This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled but there are moments when we can transcend the dualistic system and reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that’s what I mean by ‘Hallelujah.’ That regardless of what the impossibility of the situation is, there is a moment when you open your mouth and you throw open your arms and you embrace the things and just say, ‘Hallelujah! Blessed is the name…’
The only moment that you can live here comfortably in these absolutely irreconcilable conflicts is in this moment when you embrace it all and you say, ‘Look, I don’t understand a fucking thing at all–Hallelujah’ That’s the only moment we live here fully as human beings.”

The quote is from Leonard Cohen, speaking about his famous song, “Hallelujah.” I’ve been reading Alan LIght’s The Holy or the Broken, a history on that song. For years, it languished in obscurity: Columbia Records didn’t release Cohen’s album with that song and most people who heard the song (or in the case of Jeff Buckley, initially sung the song) didn’t know that Cohen was the writer.

Cohen is a poet by trade, and a damn good one at that. He summarizes my feeble attempt at explaining my current state of things better than I ever could. Cohen’s “Hallelujah” deals with spiritual resignation and irony but ends with a tone of hopeful triumph that other versions of the song leave out. “Even though it all went wrong/I’ll stand before the Lord of Song/With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.”