by Holt, Jason
The need for the other in establishing the self is paradoxical: in order for you to differentiate yourself from the other and to experience your own agency, you need to be recognized by the other. This is “the paradox of recognition.” Psychologist Jessica Benjamin, who has examined the implications of this need for the other, writes “At the very moment we come to understand the meaning of ‘I, myself,’ we are forced to see the limitations of that self” (p. 33). The paradox was first recognized as such by Hegel in 1807 (p. 178), who understood recognition to be essential to our development as social beings, and self-consciousness to exist in and for itself when, and only by the fact that, it is acknowledged by another. Some version of the paradox may be alluded to in Cohen’s song “Who by Fire,” which is based on a Hebrew prayer that is chanted on the Day of Atonement. The prayer recites the various ways in which you might leave this world: some will go by fire, some by water, some by sword, and so on. In “Who by Fire,” Cohen asks, “Who in solitude, who in this mirror / . . . And who shall I say is calling?”
As many psychologists have pointed out, fathers and other primary caretakers—not just mothers—can be magical mirrors for young children. Moreover, other adults and older siblings who are capable of responding to young children in this special way can serve as mirrors. In Leonard Cohen’s song, Suzanne possesses and exhibits this special sensitivity when she holds the mirror for the children who “are leaning out for love” and perhaps, as “Our Lady of the Harbour,” for the rest of us as well.
The Epistemic Value of Love
Being experienced and reflected by others in the way that I described above is essential to the maturational process, but the value of such reflection doesn’t diminish upon reaching maturity. On the contrary, true and accurate reflection is a central component of friendship and love, and it’s a primary reason why we value these kinds of relationships. Love in its various forms is one means by which we can acquire self-knowledge or self-understanding, and in particular, knowledge of our values, dispositions, and concerns. Episteme is the Greek word for knowledge, and to say that love is a pathway to self-knowledge is to say that love has, among other benefits, epistemic value. Our ability to see and accurately reflect each other is central to love in that it enables us to form relationships based on mutual trust and respect, without which genuine love isn’t possible.
In her discussion of the epistemic significance of love, Neera K. Badhwar reminds us that Aristotle thought that friends served as “mirrors of the soul” for each other. She then draws a parallel between the mirroring that takes place between friends and the mirroring that occurs in a parent-child relationship. For a friend to be such a mirror, he or she must reflect the person accurately and without distortion, and do so reliably over the course of the friendship. Love relationships, whether of friendship or romantic love, reveal ourselves to ourselves in that we are seen and affirmed in the eyes of the other (“Love,” p. 57). This mirroring seems to be an essential part of the friendships at the heart of Cohen’s two novels: between Breavman and Krantz in The Favourite Game and between the narrator and F. in Beautiful Losers.
A friend or lover does not merely reflect you as you are in the moment. As in the case of a parent-child relationship, the gaze of the one who is the mirror does more than reflect the beloved truly and accurately: the mirroring person also shows the beloved what he or she as mirror sees. Cohen’s poem “Beneath My Hands” quite explicitly expresses a lover’s desire to act as such a mirror (“I want my body and my hands / to be pools / for your looking and laughing”). Like a sensitive parent, the friend or lover is a magical mirror who offers you an interpretation of yourself in which you may discover or construct an aspect of you. In this sense, the friend or lover reflects the person you are becoming as well as the person you are and have been.
As Badhwar and others have observed, the acknowledgment of a person’s potential by a friend or lover can help to bring about that very potential. This idea is given to us in Plato’s Symposium, where love is seen as the power by which we bring forth the beauty of another by recognizing it. The possibility of bringing out a person’s potential rests on an acknowledgment of that person’s inherent value as a human being and the valuing of his personal qualities for their own sake. “To love is not only to respond to value but also, thereafter, to seek value and to expect to find it. This optimistic, value-seeking spirit makes love imaginative and discerning, thereby enabling the lover to perceive potentials that even the beloved cannot see” (“Love,” p. 55).
In a love relationship or friendship, a union is formed through the history of interactions between two people that potentially transforms them both. Love is not just an emotional state that is present at a particular time; it represents a complex pattern of interactions between two people involving emotional interdependence and appreciative response. As the philosopher Amelie Rorty notes, love exhibits historicity: it arises from and is shaped by a pattern of dynamic interactions between people. The pattern of interactions that constitutes the relationship shapes and transforms the lovers (Friendship, pp. 73–77). You are who you are in the relationship because of the particular other, a particularity that is known and experienced by you in virtue of the ways that it is expressed.
The Mystery of the Mirror
We can imagine Suzanne as Leonard Cohen might have seen her, sitting across the table from him in her apartment in the late afternoon. The fading light through the window beside her illuminates her face: undertones of rose and terre verte. During a pause in the conversation, perhaps she gets him on her wavelength. Then she lets the river answer.
Leonard Cohen and Suzanne Verdal did not sleep together. But in a 1994 radio interview with the BBC, Cohen admits to touching her perfect body with his mind “because there was no other opportunity.” Although her relationship with Villaincourt had ended by the time she moved to the Montreal waterfront, circumstances didn’t permit a romantic relationship with Cohen (I’m Your Man, p. 129).
