by Holt, Jason
Cohen’s attitude of calm and practical helpfulness in the midst of strife is also evident in his response to 9/11. He counts himself among the “we” who were attacked, but he refuses to indulge in a tirade of offense (or self-recrimination), as theoretically justified as that might be. Instead, he “just holds the fort” and asks simply whether you “went crazy” or “reported.” Did you succumb to rancor and the desire for revenge, or did you lend a hand to those saving lives and preserving order? Are you part of the problem, or part of the solution?
A Personal Trial and Forgiveness
On a more personal level are the financial and emotional tribulations Cohen went through in the 1990s and 2000s. His friend and business manager, Kelley Lynch, embezzled the bulk of his estate while he was on extended retreat at Mount Baldy. The “thirty pieces of silver” in this case amounted to about $5 million, and the betrayal led to bankruptcy rather than the cross, but the hurt must have been acute. The theft was compounded, moreover, by months of harassing emails and threatening voice messages from Lynch. Even so, Cohen maintained remarkable equanimity. At the trial, he announced:
It gives me no pleasure to see my one-time friend shackled to a chair in a court of law, her considerable gifts bent to the service of darkness, deceit and revenge. . . . I want to thank the defendant Ms. Kelley Lynch for insisting on a jury trial, thus exposing to the light of day her massive depletion of my retirement savings and yearly earnings, and allowing the court to observe her profoundly unwholesome, obscene and relentless strategies to escape the consequences of her wrongdoing.
It is my prayer that Ms. Lynch will take refuge in the wisdom of her religion. That a spirit of understanding will convert her heart from hatred to remorse, from anger to kindness, from the deadly intoxication of revenge to the lowly practices of self-reform. (reported by Sean Michaels in the Guardian)
Although pointed, these words carry the very spirit of understanding they invoke. Forgiveness isn’t explicitly mentioned, but resentment seems largely overcome with mercy. His response to his “lynching” is a good example of a refusal of animosity that still cares about justice. An oft-remarked irony of the Lynch affair is that Cohen was moved in 2008 to embark on a multi-city tour to recoup his losses, so again the world was treated to his live music and his own heart was “warmed” (Jon Pareles in the New York Times). Thus can good come out of evil.
Being Grateful
A prophet foretells what is yet to be, but she also retells what has already been. Like Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Past, she may even do the former by doing the latter. To read or listen to Leonard Cohen is to see this done in our own day, to be gratified that sacred scripture can still be written. Only chameleons close their cannons and disappear into other people’s foliage. We should thank Cohen for keeping the Biblical shop open and serving as a mouthpiece of the divine, even amid his own “convivial disbelief” (Book of Longing, p. 24). Now, as “Going Home” makes clear, Cohen is preparing to retire, even to die.
The only question still outstanding is the final form of God’s love. Is there personal immortality or nothingness after death? Judaism thrived for centuries without belief in an afterlife, the doctrine first being formulated in the Book of Daniel. Many contemporary Jews and most orthodox Christians affirm resurrection of the dead, but Cohen’s position on the matter is unclear. He has narrated The Tibetan Book of the Dead, but I know of no place where he directly endorses life after death. In Book of Longing, he says “to a young nun”: “Your turn to die for love. My turn to resurrect” (p. 14). But the latter seems a this-worldly reanimation. Elsewhere in Longing, he says: “I have no interest in the afterlife” (p. 138).
In two places, Cohen appears to deny the eternity of God’s own ’hesed, steadfast love. In the song “Love Itself,” Cohen echoes the Buddhist notion that Love eventually reaches “an open door” and is “gone.” This idea aligns well with Cohen’s Dharma name Jikan, which means “silence” or “the silent one,” but it’s hard to square with Jewish conceptions of the never-ending grace and creativity of YHWH. If human life and love are finite, does Divine Compassion Itself finally come to no-word and no-thing? In Book of Mercy, the prophet speaks of the time when the Lord “suspends his light and withdraws into himself, and there is no world, and there is no soul anywhere” (psalm 29). This too seems to admit a limit to God’s love. In the end, does the Lord collapse into narcissism? This is a humbling thought for any creature, but it seems oddly un-Jewish.
