Leonard Cohen and Philosophy

by Holt, Jason

  The reference to the Book of Revelation in these lines reinforces the suggestion of a sacred union, a marriage even of the creator and his creation. From this perspective the stuttering of the word is blessed and the “broken-hearted host” paradoxically “whole.” This suggests that the revelation of God in the flesh is a revelation of compassionate, suffering love: “leave no word of discomfort / And leave no observer to mourn.” Indeed, one might take this revelation as a sublime act of condescension by which the creator takes on the limitations of the creature to reveal its hidden nature as self-giving love. Viewed from one angle then, “The Window” seems an affirmation of a Christian deity who reveals himself in physical form: “and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father” (John 1:14).

  Yet this is only one side of the picture. The chosen love is also frozen: the divine must resist the very embodiment that reveals its nature. It can’t be frozen in determinate shape or form. What’s more the word made flesh stutters: it can’t utter the unknowable, unmanifested core of the divine nature. The Holy One may dream of a letter but it’s a dead one: a communication that can’t contain the living force and presence of the one communicated. Such a letter can never reach the one to whom it is sent. More tellingly even, the dead letter referred to is in fact “a letter’s death.” The “letter” here is of course literally a missive or communiqué. Mystically or esoterically, however, a letter is a divine attribute and in Kabbalistic thought Hebrew letters are given deep significance (The Universal Meaning of the Kabbalah, p. 40). The one “sent” must die and all forms of it be erased: “he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him there is no beauty that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2).

  Clearly this refers to the passion of Christ, which Cohen has evoked in many places in his work. We don’t, however, find anything in this song evoking a resurrection: the erasure of the word is final and the tragedy of the incarnation unsurmountable. The flesh betrays the spirit in religion as in eros, and love, whether human or divine, is a burden the body cannot sustain. It’s perhaps no surprise then that Recent Songs ends on a detached, ironic note: “my darling says ‘Leonard, just let it go by / That old silhouette on the great western sky.’” The central questions of Western civilization, of matter and spirit, God and humanity, remain suspended beneath the shadow of an absconded deity. We may note in passing that, just as in the Cloud, God sheds darkness rather than light. “There is in God, some say, / A deep but dazzling darkness . . .” Henry Vaughan tells us in his wonderful poem “The Night” and this thought seems applicable here. Yet the reference is brief, casual, and even slyly dismissive.

  Self-Overcoming

  One might conclude then that Cohen has come to a sort of postmodern, skeptical stance. However, one of the admirable things in Cohen is that he has never stood pat. Since Recent Songs Cohen has, as is well known, become increasingly concerned with the meditative traditions of the Far East. Cohen has told us on Various Positions that he has longed for “nothing to touch.” Taking this cue we might read his later turn to Zen Buddhism as part of his ongoing fascination with negativity and nothingness as positive energies.

  However, this isn’t exactly new territory for Cohen. As Stephen Scobie reminds us, “Cohen’s saints must make their wills transparent to Nothing. The self is not sacrificed to some higher cause; the sacrifice of self is the higher cause” (p. 10). Scobie speaks of this longstanding tendency in Cohen as part of a “black romanticism” inherited from figures such as Baudelaire and Jean Genet. This black romanticism emphasizes the loss of ego or self through extreme states of consciousness and transgressive and self-destructive behavior. As Scobie puts it, “If the lack of social or political commitment in the fifties threw the artist back onto his naked self, then his exploration of that self might lead to its annihilation” (p. 9).

  However, this nihilism of the black romantic isn’t all there is to the story. As Scobie tells us, “Cohen always retains a belief in the power and the beauty of love. But love can only enter the world once it has accepted the essential conditions of destruction and loss. Love is only for the broken, the maimed, the outcasts, the beautiful losers” (p. 14). This often lends poignancy and indeed compassion and humanity to some of Cohen’s darkest visions. More importantly, it reminds us that at their heart both Buddhism and Christianity are doctrines of compassion: they don’t evoke nothingness for the sake of nothingness as in the nihilistic hedonism of the black romantic. The aim of both traditions is the emptying of self for the sake of salvation, the liberation of both oneself and of all other beings as well from suffering. Thus, the Buddhist concept of Nirvana is nothingness and emptiness only by excess. As in The Cloud of Unknowing the nothing is nothing but the mind’s approach to the all.

