by Holt, Jason
Cohen himself often acknowledges these stereotypes and addresses them in his songs, sometimes with cynicism and anger (like when he identifies with the money lender or “the very reverend Freud” in “Is This What You Wanted”), but usually with irony and self-deprecating wit. He frequently reminds us of an inconvenient truth that anti-Semites will find hard to stomach: it is the Jewish tradition which is at the heart of Christian culture, and not just because it was a “little Jew who wrote the Bible” (“The Future”). One strategy which Cohen often resorts to in order to put a spin on stereotypes is to seemingly embrace and affirm them, before turning them all the more strikingly on their head—which means we have to add Socrates and his elaborate use of irony to the list of Cohen’s spiritual ancestors. Cohen’s pilgrims and saints, for instance, are not quite as pure and abstinent as you might think: On one occasion, Leonard practices on his sainthood, giving generously to everyone, before we’re informed that all he’s interested in is building a reputation for himself as virtuous so as to impress a woman (“Came So Far for Beauty”). Master-pupil relationships are similarly infused with sexual undertones (“Master Song”).
Similarly, we may have said that archaic images of respected kinds of manhood prevail in Cohen’s songs, but that doesn’t stop him from mocking them wherever he can. The Old Testament world that his characters inhabit offers plenty of occasions for this, with its sheer endless story about the most dysfunctional family you can think of, where “murder, theft, deception, and other crimes too numerous to mention” are the rule rather than the exception (“Jewish Men,” p. 441). The Old Testament may teach us to obey our parents and instruct wives to remain under the authority of their husbands, but what a world dominated by these stern patriarchal views would look like is frequently illustrated in Cohen’s songs—and it is hardly the Garden of Eden which the listener will be reminded of. Cohen adapts the well-known “Story of Isaac” to show where father can lead son, and that it is a truly terrible world in which fathers are willing to sacrifice their children because they believe themselves to be on a divine mission. For the sons, inheriting the world and its rulebook from their fathers carries all kinds of burdens and obstacles, and you’ll often find them rejecting the legacy, or begging their fathers to change their names which are “covered up / with fear and filth and cowardice and shame” (“Lover Lover Lover”). And troubled manhood doesn’t end here.
Even if you are part of the pantheon of male role models, you can still fall short of the ideal. Sure, Cohen’s lyrical self often claims to be a soldier or a proud captain—but what good are these ranks if you are not part of the winning army in a battle, but a partisan whose side has already lost and who is now at the mercy of old women (“The Partisan”)? A cowboy who is neither patrolling the frontier nor protecting a town from bandits but one whose horse has run away (“Ballad of the Absent Mare”)? A captain whose ship is either leaking (“Everybody Knows”) or has not even been built (“Heart with No Companion”), or whose crew has left him (“The Captain”)? All these examples show that the uniforms and badges which allegedly make a man are easy to mock—and, more troublingly for the men in question, they are even easier to mimic. Anybody, as Cohen himself will tell you, can pin an iron cross to his lapel, walk up to “the tallest and the blondest girl,” and ask her to remove her clothes (“Memories”), and the idea that much-admired men, whom young boys are supposed to look up to in order to learn about the importance of duty and ethics, might be frauds and impostors can be difficult to handle.
Some men (biological essentialists) thus take the view that a “real man” should not be defined by the medals he has won or the ideas he has created, but mainly by his alleged genetic “nature”: what they mean usually amounts to a dangerous cocktail of chromosomes, testosterone, and primary sexual characteristics. Is Cohen one of those guys because of the jokes he heaps on military men and sailors? Absolutely not. If anything, his humor turns even darker when he considers the kind of man who likes to eat meat, or who feels some kind of primordial beast awakening in him. Some of them are gently reminded that a mighty erection might not be the best of advisors (“Don’t Go Home with Your Hard-on”), some of them are lampooned for howling with the wolves (“I’m Your Man”). And don’t forget the artwork of that particular record: I’m Your Man comes with a photo of Cohen, the most enigmatic singer-songwriter, holding a peeled banana. The raw and uncivilized idea of a man comes dangerously close to an ape—not really a creature you’d want to model your gender identity on.
