Leonard Cohen and Philosophy

by Holt, Jason

  Indeed, in Cohen’s writing about women, as in all of his subject matter, loss and sorrow preside over even the most dazzling passions, as if he knows that ultimately he will be alone with his thoughts and words—as if he knows he must be. “Tower of Song” perfectly conveys the crucially necessary loneliness that artists (or philosophers) must not only face, but also embrace with a devotion that painfully wrenches them away from other affections, over and over, in an endless cycle of intimacy and retreat to the cloistered chamber of creation.

  From early songs such as “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,” to middle-period compositions like “Take This Waltz” and “Closing Time,” and especially “Love Itself,” Cohen discovers the most profound expressions of love in its inevitable passing. The poem, or the song, contains the finest and most beautiful aspects of the physical relationship, given unassailable substance in words found only in the silence of his “little room.” And this room in his aesthetic tower also offers him the sanctuary to apprehend and comprehend the sometimes twisted passions, obsessions, complications, and heartbreaks of love.

  Creation

  The creative crucible, for Cohen and Schopenhauer, takes precedence over worldly matters. Each, in his way, retreats to advance ideas about the deceptive limitations of the physical sphere. Each recognizes, one as practitioner, the other as practicing observer, the power of art to transcend the anguish of what Schopenhauer calls “the Will” and Cohen, “the World” (“Night Comes On”) or “the Big World” (Flowers for Hitler). Both Cohen and Schopenhauer commit themselves fully to explorations of the Will, or World, that is each of us in our urges and desires.

  But even the transformative power of thinking and writing in the privacy of a room far away from the wants and whims that their willed worlds exact can seem insufficient, and Cohen and Schopenhauer then look to spiritual practice as a possibly greater solution to mundane frustration and suffering.

  In 1994, after a tour to promote his recently released album The Future, Cohen retreated to the Mount Baldy Zen Buddhist monastery in the San Gabriel Mountains of California, where he had spent much time periodically during the previous decade. He was in poor health, reeling from shattered relationships and intense depression, and he saw the monastic life as a chance to reclaim his life. For five years, that seemed to be the case: Cohen fulfilled the rigorous daily routine, was ordained as a monk and given the monastic name Jikan, which, ironically, means “silent one.”

  But he could not stay silent; he wrote poem after poem during his time in the monastery, and in the end found it impossible to yield himself to a lifetime of Buddhist practice. Although he did say later that his Judaism was strengthened by his experience as a Zen monk, there was no doubt that he would choose a single path, and no doubt which one it would be. It’s difficult to counter many generations of rabbinical practice; it’s hard to ignore the fact that one’s own name, Cohen, means “priest.”

  His biblical references are numerous and thrillingly proprietary, and so are his sometimes anguished, sometimes wry allusions to Jewishness in the post-Holocaust world. Buddhist principles do arise in Cohen’s work, as in the enjoinder in “Anthem” to forget our “perfect offering,” but Cohen’s spiritual allegiance and practice now belong to the faith he grew up in, the faith of his ancestors; both his grandfathers were rabbis.

  In an extraordinary conversation with American author and editor Arthur Kurzweil, just after his Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs (1993) came out, Cohen responds to Kurzweil’s question about a certain line from “The Future”:

  Oh, I am the little Jew who wrote the Bible. I am the little Jew who wrote the Bible. “You don’t know me from the wind. You never will, you never did”—I’m saying this to the nations. I’m the little Jew who wrote the Bible. I’m that little one. . . .

  A confident people is not exclusive. A great religion affirms other religions. A great culture affirms other cultures. A great nation affirms other nations. A great individual affirms other individuals, validates the being-ness of others and the vitality. That’s the way I feel about this thing. (from the Cohen and Kurzweil conversation, titled “I Am the Little Jew Who Wrote the Bible,” p. 23)

  Schopenhauer would have fervently and fiercely disagreed. In a disturbing 1850 essay, “On the Sufferings of the World,” he writes: “Judaism is inferior to any other form of religious doctrine professed by a civilized nation; and it is quite in keeping with this that it is the only one which presents no trace whatever of any belief in the immortality of the soul” (p. 14). Within the “despotic theism” of the Old Testament, he contends, humanity is ruled by law alone; the New Testament liberates man from the yoke of law and offers the kingdom of grace, attained by faith, love of neighbor (except, perhaps, adherents of Judaism), and self-sacrifice.

