The past few weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about obsession. I guess you could say I’ve been obsessed with obsession.
The other night at home I read a magazine article about Leonard Cohen’s 1984 song “Hallelujah.” The article was a sort of a tribute to the song, offering a description of how the song came to be and about the many performers who have covered it over the years.
The first time I heard the song was 20 years after Cohen recorded it. This version was on NPR during a live performance k.d. lang was giving at Carnegie Hall during a tour promoting her 2004 CD, Hymns of the 49th Parallel. I was in my car and nearly had to pull over. I felt a soft explosion in my heart and my entire body seemed to get caught up in a vertiginous swirl of thought and emotion I couldn’t stop—and didn’t want to stop because that kind of surrender just felt so good. I bought the CD and listened to it—and “Hallelujah”—on and off (more on) for about two years. Then one day I took it out of my CD changer and gave it a rest. I’d had enough.
When I opened that magazine article the other night, I lost myself all over again. Maybe this is what an alcoholic feels like if he or she takes a drink after having been on the wagon for a while. There’s this gripping feeling of delight and dread, the cartoonish angel on one shoulder (Better not) and the devil on the other (Go ahead, do it). I did. After I read the article, I clicked on youtube.com to see if there were any videos of anyone singing the song.
Turns out were plenty of them. There’s not only lang’s version but there’s also one by Jeff Buckley, John Cale, Allison Crowe, Rufus Wainwright, Sheryl Crow, and even Cohen himself. Of course, I had to watch them all. Then I clicked through to some other sites to get the lyrics (they change slightly depending who is performing the song), which led me to sites that explored the meaning of the word “hallelujah” (it’s Hebrew for “praise the Lord”) and examined the song’s allusions to the Biblical stories of David and Samson. This started at about 9 p.m. When I next looked up from my computer at the clock, it was close to 1 a.m.
Where did those four hours go? People who study obsessions and addictions say when met with the object of our desire we go into a sort of trance. Is that what happened? And, if so, is it such a bad thing? What’s the difference between getting lost in a trance and simply paying attention? In Buddhism, what happened to me might be called samadhi, which is Sanskrit for the sort of mental concentration that leads to an awareness of ultimate reality and complete freedom from suffering. My mind was not wandering, scheming, wishing, dreaming. I was nowhere else but right on task with what I was doing.
I love good music. And I love to learn. I spent hours online that night because I wanted to hear a song I love played many times by many performers. And I wanted to know more about the song because that would deepen my love and appreciation for it. Is there a crime in that?
What about getting caught up in a good book? “I couldn’t put it down,” people say about reading a novel into the wee hours of the night. We commend people for that—both the writer for telling a good story and the reader for finding so much pleasure in an activity our culture holds up as one of humanity’s highest achievements. The other morning I found myself so engrossed—obsessed?—in reading a book on obsession and addiction that I forgot I had put the stove on to heat a skillet to scramble some eggs. I laughed. But if I had been online then chasing “Hallelujah” down a rabbit hole, I wonder if I would been so kind to myself.
Now, days later after giving it all some more thought, I am wondering if clicking through sites online is just another form of page turning, and I am wondering if my little adventure with “Hallelujah” was just as compelling an adventure as reading a good book. It was a sort of story I was wrapped up in—the song, its performance, creation, and hidden meanings.
The song has many others who can’t seem to get enough of it. When I last checked, one of lang’s performances had gotten 1,091,990 hits on youtube.com (I must have contributed to about a hundred of those); Buckely’s has 8,405,694 (which is more than the entire population of New York City); Cale’s (which appears on the soundtrack of Shrek) 1,763,840; Allison Crowe’s 2,973,259 views; Wainwright’s Irish performance 3,758,095 views; Sheryl Crow’s 994,143 views; Cohen’s own version (and not the best, by my lights), 6,359,846 views.
When I first heard lang sing “Hallelujah” on the radio back in 2004, I was in a relationship that wasn’t going well. It eventually ended—and it did not end well. I listened to the song a couple of years later while in the throes of another relationship that ended barely before it began. Amidst all that listening, the song gave me a profound insight into the nature of love. There’s a line in the lyrics that says “love is a cold and broken hallelujah.” I’d heard that line dozens of times before, but it struck me anew after my second break-up and has stayed with me through the years, like a tuning fork whose sound never changes—or goes away.
“If we hear a piece of radically new music enough times, some of that piece will eventually become encoded in our brains and we will develop landmarks,” writes Daniel J. Levitin in his book, This is Your Brain on Music. “If the composer is skillful, those parts of the piece that become our landmarks will be the very ones that the composer intended they should be; his knowledge of composition and human perception and memory will have allowed him to create certain ‘hooks’ in the music that will eventually stand out in our minds.”
I wonder if I listened to the song so much during those couple of years in an attempt to imagine a better outcome for either relationship, if only in my own mind. Change not the events but my perception of the events. Locate within me a level of acceptance that certain relationships—like certain roads—are not always smooth and do not necessarily lead you where you really want to go. Or maybe I listened to find solace in a world in which my broken heart felt like the only heart that was ever broken. One website I found examined the lyrics of “Hallelujah” and pointed out that the song speaks of the fact that “people are imperfect and wavering in their affections.” And those people include not just others, but also ourself.
The dictionary defines obsession as “a persistent disturbing preoccupation with an often unreasonable idea or feeling.” So I’m thinking that this is the line in the sand between a healthy enjoyment of something or a pathological compulsion. On one side there’s joy. On the other “a persistent disturbing preoccupation.”
Given that, I don’t think I’m obsessed with “Hallelujah.” I just like the song. A lot.
Amen.
***
Purchase k. d. lang’s Hymns of the 49th Parallel
Puchase k.d. lang: Live with the BBC Concert Orchestra [Blu-ray]