Giving Us All He’s Got
His rejection of a biological approach to gender and masculinity brings us to Cohen-the-performer, one (and, since the launch of his monumental world tour in 2008, maybe the most popular) of Leonard Cohen’s various fields of activity as an artist. Within Gender Studies, the concept of performance and performativity is linked to one of the most influential and radical theories of the recent past. Few thinkers are as strongly opposed to defining relationships between men and women solely on the basis of their biological makeup as Judith Butler. In her groundbreaking book, Gender Trouble (1990), Butler introduces the idea that the classic distinction between sex (as biological) and gender (as cultural) does not hold up, that the very idea of sex is culturally produced as well, and that gender must be thought of as something that is performed (rather than embodied) by individuals. Masculinity, for instance, is something that has to be fought for, defended, proven, and put into practice time and again: when talking to friends, when building a career, when competing out on the sports field.
According to Butler, although traditional accounts of gender are based on the idea of original gender ideals, the latter are just a myth: it is only in the act of performing femininity and masculinity that the idea of the gender ideals comes about in the first place: “an expectation that ends up producing the very phenomenon that it anticipates” (p. xv). This theory of gender identities seems to fit contemporary culture, especially the music business, where most people want to experience their favorite artists, whether pop sensations or renowned singer-songwriters, live on stage, as opposed to merely listening to their records. Legendary artists like Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, who have played thousands of concerts in the course of their careers, have always relied on direct interaction with their audience to build their reputation.
Leonard Cohen’s masculinity is much more than the sum of his lyrics. If there is one thing that the audience members who have attended one of Cohen’s more than 300 concerts since he started touring again in 2008 can agree on, it is that Cohen, much like the wine that is flowing in his songs (“The Guests”), has aged remarkably well. Being in your seventies appears to liberate you from what current fashion dictates, for once you have been around long enough to witness styles blossom, wither, and perish before getting repackaged as nostalgia, you have pretty much earned the privilege of creating your own style. His trademark suit and fedora might make Cohen resemble last century’s man rather than “Last Year’s Man,” but here is a man so comfortable in his skin that he won’t mind appearing out of date to some people—he is timeless to others.
Cohen’s suave performance onstage is unlikely to be pigeonholed as modern-day dandyism, for not only is he generous with smiles and frequently bows to the audience and his fellow musicians, he also adopts different masculinities throughout the performance, being neither averse to clowning and self-mockery (listen to the recording of his 2008 London concert and his hilarious monologue on the various anti-depressants he has been on) nor to sprinkling the concert with little moments of ambiguity, which add to his performance even more layers of significance. Occasionally, Cohen will kneel during a song, which can carry wildly different meanings depending on the context—he may be taking time for a little prayer (a pilgrim who has seen the angels, “the sublime Webb Sisters”), he may be serenading an absent mistress or his “shepherd of strings,” Javier Mas, like a devoted fan or even a gay lover. Either way, Cohen’s masculine performance is powerful e
nough to be taken seriously while still remaining in flux and ironical, driving home Butler’s point that true gender identity is a fiction, always “an imitation without an origin” (p. 188).
In this way, Cohen’s songs ultimately answer the question “What is a real man?” by putting this very idea into doubt. If there were such a thing, of course, he’d “know that kind of man” (“The Stranger Song”). He knows them all.
4
The End of the World and Other Times in The Future
GARY SHAPIRO
In an interview with his biographer Sylvie Simmons, Leonard Cohen identifies the main interests in his work as “women, song, religion” (p. 280). These are not merely personal concerns for Cohen, they are dimensions of the world that he tries to understand as a poet, singer, and thinker.
Now it’s something of a cliché to see the modern romantic or post-romantic singer or poet in terms of personal struggles, failures, triumphs, and reversals. Poets sometimes respond by adopting elusive, ironic, enigmatic, or parodic voices: think, in their different ways, of Bob Dylan and Anne Carson. Yet Cohen has always worn his heart on his sleeve or some less clothed part of his body: he let us know, for example, that Janis Joplin gave him head in the Chelsea hotel while their celebrity limos were waiting outside. We want to know all about Suzanne, Marianne, and the sisters of mercy (two traveling young women whom he gave chaste shelter one night). Cohen’s many biographers are obsessed with his loves, depression, career ups and downs, Montreal Jewish origins, Buddhist practice and monastic retreats.
