Leonard Cohen and Philosophy

by Holt, Jason

I was once playing Cohen’s first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, when my younger sister entered the room and asked why I was listening to such depressing music. I replied that I listened to his songs because they’re beautiful, and that while I found them almost unbearably sad, I didn’t feel the least bit depressed by listening to them. Indeed, I found them heartening. This chapter is an extended reply to her question more than forty years on.

  In his lecture, “The Secret Life of the Love Song,” delivered at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, on September 25, 1999, Nick Cave remarks,

  All love songs must contain duende. For the love song is never truly happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain. Those songs that speak of love without having within their lines an ache or a sigh are not love songs at all but rather Hate Songs disguised as love songs, and are not to be trusted. These songs deny us our humanness and our God-given right to be sad and the air-waves are full of them.

  Of this specific sadness he says, “Leonard Cohen deals specifically in it,” but notes that such genuine sadness—that expression of longing—is rare in contemporary rock music. Not so in flamenco. Flamenco music always aspires to duende, even when it disappoints. But what is duende? It concerns a kind of aesthetic response to works of art that resist the temptation to excessive sentimentality.

  In addition to listening to Cohen’s music, I also read his novels at the time of their publication, and I found in them a certain conception of the aesthetic that I have held throughout my life. I offer you this snippet from The Favourite Game. Breavman, the narrator and autobiographical voice of Leonard Cohen, is at university with Shell, whom he sleeps with but does not love. They have been driving all day and put up in a cheap rooming house. Shell wants him to help her move the bed.

  Breavman was furious. He didn’t want to move the bed.

  “What does it matter where the damn bed is? We’ll be out of here by eight in the morning.”

  “We’ll be able to see the trees when we wake up.”

  “I don’t want to see the trees when we wake up. I want to look at the dirty ceiling and get pieces of dirty plaster grapevine in my eye.”

  The ugly brass bed resisted her. For generations of sleepers it had not changed its position. He imagined a grey froth of dust on the underside. (pp. 136–37)

  A Short Address in the Second Person

  You, reading this chapter in a library or on a train or at a bar, have fallen in love and suffered accordingly; you have been torn up like wind-borne ticker-tape; like betting slips in the gutter outside the track; or worse: you have grown tired of love and it no longer perturbs you. You lie awake at four in the morning ordering your regrets and counting your sins, sorting the deep from the shallow, the immensity of some trivial remark, its embers burning slowly still. This is your life and you did it. You wonder how you might be saved and by what or by whom. You have drunk from the top-shelf with its famous brands—the good rum with its Baroque label and its gold medals; but you have also swallowed the nameless liquors from the well and you know their bottles inside out. In bars you nursed a drink alone, overwhelmed by hopeless desire; summoned by the gleaming obsidian eyes of a boy or a girl who returned the pleasantries, softly, in a foreign accent, and who poured your drinks and smiled courteously. You squandered time in squalid apartments doing drugs (both soft and hard). You’ve had your uppers and downers. And when death comes you shall have left too many things undone and unsaid. And you, in this library, or on this train or at this bar, shall surely die. And everybody knows. . . .

  Love, loss, utter dejection, abject boredom, regrets (both small and large), bouts of binge drinking (both brief and protracted), desire, fear, and defeat—all forms of longing: what has philosophy to say about any of these as they cast their shadow over our lives? How might we reason within these realms? Better, perhaps, to treat of them in song, as Cohen does, where the passions can be suitably expressed and left aching and dark, unilluminated by the light of reason.

  Duende

  In his 2004 book of that title, author Jason Webster is introduced to the concept of duende and later discusses it with Pedro, a Spaniard with whom he takes in a concert.

  One of the fat women stood up, the low hum-like song began, and the audience fell silent.

  “Did you feel it?” Pedro asked again when the piece was over.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “Did you really feel it?”

  I couldn’t speak. The performance had filled me with something I had never felt before, and didn’t know how to describe.