  Indeed, it seems a general fact of experience that things “become themselves” through self-overcoming: “He who would save his life must lose it.” So if the artist seeks a kind of selflessness or self-erasure, does this not make his art more comprehensive and objective? If the saint seeks to empty his ego, isn’t it to attain a pure, disinterested love of all things? Certainly, in the Buddhist tradition the emptiness of sunyata (the void achieved by the cessation of desire) opens us to compassion for all beings and desire for their liberation from suffering. We are reminded by this that the negation or nothingness of which Zen speaks can equally be spoken of as a pure and clarified consciousness that surpasses all limitations of ego or self. If you like, the urge to “nothingness” that has been a longstanding part of Cohen’s work can, through Buddhist practice, find an explicitly positive focus.

  Cohen hasn’t dropped names idly: the reference to The Cloud of Unknowing has in fact illuminated Recent Songs and indeed the trajectory of his career. It fits neatly in the context of deep spiritual concerns that shape Cohen’s earliest work and have persisted even to the present. Indeed, we might say that albums like Recent Songs concern themselves with the deepest and most longstanding issues of theology and spirituality. In particular, Cohen has explored the themes of nonbeing and emptiness as “supraconceptual” approaches to the divine. That he has done this in a way which sacrifices nothing of the emotional resonance of his art is a testament to his stature as a poet and musician.

  20

  The Happy Memes of “Hallelujah”

  PETER STONE

  Dog eat dog. It’s a jungle out there. Survival of the fittest. Eat or be eaten. This is the kind of language people routinely use to describe the music world. It’s a rough, tough, take-no-prisoners kind of world. Nobody knows this better than Leonard Cohen. At the beginning of his musical career, for example, Leonard somehow signed away the rights to “Suzanne,” one of his best-loved songs, to a producer he worked with. More recently, he decided to begin touring again because his unscrupulous business manager embezzled most of his money, leaving him almost bankrupt. This is the law of the jungle at work here—at its most jungle-like.

  In this dog-eat-dog world, it’s awfully hard to succeed in the music business. It takes both skill and luck. In The Prince, Machiavelli famously said that a leader can only control about half his fate—the rest is up to fortune. That certainly seems to be how the music world operates. Talent helps, but it makes no guarantees. And luck helps a lot, too—indeed, luck can prove essential (Spice Girls, anyone?)—but when the luck runs out, talent can mean the difference between continuing success and disappearance into obscurity (Spice Girls, anyone?).

  All of this applies to songs as well as to singers and songwriters. Luck can make a big difference in a song’s fate, but at the end of the day, if you want a hit, it helps to have a really great song. Take what is probably now Cohen’s most famous song, “Hallelujah.” There’s an enormous amount of luck in the history of that song. It originally appeared on Cohen’s album Various Positions (1984). Its American release was very troubled—Walter Yetnikoff, then-president of CBS Records, declined to release it in the U.S. (Yetnikoff supposedly told Cohen, “Leonard, we know you’re gr
eat, but we don’t know if you’re any good.”) A smaller label released the album in the U.S., and Columbia (parent company to CBS) finally released an American edition in 1990. And yet upon its release “Hallelujah” immediately won some fans, including a number of musicians whose covers kept the song alive and increased its reputation. John Cale recorded it for a Cohen tribute album in 1991. Jeff Buckley, in turn, was much taken by Cale’s version of the song, and used it as the basis for his own version, perhaps the most famous one to date. Cale’s version could be heard in the movie Shrek (2001), and a version by Rufus Wainwright appeared on that movie’s soundtrack. From there, the popularity of the song snowballed. The entire process is masterfully chronicled in Alan Light’s book The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of “Hallelujah.”

