Leonard Cohen and Philosophy (15 page)

The
duende
is surely Spanish. Nevertheless it entered Spain via Gypsy or, to use the contemporary term, Roma culture from Egypt, most probably originating in India—as did
“deep song” whose prototype is the Romani
siguiriya
. Deep song prefigures flamenco in Andalusian culture and, as such, claims a greater authenticity. It is unaccompanied and has the sound of a cry or a wail. Flamenco introduces the guitar and with it the possibility of harmony and polyphony. As Lorca tells us,

The Gypsy siguiriya begins with a terrible scream that divides the landscape into two ideal hemispheres. It is the scream of dead generations, a poignant elegy for lost centuries, the pathetic evocation of love under other moons and other winds.

Then the melodic phrase begins to pry open the mystery of the tones and remove the precious stone of the sob, a resonant tear on the river of the voice. No Andalusian can help but shudder on hearing that scream. (p. 4)

We might wonder how this helps us to understand Leonard Cohen, a Montreal Jew—removed by thousands of miles and many degrees Fahrenheit from Andalucía. We should note that in 2011 Cohen was awarded Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. In his acceptance speech he remarked that he had brought with him his guitar, a forty-year-old Conde from Madrid; and that as a young poet he had studied the English poets but he was searching for a voice of his own. When he discovered Lorca he felt that Lorca had given him permission to find a voice. He also remarked that one day, early in the sixties, he was visiting his mother’s house and that in the park overlooked by the house was a young Spaniard playing flamenco guitar to a group of boys and girls. Cohen hired the young guitarist to teach him to play. The Spaniard tuned Cohen’s guitar and taught him six chords. Those six chords are not only the basis of many flamenco songs, they also were to become the basis of all Cohen’s songs. Everything, he told his audience, came from Spanish soil and he expressed his gratitude to the country to which he owed so much.

So much for Spanish
duende
and the national character of Spain. However, we might recall that Torre, discussed by
Lorca above, concurs with Goethe. In a footnote Lorca refers us to
Conversations with Goethe
, in which the author Eckermann finds it “a suitable occasion to speak of that secret, problematic power, which all men feel, but no philosopher explains, and over which the religious help themselves with consoling words. Goethe names this unspeakable world and life-enigma the Dæmonic (dämonisch)” (p. 357).

A page earlier Eckermann comments that Goethe seeks an all-encompassing Deity, whose nature includes the demonic as part of His greatness. Some artists use this energy to make an art that speaks more for the whole than for the merely agreeable. This is familiar Cohen territory. According to Goethe, it is to be encountered more often with musicians than with painters. Goethe was writing from an abstract point of view; and so he wasn’t concerned with any particular nation but with the conditions of human existence. So far as Torre drew upon sources external to his native Spain, we can assume that he spoke of a more universal concept, such as the demonic, when giving shape to the
duende.

Nietzsche, late in life, was so taken by Bizet’s
Carmen
as to call it “perfection.” Perhaps as an example of international interest focusing upon a Spanish narrative, and taking Spanish musical themes within the score, the story of a beautiful Gypsy girl who worked in a Seville cigarette factory deeply affected the philosopher who looked for and championed the Dionysian in art: a German listening to a Frenchman’s music that captures the tragic life of a poor working girl in Andalucía.
Carmen
is
duende
.

Art and Genius

Surrealists like Lorca rejected the saccharine and duplicitous nature of bourgeois culture. Its sweetness they found sickening, a lie. Life is not sweet. Our sexual relationships are messy, painful, achingly insecure and sometimes catastrophic. That is the nature of the love song that celebrates what it is to be a vulnerable person reaching out to another. Leonard Cohen writes about the loneliness that each of us
must feel at some time or other—unless we systematically fabricate some convoluted deception, not just of others but of ourselves as well. Bourgeois culture, to the Surrealists, is nothing short of such a deception. And so art, according to these artists, is a search for a certain kind of truth; a truth that, without the revelatory power of art, would remain undiscovered.

In Kant’s
Critique of Judgment
there are much-discussed passages on artistic genius. Contrasted with science, which always involves rule-following, there are no rules that govern making art. Rather, it is as if nature speaks through the artist to provide us with original ideas that stand alone as original. They do not imitate previous works of art but serve as standards of taste for others to follow. Consider an art class in which students are asked to copy a master work. The professor looks at a number of them describing them as adequate copies. Then he sees a piece by one of the students and deems it promising. In this last case the student shows some originality. Their work is not a mere copy.

Or consider the image from
The Favourite Game
with which we started this chapter. Shell expresses the view that nature, as represented by the trees, is the proper place to find beauty. She wants to look through the window at them when she wakes. This is the standard representation of a picture as a window we look through. But Breavman wants a different kind of beauty. He takes the room in which they will spend the night as the place for thinking about the world as something we’re just “passing through.” The ephemeral nature of the one-night rooming house is contained in the sadness of the image, as is the thought of a “froth of dust” under the bed—to be disturbed by achieving the saccharine niceness Shell desires. There is something more honest and truthful in Breavman’s acceptance of the “dirty plaster grapevine” that might fall in his eye.

