Leonard Cohen and Philosophy (20 page)

This is a reflection we can apply to his entire body of work. We know that Cohen himself was the owner of the famous blue raincoat (
I’m Your Man
, p. 72) and was often described wearing it in his early years. So is he the undersigned or the recipient of the letter? Was his woman stolen from him, or did he do the stealing? If the truths of love are relative, then perhaps both versions of this love story can be true. If we dispense with final vocabularies, we can dispense with final selves—and, in doing so, we dispense with the distinction between protagonist and artist and bring about a fusion of the two. Perhaps the two fuse together most prominently in the deeply personal and confessional lyrics of “In My Secret Life,” where we find Cohen seemingly relating his own propensity to be deceptive.

In conclusion, the notion of being overthrown by beauty that we find in “Hallelujah” and so many other songs provides the basis for Cohen’s transcendental account of romantic love. So depicted, love and relationships can be an unrelenting struggle. But with Cohen’s fusion of the erotic and the spiritual, this conception of romantic love is one that’s not constrained by the usual modes of reason. While the relativity of Cohen’s view leads to an ironist position, there is a liberating effect that allows him to reach and express greater authenticity.
¹

____________

¹
Thanks to Katerina Alexandraki, Fern Day, Sonja Delmonte, Malcolm Devoy, Jason Holt, Matthew Mayhew, Jill Riches, and Andrew Watson for helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts.

11

Hallelujah and Atonement

B
ABETTE
B
ABICH

P
oet that he is, Leonard Cohen’s songs come to live within us. Indeed, Cohen’s observation that there’s “a crack in everything” resonates in popular culture and even echoes in the title of a book about not Cohen but spirituality:
How the Light Gets In
(Schneider).

In his own songs, Cohen often seems to address us directly, his words expressing soul-wrenchingly dark feeling, desire, sometimes heartbreakingly keen. The erotic themes often include a constant dialectic, asserting (thesis) and countering (antithesis), and sublimating (synthesis) the claims of others, including the deity. In this way, his songs of love include not only the promise of grace, salvation, and blessing, but also conflict and abandonment, as well as affirmation and letting be.

You

This asserting and countering is ambivalent, echoing as it does in Hegel and in Plato’s terminology and indeed even before Plato in the turn from love to strife in the Pre-Socratic thinker, Empedocles. And there’s ambiguity too. Hence in Cohen’s “Hallelujah” we hear the ambiguous play between the “you” the singer seems to address—the one who isn’t really a music fan—and the “you” who seems to be David himself (could that be Cohen?). This is the David of the secret
song, the one who finds himself undone by “her beauty in the moonlight,” and who later winds up bound to a kitchen chair, of all things, by some unnamed “she.” Associations run riot in the song (Babich,
The Hallelujah Effect
). With this poetic ambiguity there’s a suggestion of erotic sadism, sexual play, and a disturbing hint at an ultimate unmanning gesture. Everything falls into place, the domestic binding of strength, which shatters the locus of power, along with the special significance of a woman cutting an incapacitated man’s hair, and now we’re no longer talking about King David and any song, however pleasing to the Lord, but old Samson and the temple he brought down around him.

Cohen’s ambiguity works between the lines of the song. The “you” addressed is lover and king and champion in one, and we remember that in addition to writing psalms, David was a warrior: one who knew how to keep his distance for the sake of triumph. Calculated distance adds to the sense of ambiguity. Still the flag that “you” would seem to have placed on some marble arch in the interim, complicates the dialogue. This “you” is the one who doesn’t really care for music, but at the same time it’s clear that “your” flag, however displayed, can’t hold a candle to the singer’s tale. It is of sublime irrelevance (this is the consummate synthesis of the song) as the “you” in question, whichever “you” hears the holy or the broken Hallelujah.

Plainly, the song is only incidentally about David; it’s really about Cohen and his lovers, and it lets them know his singer’s disappointment, a lover’s resignation. The dialectic works because Cohen begins the song in his own voice: the first word—after “now”—is “I.”