Cohen speaks regularly of “heaven” as the abode of God and angels, but it cannot be accidental that he’s mostly mum on the question of human immortality. My hunch is that he would be neither Pharisee and insist on life after death, nor Sadducee and disallow it. And “who dares expound the interior life of god?” asks Book of Mercy (psalm 10). Mr. Cohen is a prophet for the living and doesn’t dwell on such eschatological matters. He has communicated his vision and, to take a phrase from O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon, has earned “the right of release,” whatever this might mean. “Nunc dimittis. . . . Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word” (Luke 2:29). We can only be grateful. Cohen is.
19
Clouds of Unknowing
BERNARD WILLS
Leonard Cohen has been nothing over the years if not a celebrant of the wonders of the flesh. It may be a cause of wonder then that his later years have been marked by a deep engagement with the concepts of emptiness and detachment explored by Zen Buddhism and (we should remind ourselves) by Christian mystics and Jewish Kabbalists as well. This longing for a kind of nothingness or non-entity has been a persistent undercurrent in Cohen’s work for quite some time.
While listening to the 1979 album Recent Songs some months back I was struck by a reference in one of Cohen’s most gorgeously sensuous songs, “The Window.” The reference was to an anonymous medieval work called The Cloud of Unknowing. This is a work of “negative” mysticism by which I mean that it demands of us that we seek God in a “cloud of unknowing.” By this the author means that in our spiritual quest we should abandon all representations grounded in sensation, imagination, or intellect and seek the divine in a “naked intent of love” that elevates us beyond knowledge and beyond being. Indeed, for the author of the Cloud God is a kind of emptiness or non-being that is at the same time total plentitude: the nothing, he says, is the all and it is possessed in a negation or suspension of all our faculties of sensation and mind. What on earth might such an esoteric teaching have to do with a pop record from the late 1970s? One of the things Cohen’s work challenges us to do is to think about such connections. To meet that challenge, we’ll explore the undercurrent of negative mysticism that runs through Recent Songs and indeed much of Cohen’s other work.
Cohen’s Spirituality
It’s no secret that Cohen’s work has a spiritual dimension. Both Judaism and Catholicism informed his childhood and his novels, and his songs and poems are saturated with Christian iconography to a degree unusual for a Jewish artist. The Christian tradition, I would argue, plays a very specific role in Cohen’s symbolic economy. For Cohen, who differs profoundly from thinkers like Nietzsche on this point, Christianity is the religion of the body, of sacralized flesh as the bearer of revelation.
This can be illustrated in a number of ways but for now I’ll emphasize one. The person of Jesus in Cohen’s songs and poems is heavily eroticized. As the word made flesh he reveals the beauty and vulnerability of the sexualized body. Often, as in the lyric “Suzanne,” he’s associated with a life-giving female figure who offers wisdom in the form of fulfilled erotic vision. In this perhaps Cohen takes up a tradition in Catholic iconography that “feminizes” the image of Christ to a striking degree. In contrast, the “Jewish side” of Cohen is more detached, ironic, and skeptical. This Cohen is the poet of absence and loss who evokes the smoke that’s “beyond all repair” of the holocaust and other disasters of the twentieth century. Jesus himself, despairing on the cross, is “broken / lo
ng before the sky would open” as God displayed in the glory of the flesh withdraws into hiddenness and silence, just as woman withdraws inevitably from man or man from woman.
