Leonard Cohen and Philosophy (32 page)

Shall I call him a chameleon, then? If a chameleon alters its skin color to hide in safety, Cohen wears a coat of many colors and says, “Here I am, send me” (Isaiah 6:8). His combination of sublime lyrics, soulful music, and trenchant social commentary makes him, as I say, prophetic. A prophet embodies revelation and critique rather than concealment and comfort. Cohen has received many prestigious awards—even in his own country—but in the end he’s a spiritual witness rather than a popular hero. Is he, then, a second Jeremiah, a fourth Isaiah, or even another John the Baptist?

If the original Baptist lived a simple and disciplined life, full of
askesis
(self-denial) to please God, Cohen was no divine “askeser,” at least not early on. He evidently led a rather Bohemian
existence: sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. If John called for repentance, Leonard suggests that we don’t know what the word “repent” means. If John marked the beginning of a rift between Judaism and Christianity, Cohen may yet help heal that old and painful wound. In the end, though, Cohen is not a Zen koan for someone or something else; he’s himself. To borrow from Eliot’s
Four Quartets
, “there is no competition.”

Cohen’s maternal grandfather was a rabbi and Talmudic scholar, and he takes seriously the Hebrew meaning of his last name: “priest.” I am told that he closes his e-mails with an image of two open hands, palms out, thumb tips touching, fingers opened to a V between middle and ring fingers on both hands.

This is the Jewish symbol of priestly blessing. Cohen spent five years (1994–1999) at the Mount Baldy Zen Center in California, studying with Joshu Sasaki Roshi, and was ordained a Buddhist monk in 1996. It’s tempting to say that, in spite of these Eastern digressions in the American West, he continues to self-identify as a Jew. This would blur an important point, however. Even though Cohen himself at times dismisses his Buddhist practice as merely a relaxation technique, a means of mastering depression, it’s clear that it’s also provided him another window on cosmic order (Dharma). I don’t doubt that Judaism provides his most formative principles and stories, and so remains the deepest shaper of his spirit, but part of the man’s genius is to refuse to allow traditional boundaries to stifle insight. With admirable epistemic
humility, he takes wisdom and symbolism where he can get them. A lesser mind might degenerate into a vapid, new-age eclecticism, but Cohen doesn’t appropriate a metaphor unless he’s lived in it long enough to test its truth and make it his own.

All religion can be seen as the effort to overcome the distance “between the Nameless and the Name,” to borrow a phrase from Cohen’s “Love Itself.” Nevertheless, Cohen leans towards a theism that outstrips most, if not all, forms of Buddhist cosmology. A purely negative or impersonal vision of the universe is usually not enough for him. (In this respect, he’s like Thomas Merton, who remained a Roman Catholic while studying with Buddhist sages in Asia.) Cohen longs for a personal Deity with a loving heart and a creative will, so his main preoccupation is with Judaism and Christianity.
He is an observant Jew, but he takes us back to that pregnant moment when Christianity was a form of Judaism.
He wants to be shown “the place / Where the Word became a man . . . the place / Where the suffering began.”

For centuries, Christian theologians have appropriated Hebrew texts, awkwardly, as pointing forward to Jesus as the Messiah. At last, with Cohen, we have a Jewish thinker who quotes Christian texts, deftly, as harkening backward to their Hebraic origins. This is enormously courageous and profoundly therapeutic. He helps lead the Biblical tradition toward wholeness and the soul to something higher. Even when he describes, on YouTube, “The Window” as “a prayer to bring the two parts of the soul together,” he ends up celebrating something larger than human personality.

Divine Disconsolation and the Perils of Double-Mindedness

Much of Cohen’s most inspired work is either a gesture of gratitude for an unspeakable grace or an act of solidarity with those unjustly afflicted. Although exquisitely sensitive to the pain and suffering of life—he has been labelled “The Prince of Bummers”—he still manages to escape both
delusion and despair. His favorite word is “broken,” with “cross” and “crack” not far behind, yet recovery and hope typically hover nearby. “Come healing of the spirit / Come healing of the limb.” “From this broken hill / All your praises they shall ring.” “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” I would call this the gift of divine disconsolation, the ability to bless without dishonesty—or, perhaps, to bless in confessing dishonesty.

I have called Mr. Cohen a prophet, but at times he is so disconsolate and disconsoling that he sounds more like a seeker, a skeptic, even an atheist. Cohen’s public words are frequently addressed to God, but the dialogue sometimes falters. One of the stanzas of “Hallelujah” is a complaint that God (addressed as “you” but pronounced “ya”) no longer shows him “what’s really going on below,” and we are left to speculate on a more mystical or religiously revelatory phase of the author’s life. How was he moved, and what made this intimacy with the Deity stop? In “Everybody Knows,” Cohen sings to God, or more specifically Jesus, in the second person. These lines, about what Christ has gone through, from Calvary to Malibu, can be read as a continuance of the “God is dead” debate he commented on in his novel,
Beautiful Losers
. “God is alive,” he declared there, “God never sickened. . . . God never died” (p. 157). But if so, what does it mean to say that the Christ is in trouble and to suggest that the “sacred heart” is about to “blow”? In “Suzanne,” Jesus is described as having sunk “beneath your wisdom like a stone.” In “Democracy,” Cohen calls the Sermon on the Mount “staggering,” but he doesn’t “pretend to understand” it. In “Who by Fire?” the counterpoint of religious faith and doubt intensifies. There Cohen asks the haunting question of death or death’s god: “And who shall I say is calling?”