  But most practicing Christians don’t come off much better under Schopenhauer’s cutting gaze; their only mitigation is that they’re irretrievably trapped by the base justice and rigid rules of the Old Testament, which, if done away with, might lead to the true “path of redemption from the evil of the world.” The path of Christ, he says, “is undoubtedly asceticism, however your protestants and rationalists may twist it to suit their purpose” (“Sufferings of the World,” p. 16). Asceticism, to Schopenhauer, is the denial of the will to live—a highly desirable outcome: “To those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours, with its suns and galaxies, is—nothing.” (Will and Representation I, p. 412).

  Self-abnegation, Schopenhauer’s interpretation of the practice of Christ and certain saints, and of the Eastern mystics, offers a means to neutralize the horrendously cruel, violent, ubiquitous effect of the Will he sees as the all-powerful force ruling the physical world. Although this isn’t particularly Cohen’s view, he’d likely be less resistant to it than to living completely or permanently in the manner prescribed—discipline, he would probably argue, is quite a different process from self-denial.

  Even more influential on Schopenhauer than his biblical readings were his explorations of the Upanishads, the founding texts of Hinduism, which he first read in his mid-twenties, pored over all his life, and referred to widely as the summit of wisdom (for example, Will and Representation I, p. 355). He was also, like Cohen, drawn to Buddhist teachings, in particular that life entails suffering rooted in desire or ignorance, and that the cessation of suffering is possible. In his major work on ethics, On the Basis of Morality (1837), he gives voice to a fundamentally Buddhist principle of liberation from anguish within “the everyday phenomenon of compassion . . . the immediate participation, independent of all ulterior considerations, primarily in the suffering of another, and thus in the prevention or elimination of it” (p. 144).

  But what Schopenhauer fails to address is that in religious practice the world over, fulfillment and joy are attainable through the very processes he touts as ideals. Buddha’s Third Noble Truth says not only that suffering can be overcome, but also that happiness and liberation can thus be achieved in oneself and in the service of others. Christ is cited in John 16:24 as saying: “Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full.” Or, from the Vedantic tradition: “Seek happiness not in the objects of sense; realize that happiness is within yourself.”

  Asceticism, in the great traditions, is not so much the eradication of self—of the Will, as Schopenhauer would have it—as the “extinguishing” (the literal meaning of the Buddhist term “nirvana”) of the flames of greed, hatred, and delusion that attack and distort a person’s character, that promote misery and disable happiness. Schopenhauer spent a lifetime brilliantly and meticulously mapping the very real misery and suffering of the human condition—of the world as he thought it to be—but it’s as if he couldn’t bring himself even to recognize, let alone seek, joy in spiritual practice any more than in any other realm. Not for him the open-hearted religious explorations that Cohen has undertaken over the decades—or the celebratory reaffirmation of his ancestral faith in rec
ent years.

  Schopenhauer had little to celebrate. He was denied fame until the last decade of his life; he was unrelievedly unhappy in love; and he lived alone from 1833 until his death in Frankfurt in 1860—except for the company of a series of poodles, one of which he named Atman, the Hindu term for the essential self, the eternal spirit.

  An Imagined Dialogue

  Suppose Leonard Cohen and Arthur Schopenhauer could meet—in a third room, as it were—and discuss the matters that unite them and set them apart. Since this encounter is imaginary, obstacles such as geography and language wouldn’t exist. The two men would have some prior knowledge of each other and could freely discuss will and world and word, art and asceticism, love and, yes, even death, as known to each of them on—at present—either side of the great divide:

  LEONARD: It’s extraordinary, Arthur, that we share, at opposite ends of life, a unique relationship with the date September 21st.

  ARTHUR: The autumnal equinox, which is supposed to be a day equally divided between light and darkness.

  LEONARD: Supposed to be? Oh, perhaps you mean that you dwell in a realm where such distinctions no longer signify.

