Leonard Cohen and Philosophy

by Holt, Jason

  Cohen’s “Hallelujah” can be heard in this fashion and even in his “Suzanne” Cohen moves between religious confessions. As Judy Collins, who made “Suzanne” a hit with the recording on her album In My Life (1966), reflects on this ambiguity in Sylvie Simmons’s biography of Cohen, it almost seems “that a Jew from Canada can take the Bible to pieces and give the Catholics a run for their money on every story they ever thought they knew” (p. 150). As Dionysus, transcending the male, the female, the bourgeois, the counterculture, as well as the banal-exotic and ecstatic-erotic, perhaps above all we hear redemption as Cohen sings “Suzanne” with intimate pathos, a ballad of fascination and captivation, longing and rebuke, and this works, no matter whether Cohen sings it himself or Judy Collins does. Listening to the song, we’re almost there in our minds as Cohen describes the harbor with the sun like honey. This recalls the “honey sacrifice” we read about in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which alludes not only to the generosity of Zarathustra and echoes Empedocles’s own gift to the people of the sacrifice of an ox made of barley and honey, but also to the erotic significance of honey (Reading the New Nietzsche by Allison, pp. 165–68). Recalling the cycle of love and strife, we remember Empedocles and his honey sacrifice of the same love ruling the world of commingling, combining different elements. But what about difference? How does love engender strife? In Empedocles, when different things come together, it is by means of that coming together that they must eventually recoil and separate again.

  Thus we wonder about the “ladies of the harbor,” and if we listen to Nina Simone’s cover of “Suzanne” we can hear echoes of St. Augustine. Still we ask, as this tells us about the ladies, who is the “you” who receives the “tea and oranges”? “She” brings these to you. Is that “you” the singer remonstrating with himself? Is that “you” the listener? Both? Who—which you?—has always been her lover? Who’s speaking? Again, thinking of Nina Simone, we can note the impact of different covers of Cohen’s songs. In some covers—this is true well beyond Cohen—the singer seeks to channel the original voice (like singing along with the radio in the car for the karaoke effect) while other singers take their revenge on the song or seek to take it over for the sake of a hoped for new hit, an appropriation which sometimes brings back the song itself.

  In the case of Cohen, as in the case of a lot of pop music, just how much philosophy do we need? We’re able to identify the “she” in “Suzanne” (because the song carries her name: it’s about her). But in the case of other songs, like, Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” who the “you” is is still a debated topic, a referential issue charmingly, humorously, embarrassingly, illustrated in Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me, Maybe.” We may ask what such a song really means, but hearing the song turns out to be insufficient: we have to see the video to disambiguate the reference. Given a culture of acknowledgment and support of sexual difference, we get it and with the video, we get to see that the songwriter gets the point herself: her song is about open-mindedness, forswearing bias. Meaning is a little more problematic in the case of Psy’s “Gangnam Style.” Do we take that with or without Korean?

  Feminism and Nietzsche

  Are such questions of meaning more a matter for cultural or media studies than philosophy? Posing the question in this way can be convenient in Leonard Cohen’s case as it saves us the trouble of overthinking his songs. And then there are the questions of feminism. Both “Hallelujah” and “Suzanne,” but also quite a few others (even “Dance Me to the End of Love”), are characterized by a fond dissonance. May we call Cohen a feminist given his declared “love” of women? Like most such love interests, Cohen’s love of women, like Shakespeare’s talk of love in his sonnets, tends to be undone by its own, and almost immediate, distraction, and Cohen himself dispassionately tracks his own dissipation. Interest in the other sex as with the identification of being a ladies’ man traditionally betrays self-interest. Some authors make this point over on Cohen’s behalf: Cohen isn’t misogynistic because he’s really not talking about women, so goes the argument, but just about himself.

