{"id":160343,"date":"2022-06-23T13:10:56","date_gmt":"2022-06-23T17:10:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=160343"},"modified":"2022-07-01T09:58:30","modified_gmt":"2022-07-01T13:58:30","slug":"a-brighter-kind-of-madness-on-leonard-cohen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/06\/23\/a-brighter-kind-of-madness-on-leonard-cohen\/","title":{"rendered":"A Brighter Kind of Madness: On Leonard Cohen"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Leonard Cohen. Photograph by Rama<\/a>. Licensed under CCO 2.0<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

To mark the appearance of Leonard Cohen\u2019s \u201c<\/i>Begin Again<\/a>\u201d<\/i>\u00a0in our\u00a0<\/i>Summer issue<\/a><\/i>, we’re<\/em> p<\/em>ublishing a series of short reflections on his life and work.<\/i><\/p>\n

In 2002, the year I graduated from college, I had a young male psychiatrist at NewYork-Presbyterian who called me the night before every session to confirm our appointment. I feel bad for this guy now. He was kind of clueless and innocent, and I tried to horrify him at every session with more and more outlandishly irreverent thoughts about life. I’m not sure why I did this\u2014maybe just for my own entertainment. He used to tell me that he could decipher my moods based on my outfits\u2014he could determine when I was depressed or activated or hadn’t been sleeping based on the color combinations I chose. This was a very confused, manic period for me, and I had developed a practice of dressing that followed something like an equation. One garment had to be the equivalent of garbage; disgusting T-shirts and track pants fit into that category. One garment had to be opulent and luxurious, like a sequin blazer or buttery leather pants. And one garment had to be ironic. This was the hardest category to fulfill because it was so subjective.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I had first learned the word ironic<\/em> from the hit nineties movie Reality Bites<\/em>, but I didn’t understand it until I had lived in New York for several years. New York teaches you all kinds of interesting things. It was during this period when I was dressing like a lunatic that I used Leonard Cohen\u2019s spoken opening of \u201cFirst We Take Manhattan\u201d as the recording on my answering machine: \u201cFirst we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.\u201d His voice is dark and conspiratorial but pure and noble, and he speaks these words a cappella, as though to announce that a great force of collective love and fury is about to overtake the world. I thought this was rather ironic, because I was a young woman who was not in the business of overtaking anything. I could barely take my medication.<\/p>\n

One night I got very drunk and showed up to my psychiatry appointment the next day in a full-length yellow-and-green plaid mohair car coat from the sixties, a Boston Pops sweatshirt from childhood with sleeves that ended at my elbows, and ragged pajama pants stuffed into knee-high go-go boots. I\u2019m not sure what I was thinking\u2014maybe this was the outfit I’d had on the night before. \u201cI tried to call you yesterday evening,\u201d the psychiatrist said. \u201cBut I got some old man’s answering machine.\u201d \u201cThat’s not just some old man,\u201d I said. \u201cThat’s my husband.\u201d I left it at that. I loved Leonard Cohen more like a daughter loves a father, though. His music tempered my insanity with a brighter kind of madness. He grounded my heart at a time when I was worried I would jump out the window.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ottessa Moshfegh is a novelist and screenwriter. Her latest novel,<\/em> Lapvona, is out now.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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