As a professional dancer and the object of Cohen’s desire, Suzanne no doubt had a “perfect body.” The facts and circumstances together initially suggest a somewhat literal interpretation of the line of the song in which Cohen says, “you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind.” But this objectified physical appreciation of Suzanne can’t be the basis for her trust, which is what the other line of the couplet asserts as having been secured by your (his) touch of the mind. Nor is the body-as-object plausibly what “perfect body” refers to in the lines where first Jesus, and then Suzanne, touches your perfect body. The body-perfect must ultimately be understood as the embodied subject, in other words, the person incarnate.
When Jesus touches your perfect body with his mind, and so you come to think maybe you’ll trust him, the body that he touches is the mortal you. The trust that is thereby engendered is the result of Jesus’s true and accurate reflection of you—not just certain aspects of you, but the “perfect” you. In this context, perhaps you as you were made in the image of God and you as you might come to be realized through fellowship with God. This touching of the body by the mind would be a form of seeing and understanding; if it is an expression of love, it is an expression of agape, the Greek term for a kind of love that is unconditional and spiritual. In God’s eyes, people are intrinsically valuable, and they have equal worth. Agape recognizes the inherent value of persons as such, and to be seen in this way by Jesus is to be understood and valued for your own sake as a person. (On the other hand, there is textual evidence for both a Christian interpretation of Jesus and an understanding of him, by Cohen, as a fellow anguished Jew. If Jesus is taken to be the latter, his touching of your mind may be an expression of philia, that is to say, brotherly love.)
In the case of friendship or a love relationship, however, people value each other not only for their intrinsic worth as persons but for their individuality. When Suzanne touches your perfect body with her mind, she sees and appreciates you as a unique human being. What makes you
unique are your abilities, dispositions, values, and concerns, and their concrete style of expression (“Love,” p. 64). Suzanne reflects truly those qualities that make you who you are. You know that you can trust her because she values and respects you.
Suzanne touches the embodied you with her mind. The body that is touched is not merely the body taken as object; it is the body as the field of physical activity and the vehicle of expression of the “I” as subject. When she touches your perfect body with her mind, she sees your beauty as it might be physically expressed in erotic love. She sees you through a history of shared perceptions, imaginative thoughts, and feelings—a history that bears traces of your past experiences and which portends the future. And she holds you in her mind. To touch someone’s perfect body is, among other things, to play the role of the magical mirror, the mirror that reflects not only what is but what can be.
Suzanne sets her cup of tea down on the table. Daylight has vanished, and in its place is the flame of the candle that she lit for you when you arrived. As she lifts her head, her eyes meet yours. In her gaze, you find what you will always want again.1
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1 Thanks to Peter Julian, Maria Kowalski, Nicholas Pappas, and Barbara Pizer for helpful conversations. Special thanks are due to April Selley for interpretive assistance with the Judeo-Christian elements of “Suzanne” and to Jason Holt, the editor of this volume, for many helpful editorial suggestions.
10
Leonard Cohen on Romantic Love
SIMON RICHES
Leonard Cohen offers a conception of romantic love from a distinctly spiritual perspective. With characteristic emphasis on the poetics of love and relationships, we might say that Cohen worships female beauty to the extent that people of faith encounter a religious experience. Juxtaposed with this spiritualization of love, Cohen’s songs also embody a conflicted picture of relationships, where his protagonists enter into relationships with each other that are, somewhat paradoxically, at once both distant and close. In his songs, military metaphors abound and the conflict Cohen depicts is dark, solitary, and often underpinned by degrees of irrationality and self-deception.
The topic of self-deception raises a paradox about rationality that has long perplexed philosophers, namely: how is it possible to lie to yourself? After all, how can we concurrently hold one belief and another that contradicts it? Cohen’s songs express a spiritualized conception of romantic love and show that Cohen addresses the paradox of self-deception by offering an understanding of romantic love that goes beyond reason; it is based instead on faith. In doing so, he rejects a pessimistic determinism in relationships and embraces freedom, authenticity, and irony. The irony in Cohen’s songs is the natural consequence of the conflict.
The Erotic and the Spiritual
There’s a striking case of ambiguity in “Night Comes On” where he recounts an episode of being locked in a kitchen, taking to religion, and wondering about the length of time “she” would stay. One possible clarification of this rather suggestive line is that religion is a woman, or even women in general. In other words, his relations with women—and indeed female beauty—engender a kind of religious experience, albeit of a more hedonistic kind, which is to be accorded something approaching worship. In so doing, Cohen follows a tradition in the history of art, literature, poetry, and cinema, bringing to mind, for instance, the goddess Venus, Helen of Troy, and the idea of the femme fatale as a contemporary goddess. We might look no further than “Light as the Breeze” to see this played out in full. In this song, Cohen is literally worshipping a woman on his knees, in an encounter that appears to eventually bring about salvation. In the early 1990s, Cohen said: “I don’t think a man ever gets over that first sight of the naked woman. I think that’s Eve standing over him, that’s the morning and the dew on the skin. And I think that’s the major content of every man’s imagination. All the sad adventures in pornography and love and song are just steps on the path towards that holy vision” (quoted in Simmons’s I’m Your Man, p. 20). Countless Cohen songs concern a woman as the central subject; and, through endless eulogizing, Cohen invokes the idea of something transcendental in his appreciation of female beauty. The reference to blessings from heaven in “Light as the Breeze” is matched in songs like “Our Lady of Solitude,” where Cohen describes light emanating from a woman’s body. Notably, Cohen’s biographer Sylvie Simmons remarks on his “flair for fusing the erotic and spiritual” (p. 493), and goes on to recount how this has been an enduring theme right through to his advanced years.
