I felt that I was in some sense displaced (I don’t know how else to put it) or out of time. The spirit in which I experienced these reflections was one of melancholia, which is a state of mind very typical of Cohen. It came to me that for a good part of my life there was a feeling that to some extent I had missed my way. Like his bird on the wire, I longed in my way to be free, without really being able to articulate the sense in which I understood “freedom”.
It was only when Cohen’s music re-established that connection with the past that I realised just how far I have moved beyond that now. I have been trying to think whether or not that way of experiencing the world has ever made it into my painting, and I suppose that the Four Quartets series has a good deal of that spirit in it. In Leonard Cohen’s own words, however, “It seems so long ago”.