Both sympathy and ambivalence are possible from this perspective and in this same sense, Cohen asserts a sovereign interpretation of his own claim, partly sung to himself and partly sung to (and for) the listener who identifies with Cohen, the singer, and partly sung to his lovers. For his own part, what singer wouldn’t want a share in whatever secret King David knew, a sovereign secret to living large, with intrigues and battles, the secret of a series of lovers to sing to
and a reputation as a lover and a singer exceeding nearly anyone in the Bible. Rather like Cohen himself.

Ambiguity

Lovers are more than fickle. The lover makes a promise to the beloved and seemingly always, nearly immediately breaks his word: it “breaks in his mouth,” as Nietzsche says (
Genealogy of Morals
, p. 60). Am I, can I be, the same person who promised in the past? Can’t I say: that was then, this is now? Everything changes, especially feelings. Feelings change, we change. Those who know us today often ignore the past, a distinct advantage for those who prefer to see themselves as able to reinvent, reconstitute themselves every day.

Descartes reminds us that “because I was in existence a short time ago, it does not follow that I must now exist, unless in this moment some cause create me anew as it were,—that is, conserve me” (p. 95). Derrida echoes this point in the context of making promises: “in a promise, when you say ‘yes, I agree, I will’ you imply, ‘I will say “I will” tomorrow and I will confirm my promise,’ otherwise there is no promise. Which means that the ‘yes’ keeps in advance the memory of its own beginning” (p. 27).

In practice, of course, promises and contracts are sometimes broken but that means only that they simply “stop,” so Derrida argues. Cohen seems to express a perspective on this stopping, addressing the “you” who changes from generosity to refusal (“but now you never show it to me”).

And thus Cohen illuminates the ambiguity of the human condition: challenging us with his “Hallelujah”: “It doesn’t matter which you heard.” The thing about ambivalence is that Cohen can give his claims away again and again. The poet’s license takes it either way, has it both ways, in a nonexclusive disjunction, as the song goes.

Ambivalence, having things both ways, having anything both ways, even when it comes to religion but especially when it comes to intimacy, is consummately erotic. At the
same time, ethically speaking, it can be the essence of forgiveness and forbearance, even love. As Simone de Beauvoir highlights in
The Ethics of Ambiguity
, the ambiguous is emblematic of the human condition, existentially described as a lack of being: a person is what they are not, both their past legacy as well as future projects and plans.

For the existentialist, the key turns on a life in time: the life lived by who you used to be and are no longer, as no longer young, innocent, trusting, foolish, and so on. At the same time, there’s the life you currently live and have to live. This having to live is both obligation and condemnation. The past, even if it haunts you, is no longer an option; the future takes its own good time and, ultimately contingent, may turn out other than expected. A person is “freely obligated” to be, and may succeed or fail. And only for such a being
can there be
an ethics:

One does not offer an ethics to a God. It is impossible to propose any to man if one defines him as nature, as something given. . . . This means that there can be a having-to-be only for a being who, according to the existentialist definition, questions himself in his being, a being who is at a distance from himself and who has to be his being. (
Ethics of Ambiguity
, p. 10)

Cohen’s broken “Hallelujah” seems to sing of the failure that proves a higher order, even without God. One might call this higher ideal the “Empedocles effect” in Cohen as it retraces the alteration of love and strife as the cycle of cosmic time. As Empedocles describes the eternal cycle, “In Anger all are different forms and separate, but in Love they come together and are desired by each other” (
The Presocratic Philosophers
by Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, p. 293) according to the epoch in question. Parmenides is relevant to the extent that both Cohen and Parmenides would seem to share a vision of women as angels or messengers, as these guide the adept in the first part of Parmenides’s
Proem
: “The mares that carry me as far as ever my heart ever aspires sped me on, when they had brought and set me on the far-famed road of the
god, which bears the man who knows over all cities. On that road was I borne, for that way the wise horses bore me, straining at the chariot and maidens led the way” (p. 473).