  “That was duende,” he said. (Webster, p. 31)

  A couple of pages on the concept calls out for explanation if not definition. Not all concepts need be defined. Game is one such. There are many forms a game can take and it is hard to think of one feature that all games must have in common and by which they are defined as games. Nevertheless, the term is used confidently and successfully. However, the same cannot be said for duende.

  “Pedro,” I asked as we walked back to the car, the narrow streets crawling with people as they headed off, “what is duende?”

  He didn’t reply at first, but waited until we had emerged onto the esplanade.

  “Duende,” he said. “Duende is duende. More than this you will have to find out for yourself, mi querido. . . .” (p. 33)

  That reply is inadequate, unhelpful. In the case of terms such as “game,” we can muddle along knowing more or less what activities count as games, and communicating on that basis, without having to give a precise definition of the term. It looks as if the concept duende is different and resists even vague characterization. There seem to be no criteria by which we can sanction its use as a meaningful term in our language, in which case, we could never know its correct application. We must look elsewhere for clarification.

  Nick Cave, in his “Love Song” lecture, refers to Federico García Lorca, who as we know was a major influence on Cohen. While Cave gives a well-informed characterization of duende, there’s still no real way to sort candidates into clear-cut cases of duende and non-duende. In listing artists who he thinks have duende, Cave includes Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and Leonard Cohen, equivocates over Van Morrison, and rules against the Tindersticks who “desperately want it.” We need to grasp the basis on which some artists, but not others, are included in the duende class.

  Lorca, in his In Search of Duende, expresses the intractability of the concept but begins to describe how we might nonetheless recognize its presence. The “black sounds” of melancholy in music—and how many Leonard Cohen songs fit this description?—and presumably in poetry and the other arts too:

  Manuel Torre . . . pronounced this splendid sentence on hearing Falla play his own Nocturno de Generalife: “All that has black sounds has duende.” And there is no greater truth.

  These “black sounds” are the mystery, the roots fastened in the mire that we all know and all ignore, the fertile silt that gives us the very substance of art. “Black sounds,” said that man of the Spanish people, concurring with Goethe, who defined the duende while speaking of Paganini: “A mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains.” (p. 57)

  Philosophy is charged here with the crime of trying to imprint rationality on that which lies outside the jurisdiction of reason—think of academics generally, as Breavman observes in The Favourite Game, as having “hands bloody with commas” (p. 101). A great many people in the arts think of criticism as an unwarranted intrusion of reason into a realm where emotion should reign unencumbered. However, the philosopher’s task here is to examine the ways such emotions are to be themselves understood.

  Lorca was a surrealist poet. (Despite his profound influence on Cohen, and despite occasional flashes of surrealism, Cohen himself isn’t usually characterized as a surrealist.) The Surrealists attempted to make work that engages the viewer with thoughts that lie beneath the surface of appearance as that might be explained by science. The attempt of the Surrealists is to bring out
the nature of the uncanny in the ordinary things of everyday life. Magic and irrationality, dream and mystery, were to be features of the dark character of life cast in shadow by the cleansing light of reason and science. That is to say the Surrealists wanted to find aspects of life untouched by the relentless march of science and rationality—somewhere for the soul to take refuge.

  Lorca identifies three spirits that move the artist to create (pp. 58–60). These are the angel, the muse, and the duende. “The angel gives lights” and inspires visionary art—art that looks forward. The muses are the nine daughters of Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, and the half-sisters of Apollo, god of beauty, poetry, and music. The muse inspires an art of memory—based upon experience, both perceptual and emotional. The angel and the muse operate outside of us, whereas “one must awaken the duende in the remotest mansions of the blood” (p. 59). The duende is a demon; it wields a dark power whose energy is emotional, primordial, and “in the moment.” As such, Lorca attributes to it Dionysian characteristics, as Nietzsche would call them.

