Leonard Cohen and Philosophy

by Holt, Jason

  Whether or not the entire album should be construed as a marriage proposal, the one extended by the singer of “Waiting for the Miracle” invites much thought about love, time, and song. In this song it is always already too late. Life has been wasted and youth spent in the waiting process. The miracle is not the object of faith, which holds with passion to the coming event, or of hope, which still believes in possibility. But mere waiting for what may or may not come lacks both passion and a living sense of possibility. In the passive mode, giving oneself over to undifferentiated chronos, there’s “nothing left to do.” Pointless waiting and disappointed expectations are of course a major theme of the blues, which typically give voice to the downside of chronos, the feeling of futility, often announced by phrases like “Woke up this morning. . . .” In “Be for Real,” one of two covers in this album, the singer who has a history of being hurt by his lover, fears being hurt again (and again) if she returns. “Waiting for the Miracle” differs from blues songs that lament a more or less datable loss (like your lover dumping you) because it records and regrets a failure to act, to seize the moment. Heard this way it reflects on the loss of time itself; it leads to thinking of an experience of time as loss.

  We could read Cohen’s song alongside Nietzsche’s aphorism on “The problem of those who wait” in Beyond Good and Evil (section 274). Here Nietzsche writes like a Stoic, seeing most human beings as aimlessly waiting: “in every corner of the earth people sit waiting, hardly knowing how much they are waiting, much less that they are waiting in vain. And every once in a while, the alarm call will come too late. . . .” The genius of Cohen’s song is its foregrounding the consciousness of waiting and realizing only too late that it is too late and time has gotten away from you irretrievably. “I didn’t see the time / I waited half my life away.” Waiting means that invitations or opportunities were declined. There was the passive expectation that “the great event” would simply manifest itself. The alternative, Nietzsche implies, is vigilance, readiness to seize kairos by the forelock. One of Cohen’s most unusual pieces (on the collection More Best of Leonard Cohen) is a short statement, read by a robotic female voice, called “The Great Event,” which says that time will be renewed “next Tuesday” when he/she plays the “Midnight Sonata” backwards.

  Recall here the ancient figure of kairos. This personified image of opportunity has two pairs of wings, one growing from his back, one sprouting from his ankles. He is typically represented as holding a scale which is out of balance. That is, the time he announces is one in which things are shifting and rearranging themselves. Circumstances are open briefly to being mastered if we can read the signs of the times. We must literally seize the time, adroitly grasping the shock of hair at the front of his head. Otherwise, we’ll be left in the lurch as we see the bald back of his head quickly speeding by. In contrast, a Cohen song about seizing kairos by the forelock is “First We Take Manhattan.” There the singer declares that he was sentenced to “twenty years of boredom for trying to change the system from within.” Rather than grasping the opportune moment when things are imbalanced, he submitted himself to the routines of the system, to the bureaucratic measured time that eats away at spontaneous life and keeps us going with promises of gradual change or the expectation of secure retirement.

  Happy Times: Let’s All Get Naked

  So is time coming to a terrible, final end or are we condemned (possibly self-condemned) to lead a life of eternal waiting in some limbo condition? This is the question posed by the two opening songs of The Future. With this question in mind, let’s return to Cohen’s three great interests—women, song, religion—seeing them from the perspective of prophecy and salvation (if we were to explore this from a biographical perspective, we could dwell on Cohen’s close study of the prophet Isaiah with his rabbinical grandfather). These seem to coincide in an apocalyptic thematic of the glorified body and songs of divine praise and celebration.

  Apocalypse is not only a final end it is also nakedness, a favorite Cohen theme. So, a brief note on language: in the Greco-Jewish translation of the Hebrew scriptures (known as the Septuagint) the Greek word apokalypsis was used as the equivalent of the Hebrew gala, which means uncovering or denuding. Biblical apocalypse and Cohen’s frequent image of happiness, then, are both simultaneously revelation and denuding. I am less interested in uncovering the naked Leonard than in understanding Cohen’s theme of nakedness (starker than mere nudity) in its full apocalyptic sense. When we are naked everything’s been revealed and the final truth is unavoidable. Characteristically, Cohen says (adding his own words to his cover of a song by Frederick Knight) he is interested only in naked truth (“Be for Real”). The woman’s naked body is a signature Cohen image, often expressed in religious language, as in “Light as the Breeze,” where the lover’s adoration is presented as a celebration of the glorious body. There he preaches adoration of the woman’s body, prescribes a kneeling posture for devotion, and compares the sexual delta to the confluence of the river and the sea. The last image suggests a way of making contact with the oceanic or cosmic. This is the worship of the absolute, the alpha and omega (a phrase out of Apocalypse) or beginning and end of all things. Recording his own devotions, Cohen says he knelt like a believer, received something like a heavenly benediction, and achieved a glorious moment of peace. Theologically speaking, we might say he was participating in that life of salvation where all work is completed and there is nothing left to do but to give praise. If the choir of the saved and the angels sing hymns to God then, Cohen’s “spiritual” addresses the naked body of the beloved.