  As Nietzsche reminds us in Beyond Good and Evil, we are, as he was, caught coming and going, beyond correction, beyond change. For Nietzsche, and I would argue for Cohen too, the projection, the supposition, the fantasy that women could constitute the fairer or as Goethe supposed the “higher” sex, is also a way of dis-imagining their humanity: Simone de Beauvoir describes how the “other” sex, like the Jim Crow laws in the American South, does not merely distinguish, it diminishes, it distances. Nietzsche sees this “stupidity” in himself analyzing his own “convictions” as he speaks of incorrigible personal prejudices, set off in scare quotes, as so many “footsteps to self-knowledge, signposts to the problem which we are—more correctly to the great stupidity which we are, to the unteachable ‘right down deep’” (pp. 143–44). But Nietzsche also discredits the misogynistic basis of the ideal of the “eternal feminine” in both Wagner’s operas and Goethe’s Faust. But even Nietzsche himself projects himself upon “women,” seeing them from a distance and imagining that there can be discovered a better or a higher self, as Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science (his book titled for the tradition of courtly love). Cohen’s projections are steeped in this same ideal poetic tradition, and one can hardly refrain from pointing out that this tradition was a convenient refuge for him, as he tells Tim Footman: “I thought that all women inhabited this highly charged landscape that poetry seemed to arise from. It seemed to be the natural language of women and it seemed to me that if you wanted to address women . . . you had to do it with this highly charged language” (p. 184). The distance Cohen underscores here between himself and women is the same distance Nietzsche highlights in the title of his The Gay Science aphorism, “Women and their action at a distance” (p. 123). It covers alienation, fascination, ambivalence: all of which may be heard together with a wonder that runs throughout “Suzanne” and which together with a high religious tonality also forms the heart of “Hallelujah.”

  Formally, the referent for the second person singular pronoun “you” varies as it functions in “Suzanne” and “Hallelujah.” The “you” who speaks in Cohen’s “Suzanne” is the singer’s own self, sung between the singer and the selves of his compatriot listeners who know what he means: “you” meaning you the (male) listener and the singer, you who are and have been subjects of desire, subjects of salvation. So the “you” who sings and the “you” who hears “you have no love to give her” is also the one Suzanne gets “on her wavelength,” not through what she says, since she doesn’t really speak, half crazy as she is, which is also the reason the “you” who is Cohen, or the listeners who identify with him, can wish to “spend the night beside her.” Cohen’s listeners have been there and understand, they also understand how, at least for the space of the moment (but this is how we have Eros in the first place, this is how Penia seduces Poros), it’s already a given that, as the song continues, “you’ve always been her lover.”

  At the same time, Jesus was a sailor—as Cohen says—and again we may refer to Nina Simone to help us here and we remember too that it can be no accident that Cohen’s backup singers are often gospel singers.

  The erotic moves through the exotic to the divine and then, over-familiar—but what else is it to love?—Cohen, just as he will in “Hallelujah,” seems to take the side of the divine. Suzanne, as she speaks in the shadows of the song sung to the “you” who is addressed, has the audacity to claim compassion of us, not for ourselves, but for Jesus, broken “before the sky would open”—specifically, Good Friday at 3 PM on Golgotha hill in Palestine.

  As a Jew, Cohen reminds us to feel for Christ, not to be a Christian necessarily but to get the point about Christ, and even Nietzsche, that consummate anti-Christian, gets that too, writing as he does in The Antichrist: “There was only one Christian, and he died on the cross” (p. 151). And we’re at Golgotha again.

  Ecumenicism has its limit however, most partic
ularly when it comes to the erotic and “Suzanne” makes this point as clearly as “Hallelujah”—especially as Nina Simone sings it. And this can work—this is a point Beauvoir makes in The Second Sex—because male and female, male or female, gender here and gender there, all of us listen with men’s ears. And that’s the point, again, of “Call Me, Maybe” (this is exactly why the song works) and it’s why Psy’s “Gangnam Style,” offensive as it should be, works for listeners across the board, blowing viral video stats out of the park.

  Thus Cohen’s “you” in “Suzanne,” even as this refers to the singer himself, taking the perspective of Jesus’s touch, of Suzanne’s touch, isn’t the same “you” invoked when we get to his “Hallelujah” where he sings of David’s secret chord and then reproaches some other “you” for not really caring for music.

