by Holt, Jason
Now, this decision obviously seems absolutely nuts, especially if the story is taken literally (which tends to be a terrible way of reading religious mythology in general). Some people have read Kierkegaard to be advocating for some kind of “divine command ethics,” which basically means that whatever God says is good truly is good, no matter how evil it may seem. Kierkegaard actually makes a great deal of fun of this view in Fear and Trembling, meaning that such a literal interpretation is probably more than a little off base.
The story of Abraham is ultimately a symbolic one, and what it symbolizes is faith as love. Abraham doesn’t have any rational knowledge of God’s purpose, but he does know something about who God is. God had promised Abraham that he would bear a son and that this son would become the father of the nations. Abraham has absolute trust in God because he knows that his God is a God of love. His trust is so absolute that he believes that even if he were to sacrifice Isaac, God would not break his promise.
Which, of course, doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense. But that’s exactly the point, says Kierkegaard, the lover of the absurd. When Abraham says “yes” to God he moves beyond what Kierkegaard calls “the ethical” realm into “the religious.” The ethical realm represents what can be rationally understood, our duties and responsibilities as determined by our position in life and our commitments. The religious, on the other hand, represents that which lies beyond the realm of the reasonable. It is to believe in the impossible, to sail beyond the harbors of what is normal and safe and to enter into the uncharted waters of risk and possibility. To live a “religious” life does not primarily mean going to certain kinds of services or saying certain kinds of prayers (Kierkegaard is one of the great critics of superficial religiousness). It means, rather, to be a certain kind of person, to say to hell with what is safe and comfortable. When someone says “I love you” we can’t ask for some kind of scientific proof or philosophical theory that will prove their love to us. All we can do is take the plunge.
So resignation for Kierkegaard is not just about letting go of The Answer but also about letting go of yourself, which is what Cohen’s beautiful “Hallelujah” encapsulates so well. The version made famous by John Cale and the late Jeff Buckley emphasizes the bitter in this bittersweet song, ending as it does with the notion that all our Hallelujahs are as cold as they are broken. In Cohen’s original version from Various Positions the cynical view of these later versions, that love is only a game of one-upmanship, a matter of who shoots first, is overcome in a moment of faith where the ego is transcended and we realize that it really doesn’t matter if our Hallelujahs are holy or broken, sacred or profane, as long as we sing them with all our might, for then every word will be ablaze with light and love. Even if it does all go wrong, if all our best-laid plans come to nothing, it’s still worth risking it all, to take the leap into the unknown, to live a life that’s not obsessed with safety or comfort but rather with generosity and love. If we live in this way we can stand, broken but proud, naked but unashamed, before the Lord of Song.
The human self is a constant work in process, Kierkegaard wrote in The Sickness unto Death (pp. 13–22). The path towards overcoming despair has not so much to do with gritting our teeth like Sisyphus and making our peace with the absurd but rather with constantly transcending ourselves, with letting go of our obsessions and our ego, and with committing ourselves to other people and to God (whatever we mean by that beautiful, mysterious word). In Book of Mercy Cohen writes: “Let me raise the brokenness to you, to the world where the breaking is for love” (psalm 49). We may never be perfect but that is exactly why we’re capable of such great love, a love as great as God’s. Suffering begets compassion, and compassion begets love. But this is only true as long as we resign ourselves to our brokenness and embrace it as the thread that binds us to our fellow human beings who also suffer. We’re all citizens of Boogie Street. Without that resignation we can neither offer love nor accept it. As Cohen puts it again in Book of Mercy: “Why do you welcome me? asks the bitter heart. Why do you comfort me? asks the heart that is not broken enough” (psalm 40).
The term “joyful sorrow,” which originated in ancient Christian mysticism, perfectly encapsulates the beauty of Cohen’s art. There is, indeed, a great deal of darkness in the broken night. Yet Cohen reminds us that in that darkness there is light, in the sorrow there is joy. Cohen’s songs are uplifting because they are dark, unlike the cornucopia of sugary pop songs that assail us from the airwaves and which do nothing but exacerbate our despair with their forced “happiness” (if anyone is the grand master of melancholia it’s Justin Bieber, God bless him). The existentialism in Cohen’s art is the hopeful reassurance that our sadness is an essential part of what makes us human and that it is deeply intertwined with our joy. The fact that we’re not perfect, that we are shy and anxious and confused and suffering, is what makes us capable of love, which, as the poet W.H. Auden pointed out, is what being happy truly means. Or, as Leonard Cohen put it, “that’s how the light gets in.”