  This concatenation of questions around the theme of nakedness is especially strong in the verse of “Waiting for the Miracle” where Cohen says that he dreamed of his mostly naked lover, also waiting, as the sands of time ran through her hands. Yet some of her was light, perhaps the light, as he says in “Anthem,” that comes through the cracks in everything and opens up another spiritual dimension.

  Beginning Again, Ending Again, Escaping Time

  Let’s consider the remaining songs on The Future which broaden the spectrum of temporal experience and provide alternatives to the dichotomy of terrible end or endless waiting posed by the first two pieces. “Anthem” is all about beginnings and persistence in a world where wars continue, the “holy dove” is caught and commodified, and there’s no point in trying to make a “perfect offering” (this may allude to ritual sacrifices precisely specified in Leviticus and Deuteronomy). Every day at dawn the birds sing and begin anew. The singer not only heard them doing this, he heard them saying it. Song is a repeated litany of new beginnings, not just pointless waiting or a repeated round of suffering. Cohen provides his own version of those New World thinkers Emerson and Thoreau, who celebrate the promise of life in each fresh morning. Authentic beginning requires freedom from unnecessary, excessive concern with the past and future. In contrast to this mode of renewal through song, there are “signs” of the failure of governments and the continuing rule of hypocritical killers who disguise themselves through public piety. World history is a succession of ruins. And despite this, the world, as evidenced by the birds of dawn, is not a closed totality. The future is still open, but how? Somewhat enigmatically Cohen discloses that despite everything “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.”

  Here Cohen may be channeling a Gnostic thought: in this flawed world, created perhaps by a malevolent god (not God), some inkling of salvation or light nevertheless becomes evident through its very flaws and cracks. Contrast this with the framework of Jewish and Christian monotheism that give a sense to apocalyptic times in the lead song. These traditional religions see creation and salvation as involving the acts of a single deity. The world and its history are redeemed by the same God who created them. In Gnosticism—a philosophical and religious view that competed vigorously with early Christianity—the world is hopelessly irredeemable, the product of an evil or minor god (sometimes called a demiurge, following Pl
ato). Yet there are uncanny cracks in the oppressive order of the created world, cracks allowing a metaphysical or spiritual light to appear. Escape from the miserable world is not through a sacred history developing within it (for example, from Adam through Abraham and Jesus and finally the end of days). Liberation depends on seizing the opportunity offered by the bits of light that get through the cracks. Deep down we are all sparks of pure light that can be awakened in the right circumstances.

  So is Cohen a Gnostic? I prefer to think that he borrows a Gnostic metaphor to articulate the struggle to free oneself from the fallen world; perhaps Gnostic ideas filtered down to him from the Jewish Kabbalistic tradition. In “Anthem” he adapts the Gnostic motif of the cracks that let dazzling bits of light shine through the world’s darkness. It is the anthem of a campaign or conflict, but of what kind? A struggle carried on without regard to time and future by those who sing, whether dawn’s birds or midnight’s poets? Or does the poet promise to engage with the world when he vows that the unnamed malevolent powers will hear from him? Yet he says this without much force and the march has no drum.

  I have been suggesting that while the album The Future is about time, no single theory, view, perspective, or attitude with regard to time takes precedence over the others. Rather than taking this as a sign of incoherence, we might see it as a kind of lyrical phenomenology of time, in which an array of experiences and understandings of time is given voice. At some points shifts in tone invite us to think about shifts in temporal focus. “Anthem” ends by calling for a march, but notes that there are no drums; as if in response, the next song “Democracy” begins with a lively upbeat drumming march. If “Anthem” is ambivalent about activist engagement, the words and tone of “Democracy” are full of militant hope and enthusiasm. “Democracy” is coming, we’re repeatedly told, although it’s uncertain what its mode of being is: “it’s real” but not “exactly there.”

  I would be surprised if Cohen were familiar with Jacques Derrida’s idea of “the democracy to come” (p. 104), but I think we can use it to make sense of this militant, hopeful song. Derrida talks about the “e-vent,” the unexpected, unpredictable, incalculable, surprising future which arrives, not in the form of a specific state of things (like a new constitution, governmental reforms, and so on) but that which is always to come.

  Our vision of a full democracy should always be expanding as we respond to more calls for inclusion. Its shimmering spectral reality is the shadow that the future in process, always still to be determined, casts on the present and the past. It’s not impotent waiting but enthusiastic expectation. Each verse of the song begins by declaring “It’s coming. . .” and names fermenting, chaotic sites and provocations that elicit democracy from “a crack in the wall.” The crack of course recalls the crack that lets the light in (“Anthem”). But now the crack is in the wall. Walls mark borders defining the power of states whose sovereignty restricts the spontaneous and autonomous activity of the people. Walls suggest social and political divisions that constrict democracy. Cohen deploys an extensive, varied set of metaphors summoning up visions of those cracks—homeless camps, the AIDS crisis, broken families—from which the democracy’s light breaks in. If the future of the album’s opening song is irredeemable disaster, the coming democracy is a paradigm of futurity, the openness to the radically new that cannot be predicted on the basis of the past. It is always arriving. Its reality is never complete, never fully determinate, always to come. We could describe this as the difference between apocalyptic and messianic—as in “messiah”—time. Apocalyptic time is that of the end, the final event. It announces the last judgment from which there is no appeal. Messianic time is a time of liberation and openness, as in “Democracy” where the heart opens, barriers are demolished, and a fresh future emerges, as in the Sermon on the Mount. It’s a time freed from past restraints rather than a closing of time itself.