  Of philosophical importance to an appreciation of duende both in itself and in the work of Leonard Cohen is a conception of aesthetics that includes life rather than forms a gulf between life and art. A problem for much so-called modern art derives from the apparent separation of art from life—a separation that did not figure when art belonged to the enchantment of life by religious belief. Immanuel Kant thought of the aesthetic attitude as a kind of disinterested attention implying a separation, a distance between perceiver and artwork. The spectator looks at, listens to, or watches a painting, a concerto, or a dance. But the festival participant engages in the festival. The opposition is shaped for us by Nietzsche, in his Birth of Tragedy, who ascribes the two views to the symbolic character of the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus.

  The Apollonian conception of art involves only passive contemplation, whereas the Dionysian claims our participation in the art we are experiencing. Music is Dionysian when, for instance, a religious composition is enmeshed in the religious ceremonies for which it was written. Indeed the concert hall with its Bach recital, its concertgoers sitting in an audience, is on this view a degradation of the original intention, which was for music to be integrated into, and not simply accompany, the liturgy of the Mass. Music, perhaps more than the other arts, provides an idea of what enchantment means in terms of religious feeling. Many of Cohen’s more spiritual songs reflect this tendency quite clearly. It is this that is missing from the secular world and it is this that needs to be replaced by art if art is to re-enchant the world.

  Here the notion of magic is used to fill out the idea of an emotional engagement with the world. Dionysian magic, we might think, is not the audience we give the conjurer; nor is it the belief in some causal power that cannot be explained by science. It is the emotional coloring that we are able to give to the world in virtue of some activity we are engaged in. Think of the war dance of the warrior about to engage in battle. The war dance is undertaken in order to summon up courage and to bind the warriors together as a fighting unit, and to identify a people against its enemy. This form of magic can be found in the singing of national anthems before international sporting events, where it is again engaged in by nationalists to focus their unity and patriotism. The role of music in religion, then, can be seen as the magical engagement that colors emotional responses to the ceremony underway. You can hear Cohen calling to us in his “There is a War” and commanding us in “Dance Me to the End of Love.” It is to be heard as part of the activity that provides the ceremony with its celebratory force. Moreover, its contribution is integrated into the ceremony not as a mere adjunct, but as an internal constituent. (The ceremony wouldn’t be the ceremony it is without the music.)

  Sol y Sombra

  Sol y Sombra, literally “sun and shade,” is the name of a drink comprising equal measures of anise, a clear aniseed liqueur, and Spanish brandy, a dark spirit—the concoction served in a small brandy snifter. The name derives from the distribution of seats at the bullring. Sol designates the cheapest seats that are in sunshine throughout the corrida; sombra designates those that are shaded throughout. Sol y sombra are those that are in sunlight at the beginning of the afternoon and become shaded as the sun passes over. Sol y sombra, however, is also used as an epithet for the Spanish character—the two sides of the collective soul of a noble race. And we are well acquainted with the cliché of someone having a dark side.

  The duende is surely Spanish. Nevertheless it entered Spain via Gypsy or, to use the contemporary term, Roma culture from Egypt, most probably originating in India—as did “deep song” whose prototype is the Romani siguiriya. Deep song prefigures flamenco in Andalusian culture and, as such, claims a greater authenticity. It is unaccompanied and has the sound of a cry or a wail. Flamenco introduces the guitar and with it the possibility of harmony and polyphony. As Lorca tells us,

  The Gypsy siguiriya begins with a terrible scream that divides the landscape into two ideal hemispheres. It is the scream of dead generations, a poignant elegy for lost centuries, the pathetic evocation of love under other moons and other winds.