  The “do ya” stings. This “you” is a target, the object, and is neither the singer nor the male listener. This is another Other, one who in time undergoes unwanted changes from the “time you let me know,” to the time, now, when “you never show it to me.” This one flies a flag on a victory arch, or wants to, wears its heart on its sleeve, tells others too much, especially when the singer himself is already justifying other conquests by appealing to higher ideals, since love isn’t “a victory march.”

  This “you,” who doesn’t care for music, withholds, being at the same time a “you” who overreaches, a female. Her desire is the desire of the one who desires desire, who doesn’t desire any object as such but desires instead to be desired: to be the loved object, and who wishes to announce the fact of that desire, the facticity of being loved, to all and sundry, a “you” who needs diamonds and wedding parties (or at least a marble arch) to do it. At the same time, this is the woman who “only speaks poetry” and who, of course, suffers what happens to anyone who only speaks poetry. Let’s remember T.S. Eliot’s Cumaean Sybil, who gets “old and wrinkled” while Cohen stays (and pushing eighty he’s still, wonderfully, thankfully, there in his mind) “seventeen.”

  The point to be made can be rephrased via the sweet spirit of Jonathan Richman’s “I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar,” and in this same gendered sense, now necessarily so, it can’t be any woman’s voice that can take over and sing “Hallelujah,” of all of Cohen’s songs. But and arguably beyond Cohen’s own voicing, even beyond the late Jeff Buckley—the usual saint of the song—and beyond even Rufus Wainwright, father of Cohen’s granddaughter, yet another Canadian singer, k.d. lang, has achieved just this, not just once but again and again. When lang sings “Hallelujah” we get clear hints of other versions, the beauty of Buckley’s rendering of John Cale’s indispensable phrasing of the song and Wainwright’s recollections of the same modalities (The Hallelujah Effect, p. 79). But it’s k.d. lang who lets us hear the chords that are the key to the song (she sings so that both words and chords are there to be heard) to the extent that listening to the crafted structure of the song, Cohen’s poem as a poem, which is to say, Cohen’s music as music, turns out to make all the difference.

  Who

  Like the Hallelujah psalm praising the name of God, Cohen’s “Who by Fire” recounts the New Year prayer, Unetanneh Tokef—who will be inscribed. This is the meaning of the blessing of the New Year Greeting, L’shanah tovah—may you be inscribed. To be inscribed in this sense means that the name of the person so greeted might be added to the Book of Life for the coming year. The ultimate issue is fate, one’s fate, one’s destiny, and the destiny for each and every one of us.

  The judgment of the high holy days, the judgment of the New Year, is the judgment of the Lord, as all are brought before the Lord. As a prayer to grace the holiest days of the year, it is attributed to the medieval rabbi Kalonymus ben Meshullam who, in good traditional fashion, reports hearing it in a dream from Rabbi Amnon of Mainz, a moving liturgical psalm, but I quote only that part of it that bears on what Cohen sings:

  On Rosh Hashanah it is written,

  On Yom Kippur it is sealed,

  How many shall pass away and how many shall be born,

  Who shall live and who shall die,

  Who shall reach the end of his days and who shall not,

  Who shall die by fire and who by water. . . .

  (The High Holiday Prayer Book, pp. 189–90)

  Unetanneh Tokef recounts the judgment of the Lord, between salvation and doom. What is decided in the new year is fate. And because this is a prayer what’s also emphasized is hope: the chance of mercy. As the logic of the high holy days sets Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, to answer the conclusion of this Rosh Hashanah New Year prayer: “But Teshuvah, Tefillah, and Tzedekah, Penitence, Prayer, and Deeds of Mercy annul the severity of judgment.”

  Cohen’s “Who by Fire” repeats this and we may find in it echoes of Anaximander, Heraclitus, and therefore, as Nietzsche tells us, also a tragic ethics, as Cohen hears all the ways of coming to one’s own death, such as poets and songwriters like to count these kinds or modes of judgment. These disjoint ways of life and death aren’t the flower-power, petal plucking, “she loves me, she loves me not” of more pragmatic (and one might say justly unattributed) rot-gut verse: “For if she will, she will, you may depend on’t; And if she won’t, she won’t; so there’s an end on’t.”