  “Closing Time,” by contrast, is honky-tonk eschatology, the end of the world in the alcoholic and erotic haze of a road-house Cohen might have frequented during his time in Nashville. We wonder whether it’s just closing time in the tavern as dancers choose final partners for the night, or the closing time of a love affair, or could it also be a closing of time, an end of all things? In other words, is “closing” an adjective marking a specific time or a verb denoting the act or process of closing, completing, or finishing time? The second is suggested by the two times the dancers go successively crazy for both the devil and Christ. That sounds like the two moments of John’s Apocalypse: first the catastrophe (devil), then Christ’s kingdom on earth. Yet the site of “Closing Time” is also a bell tower that chimes “the blessed hours.” Are these the bells that “Anthem” commands us to ring? As in other songs on The Future, uncanny cracks and thresholds appear. The scene at closing time may look like freedom, but feels like death. There is both a scene of revelry, a choosing of final partners, and the foreboding that the revels are now at an end. It must be something in between life and death, as democracy is real but not exactly there.

  Love Always

  The original version of “Always” was written by Irving Berlin in 1925 and has been a standard tune ever since. Most versions take about three minutes. Cohen extends the song to eight minutes by means of a slow steady beat, choral backing, and playful interchange with the chorus, singing in one of his deepest tones, with repetition, framing, and his own additions. There’s a heavy emphasis on the word “always.” He adds a verse which could hardly have worked in the 1925 version comparing this true vow to lesser couplings, from flings in the shower to summer romances. The song expresses simply the lover’s impossible yet necessary pledge of eternal love and fidelity. Can we seize the opportunity of love? Can love conquer time? Can a joyous eternity displace the stifling one damn thing after another of chronos? The final number on the album, “Tacoma Trailer,” is a haunting, purely instrumental piece. As musical time flows calmly we are given an opportunity to think about questions like these that are raised in The Future and to meditate on the album’s different takes on time.1

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  1 Many thanks to Louis Schwartz who helped me to clarify many aspects of this essay and to Babette Babich whose work on music and contribution to our symposium on “Leonard Cohen and Philosophy” at the 2013 World Congress of Philosophy in Athens, Greece were invaluable stimuli.

  II

  Songs of Beauty

  5

  Is Leonard Cohen a Good Singer?

  JASON HOLT

  When Leonard Cohen accepted the Juno Award for Best Male Vocalist in 1993 for his album The Future (the Junos are like Canada’s Grammys), he was characteristically self-deprecating, saying that “only in Canada” could he have won such an award. This remark evoked his well-known, ironically self-mocking verdict from “Tower of Song” that his voice is golden. While few would contest the substantial quality of Cohen’s voice as an artist—that is, his figurative, nonvocal voice—many diehard fans will admit that he’s not the greatest singer. Yet it seems reasonable to consider as a live question whether he ranks as a good one, and to explore in the process what it means to have artistic merit in such a role as singing. Though some detractors deny that he sings at all much less well, many fans would insist, on the contrary, that he’s not just a good singer, but so much more.

  Does it even make sense to consider seriously the notion that Leonard Cohen is a good singer when it seems pretty clear that he himself doesn’t think so? Well, yes. He may not mean it, for one, and even if he does, he could be wrong. It’s not just a matter of his opinion, or ours for that matter. Opinions differ widely on many questions, and Cohen’s singing is no exception: some critics are too harsh, some fans too forgiving. In matters of taste it is often said “To each their own,” and up to a point this is true. Say I like sleeping in, milk in my coffee, and listening to Leonard Cohen—and you don’t. That’s just fine, and if all people meant by championing or slamming an artist was “I like their work”
or “I don’t like their work,” there would be no issue, no dispute. But that’s often not where it stops. Taste tends to assert itself, to vie for dominance. Fandom wants company, and no dissent. Saying that Cohen is a good singer implies not just “I like him” but that other people should also so acknowledge him.

  Since many fans will be at loggerheads with critics so harsh as to be anti-fans, how can we get beyond fandom and anti-fandom to achieve some sort of objectivity? Might we conduct an opinion poll? We could, but mere opinion won’t do, as we’ve seen. Nor is it simply a matter of the numbers, of whether enough people (a majority?) self-identify as “Team Leonard.” If it were a matter of popularity, then [insert current pop phenom here] would be better than Mozart, but clearly that’s not so. Popularity determines neither truth nor quality, and supposing otherwise is fallacious, a reasoning error. Citing the fact that Cohen won a Best Male Vocalist Juno Award doesn’t settle the matter either, for we may think—on independent grounds—that someone else should have won instead and that he shouldn’t have been in the running. Because we need a real standard, tackling this problem, the problem of taste, will take us deep into philosophy from the shallows of the most egregious internet debates.