For his own part, Cohen’s youthful idealization of women as poets (recollecting he supposed “that all women were poets,” and hence as we will see that he further reflects their language was the language of poetry) leads him to his own poet’s vocation. But where Parmenides is raising the question of Being, that which is and at the same time that which is impossible not to be (p. 245), Cohen himself expresses a vision of the divine. In keeping with his typical attention to ambiguity, Cohen includes Jewish, Christian, and even Buddhist elements. He refers to Buddhism not simply as an idle practice but from the perspective of an ordained monk.

Cohen’s “Hallelujah” can be heard in this fashion and even in his “Suzanne” Cohen moves between religious confessions. As Judy Collins, who made “Suzanne” a hit with the recording on her album
In My Life
(1966), reflects on this ambiguity in Sylvie Simmons’s biography of Cohen, it almost seems “that a Jew from Canada can take the Bible to pieces and give the Catholics a run for their money on every story they ever thought they knew” (p. 150). As Dionysus, transcending the male, the female, the bourgeois, the counterculture, as well as the banal-exotic and ecstatic-erotic, perhaps above all we hear redemption as Cohen sings “Suzanne” with intimate pathos, a ballad of fascination and captivation, longing and rebuke, and this works, no matter whether Cohen sings it himself or Judy Collins does. Listening to the song, we’re almost there in our minds as Cohen describes the harbor with the sun like honey. This recalls the “honey sacrifice” we read about in Nietzsche’s
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
, which alludes not only to the generosity of Zarathustra and echoes Empedocles’s own gift to the people of the sacrifice of an ox made of barley and honey, but also to the erotic significance of honey (
Reading the New Nietzsche
by Allison, pp. 165–68). Recalling the cycle of love and strife, we remember Empedocles and his honey sacrifice of the same love ruling the world of commingling, combining different elements. But what
about difference? How does love engender strife? In Empedocles, when different things come together, it is by means of that coming together that they must eventually recoil and separate again.

Thus we wonder about the “ladies of the harbor,” and if we listen to Nina Simone’s cover of “Suzanne” we can hear echoes of St. Augustine. Still we ask, as this tells us about the ladies, who is the “you” who receives the “tea and oranges”? “She” brings these to you. Is that “you” the singer remonstrating with himself? Is that “you” the listener? Both? Who—which you?—has always been her lover? Who’s speaking? Again, thinking of Nina Simone, we can note the impact of different covers of Cohen’s songs. In some covers—this is true well beyond Cohen—the singer seeks to channel the original voice (like singing along with the radio in the car for the karaoke effect) while other singers take their revenge on the song or seek to take it over for the sake of a hoped for new hit, an appropriation which sometimes brings back the song itself.

In the case of Cohen, as in the case of a lot of pop music, just how much philosophy do we need? We’re able to identify the “she” in “Suzanne” (because the song carries her name: it’s
about
her). But in the case of other songs, like, Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” who the “you” is is still a debated topic, a referential issue charmingly, humorously, embarrassingly, illustrated in Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me, Maybe.” We may ask what such a song really means, but hearing the song turns out to be insufficient: we have to see the video to disambiguate the reference. Given a culture of acknowledgment and support of sexual difference, we get it and with the video, we get to see that the songwriter gets the point herself: her song is about open-mindedness, forswearing bias. Meaning is a little more problematic in the case of Psy’s “Gangnam Style.” Do we take that with or without Korean?

Feminism and Nietzsche

Are such questions of meaning more a matter for cultural or media studies than philosophy? Posing the question in this
way can be convenient in Leonard Cohen’s case as it saves us the trouble of overthinking his songs. And then there are the questions of feminism. Both “Hallelujah” and “Suzanne,” but also quite a few others (even “Dance Me to the End of Love”), are characterized by a fond dissonance. May we call Cohen a feminist given his declared “love” of women? Like most such love interests, Cohen’s love of women, like Shakespeare’s talk of love in his sonnets, tends to be undone by its own, and almost immediate, distraction, and Cohen himself dispassionately tracks his own dissipation. Interest in the other sex as with the identification of being a ladies’ man traditionally betrays self-interest. Some authors make this point over on Cohen’s behalf: Cohen isn’t misogynistic because he’s really not talking about women, so goes the argument, but just about himself.