Recently, provoked in part by the album Old Ideas, and an ambitious, successful world tour, Cohen’s public has shown interest in how he is dealing with aging, or more subtly, with the artist’s meeting the challenge of the late career. Rather than focusing on Cohen’s life (multiple biographies already exist) I want to think with him about the meaning—or more specifically meanings—of time, a theme he clearly addresses in the album The Future (1992). As the Christian philosopher Augustine said about time, we all think that we know what it is until we ask ourselves to define it.
Meanings of Time
In The Future Cohen asks and finds some answers. Let’s begin by looking at the first two songs, one about the end of time, the other about endless waiting, and then ask if these are the only ways of experiencing time in Cohen’s universe. The title song evokes a vision of an apocalypse at the end of time. “Waiting for the Miracle” is a dark anatomy of a life based on deferral, on putting things off. We all want “Democracy” but when and how will it come? “Closing Time” is the hour when the bar closes, yet possibly time itself is closing. All lovers, Cohen says (covering a classic Irving Berlin song), should vow eternal love, love “always.” These songs concern the experience—more precisely a range of various actual and possible experiences—of time. They deal with what philosophers call the phenomenology of time: sudden and startling change, interruption, boredom, anticipation of major events, and vows of eternal fidelity. Cohen invites us to think our way through a spectrum of ways of experiencing time (“temporalities,” some would say). The Future consistently interrogates time. It explores and articulates different forms of temporality from religious, romantic, political, and artistic perspectives. It invites us to think about whether and how we can live these different times and how they are related.
The Future as Apocalypse
In the lead song Cohen—or his prophetic persona—identifies himself as a servant of an unnamed higher power. His mission is to tell us of the vision of the future he’s been granted. That future is murder. It teems with grotesque scenes of torture, fire, and phantoms. In this future we might as well abort fetuses and destroy the last trees. Readers of the Biblical Apocalypse will recognize imagery drawn from that story about the end of the world, yet it is updated and filled with our time’s obsessive fears. Dehumanization, environmental disaster, loss of individuality and privacy, terror and humiliation are what the future has in store. Cohen’s future gives a voice to our fears.
“The Future,” speaks prophetically from the standpoint of a world lost or transformed—post-catastrophe, post-disaster (after the final turn, after the terrible misalignment of the stars). Whether through the emergence of the beast from the abyss and Antichrist (as in Christian tradition), or in more contemporary terms through war, environmental collapse, pandemic, domination by a society of total surveillance, or global capitalism, from this visionary site the dreadful has already happened. Everything is over. This is why Cohen calls for the restoration of the Berlin Wall, of Stalin and Saint Paul.
Yet why does the singer cry for the return of barriers and order, even those of tyranny, religious orthodoxy, and the Cold War? Christian theology offers a clue when it teaches that there is a “restraining force,” in Greek a katechon, that holds back the coming of the Antichrist and the world’s end. The Biblical source is the Second Letter to the Thessalonians attributed (doubtfully) to Paul; it speaks obscurely of a katechon in order to discourage premature expectations of the final tribulations and Christ’s return. From the song’s perspective, the katechon no longer works, the future we had hoped to delay is here: it is murder. Here is one perspective on time on the largest scale. Time as we know it can come to an end. In “The Future” there no longer is a future. It is a future robbed of futurity, of any sense of open possibility.
The song begins with regret for a time that has been lost, a world that no longer exists. The singer (or chanter) wants back what has been taken. But this is not the deep unease with “time and its ‘it was’” that Friedrich Nietzsche analyzed as the deepest core of human resentment. It is a cry of distress at the loss of a specific kind of life that’s no longer possible in the future. What disappeared was a private, secret life reflected infinitely in a mirrored room. The catastrophe involves the disappearance of walls and borders within which the singer could enjoy his former broken nights, including delights like anal sex.