  The beauty of the love disjunction, in all its insight and all its calm (a calm no lover ever concedes or seems to believe for a moment: the beloved will or won’t, loves me or doesn’t) is its illustration of both the principle of contradiction and the same principle of identity which is yet more fundamental to logic and mathematics, namely tautology—as if one needed that. In the same way, different in spirit and accent from Derrida’s reflection that every promised yes is affirmed again, “yes, yes,” the philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser proved the value of counting positive statements twice, yeah, yeah, as taken twice they make a negative, the Beatles already one step ahead when it came to love, sing “She Loves You”—count the yeahs—yeah, yeah, yeah.

  The Judeo-Christian world is fond of threes, and if the Lord decides who is inscribed and who not, there is mercy, forbearance, what Hegel’s dialectic saves (Aufhebung, usually translated as “synthesis,” also means what is preserved): “Penitence, Prayer, and Deeds of Mercy annul the severity of judgment.” But Cohen’s “Who by Fire” echoes not only the Rosh Hashanah prayer but the words of the American poet Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice” as Frost himself alludes to judgment and the end of days and what he remembers of the touch of “desire.” Frost’s “desire” resonates with Cohen, who always holds with passion even if from the same first-person perspective Frost emphasizes, and there’s the doom once again. “Who by Fire” echoes this favoring, it also speaks desire (echoes of “Ring of Fire”) but the high tone is wholly prayer, the prayer of the days of awe.

  Towards Death

  Cohen’s verse tells the various ways of perishing, as if there’s a simple list of the ways to go. Inside Cohen’s lyrics is a recognition of the singularizing solitude Nietzsche emphasizes in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks: “To walk along a lonely street is part of the philosopher’s nature” (p. 66). This is why Heidegger can tell Hannah Arendt that thinking is a “lonely business,” as such solitude can account for both the destiny and the obscurity of the philosopher. The distinction may also be made with regard to the arch-lonely Heraclitus as Nietzsche writes: “The feeling of solitude, however that pierced the Ephesian hermit of the temple of Artemis, we can only intuit when we are freezing on wild desolate mountains of our own” (p. 67).

  We can sense this then only when we, too, belong to what Nietzsche, alluding to Schopenhauer, calls “the republic of creative minds: each giant calling to his brother through the desolate intervals of time” (p. 32). Nietzsche emphasizes solitude here, the same solitude that may be heard in the first-person focus of Cohen’s reflections.

  The song’s coda—“who shall I say is calling?”—is quasi-Augustinian. The same eros of desire holds between the creature and the creat
or, where what’s to be noted is the attunement of creator to creature, the call is issued not from the abandoned soul, crying out for his god in the wilderness. This isn’t Elijah, this is a post-Christian Jew, who keeps all his piety in the space and in the midst of every advantage of Western, all-too-Christian culture. As Nietzsche reminds us in The Antichrist (and we always need reminding, jealous as we are of our sectarian differences), “A Christian is only a Jew of a broader confession” (p. 159).

  The conclusion of “Who by Fire” alludes to awe as it lists, again and again, the various ways to be called from life. The solitude (“Who in solitude . . . ?”) is the “who” that Cohen changes from the original Rosh Hashanah prayer, transposing this musical liturgical poem to the tonic rhythms of today’s music, speaking, as surely as the tradition itself, to our hearts. What Cohen sets to music is not the subject “you,” not the object “you,” but rather the singularizing “who,” the who that we are in our uniqueness, as death, as Heidegger reminds us, cannot but singularize each one of us in its claim, at the hour, at the moment of its claim.

  IV

  Songs of Literature

  12

  Politics in Beautiful Losers

  STEVEN BURNS

  A few years ago I was on a bus. I was re-reading Beautiful Losers. A stranger got on, and took the seat beside me. I looked down at my page, flipped to another page, and then found myself closing the cover. I didn’t want the stranger to see that I was reading so much “fuck” and “shit.” There’s no doubt that the book could be charged with obscenity. One critic wrote, “I have just finished reading Beautiful Losers, and I’ve had to wash my mind.” People who just saw the book as obscene wanted it banned from libraries and bookstores. That is one way of reading Cohen’s novel, but it is not a very good reading. I’ll call it the Obscenity Reading.