3
Why Cohen’s Our Man
WIELAND SCHWANEBECK
Over the course of his career as a singer and songwriter (not to mention poet, philosopher, ladies’ man, and bearer of the gift of a golden voice), not only has Leonard Cohen been on a quest to spread wisdom and precious melancholia to the sounds of his guitar, and (lately) to outperform Bob Dylan as the most diligent touring artist in the world, but also he seems to have embarked on a personal mission to dedicate a song to every female first name there is. Yet don’t let all those Heathers, Suzannes, Mariannes, and Nancys fool you: the number of women he name-checks is no match for the variety of masculinities in his work, even though men are not as frequently evoked in name or shape. Already in 1970, Cohen’s fellow countryman Michael Ondaatje (in Leonard Cohen) was one of the first to draw attention to the abundance of different masculinities in Cohen—better known as a poet than a singer back then—including “the magician, the wit, the aesthete, the wounded man”; Cohen’s women, on the other hand, tended to be “dangerously similar” (p. 13). This observation holds just as true for the impressive song catalogue Cohen has assembled over the decades, in which femininity always appears in similar embodiments: angels of compassion, sisters of mercy, and ladies of solitude.
By looking at the masculinities evoked in Cohen’s songs (and his very own versatile performance as a singer and songwriter), we can better assess the quality of his writing and his insight into human nature, for Leonard Cohen has a lot to say about gender relations and the dubious nature of traditional gender images. So let’s apply some Johnny Walker wisdom and find out just how many different masculinities Cohen’s songs and stage performances offer, why there is no contradiction between his stable image as a wise and witty singer-songwriter and the idea of embodying different masculinities, and how he continues to inspire both men and women to “become naked in their different ways” for him (“Because Of”)—okay, so we may not really get to the bottom of the last one. There is only so much that philosophy can do.
What I will talk about is not Cohen the man but rather the “lyrical self,” a concept that literary scholars use in order to avoid confusion between the historical person who wrote the poem (the author) and the voice that is speaking in the poem. The lyrical self is a handy tool to use to avoid upsetting Mrs. Shakespeare, for instance, because otherwise we’d be speculating about how many of her husband’s 154 sonnets were dedicated to others he may have had a crush on. It is linked to the concept of the persona in the performing arts, a term originally applied to ancient Greek theater masks which—through their exaggerated features (a sad face, a laughing face)—helped the audience members distinguish between characters. In the modern age, we sometimes talk about a persona adopted by an actor who is nothing like the characters he plays on stage or on screen, but who tends to play similar roles, resulting in his audience’s inability to distinguish between the real person and the type of character he plays. The
same thing can happen to tenants in the Tower of Song, of course.
So for the time being, let’s just assume that the following remarks don’t directly concern Leonard Cohen himself, but rather the fictitious man who comes alive in the music and lyrics that are written and performed by the actual Leonard Cohen. The former makes frequent appearances in the latter’s verse—not only in spirit but also in name, be it as “L. Cohen,” the signer of the dreariest holiday card ever (“Famous Blue Raincoat”) or as “Leonard,” the self-deprecating, lazy bastard that lives in his suit (“Going Home”).
He’s Our Man, and Then Some
In one of his most enduring anthems (and one which he continues to perform in his concerts to this very day), Leonard Cohen tells his audience, “I’m your man.” Having performed the song over the course of nearly three decades, Cohen still pulls off a remarkable feat that is part of the crooner’s handbook: making each audience member believe that she or he alone is the sole addressee of this promise. But the statement can also be read in a slightly different way, for unlike other languages, English does not distinguish between the second person singular and plural: not only does it remain ambiguous who exactly “you” is, but also how many people are meant (“you” the individual, or “you” the crowd). If Leonard is different people’s man, then this would mean that he can be different people’s idea of a man, and oh boy (or should that be, “oh man”?), can these ideas differ!
Maybe you’ve heard: there’s “a war between the man and the woman” (“There Is a War”). It’s been going on for some time, but turned into a full-on academic battle of the sexes (and genders) in the twentieth century, as feminism became far more prominent in the Western world, especially throughout the 1960s and 1970s, even though some people slept through those wild years in a room in the Chelsea Hotel. Feminists challenged much of traditional Western philosophy and thought, fighting against social injustice and for political participation, killing one or another ladies’ man in the process. It took some time, however, before men, rather than being merely attacked for the injustices they had wreaked, became studied and theorized as men. It wasn’t until a few years later—around the same time Leonard Cohen wrote said song, which you can find on the album of the same name—that men and masculinities were examined in a variety of fields, which even resulted in the founding of a new academic discipline: first known as Men’s Studies, later as Masculinity Studies.
Up until then, men had played a surprisingly small role in the field of Gender Studies, which was more or less synonymous with the study of women. Yet by focusing mostly on women, much of the story remains untold, for we can only hope to improve society gender-wise if we acknowledge that part of the reason women (or members of the LGBT community) often get treated so unfairly is that so many dominant notions of masculinity are just never questioned. Though it is their task to put received wisdom in doubt and to question what we take for granted, many philosophers have contributed to this state of things. Many of them (including Aristotle, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Schopenhauer) not only took the dominance of men for granted, but also assumed that women have limited intellectual capacities.
At the same time, it’s not exactly like the majority of men were crying out to subject themselves to the critical eye of sociologists or psychoanalysts. On the contrary, when feminists called out for the boys to sing another song (as the previous one had grown old and bitter), most of them turned a deaf ear. It took some time for middle-class white men to understand, as Michael Kimmel put it, “that race, class, and gender didn’t refer only to other people, who were marginalized by race, class, or gender privilege,” and that they had been pretending their masculinity was invisible, as if “gender applied only to women” (The Gendered Society, pp. 6–7).
