Leonard Cohen and Philosophy (34 page)

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 / long 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).

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).