Leonard Cohen and Philosophy (16 page)

His irony was thus not merely a matter of words, but of interpersonal relations. Ordinary verbal irony takes a statement to mean its opposite, as when the hackneyed sitcom character goads a friend who has just disclosed too much, “Why don’t you tell us what you
really
think?” We find comfort in such scenes—albeit a dull, anesthetizing sort—because irony is generally an unthreatening way of cultivating intimacy. An ironic turn of phrase points to a meaning beneath the surface, and when the speaker acknowledges that we grasp this meaning, we share with her an open secret. According to Kierkegaard, Socratic irony operated on a similar principle, but it was much more enlivening, since what was
hidden behind everyday language was not just an opposite meaning for the sentence but an entire self-understanding. Appreciating Socratic irony meant grasping not just the hidden meaning of a sentence, but that all meaning involves a certain amount of hiding.

The meaning of the word “irony” has continued to evolve since Socrates’s time to the point where we can now call facts of nature “ironic.” When I can’t help giggling at the church sign that quotes Psalms 16:11 (“In your right hand there are pleasures forever”) or Cohen titters at the stubborn persistence of sexual desire in the old and frail, we are marveling at what Kierkegaard calls “nature’s irony,” the notion that nature itself seems to be screwing with us. Just as an act of verbal irony hides a true intention behind an opposing sign, nature seems to conceal its intentions behind the obstreperous or absurd appearances it puts before us. No doubt, there is often consolation to be found in this approach to nature, but when we try to locate irony either in words or in states of affairs, we lose sight of the ways that the practice of irony in the Socratic fashion builds personalities and holds a promise of intimacy. Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Socrates helps us understand that irony is not just a relationship between a speaker and his words, but a relationship between subjects who share a private meaning. What makes this sharing so freeing is that it does not bind us to all the ordinary implications of our statements. The ironist affirms neither the literal meaning of his words nor the opposite, but merely recognizes that the hearer is capable of understanding the gap between words and intentions—between the social order and an individual personality.

While the recognition of this gap can open up the possibility of greater intimacy, such intimacy cannot be sustained forever. The sitcom character whose only goal is to entertain can get by indefinitely on such a lack of commitment, but someone who wants to disclose a personality through irony has the much more difficult task of being serious about connecting with others on a foundation of unseriousness. The latter type cannot be merely a joker who mocks all seriousness,
including his own, but must keep alive a promise even as he acknowledges that nothing really can be promised. In this regard Leonard Cohen’s best work not only keeps alive the Socratic project, but renews and improves upon it.

Cohen’s Sexy Irony

One of the reasons many of Cohen’s songs are so affecting is that, even when they fall into our modern fixation with nature’s irony, they quickly return to the kind of Socratic irony that seeks to restore a one-to-one connection. From “Suzanne” to “Ain’t No Cure for Love” to “Democracy,” Cohen’s songs frequently feature alternations between the third and second person that allow the song’s narrator to take a bird’s-eye perspective in one breath and attempt to reestablish an ironic connection in the next. “Closing Time” finds a great deal of irony in the mating rituals of adults past their primes, but these impersonal musings give way to the second person: “I loved you for your beauty / That doesn’t make a fool of me. / You were in it for your beauty too.” Here Cohen initially seems to offer a half-apology for the superficiality of his earlier attraction, but he retracts it with a challenge: who we are inevitably evades what convention says we must be. The connection may have been superficial, but because what was superficial was also shared, it was a connection nonetheless. When, however, Cohen proceeds in the next line to mock himself for the “voice that sounds like God to me / Declaring that your body’s really you,” he calls both his original cynicism and its romantic cancellation into doubt. The supposition that our true selves are driven by biological urges that exceed the strictures of culture is itself a delusion, though a not entirely unhappy one. This admission of self-deception is both an offering to the listener to share a secret about the narrator’s true self and a suggestion that this true self does not really exist. Unlike the fascination with the lover’s beauty, the “voice that sounds like God to me” is apparent only to the narrator. Cohen has given us a clue about his true feelings and yet made clear that it is not
a reliable clue—and, in any event, he’s not sure these feelings exist in the first place.

In this oscillation between offering up a hidden meaning and suggesting that there might not be any hidden meaning at all, Cohen follows the contours of Socratic irony, which is a large part of what makes his lyrics so inviting despite their coldness. Even in moments of brutal cynicism, as in “Everybody Knows” and “The Future,” he makes clear that his goal is not to prove the impossibility of genuine intimacy, but to
cultivate
the same sort of intimacy he has just claimed is impossible. In many of Plato’s dialogues, including the
Meno
, the
Republic
, and the
Theaetetus
, Socrates shows a similar commitment to pursuing shared wisdom with his friends even as he voices suspicions that such wisdom is impossible. His clear-headed rejection of apparent points of agreement encourages his friends to seek a higher truth with him, and his moments of skepticism about this higher truth only heighten their desire. Because he refuses to accept superficial agreement, they know that any points of agreement that do emerge will not be superficial. Like Cohen, he makes us see the value of commitment by denying that present circumstances meet its stringent conditions. Yet though there is undoubtedly far more philosophical range in the Socratic reflections that have been passed down to us by Plato, what makes Cohen’s songs
sexy
is an additional element not found in Kierkegaard’s account of Socrates and at best underdeveloped in Plato’s depictions of Socrates.