I speak of this as a symbolic shortcut only: I’m not trying to relate these tendencies in any straightforward way to historical Christianity or historical Judaism. Christianity has given rise to powerful iconoclastic tendencies, and as for Judaism one need only read through the interminable genealogies of Genesis to realize the degree to which it’s grounded in the reality of the body (as an interesting reflection on this one might consider Robert Crumb’s earthy and sensuous rendition of Genesis). In point of fact, the so-called “affirmative” and “negative” theologies (which I’ll discuss below) play their respective roles in both traditions. However, the roles these traditions play in Cohen’s personal symbolism (and presumably his psyche) are somewhat more schematic.
Cohen’s experience of the immanence of God is focused around Christian images and symbols from his earliest collections of verse. His experience of divine absence, of loss and withdrawal, tends to focus more on the hidden God of which Isaiah speaks, who reveals his name to Moses as “I am who I am”: a baffling tautology saturated with indefinable presence yet yielding no clear meaning as to whether God is present in or absent from creation. It’s not my concern to say where Cohen comes down on the issue of immanence vs. transcendence (whether God is present in or absent from creation). It’s the primary role of an artist to dramatize such conflicts, not resolve them. However, Cohen has come in recent years to focus on the meditative techniques of Zen Buddhism which involve the emptying of the mind of all attachment to self. This movement, I will argue, is already prefigured on Recent Songs where the Cloud is referenced, a text through which a Western reader might indeed find a path to the wisdom of the east.
Positive and Negative
First however, we should go over some basic distinctions. The Anglo-Catholic writer Charles Williams has spoken of a fundamental conflict at the heart of the theological tradition between what he calls “the way of affirmation” which embraces images and “the way of rejection” that seeks to transcend them (p. 58). Dante is one writer he considers a master of the former way but we might add such medieval figures as the Abbot Suger (spiritual father and theorist of the gothic movement in architecture) to the list. To be brief, such writers see the glory and power of God directly reflected in the created order from the highest ranks of the angels to the lowest determinations of matter. For this tradition “Being” tends to be the highest name of God and “beings” an expression of his power, intelligence, and goodness. In theology, they are engaged in what is called kataphatic or positive description of the divine nature—what God is.
Conversely, there is a tradition, founded in Neo-Platonism, according to which God infinitely transcends the created order such that there’s no analogical bond between them. For these writers, including the author of the Cloud, “Goodness” is a higher name for God than “Being” (referring to Plato’s idea of the good). When speaking of God they engage in apophatic or negative description of the divine nature. Where the previous tradition affirms positively the other negates such that God is understood not by what he is so much as by what he is not. In Williams’s terms, they try not to see God through images, which can be dangerously distracting and distorting, but to see God beyond images.
One can see this spirit at work in the many outbreaks of iconoclastic fervor that have erupted in the Christian world. In practice, however, these traditions can meld into each other and indeed, both discourses often ground themselves in the same source, the Mystical Theology of Dionysius the Areopagite. One of Aquinas’s theological projects is to reconcile these two types of theology in his “doctrine of analogy.” Jewish authors such as Maimonides and Ibn Gabirol are also strongly wedded to negative descriptions of God. This tendency in Jewish thought is strongly reinforced by the Kabbalah: “He is beyond all measurement, infinite both in his hidden essence and in his ontological and revealed qualities” (Schaya, The Universal Meaning of the Kabbalah, p. 22).
As mentioned above, the author of the Cloud belongs very much to the latter tradition and indeed, is somewhat rare in being almost a pure example of it. We are told, for instance, “When you first begin, you will find only darkness, and as it were a cloud of unknowing. You don’t know what this means except that in your will you feel a simple steadfast intention reaching out towards God” (p. 61). The author claims that the intellect cannot penetrate this cloud: the first step in our ascent to wisdom is, in fact, a meditative suspension of all our faculties of imagination, reason, and intellect. Rather, he says “All rational beings, angels and men, possess two faculties, the power of knowing and the power of loving. To the first, to the intellect, God who made them is forever unknowable” (p. 63). However, he continues, “to the second, to love, he is completely knowable, and that by each separate individual.”
