'Take This Waltz' / Leonard Cohen

Take This Waltz

Leonard Cohen

Here's something they don't tell you when you're studying to be an English teacher:
Teaching media you personally love is fucking terrifying.

Okay picture it: you're standing in front of a bunch of generally apathetic teenagers, most of whom would rather be sleeping or on Snapchat. You hold, in your hands and your heart, something that definitively shaped you. They stare back at you blankly. Taking a deep breath, you press play or send or hand it out. The words are theirs, now. They're confused, they're bored, they're waiting for recess.
And now, vibrating with context and history and hope, you have to direct the discussion.

As a person, I am deeply defined by the media I love -- to the point where if you want to get to know me, I'd rather give you a song or a book than explain who I am. So as a teacher, I raaaarely bring stuff that has profoundly affected me into the classroom (unless I have a class that I know won't completely rip it apart and leave me raw and crying). There are, however, exceptions --- and Leonard Cohen is one of them.

Leonard Cohen has defined my literary and musical souls for as long as I can remember. Before Bowie, there was a low grumbling voice that barely hit any notes, expelling (because he never speaks) poetry. My father, a few years younger than Cohen, idolized him and grew up in his footsteps -- just a few neighbourhoods away from Westmount, where Cohen embodied (and, I'd argue, in many ways still embodies) the spirit of artistic Montreal. I was raised on Cohen. I knew the lyrics to Everybody Knows before I understand what any of it meant, would write down lines about taking Manhattan and then taking Berlin in my elementary school notebooks.

This is a fairly dangerous way to raise a little girl.

As she gets older, the lyrics will start to pierce and twist inside her. She'll realize that words hold volatile power; that they are, somehow, enough. She will become strange, and separate. And when she is old enough to start sincerely understanding what's behind formative explosions like Take This Waltz --- it will devastate her.

Take This Waltz shifts paradigms.

A translation of a Federico Garcia Lorca surrealist poem, and a professed thank you note to Lorca from Cohen -- this song is too much to process, the first few (many) times you hear it. Musically, I am sure it's the reason I now love 3/4 (waltz) time; lyrically, I'm sure it's from where much of my literary aesthetic derives. I can't even decide on one lyric to post; all of them shatter me ---- but I guess for the interest of enticement:

And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook
With the photographs there and the moss
And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty
My cheap violin and my cross

I don't know that my father ever particularly loved this song -- but I vividly remember when I started loving it. It was one of the first instances I was aware that the music was mine, as opposed to chosen by my parents ------ I wasn't allowed to use the CD player until I got to high school (my dad was Very Into Sound Equipment) -- and I would always ask him to play me this song. It was my Leonard Cohen, it was viciously gorgeous, and it has never disappointed me.

My English classes are admittedly chaotic, but there are a few things I know with certainty -- and one is that, before you graduate high school in Montreal, you must have experienced Leonard Cohen. There are no two ways about this. His words are essential.

So every year I teach grade 11, I put on emotional armour, hope the kids won't laugh -- and press play. Sometimes they can't handle it, sometimes they just don't care -- but there's always at least one student I'm teaching for, one adolescent who reminds me of my little goth girl self, years ago; another person willing to open up their figurative veins and let in Cohen's quietly violent brilliance.

Or at least, the hope that there is...is enough.