It is not that we cannot say what it is that we hear when we recognize
duende
, as for instance in “deep song.” Rather we should notice that in this original incantation we hear the originality or the integrity of the singer in her interpretation
of the flamenco song she performs. Similarly, in Cohen’s work, we recognize an original and perceptive characterization of our world, unsweetened by the niceness that otherwise we might crave. The world is not sweet. It is full of yearning and bitter sadness and it is ours. If you add to this the remarkable influence that Spain, Lorca in particular, has had on his work, we can see why the dark tones of
duende
provide a valuable perspective on that work. During his acceptance speech in Spain Cohen tells us of the voice Lorca helped him to find: “As I grew older, I understood that instructions came with this voice. What were these instructions? The instructions were never to lament casually. And if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all, it must be done within the strict confines of dignity and beauty.” Leonard Cohen, in his poetry, in his novels, in his songs, and also in his humility, achieves this. That’s why it’s a mistake to think of his work as depressing. It’s shoddy, flimsy, easy, light, pretty art that’s truly depressing. Cohen’s work, by contrast, is dark, serious and, above all, beautiful in its candor. It lifts the heart—tears at it—as does the scream of deep song. It has
duende
.

8

Irony as Seduction

C
HRISTOPHER
L
AUER

L
eonard Cohen’s lyrics are undeniably seductive, but what exactly makes them so can be difficult to pinpoint. For the most part they lack the youthful exuberance of a Keats or the sustained passion of a Donne, and they occasionally toy deliberately with disgust: witness the line in “Closing Time”—“She’s a hundred but she’s wearing something tight”—or the one in “I’m Your Man”—“I’d howl at your beauty like a dog in heat.” If such lyrics flatter, it’s not by highlighting anything particularly worthy about the listener, and if they seduce, it’s not by promising an otherworldly experience.

Cohen somehow manages to flatter and seduce us by indicating that these are not his aims at all, and, even if they were, he would be incapable of succeeding anyway. But far from blunting its impact, the obliqueness of this approach makes it all the more powerful. We feel a sense of intimacy with Cohen that would not have been possible if he attempted to express his ardency in more conventional terms. Rather than aim directly at intimacy, Cohen’s most affecting songs take a circuitous route, denying that intimacy is possible at all and seeking to make the listener complicit in this denial.

Get a Personality!

To understand how Cohen can pull off this trick of making us feel close to him by telling us again and again that he’ll no longer let anyone close to him, it is useful to turn to Søren Kierkegaard’s first major work,
The Concept of Irony
(1841). The book turns its attention to Socrates, a man who was executed for, in addition to alleged heresy, “seducing” or “corrupting” the youth of Athens. Kierkegaard barely mentions the possible sexual connotations of this alleged seduction, but he does argue that, for all his virtues, Socrates was not entirely innocent of leading those around him astray. Indeed, leading others astray was central to his method of philosophy. In ancient Greek, this method came to be called “irony” (
eironeia
).

In Socrates’s time
eironeia
was a relatively uncommon word. It would have been intelligible enough as a modification of
eirō
, an ordinary word for “speak,” but its unnecessary suffix would have made it sound to Greek ears something like how “speechifying” sounds to us today: as a mockingly fancy term for speech that was too fancy to be trusted. When writers like Plato used it to refer to Socrates, it came to mean something like “dissembling.” When Socrates claimed to be ignorant, there was a sense in which this was
merely speech
. Just as Cohen has made a career of being simultaneously confessional and reclusive, Socrates always seemed to be hiding something of himself, even when his language sounded straightforward.

All speech hides far more than it reveals. To say anything meaningful at all requires us
not
to say countless other things. But Socratic irony elevates the concealment built into all speech by making hearers conscious of the distance between the speaker and what he says. In everyday conversation, when you ask how I am doing and I give only a vague, conventional answer, I allow the conversation to flow right past the divergence between my words and my feelings. If, however, I reply with an especially curt “Fine” and turn my head away, I am letting you know that I am not fine at all
and that there are depths to myself that I am refusing to express. You can choose either to ignore my curtness or to question me further about my true feelings, but in either case I have made plain that something about me cannot be conventionally expressed.

Such ostentatious self-concealment makes us more attentive not only to the speaker’s motivations, but to our own as well. When Cohen asks dismissively, “But you don’t really care for music, do you?” we can’t help but think about both what he’s hiding and what we’re hiding. Socrates made an art of this approach to conversation, continually drawing his friends in by saying both less and more than he seemed to intend. In the process, Kierkegaard argues, Socrates made it possible for everyone who associated with him to develop a “personality.” Kierkegaard uses this term in a technical sense to mean far more than when we now say, “She has a great personality,” or even confrontationally, “Come on, get a personality!” In the modern casual sense, when we refer to someone’s “personality,” we refer to a consistent pattern of interacting with others that is in some way unique to the individual. When, in contrast, Kierkegaard uses the term, he is referring to a kind of self-awareness that
cannot
be found in casual interactions with others. Socrates’s philosophical genius lay in challenging his contemporaries to realize that who they were could not be reduced to their engagement in the life of their community.