Two of our greatest bards recently made news. Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature and Canadian singer Leonard Cohen passed on. Both mused poignantly on love, and yes, there is a tennis connection.
It’s not just that Dylan’s (“I’m bigger than the game”) refusal to go and give a speech at the Nobel ceremonies brings to mind Bjorn Borg at first choosing not to go to Newport to be inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. Or that Dylan had actually played there in 1964, as well as at Forest Hills, the longtime home of America’s foremost tennis tournament.
Dylan also rallied with Beatle George Harrison on a threadbare tennis court on the Isle of Wight in 1969. And it’s easy to suggest that the rowdy in-your-face, rebel Dylan laid the groundwork for the over-the-top rants which would soon shake tennis. Dylan’s “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more” devolved into McEnroe’s “You cannot be serious.” Granted, these days, Dylan’s Malibu mansion doesn’t have a court – but the estate next door does. The only time Dylan actually muses on tennis comes in his whimsical ditty, “I Shall Be Free No. 10.” There, almost chuckling, he recalls how he, “Sat with my high-heeled sneakers on/Waiting to play tennis in the noonday sun/I had my white shorts rolled up past my waist/And my wig-hat was falling in my face/But they wouldn’t let me on the tennis court.”
Dylan’s line about his wig-hat falling on his face predates a hilariously similar fiasco 11 years later, when Andre Agassi’s lion-mane wig all but disintegrated the night before his 1990 French Open final. But with the help of his brother, 20 hair clips and ample prayer, disaster was averted. Andre confided that during the match, “With each leap I imagined it falling in the sand.” While Dylan sacrilegiously switched from acoustic to electric in a flash, Agassi shocked the world when he went from long-haired to bald overnight.
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Dylan was clearly distant from tennis’ athletic conventions and staid traditions. But the sage fits perfectly into the theme of this issue – love. Yes, the prime mission of the boy genius who “skipped reels of rhyme” was to amplify a raspy rebellion. At his music’s core were raw, unsparing calls for justice and freedom. The revelatory truth-teller struck a chord. Yet few others reflected on love with more pathos and variety. He offered this homage to his love: “My love, she speaks like silence/Without ideals or violence/She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful/Yet she’s true, like ice, like fire.”
Dylan often approached love with a caution bordering on fear – love can smother. He recalls, “I once loved a woman, a child I am told/I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul.” He insisted, “You can never be wise and in love at the same time.”
Dylan’s greatest love was freedom. Subsumed by wanderlust, the rebel who battered boundaries told us that “all who live outside the law must be honest.” The man yearned for his “boot heels to go wandering.”
He confided, “I’m ready to go anywhere/I’m ready for to fade, Into my own parade…Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky/With one hand waving free/Silhouetted by the sea/Circled by the circus sands/With all memory of fate/Driven deep beneath the waves/Let me forget about today until tomorrow.”
Still, once smitten and in love, Dylan was all in. There is little he wouldn’t do for love: “You will start out standing/Proud to steal her anything she sees/But you will wind up peeking through her keyhole/Down upon your knees.”
Of course, love can explode your universe. “I just don’t know what I’m gonna do, I was all right ’til I fell in love with you,” Dylan wrote.
Often he muses on how love can leave you reeling. With his withering candor, Dylan tells his former lover, “You could have done better, but I don’t mind/You just kinda wasted my precious time/But don’t think twice, it’s all right.”
Give him credit – he knows how to let go. “If you get close to her, kiss her once for me,” he mourns. “Oh, whatever makes her happy, I won’t stay in the way.”
In both tennis and love we have to deal with loss. Sometimes you just have to accept getting a participation trophy or a consolation prize. After his lover abandons him to cross the sea, Dylan realizes he will never again embrace her. In his sorrow he tells her, “And yes, there’s something you can send back to me, Spanish boots of Spanish leather.”
If nothing else, the vagabond prince is resilient. To Dylan, “If you are not true to your own heart, you will fail. Then again, there’s no success like failure.” He refers to a lover who “spoke of life most free from slavery/With eyes that showed no trace of misery…Though I tried and failed at finding any door/I must have thought that there was nothing more absurd then that love is just a four-letter word.”
Despite the sting of his serial losses, despite his weary cynicism and obsession with a certain existential angst, Dylan remained a lover. We see it in his paternal love when he counsels his eldest son Jesse: “May God bless and keep you always/May your wishes all come true/May you always do for others/And let others do for you/May you build a ladder to the stars/And climb on every rung/May you stay forever young.”
In a more romantic vein, Dylan pleads with his lover, “I long to see you in the morning light/I long to reach for you in the night/Stay, lady, stay, stay while the night is still ahead.”
Sure, Dylan was a ferocious countercultural sage who insisted that “to live outside the law you have to be honest.” Still, unashamedly, the establishment lavished on him their most coveted prizes – the Nobel, an Oscar, a Pulitzer, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Cohen observed that giving Dylan the Nobel Prize was “like pinning a medal on Mt. Everest.” And despite all his radical stances, Dylan repeatedly has been in commercials for companies like IBM, Apple, Cadillac and Pepsi.
Similarly, he seemed to make a hefty concession to convention when he gave us the passionately monogamous “Wedding Song,” which, though sung with typical Dylanesque intensity and wailing harp, has lyrics of traditional, almost schmaltzy, devotion that seem far from the searing angst of smoky Village cafes or south-of-the-border whorehouses. (Need we note, only fools look to Dylan for consistency.)
“Oh, can’t you see that you were born to stand by my side/And I was born to be with you, you were born to be my bride?/You’re the other half of what I am, you’re the missing piece/And I love you more than ever with that love that doesn’t cease.” generic cialis 20mg uk
A sublime free-association wordsmith and master of the surreal so often buffeted by “the twisted reach of crazy sorrow,” Dylan explored every curious mystery, every sweet triumph, every biting loss and every luscious fantasy of love, which, in the end, was to him far more than a four-letter word.