  It’s hard to look at the history of “Hallelujah” and not be struck by how much luck influenced the rise of the song from obscurity to superstardom. And yet it’s equally hard not to be struck by the song itself (although apparently Walter Yetnikoff was not). It’s a seriously impressive song. But what makes the song so great? What makes the song appeal to so many people? The music matters a lot, to be sure, but what about the lyrics? They are surely a critical part of the story. Why does the song speak to so many people all around the world?

  Genes and Memes

  If we want to understand what makes a song succeed, perhaps we should look at how the law of the jungle governs . . . the jungle. The natural world is governed by the laws of evolution, as first described by Charles Darwin in his classic The Origin of Species (1859). Can evolutionary theory tell us anything about the appeal of “Hallelujah?” Let’s find out.

  A good place to start any exploration of evolutionary theory is Richard Dawkins’s classic book The Selfish Gene, first published in 1976. According to Dawkins, natural selection induces a competition among genes for survival. Some genes, when combined together with other genes, produce an organism that is more likely to survive in its environment than other genes do. More specifically, some genes produce an organism that is more likely to pass on its genes than others. As a result, those genes will be more likely to survive than others. And so the world comes to be filled with genes that are successful at surviving. It looks like the world is filled with selfish genes, genes that are very good at taking care of their own self-interest. (I say “looks like,” of course—genes don’t think, and Dawkins nowhere says that they do.)

  At the end of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins concludes that all evolution requires is “the differential survival of replicating entities” (p. 192). But could there be entities other than genes that replicate in an evolutionary process? Dawkins says yes. There is such a thing as cultural evolution. Cultural units—including scientific theories, works of art, novels, and yes, Leonard Cohen songs—compete to survive in human societies, just like genes compete to survive in the natural world. Some of them fail to attract human attention, or attract attention but then lose it, and so vanish from human life. Others get our attention and keep it, and so human beings keep talking about them over and over again. Dawkins calls these cultural units memes, and argues that evolution works on them much as it works on genes.

  If Dawkins is right, then the law of the jungle governs our cultural products—our memes—much as it governs the natural environment. Can this fact help us to understand the success of “Hallelujah?” It might, but before answering this question we must first deal with another. Is “Hallelujah” a meme? This is a tricky question to answer. As Dawkins explains, it’s difficult even to decide what a gene is. It’s easy to say what genetic material is—it’s that stuff that makes up our chromosomes, dictating the construction of the amino acids that control the creation of us. But it can be difficult to say where one gene ends and another begins. Similarly, it’s a little hard to say whether we should treat an entire song like “Hallelujah” as a meme, or whether it makes more sense to treat the parts that make up the song as different memes. This is a big problem in theories of cultural evolution. Sometimes an entire work of art, like a song or a movie, attracts and keeps people’s attention, and so thrives for a long time. But sometimes a single scene of a movie, or line from a song, has a staying power much greater than the entire work does. This can have strange effects upon our cultural memory. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), for example, is a great Humphrey Bogart movie, a very successful meme. But even more successful is the classic line, “We don’t need no stinking badges!” Millions of people who know nothing else about the movie “remember” that line—even though that exact line is never actually uttered in the movie!

  So is “Hallelujah” one meme, or a bunch of memes? It’s hard to say. The problem is complicated by the fact that there are multiple versions of the song. The version Cohen released on Various Positions has four verses, but those four came out of a lengthy, agonizing process lasting years. During this process, Cohen composed and then rejected many verses—perhaps eighty, by his own count. After recording Various Positions, Cohen often varied the verses used in live performances of “Hallelujah.” John Cale asked Cohen for the complete set of verses for the song before recording his own version. Cohen offered fifteen, and Cale used five—two from Cohen’s original version plus three more. Together, these seven verses, plus the famous one-word chorus, seem to make up the song.