This is what I mean by “epistemic humility”: the effort to live between dogmatism and doubt, to know one’s limits but not be paralyzed or embittered. Perhaps “no one knows where the night is going,” but “everybody knows the deal is rotten.” Cohen isn’t afraid to live on that knife’s edge. Even while “waiting for the miracle,” he’s only “passing through,”
hoping that the light will “shine on the truth someday.” A Biblical expression of this finitude is 1 Corinthians 13:12: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly.”

A provocative melding of Biblical languages and liturgies has multiple perils of double-mindedness. Given the troubled relations between Christianity and Judaism—from forced conversions to bloody pogroms to the Nazi Holocaust—the embracing of any New Testament vocabulary by a Jew can seem insensitive, if not murderous. In reference to Cohen’s third book of poetry, why pick flowers for Hitler? So many political, economic, and cultural issues are raised even by talking about the “Old” and the “New” Testaments, that it may seem wise to accept the permanent alienation of the two faiths. To our benefit, Cohen is too strong a poet to resign himself to such impoverishment. He typically finds language that reconciles, if not synthesizes, the best of both scriptural perspectives.

In
Book of Mercy
, Cohen refers to “Our Lady of the Torah” and notes that “the Christians are a branch of the tree” (psalm 27). In the song, “The Law,” he suggests that Torah and Grace are one. Elsewhere, he sings of the Exodus (“Born in Chains”); he allows that Abraham was “strong and holy” (“Story of Isaac”), even as Jesus was “forsaken, almost human” (“Suzanne”). In Cohen’s lyrics, in short, Jew and Christian are again potentially united—
depending on how we as listeners respond.
No prophet, including Cohen, can compel inclusive love of neighbor, but he or she can invite it by beautiful example.

This is what I mean by calling Cohen a strong poet: one who transcends the anxiety of being influenced by others and builds something better out of both old and new bricks (see Harold Bloom’s
The Anxiety of Influence
). A strong Rabbinic scholar will learn from Kabbalah; a strong Christian theologian will learn from Gnosticism; a strong empirical scientist may even learn from alchemy. Leonard Cohen learns from all three, and his meditations become prayers. A chameleon uses his ten-inch tongue to capture and kill. When necessary, the prophet skewers others, verbally, and could be a
chameleon if he wanted to. But Cohen typically uses his tongue of ten letters to liberate and enliven, with nothing, as he sings, but “Hallelujah” on that tongue.

Cohen’s 1992 song, “The Future,” is a compelling indictment of mass murder, economic exploitation, torture, abortion, and other social injustices, even some that hadn’t yet occurred. It ideologically opposed, before the fact, both the terrorism perpetrated by Islamic fundamentalists on 9/11 and the subsequent torture of Muslims at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Cohen’s call for healing (2012’s “Come Healing”) can teach us, yet again, that if we are to have peace, we must recognize that the eternal Good transcends any temporal liturgy, creed, or nation. To be the bearer of such a message comes with a price. For hearers, as Cohen writes in
Book of Longing
, “the sadness of the zoo will fall upon society” (p. 34).

Profane and Sacred Love

Another Cohenesque duality, already alluded to, is his need and ability to live a rather worldly life, even as he praises heaven. He is famous for relishing the pleasures and comforts of sex—the Song of Songs meets the Sisters of Mercy—and he has a stunning capacity to weave together sacred and profane desire—as in “Light as the Breeze.” Put more bluntly, “naked” is another of his favorite words, and he was apparently “a fearful girler” for much of his youth and middle age. In “Chelsea Hotel #2,” he announces, unabashedly, the pursuit of wealth and sex. He makes no secret of his inability fully to commit to any female—he never married, because of “cowardice” and “fear”; the “ladies’ man” admits to driving away many beautiful women who cared for him. Whether this was due to a jealous guarding of his personal literary calling or to a more simple narcissism that could not give back, is hard to say.

In “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,” Cohen refers to things that can’t be untied. But love’s being tantamount to bondage and limitation isn’t the whole story for him. In more candid moments, romantic love seems not so much undesirable
as too difficult. “I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch,” he observes in “Hallelujah.” In the end, one would have to ask Marianne Ihlen, Joni Mitchell, Suzanne Elrod, Dominique Issermann, Rebecca de Mornay, and other women in Cohen’s life about his capacity to give and receive. Cohen is currently in a stable domestic relationship with his artistic collaborator Anjani Thomas—see “Crazy to Love You”—and, in any case, a prophet isn’t the same thing as a saint. Furthermore, roués may grow over time into saints, a theme Cohen has explored variously in fiction and in song.

As articulate as Cohen is about the volatility of romantic love (
eros
), his richest talent is for seeing “with Love’s / inhuman eye,” as he says in
Book of Longing
(p. 42). Such steadfast love Judaism calls
’hesed
and Christianity
agape
. (Buddhism calls it
karu
ā
, I believe.) If
eros
appraises the value of an object in how it benefits me,
’hesed
and
agape
bestow worth upon an object without insisting on reciprocity. There’s great potential for hypocrisy in extoling unconditional love, for who is capable of such virtuous promiscuity? As Cohen concedes, even great masters get beaten up by sacred texts. Nevertheless, both the Hebrew and the Christian Bible see neighbor love as commanded (Leviticus 19:18 and Matthew 22). A self-giving and creative love is at the very heart of God’s holiness, and we are to be holy as God is holy (Leviticus 11:45).