  ARTHUR: Not at all, for if that were so, this dialogue could not take place.

  LEONARD: I’d say that I stand corrected, except that I’m seated.

  ARTHUR: Very well then. I could elucidate—

  LEONARD: It was meant as a joke.

  ARTHUR: Oh, I see. I’m afraid humor usually eludes me. I think of such talk as an outgrowth of boredom we’re driven to as an anesthetic against the ravages of Time.

  LEONARD: Yet here we are, outside the grip of Time, at least for a time.

  ARTHUR: You are a poet.

  LEONARD: Yes, after a fashion.

  ARTHUR: A poet who delves into the dark places of life, the suffering that is the nature of everyday existence, the violence of individuation.

  LEONARD: Yes, and the luminous ones as well.

  ARTHUR: There’s that “darkness and light” again. Good and evil. As if in the everyday physical world such distinctions are possible. Some observable, measurable celestial point—an equinox, during whose perfect balance the warring nations suddenly lay down their swords and shields—

  LEONARD: (singing): “Down by the riverside, down by the riverside. I ain’t gonna study war no more.”

  ARTHUR: What is that? It’s beautiful.

  LEONARD: It’s a traditional gospel song. Inspired by the Bible. Isaiah: “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

  ARTHUR: Oh.

  LEONARD: My goodness, Arthur, surely you have something more to say than “Oh,” given your extensive commentary on the “Jewish Bible” and the hierarchy of the races.

  ARTHUR: Ah, Leonard. A poet, a musician—which I applaud, by the way—and a Jew? Of course. Of course I know who you are, in this state of knowing-beyond-knowing I find myself in, suddenly embarrassed, suddenly ashamed—not feelings I was wont to experience in life, yet corporeal sensations all the same.

  LEONARD: Embarrassed? Ashamed? Haven’t we all had such feelings? And couldn’t they be part of the foundation of the compassion you wrote about so eloquently? Couldn’t your state of knowing-beyond-knowing be the fertile ground in which that great tree grows—“And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations”?

  ARTHUR: Yes, Socrates. (Leonard laughs heartily.) I know that passage; it’s from the Book of Revelation.

  LEONARD: New Testament.

  ARTHUR: New Testament, Old Testament—they seem interwoven now. I’m not sure why I saw such a rift between them, and between Jew and Gentile, and between the sexes, and the races. . . . Perhaps, in my ceaseless and intense efforts to understand the forces of the Will and the anguish of the individual, I was as much an example of that conflict as the rest of humanity that I was describing.

  LEONARD: That’s a good insight.

  ARTHUR: And then, I was so unhappy. . . .

  LEONARD: I understand unhappiness very well. I don’t know any artists, thinkers, creators who haven’t been unhappy. It’s a question of having to express the most difficult matters of life.

  ARTHUR: But you’re not unhappy now.

  LEONARD: No. But it wasn’t some great act or event that lifted the sadness of a lifetime. It was more a recognition of and appreciation for the ordinary gifts of daily life—a garden in bloom, my daughter’s smile—

  ARTHUR: I do regret not having had a family. My relationships were terrible, destructive. It’s quite probable that my diatribes against women arose from those experiences, not that it’s any excuse.

  LEONARD: Again, as you said, your own philosophy provided exceptional perceptions of the nature of suffering and conflict, and the means, like compassion, to transcend them. But it seems you were not able to partake of them in your own life. Or even now.

  ARTHUR: Even now? Even now that I understand?

  LEONARD: But do you extend your understanding of compassion to yourself?

  ARTHUR: Do you?

  LEONARD: (laughing): You must be part Jewish, Arthur, to answer a question with another question like that. But to answer, yes. Not always, maybe not even that often, but I can be kind, compassionate, merciful to myself. Many sages say, and I agree, that otherwise we can’t really be good to others.

  ARTHUR: “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. This is an error of the intellect as inevitable as that error of the eye, which lets us fancy that on the horizon heaven and earth meet.” I’m sorry to quote myself, but it seemed apt.

  LEONARD: That’s wonderful. When did you write that?