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Leonard Cohen’s songs may not have had the anarchic energy, vast popularity, or wild, net-free leaps of Dylan, but his brilliantly conceived hymns and literary odes meld spiritual imagery with themes of redemption and sensuous desire that are deliciously accessible.
A seamless juggler of contradictions, he was a restless seeker and an ardent lover of women, wisdom and wonder. Words were his sacrament. “There [was] a blaze of light in every word,” he confided, “I did my best, it wasn’t much/I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch/I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come here to fool you/And even though it all went wrong, I’ll stand before the Lord of Song with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.”
Like Dylan, he was a poet, though more intimate and lyrical and (if this is possible) even more cerebral. Dylan compared Cohen to Irving Berlin: “Both of them just hear melodies that most of us can only strive for.”
Cohen spoke truths that were beyond our grasp. He illuminated the paradoxes we wrestle with: thigh and sky, bed and altar, doing the dishes and that transcendent chore (or is it a privilege) we all face – to know the unknowable. To Cohen, a fine spiderweb fastens our ankles to a stone. Amidst our hurt and loneliness, he connects us with our desires, our love and our God – and implies they are the same.
On November 7th, after a fall in his Westwood, CA apartment, he left us, at age 82. His son Adam recalled his father’s “unique blend of self-deprecation and dignity, his approachable elegance, his charisma without audacity, his old-world gentlemanliness and the hand-forged tower of his work.”
Cohen and Dylan were casual friends and, like Dylan, Cohen played Forest Hills and many other venues, including Roma Centrale de Tennis.
When Cohen was in his twenties, before he retreated to a blissful Greek Island, long before he bivouacked at New York’s seedy Chelsea Hotel, before he endlessly concertized around the globe and before he became a Zen Monk on a sparse Southern California mountain, an unknown and soon-departed Spaniard mysteriously changed his life in Montreal.
There, in the same leafy Westmount neighborhood that gave us Genie Bouchard, Cohen looked down from his room at some nearby tennis courts in a park where a Spaniard playing guitar was enchanting a cluster of girls. Hoping to get in on the action, he went down and met the man who, over a series of three fateful lessons, would teach him six flamenco chord progressions. Cohen recalled that he “knew nothing about the man, why he’d come to Montreal…when he appeared at that court, or why he soon took his life. But those six chords…have been the basis of…all my music.”
Decades later, as Cohen was becoming a zen monk, his master Roshi decided that instead of assigning him the usual fierce ego-scrubbing labor imposed on heady spiritual aspirants, Cohen actually needed to lighten up and learn how to play. So he told him, “go down the hill” and take tennis lessons at the Claremont Tennis Club. But Cohen wasn’t exactly Roger Federer. “I took a number of lessons,” he confided. [But] the thing that scared me away was that automatic machine that hurled balls at you at 90 miles per hour.”
Okay, Cohen didn’t take to the game. But fans worldwide took to him. His sonorous, “I’m your man” voice only empowered his words. So when he told us that “there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in,” we were almost stunned – such a simple, reassuring truth. His provocative sentiments, “a thousand kisses deep,” inspired millions – including Dylan. Bob cranked out his classic, “Just Like a Woman,” in 15 minutes. It took Leonard five soul-searching years to craft his masterpiece, “Hallelujah,” the much-celebrated homage to deep acceptance. But so what, to Dylan, Cohen’s “genius is his connection to the music of the spheres.”
At a time when Sony flat-out refused to record “Hallelujah,” Dylan sang it regularly in concert. And Cohen, like Dylan, explored every nuance of love. The man who asked his lover to “Dance Me to the End of Love,” never hesitated to celebrate physicality. He said, “I don’t think a man ever gets over that first sight of the naked woman. I think that’s Eve standing over him, that’s the morning and the dew on the skin. And I think that’s the major content of man’s imagination.”
Still, to Cohen, real love “is loving someone for who they are. To love, you have to overlook everything…forget about most things and forgive.” He contended that a Japanese saying – “Husband and wife drinking the tea. Your smile, my smile. Your tears, my tears” – was the “ultimate description of a real union.”
Cohen’s work was crowded with deep-think uncertainty. He dressed up in suits, but didn’t hesitate to get down and wrestle in the mud to launch “What’s It All About” searches for self and meaning. To the older Cohen, “The fundamental question of how and why people are as they are is something we can’t penetrate…[It’s] part of a plan that we simply cannot grasp…We don’t determine what we’re going to see next, we don’t determine what we hear next, taste next, feel next. Yet we have this sense that we’re running the show.” Ultimately he gained peace when he just let go and stopped searching.
Cohen’s greatest contribution were his exquisitely crafted hymns. For instance, when Inside Tennis wanted to honor the loss of 26 children in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, we referenced “If It Be Your Will,” Leonard’s haunting prayer of mercy and acceptance.
If it be your will/That a voice be true/From this broken hill/All your praises they shall ring/If it be your will/To let me sing/If it be your will/If there is a choice/Let the rivers fill/Let the hills rejoice/Let your mercy spill/On all these burning hearts in hell/If it be your will to make us well/And draw us near/And bind us tight/All your children here/In their rags of light…And end this night/If it be your will/If it be your will.”
After Cohen’s death, his long-ago suggestion to his departing lover Marianne came to mind: “It’s time that we began to laugh/And cry and cry and laugh about it all again.”
I wept at the loss of a wise, distinctly human and gracious sage and offered this tweet:
“I danced your truth.
Oh Leonard, your odes of vulnerability touched my soul.
Oh Leonard, you exploded my mind.
Oh Leonard – Hallelujah.”