  “Hallelujah” may contain many memorable lines, but it is the song itself that people continue to play and sing over and over again. And so I’m going to treat the entire song as a meme that has to survive in a world of other songs all competing for our attention. What features do the lyrics of “Hallelujah” have that might help the song outcompete its rivals? One thing you immediately notice if you look at those lyrics is the abundance of references to religion. The song references biblical stories, such as the story of David and Bathsheba (“You saw her bathing on the roof / Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you”). It suggests “Maybe there’s a God above,” and so on. The very title of the song is a religious exclamation, equivalent to “Praise God!” The only other topic that receives anything like the attention given to religion in “Hallelujah” is sex. And even that topic is hard to separate from religion; Jeff Buckley described the song as the “Hallelujah of the orgasm.”

  Because so much of “Hallelujah” is taken up with religion, it makes sense to ask how and why religious memes survive and thrive, and see if that sheds any light upon the success of “Hallelujah.” A good source on this topic is the book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by the philosopher Daniel Dennett. Dennett agrees with Dawkins that culture can be characterized as an evolutionary process in which memes compete for our attention, with the winners surviving and the losers fading away. He believes that this process can be used to understand what causes religious memes to survive. Perhaps Breaking the Spell can help us understand the “Hallelujah” phenomenon.

  The Evolution of Religion

  Dennett invites us to imagine a world in which our experiences put all kinds of ideas—memes—into our heads. Some of those ideas will survive, and get passed along to other people. Others will get completely forgotten by us. At one time, many of these ideas dealt with supernatural forces—gods, demons, spirits, angels—that allegedly controlled the world. Some of these forces controlled the sun, others the seas, still others the rain, and so on. It’s easy to imagine how human beings first came to have ideas about beings like that. Human beings evolved, Dennett says, with “an instinct on hair trigger: the disposition to attribute agency—beliefs and desires and other mental states—to anything complicated that moves” (p. 114). If something happens, our first instinct is to ask ourselves, “Who goes there?” An instinct like this makes a lot of sense. If you’re not sure whether that long thin thing on the ground is a snake or a stick, assume it’s a snake. If you assume it’s a snake, and it’s really a stick, the false alarm doesn’t do you much harm. But if you assume it’s a stick, and it’s really a snake, the results
could be fatal. And so human beings naturally produce a lot of false alarms, as we are readily disposed to imagine everything is caused by some intelligent being or other.

  Obviously, this is not the whole story about the origin of religion. It explains a lot about Judaism, the religion into which Cohen was born. It explains less about Buddhism, the religion Cohen practices today. (He’s an ordained monk, in fact.) But supernatural beings are incredibly important to religion. This is so true that Dennett defines a religion as a social system “whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought” (p. 9). For this reason, these beings must be front and center in any story told about the way human beings developed religion.

  And so people came to believe all kinds of things about the world. Some of them involved supernatural beings, and some did not. But real beliefs have consequences. If you believe that the rain god will deliver rain if you sacrifice a goat to him, then the rain had better follow the sacrifice. Most of the time, we update our beliefs when the real world demonstrates their inadequacies—by giving us a dry goatless day, for example. This makes our beliefs better suited to help us cope with reality. But sometimes we respond to challenges to our beliefs by modifying them so as to render them unfalsifiable. Such beliefs become immune to evidence, impossible to confirm or to refute. This has happened with many of our beliefs, including our beliefs about supernatural beings. (If it failed to happen with a supernatural belief, the belief would get weeded out by our minds as soon as it conflicted with reality.) “The transition from folk religion to organized religion,” Dennett remarks, “is marked by a shift in beliefs from those with very clear, concrete consequences to those with systematically elusive consequences” (p. 227). This applies to our surviving religious beliefs. It still happens today, and it works to push religious beliefs into the unfalsifiable category. Dennett gives the example of the athlete who prays to God for a win in a big game, but then invents excuses afterwards if he loses (p. 311).