Since putting the category of masculinity on the map, scholars in Masculinity Studies have dedicated a lot to coming to terms with several ideas that seem mutually exclusive at first sight: that masculinity is, on the one hand, privileged yet somehow also, on the other, troubled by contrasting demands; that in a patriarchal society, men are generally considered the more powerful group, yet this pressure can simultaneously lead to expectations nobody can really fulfill; and—maybe the weirdest paradox of them all—that masculinity is perceived as something that is steadfast and reliable, but also in flux all the time—in other words, “a man is still a man,” even though he’s constantly “passing through.”
Leonard Cohen’s songs reflect this strange predicament. A large part of his work’s appeal can be traced back to it, for he seems able to deliver any kind of masculinity his audience could possibly want. Sometimes we need him naked, sometimes we need him wild, and Leonard-the-singer is extremely versatile as he adopts a variety of male disguises, all of which come with their very own history of manhood and involve not just old ideas, but really ancient ones. Like the lovers he sings about in “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,” Cohen’s men are not new and many have been there before them, but the gallery he assembles is still impressive. There is the suave, fearless “Field Commander Cohen,” the super-spy who crashes diplomatic cocktail parties and nearly drives Castro out of Cuba (not even 007 succeeded on this front). There are countless soldiers, some of them fighting in the army of Joan of Arc, some of them fighting for children of snow (“Winter Lady”). And there are all kinds of religious men: rabbis, Biblical shepherds, saints, and pilgrims (many of which symbols have certainly been inspired by Leonard’s own spiritual guide, the legendary Roshi).
It is very tempting to see Leonard Cohen not just as someone whose songs are brimming with archaic male images (even the knight in “Bird on the Wire” is borrowed from “some old-fashioned book”), but also as someone wholeheartedly in favor of this kind of manhood: the enigmatic stranger who will leave you in the morning, the deserting soldier, the eternal pilgrim—all of whom struggle with companionship and prefer to remain alone, renting rooms in the Tower of Song or browsing through their very own Book of Longing. Hollywood film producers evidently went with this first association, the enigmatic stranger, and have employed Cohen’s music accordingly (in addition to casting Cohen himself as the mysterious François Zolan in a 1986 episode of Miami Vice). If you want to learn his songs exclusively through film soundtracks, then brace yourself for a rough ride through the most male-centered movie genres you can think of: the Western (Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, 1970), the action movie (John Badham’s Bird on a Wire, 1990), the serial-killer film (Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, 1994), or the superhero tale (Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, 2009). But there is more to it, for the masculinities advertised in Cohen’s lyrics are not as simple and straightforward as they appear at first glance. This is philosophy, after all—the only field where you can tell people about a mysterious stranger or about Superman and they will think Albert Camus (not Clint Eastwood) and Friedrich Nietzsche (not the last survivor of Krypton).
Working for Our Smile
You didn’t think it was that easy, did you? Just when we thought we had him categorized as the favorite balladeer of cowboys, sportsmen, and shepherds, a more careful glance reveals Cohen’s masculinities to be a lot more elusive than that. He is not one of your typical guys to hang out with, even though one of his most famous songs has him brag about sexual favors received from a then-unidentified if later revealed fellow celebrity (“Chelsea Hotel #2”)—a rare kiss-and-tell, but maybe it doesn’t count if you sing it. We owe Leonard Cohen a thorough reading of his lyrics, if only in order to find out that masculinity is a little more complicated and that we have to acknowledge various positions, not just one.
One major factor that puts a twist on Cohen’s masculinities is his well-known association with Jewish faith and tradition, which can be grasped in many of his songs. Historically, Jewish men were frequently subjected to mockery and discrimination, especially since the Jewish people have so often suffered persecution and injustice. Following centuries of marginalization and violence against Jews, this anti-
Semitic heritage prevails in the form of stereotypes that are everywhere in popular culture. The classic comedy Airplane! (1980), for example, features a scene where one of the passengers asks the flight attendant for a bit of light reading, and is handed a suspiciously slim pamphlet about “Famous Jewish Sports Legends.”
The alleged lack of athletic skill is just one of the stereotypes about Jewish men that can overshadow other, more important achievements: Woody Allen keeps telling interviewers that he was neither a bookworm nor a troubled existentialist in his youth but a gifted athlete, but somehow, it hasn’t really affected his persona. According to other, equally dominant stereotypes, Jewish men are associated with virtues such as wisdom and religious scholarship, which results in their being depicted in cartoons throughout history as hunched over books and wearing glasses. Thus, as Harry Brod says in “Jewish Men,” oppositions such as “mind over body, or brains over brawn,” are very important “in the lives of Jewish men, resulting in the life of the mind becoming valued and over-valued as a source of Jewish male identity” ( p. 442). All this amounts to a denigration of male Jews as somewhat incomplete men—“real men” don’t read but lead, and when they get into a dispute, they prefer to rely on their fists instead of well-crafted arguments.