This language is startling. The Cloud author is asserting a kind of “knowledge beyond knowledge” possessed in the immediacy of love, which sounds more than a little like Leonard Cohen. This is a real contact of the human with the divine that can occur only when “knowledge” of an intellectual kind has been transcended. The soul only “knows” what it loves and it can’t love fully until “knowledge” of a propositional kind has been surpassed. We know what God is at the very point where we cease trying to think what he is and surrender to the bare motion of our will towards its own good. Representational knowledge, as for the Neo-Platonists, is trapped in the duality of thought and its object. It must always “think” of something under the sign of “being.” True union can only be the work of love that seeks God beyond being (as a transforming presence rather than an object). Cohen describes this transforming presence in “You Know Who I Am”: “I am the one who loves changing from nothing to one.” This, as we shall see below, fits well with Cohen’s typically Jewish emphasis on the unknowability of God.
Recent Songs
Now how might we relate these seemingly arcane and paradoxical medieval notions to Cohen’s Recent Songs? One way into this record may be the strange cover of the Quebec folksong “Un Canadien Errant.” With its tuneless shouted chorus this song is unlikely to be counted as a Cohen classic. However, it’s a peculiarly apt choice for a cover. The song originates from the period of the Lower Canada rebellion and expresses the nostalgia of the exiled rebels. Subsequently, the song has become an anthem among Acadians, recalling as it does the experience of exile and expulsion.
It’s not hard to see why this song appeals to a Jewish songwriter like Cohen. Naturally, it may be taken to refer to the historical condition of the diaspora (exile of the Jewish people in the decades following the destruction of Jerusalem by the emperor Titus). More profoundly, though, it may reference Biblical myths (both Hebraic and Christian) of a fall from paradise. Further, it may recall Kabbalistic notions of the creation as an act of divine self-alienation where God surrenders something of his own nature to vacate the pure “space” of creation only to seek himself again through a union with his creation (through which his shekinah or “feminine wisdom” is diffused). Indeed, with Kabbalah as its means of transmission, it may recall Neo-Platonic notions of our descent from “the One” and our longing for reintegration with the divine principle within us. (Anyone familiar with the works of the late Pagan Neo-Platonist Proclus will immediately recognize their appropriation by the author or authors of the Zohar. This appropriation exactly parallels the Christianizing of Proclus undertaken in the mystical treatises of Dionysius. In the works of Ibn al-Arabi, among others, we find the same phenomenon in the Islamic world.)
This theme of exile suffuses the other songs on the record. “Ballad of the Absent Mare” is one notable example with its seemingly irresolvable cycle of union and separation. Might the line “there is no space but there’s left and right” refer to the ten sephiroth (or the eternal forms of divine manifestation) which are divided into their “left and right” or
“positive and negative” aspects? The subtle play of affirmation and negation in the construction of the sephirotic tree is (whatever Cohen’s explicit intention) quite apposite to the themes we have broached here. “The Guests,” evoking the Sufi poetry of Rumi with its images of drunkenness and passion, creates an atmosphere of intense longing though in the end “the guests are cast beyond the garden wall.” Recent Songs coincides with Cohen’s separation from Suzanne Elrod, so these images of our longing for union and the inevitable tragedy of separation have, for Cohen, a unique force.
Now, however, let’s consider “The Window.” The speaker of this song explores the implications of regarding the body as a locus of divinity, the “tangle of matter and ghost.” Of course, ambiguities abound. The “chosen love” is at the same time “frozen”: a telling rhyme, as we shall see. What’s more, the word made flesh is “stuttered” rather than proclaimed. Indeed, it is at one point a dead letter. Yet at the heart of the song is an injunction to “come forth from the cloud of unknowing / And kiss the cheek of the moon.” These lines suggest, even demand a divine revelation in the fullest sense and evoke an erotic union with nature as the medium and goal of this: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away . . . and I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Revelation 21:1–2).