  Then the melodic phrase begins to pry open the mystery of the tones and remove the precious stone of the sob, a resonant tear on the river of the voice. No Andalusian can help but shudder on hearing that scream. (p. 4)

  We might wonder how this helps us to understand Leonard Cohen, a Montreal Jew—removed by thousands of miles and many degrees Fahrenheit from Andalucía. We should note that in 2011 Cohen was awarded Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. In his acceptance speech he remarked that he had brought with him his guitar, a forty-year-old Conde from Madrid; and that as a young poet he had studied the English poets but he was searching for a voice of his own. When he discovered Lorca he felt that Lorca had given him permission to find a voice. He also remarked that one day, early in the sixties, he was visiting his mother’s house and that in the park overlooked by the house was a young Spaniard playing flamenco guitar to a group of boys and girls. Cohen hired the young guitarist to teach him to play. The Spaniard tuned Cohen’s guitar and taught him six chords. Those six chords are not only the basis of many flamenco songs, they also were to become the basis of all Cohen’s songs. Everything, he told his audience, came from Spanish soil and he expressed his gratitude to the country to which he owed so much.

  So much for Spanish duende and the national character of Spain. However, we might recall that Torre, discussed by Lorca above, concurs with Goethe. In a footnote Lorca refers us to Conversations with Goethe, in which the author Eckermann finds it “a suitable occasion to speak of that secret, problematic power, which all men feel, but no philosopher explains, and over which the religious help themselves with consoling words. Goethe names this unspeakable world and life-enigma the Dæmonic (dämonisch)” (p. 357).

  A page earlier Eckermann comments that Goethe seeks an all-encompassing Deity, whose nature includes the demonic as part of His greatness. Some artists use this energy to make an art that speaks more for the whole than for the merely agreeable. This is familiar Cohen territory. According to Goethe, it is to be encountered more often with musicians than with painters. Goethe was writing from an abstract point of view; and so he wasn’t concerned with any particular nation but with the conditions of human existence. So far as Torre drew upon sources external to his native Spain, we can assume that he spoke of a more universal concept, such as the demonic, when giving shape to the duende.

  Nietzsche, late in life, was so taken by Bizet’s Carmen as to call it “perfection.” Perhaps as an example of international interest focusing upon a Spanish narrative, and taking Spanish musical themes within the score, the story of a beautiful Gypsy girl who worked in a Seville cigarette factory deeply affected the philosopher who looked for and championed the Dionysian in art: a German listening to a Frenchman’s music that captures the tragic life of a poor working girl in Andalucía. Carmen is duende.

  Art and Genius


  Surrealists like Lorca rejected the saccharine and duplicitous nature of bourgeois culture. Its sweetness they found sickening, a lie. Life is not sweet. Our sexual relationships are messy, painful, achingly insecure and sometimes catastrophic. That is the nature of the love song that celebrates what it is to be a vulnerable person reaching out to another. Leonard Cohen writes about the loneliness that each of us must feel at some time or other—unless we systematically fabricate some convoluted deception, not just of others but of ourselves as well. Bourgeois culture, to the Surrealists, is nothing short of such a deception. And so art, according to these artists, is a search for a certain kind of truth; a truth that, without the revelatory power of art, would remain undiscovered.

  In Kant’s Critique of Judgment there are much-discussed passages on artistic genius. Contrasted with science, which always involves rule-following, there are no rules that govern making art. Rather, it is as if nature speaks through the artist to provide us with original ideas that stand alone as original. They do not imitate previous works of art but serve as standards of taste for others to follow. Consider an art class in which students are asked to copy a master work. The professor looks at a number of them describing them as adequate copies. Then he sees a piece by one of the students and deems it promising. In this last case the student shows some originality. Their work is not a mere copy.

  Or consider the image from The Favourite Game with which we started this chapter. Shell expresses the view that nature, as represented by the trees, is the proper place to find beauty. She wants to look through the window at them when she wakes. This is the standard representation of a picture as a window we look through. But Breavman wants a different kind of beauty. He takes the room in which they will spend the night as the place for thinking about the world as something we’re just “passing through.” The ephemeral nature of the one-night rooming house is contained in the sadness of the image, as is the thought of a “froth of dust” under the bed—to be disturbed by achieving the saccharine niceness Shell desires. There is something more honest and truthful in Breavman’s acceptance of the “dirty plaster grapevine” that might fall in his eye.