  ARTHUR: Well, in the late 1840s or so; the essay was published in 1851 (“Further Psychological Observations,” p. 40). That’s when my life was just starting to become successful; I mean, my work was. So when you speak of occasional happiness, I suppose I was at least superficially happy. The kind that comes from approval. It was better than nothing at all. But the kind you describe, that a poet and musician can describe in the minutiae of life, that, no. My own words accuse me of a limited scope.

  LEONARD: But you’ve said it yourself, Arthur—the limited scope, within which great beauty resides, within each of us. Your powerful words need not accuse you: they can set you free.

  ARTHUR: Am I not free now?

  LEONARD: We can’t equate freedom and death, although they may sometimes seem alike. Have you not expressed to me remorse, regret, a yearning to experience the liberating compassion and happiness you lacked? Could these not be the great mortal strivings that arose from your monumental philosophical endeavours and endure beyond death?

  ARTHUR: (smiling): Yes, Socrates. That’s true.

  V

  Songs from a Mind

  15

  Dear Heather in a Dark Space

  CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

  Sable night, mother of dread and fear . . .

  —SHAKESPEARE, The Rape of Lucrece

  It was a particularly nasty night, the kind of wet cold that freezes the skin and forces drafts through the weave of the best wools. I shivered. My mood was no less foul, as I’d spent the better part of the evening at the university library on a thorny research problem which did nothing but stymie me. That and a text message at about eleven that said, “I’m leaving.” I did not want to go home to a now empty apartment so I wandered the city for a while until my chin was numb and I was muzzy.

  The neon sign glowed CA E; the F was dark. It was warm inside but not all that inviting a place: a few booths and plain round wooden tables with no linens. Dotted around the tables were two, three, or five spindle-backed wooden chairs that I knew would screech when I pulled one out. I chose a booth. There were maybe three people sitting at the tables and the other booths were empty. I was not in the mood to notice much else about the place. I ordered coffee from a waitress with the longest straight black
hair I had seen in years. Her long nose and that hair made me think of a raven. But she didn’t strut or cackle and just took my order and nodded. The coffee was warm, and bitter. Fitting.

  I began to slide down into the booth and pain throbbed in my thawing chin as if to chastise me for taking it outside. I heard Leonard Cohen, coming from somewhere. His was the disembodied voice that speaks to schizophrenics, beckoning me to listen. Not just to listen to his punctuated monotone but to penetrate through the drone to his words and then to their meaning in context where he wanted to take me. It was from his album, his gift on his seventieth birthday, Dear Heather. He kept repeating “I was there for you” which, of course, guided me straight back to the subject of the text message. Cohen’s line is what I should have texted back to her, but I had done nothing. No, that’s not true, I had deleted the message. My coffee had cooled; I didn’t want to go back outside; I didn’t want more caffeine.

  Come, Civil Night, Thou Sober-Suited Matron, All in Black

  The lights flickered; Cohen stuttered and returned to his song. Then the lights dimmed and the demonic voice dropped an octave, then stopped suddenly. Silence and blackness. “Shit,” from somewhere—a different voice from Cohen’s, higher—maybe the raven. Newspaper, yes it was newspaper rustled—over there, wherever there was. My eyes struggled with a false halo from the sudden shift from light to dark. There should have been emergency lights or at least someone was a smoker. But the darkness remained. For how long had it been dark?

  In the light, the space of the café had been before me—it was separate from me. But the dark seemed to cloak me. It touched me. I could feel the air as I reached for my cup to down the last drops of coffee. The cup rang as loud as if I were in a bell tower. I felt unsettled, peculiar, for the darkness was not absence as the light was; darkness enveloped me—no it even penetrated the very core of my being. I felt the back of the booth as if it had grown into me, become me. No, I was not in a Kafka story; I was not Gregor Samsa who awoke one morning as a bug. But this was a kind of metamorphosis, for I had become part of the dark space of this café—no, the dark space had become part of me. I was for a moment Antoine Roquentin in Café Mably in Sartre’s Nausea, where his nausea had come out of him—there on the walls of the café, making him one within the nausea (p. 31). But I did not feel the same sickness as Roquentin; I felt only the mysterious but gentle dark space in which I was enveloped.