Assuming a prophetic persona that owes much to both Jewish and Christian Biblical traditions (Simmons calls it “Jeremiah in Tin-Pan Alley”) Cohen speaks (like Isaiah or Ezekiel) as a servant told to say with absolute chilling clarity that “it’s over.” Like Isaiah and Ezekiel he’s seen nations triumph and decline. The “nations” are those peoples whose successions and relations constitute world history, the time of the world. That history comes to an end in “The Future.” Whether we think of the tribulations of the last days foretold by Hebrew prophets or John’s Apocalypse (which owes much to contemporary Jewish texts), or more recent fears of total disaster, it means that we are beyond measure, over the threshold, in a world of phantoms, road fires, your inverted and suspended woman, lousy Charles Manson–like poets, and the dancing white man. These can all be heard as rewritings of passages in Isaiah and Ezekiel (for example, see Isaiah 3:17–23 on the upside-down woman). The dancing white man surrenders his traditional position as privileged spectator and now becomes the spectacle. All that’s left to do, the voice bitterly declares, is to join in the general murder and destruction, including abortion and ecocide.
The refrain exhibits Cohen’s mastery of ironic ambiguity, not knowing what “they” meant by “repent.” Does the prophet fail to understand his own instruction? Or is he channeling Spinoza, who said that “one who repents is doubly unhappy and weak”? And who’s claiming credit as the Bible’s Jewish author? Is it God, traditional author of the Pentateuch through Moses, the actual writers who severely edited and added to older texts, or Cohen himself, who here and elsewhere rewrites the Bible? Questions about time have yet to be answered.
Waiting for the Miracle
The end-of-the-world scenario is only one form of time that Cohen sings of on this album. If the main point of view in the first song is theological and cosmic, the second, “Waiting for the Miracle,” mercilessly reveals the very private life of lovers who’ve repeatedly postponed their union, perhaps until it’s too late. No doubt we all dwell on those moments when “if only” we had responded to tha
t invitation, taken that chance, or chosen a different path everything would have been better and different. It’s all about missing the right time, failing to seize the opportunity, because we vaguely imagined that a miracle—something totally outside our power—would come along, resolving our life’s uncertainties and indecisions. There may also be the suggestion that the poet too waits passively and too long for his inspiration. While Cohen speaks to a single person, the “I” and the “you” here could be anybody, could be you.
Stoic philosophers, like Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, harshly criticize the conventional time experience of waiting and deferral. Instead we should be alert for the opportune time, the temporary imbalance that provides an opening that could be seized to effect a major transformation of individual or collective life. In “Waiting for the Miracle” Cohen gives a stronger and more moving critique of waiting than do the Stoics. The song explores the dark side of delay and deferral, the time of the katechon in which we stretch out time to the maximum, fearing to take a chance or make a decision. The singer confesses to wasting his time, waiting for the miracle. Waiting here is the dark side of mere succession, of time as one damn thing after another, the devouring time that the Greeks call chronos and which the philosopher John Locke termed “perpetual perishing.” The miracle would be (in Greek thought) the kairos, the transformative, decisive event or opportunity, the opposite of chronos. Cohen sometimes calls it a “transcendental moment,” showing that he too can use a philosophical vocabulary. In this song the miraculous kairos is a wan hope, the dream of someone who’s collapsed on the road of life, lying in the rain, drenched in regret.
Sylvie Simmons interprets this song and the album as Cohen’s proposal of marriage to Rebecca de Mornay. This would surely be one of the most melancholy proposals imaginable, since he’d be asking the lover to adopt a life of parallel solitude with him while they continue to wait for the miraculous event. But if we understood the collection of songs from this point of view, we might be haunted by the suspicion that it is composed in a somewhat private lovers’ language. In this light the album cover illustration—a bird, a heart, an open pair of handcuffs—invites speculation about binding and unbinding in several registers, and presents a number of interpretive options. Perhaps more specifically it’s the emblem of ambivalence. Love (the heart) serves as a perch for either being proverbially “free as a bird” or the “bird on the wire,” who, like Cohen, has no choice but to sing. Open handcuffs suggest the play of restraint and captivity, maybe an SM bondage game, one that both highlights the theme and questions any simple opposition of freedom and bondage.