Excerpts from Inna Rogatchi’s essay, November 2018:
I remember how I was gravely impressed by hearing that public farewell of Leonard. My close friends who were the same impressed as I was on the depth and openness of the crossing the line between the Worlds, were trying to console me concluding:”So, Leonard was ready, indeed”. I knew that, but the departure is not the thing to be consoled about, especially when the leaving one was that man. We were trying to express what we felt at the time, on that rainy day in November 2016.
Two years on, and one year since I slowly re-started to hear Leonard’s records, I just can not do it with his last one. Not with all songs there, nor with the first one which is the last one for me. It is beyond my capacities.
But how special are the ways of our sub-consciousness in getting out of the maze of longing. The next thing I found myself doing after realising that I won’t able to hear the Leonard’s last album ever it was writing a letter to him. Not in words, but in images. It did come on its own, I did not plan it. I created some new work fighting that gloomy autumn reign, and upon seeing some of the work, I have sensed that it is about Leonard.
There was one mighty tree that was as if speaking, it has so much to say, and its narrative and its accents were changing due to the weather, season, mood, and time. I have realised that this is my letter to Leonard.The letter which will be coming to him, up There, during all seasons. With the message or love and remembrance carried on ‘the high silver nerves’, as he had put it in his Window song almost forty years ago.
Inna Rogatchi (C). Letter to Leonard. Homage to Leonard Cohen. Original art panel. 60 x 85 cm. 2018. The Rogatchi Art Collection.
I glanced on the calendar – it was 6 Chesvan, the actual date of the Leonard’s yahrzeit.
Instead of the unbearable farewell prayer-song of the man who was a blessing and a gift to us all, I came back to the Cohen’s The Window – and it let me out of this maze of longing, slow but assuredly.