In-Depth: How Leonard Cohen Lived Between The Hour And The Age

Lead image: Antonio Olmos Fifty years ago this month, sunk in a deep depression, Leonard Cohen released his third studio album, Songs of Love and Hate . It had been two years since 1969's Songs from a Room , which – as was often the case through Cohen's long career – critics couldn't easily reconcile to the shape of pop. Either Cohen was a rare divine creature who shone a prayerful light through frailty and longing, or he wrote dirges that, as Rolling Stone indecorously claimed , "won't have them dancing in the streets." Songs of Love and Hate stayed the course. Over fluttering Spanish guitar, 36-year-old Cohen hangs his head in self-recrimination and psychic pain, details shuddering loneliness and the grotesquery of human performance. His vocal offering comes, as ever, via his gravelly baritone, often cased in reverb as if he's singing from afar – the biblical mountains of Ararat, perhaps, or the center of the Earth. Songs of Love and Hate is dispirited, free-floating, mystical. And yet one question, which Cohen seems to be asking himself over and over throughout, anchors the proceedings: What time is it? Two tracks frame the clock hands. On "Dress Rehearsal Rag," Cohen solemnly begins, "Four o'clock in the afternoon / and I didn't feel like very much." Three tracks later, it's twelve hours around the dial: "Famous Blue Raincoat," a fan-favorite epistolary number (with which Cohen later claimed never to have been satisfied) opens up, "It's four in the morning, the end of December / I'm writing you now just to see if you're better." Image: Getty One imagines Cohen glumly sitting down to write, setting aside his cigarette, and glancing at his watch to memorialize the moment. There's no way to know what he was wearing on his wrist while writing the lyrics for Songs of Love and Hate , but as his legend grew, his choices became public. By the late 1980s, he favored military watches by Cabot , particularly its CWC G10 model. The white numbers on a black dial, appropriate for glances in the dark, make sense for Cohen, whose work trafficked in nighttime assignations. In 1992, he was photographed by Mexican photojournalist Antonio Olmos wearing a Victorinox Swiss Army watch. The portrait (as seen atop this story) is among the most famous taken of Cohen; Olmos later claimed it took his own career "to a new level." If you look closely, you can see when it was taken: Four o'clock. What time is it? On one hand, writing about a specific hour locks Cohen's songs into the familiar schedule of a single day. (If he began his "Famous Blue Raincoat" letter at 4:00 AM, you might ask, what was he doing at 3:45?) On the other, even with clock time declared, the songs never stay put. Lyrics gesture out to befores and afters, to inner provinces of wonder and memory, to imagined actions of friends and enemies. Time slows down or speeds up, jumps around or stops altogether. It's not a big leap to envision Cohen nodding alongside his favorite poet, Federico García Lorca, who wrote in the 1920s, "All clocks / deceive us. / Time at last has / horizons." A single moment can't help but call attention to time's expanse, after all, just as gazing at a star forces you to reckon with the firmament. Each minute, however weighted by personal experience, is but one in the long horological stream. You can count the minutes – as Cohen does – but the smooth movement of your seconds hand eventually connects you, forward or backward, to yourself as a child, to your child as an elder, to the Australopithecus , to our descendants summering on Mars. A single moment can't help but call attention to time's expanse, after all. So goes Songs of Love and Hate . Elsewhere on the album, Cohen visits lions and Christians fighting in the ancient Roman pits, a moneylender's daughter in sixteenth-century Venice, the revolutionary march on the Bastille. The closing track, "Joan of Arc," follows the woman in question as she is grasped by her conflagrant execution. All these moments in time come to us insinuated and recombined through Cohen's canny craft. This has a curious effect. Pressed to consider in "Dress Rehearsal Rag" that it was 4:00 PM when the singer "didn't feel like much," his listener might reasonably wonder: What time did Joan's pyre ignite? When did the caesar enter the coliseum to watch the carnage? Once this begins, there's no telling where it leads: When did my love drive off this morning? At what moment will the next earthquake strike? When did the doctor pronounce my birth? What time will it be when I die? You may telescope from the minute to the grandiose, from the sublime to the profane. Perhaps this is what Cohen was getting at when he sang, in Songs of Love and Hate 's "Love Calls You By Your Name," of being lost "between the hour and the age." You are yourself in a given hour – who you are when you are – but even so, the seconds tick by and by to trace the shape of your era. You can tell time, but the times you live in will tell you, too, right back. Fitting, then, that when Cohen was set to release 1992's The Future , the promotional materials included wristwatches emblazoned with the cover art's imagery of a blue heart, a hummingbird, and open handcuffs. The album confronts major world events: The annihilation of Hiroshima, riots in Tiananmen Square, the Berlin Wall's dismantlement. "Things are going to slide in all directions," the title track predicts. "Won't be nothing you can measure anymore." And yet, astride the chaos and the onslaught of history, here is Cohen, recommending that no matter what comes to pass, you might be well served by strapping on a watch. There's at least one more wrinkle in Cohenite timekeeping. Image: Getty Songs of Love and Hate bombed. Cohen's label considered dropping him. His depression deepened, and he later said he'd been "confused and directionless." New solutions for his bad time were needed – and soon found. In 1973, he met Los Angeles-based Zen master Kyozan Joshu Sasaki and began a study of Buddhism. This relationship deepened over two decades until, in 1994, two years after The Future was released, Cohen moved up to Sasaki's monastery at Mount Baldy to practice zazen – "seated meditation" – nearly full-time. Sitting zazen involves letting go of notions of time and space, submitting oneself to the inner meaning of existence. Cohen eventually became ordained as a monk, taking the name Jikan, "noble silence." Even still, clock time kept its hold on him. It's possible to find photos of Cohen in his black monk robes with a wristwatch peeking from the sleeve. In 1998, the writer Pico Iyer visited him at Mount Baldy to write a piece on this new phase of the musician's life. Iyer describes going with Cohen before dawn to hear a teisho , a Zen discourse. When the session ended, the men walked out into what by then had turned into "a dazzling, blue-sky day." Cohen looked up. "Nine o'clock," he said, "and we've had several lifetimes already today." Five studio albums later, Cohen died in 2016. Somewhere, there's a watch he wore that's ticking on and on and on. Twice every day, it reads four o'clock.The late singer-songwriter was obsessed with time and mortality. And because nothing with him was an accident, we can read deeply into what he wore on his wrist.