There Is a War
Ultimately, however, Cohen’s fusion of the erotic and the spiritual comes at a cost. Even a song like “Came So Far for Beauty,” despite the protagonist’s persistence, is about all that is left behind. There’s a sense in which Cohen finds his view of female beauty almost overwhelming, even unsustainable. In “Hallelujah,” he places female beauty in the spotlight once again, this time observing it under the moonlight, and explaining how we can be simply overthrown by it. This idea is a recurring theme in Cohen’s love songs. A notable example occurs in “The Traitor,” in which Cohen draws a distinction between dreamers and men of action, and clearly aligns himself with the former camp. These are presented by Cohen as mutually exclusive categories in terms of one’s attitude to love and beauty. The dreamers and men of action are described as being at war; and, for a while at least, the dreamers seem to be winning the battle. Cohen is the great champion of the poet’s perspective and, here, we find him celebrating the prominence of the romantic idea of the dreamer; but, as the song goes on, the celebration wanes. By the end of the song, stung by his own falsity, Cohen tells us that he has been openly labeled a traitor.
Cohen’s distinction between dreamers and men of action brings to mind those who fantasize and entertain “higher” concerns, on the one hand, and those who take a pragmatic stance with tangible outcomes, on the other. We might broadly think of this distinction in terms of the philosophical conceptions of rationality and irrationality. Cohen’s protagonists, in their role as dreamers, can be taken to be endorsing something irrational in their transcendental appreciation of romantic love and beauty. However, the cost is a fragmentary picture of relationships, where things don’t run smoothly, despite Cohen’s apparent immersion. Often Cohen’s songs leave us with a beautifully captured but ultimately conflicted sense of distance and loss. Think of the bittersweet “thanks” in “Famous Blue Raincoat,” with so much conflict beneath the surface of simple gratitude; the resentment with which Cohen mocks the master in “Master Song”; and the weariness with which Cohen warns against the dealer in “The Stranger Song.” Cohen can cast himself as both close confidante and distant outsider, where the outsider is often also the victim, as in “Death of a Ladies’ Man,” or in “Master Song,” which, like so many of Cohen’s best love songs, is about a love triangle, this time employing metaphorical characters of master, pupil, and prisoner. The distance, here, provides Cohen with the space to reflect, but it also yields safety.
So, despite Cohen’s protagonists’ all-encompassing faith in romance and beauty, their irrationality can also leave them blinded by beauty and, as he describes in “The Traitor,” literally among the enemies of love.
Self-Deception of the Dreamer
The irrationality of Cohen’s dreamer accounts for why he is able to occupy positions of both closeness and distance within these relationships. This irrationality may sometimes seem to veer into cases of self-deception. There are clear-cut cases of contradictory thinking in Cohen’s songs: the needing and not needing of “Chelsea Hotel #2,” and in his poem “You Do Not Have to Love Me,” where he writes, “I prayed that you would love me / and that you would not love me.”
But the self-deception Cohen depicts often probes much deeper into the heart of relationships. In “Chelsea Hotel #2,” Cohen conjures up a beautiful sense of reminiscence as he remembers the woman he was with, but the final verse contradicts our notions of love. Cohen suggests
that despite the “love,” she was essentially just another. This is confirmed in the final line where he tells her that he doesn’t think of her that often. Despite the heightened sense of spiritual love, it appears to still be disposable.
Perhaps even more significantly, in “Famous Blue Raincoat,” Cohen has a striking relationship with his “brother”—who he also describes as his “killer”—one that appears so contradictory given the way Cohen seems at once to want to appreciate his killer, despite the fact that there’s so much underlying doubt, deliberating whether he misses or forgives him, even oddly approving of his rival’s thwarting him. Here, Cohen captures the uncertainty of a complex relationship beautifully. Crucial to this is the way he suggestively depicts his wavering protagonist as a self-deceiver: as someone who holds contradictory beliefs at the same time; or, as philosophers have sometimes put it, as being able to lie to yourself.
In so doing, Cohen draws our attention to the paradox of self-deception. How can we lie to ourselves, since that would mean holding one belief and at the same time holding another that contradicts it? It might seem natural to think that there is—or ought to be—an underlying unity to the human mind, to a person’s overall system of thoughts and beliefs, a unity characterized by consistency and coherence. Following the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who characterized human beings as rational animals, the possibility of concurrently held contradictory beliefs doesn’t seem to fit with this intuitive picture of our minds. After all, surely I can’t be in a position where I’m genuinely able to lie to myself, can I?