This extra element, it should first be noted, is not sex itself. Though our modern term “platonic love” can be traced back to Plato’s depiction in the
Symposium
of a chaste and high-minded Socrates, previously in that same dialogue Socrates is seen flirting openly with the host of the party, and there is clearly an erotic element to Socrates playing with Phaedo’s hair in the
Phaedo
(section 89b). Like Cohen, Socrates is capable of being entranced by both superworldly concerns and tactile immediacy. Yet what gives Cohen’s songs an additional erotic charge is their tendency to dissolve their own ironic distance. In its allusions to the AIDS
crisis, the breakdown of social bonds, systematic oppression, and casual infidelity, “Everybody Knows” is thoroughly cynical about the possibility of love in the modern world, and yet the song’s third verse steps out of the omniscient, scornful third-person perspective to call out an unfaithful partner in the second person. Cohen’s words, “Everybody knows you’ve been discreet, but there were so many people you just had to meet without your clothes” are a clear example of verbal irony, but this is not the sort of knowing irony that seeks to disengage entirely. The tone is hostile, but this very hostility is a sign that Cohen has stepped out of the ironic stance that makes his personality inaccessible. When the rest of the song returns to its ironic stance, it thus has a tone of disoriented pleading rather than resignation at the modern evils it catalogues. Cohen’s irony allows him to avoid committing himself to the position of either the distant sage or the bitter lover, and this refusal to make a commitment implies that he would be open to encountering us on such an ambiguous basis as well.

“Democracy” makes a similar appeal for an imperfect love amidst a backdrop of disaffection with the modern world, but in this case the second-person address is kinkier and less wounded. Because the rest of the song is concerned with grand social and political themes, the “Ah baby, we’ll be making love again” stanza appears with something of a jolt. The sexual metaphors that follow seem intended more to make the listener blush and giggle than to arouse, but this mixture of the political and the sexual also adds a new sense to Cohen’s direct political claims. When he concludes the stanza with the chorus, “Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.,” it becomes clear that by “democracy” he does not just mean that those in power will take into account the needs of the poor and disenfranchised, but that the immediacy of human connection will not be subordinated to alien powers and standards. Our obsession with sex, he seems to be suggesting with his overwrought erotic language, can appear trivial when considered alongside the greatest dilemmas of our time, and yet the perspective that judges it trivial only does
so by laying claim to an established set of values—which is exactly what democracy helps to undermine. The stanza is sexy not because there is a direct erotic appeal in the image of “going down so deep / the river’s gonna weep,” but because Cohen shows a willingness to consider the full ridiculousness of sex and still conclude that it nonetheless
matters
. Here, as in “Everybody Knows,” the irony is turned back on itself, so that dissembling serves the purpose of emphasizing the possibility of a speech that also expresses something sincere.

The Crack in Everything

This pattern of interrupting the distant with the immediate can be seen in so many of Cohen’s songs that it might seem to be an unconscious tic, but the explicit themes of “Hallelujah” and “Anthem” show that Cohen is well aware of what he is doing. “Hallelujah” features a similar narrative structure to the songs we have been considering, shifting from the third-person observer to the second-person accuser-forgiver and then back to the third-person observer, but even its third-person reflections are about the centrality of irony in love. The song draws an analogy between religious and sexual ecstasy, but it posits that what makes both so transporting is not their ability to bring us to a completely alien land, but rather their inherent incompleteness. The original studio version of the song includes a verse that makes irony central to every such experience of ecstasy: “There’s a blaze of light in every word / It doesn’t matter which you heard / The holy or the broken ‘Hallelujah.’” The “brokenness” of any particular instance or expression of love is not a sign that lovers have failed to come to terms with one another, but the space in which love is allowed to develop. Thus when Cohen recalls a failed relationship with a mix of disappointment and certainty that it was destined to fail, he acknowledges the presence of intimacy even in the impossibility of intimacy. This resoluteness in the face of breakdown is even clearer in the verse, “And even though it all went wrong / I’ll stand before the lord of song / With nothing on my tongue but ‘Hallelujah.’”
Here Cohen makes explicit his affirmation of love in spite of its failure to live up to its own promises. Song itself is a kind of promise that makes no promises. The singer does not really bare his true self or commit himself to any particular line of action, and yet willingness to sing passionately anyway commits him to pursuing love even where its conditions are absent. This insight can only be conveyed by someone who is willing to embrace the role of the ironist with all its contradictions, which is perhaps why so many artists who manage to cover the song with more sustained passion (k.d. lang deserves special mention) nevertheless seem to be missing something. Cohen’s renditions of the song can’t help vocally winking through lines like “Now you never even show it to me, do you?” but such unseriousness avoids yanking us out of the song’s emotional power and, indeed, only pulls us in further. Only someone able to appreciate the comedy of his own desires can take the tragedy of love seriously without becoming resigned to it.

Perhaps Cohen’s most systematic assertion that the impossibility of intimacy is no obstacle to continuing to strive for it appears in “Anthem,” which treats music as a fitting mode of expression not just for love, but for all hope in a broken universe. One who rings “the bells that still can ring” does not assume that song can ever provide a perfectly adequate offering to whoever might be listening, and yet she chooses to make this offering anyway. She does so not because she deludes herself into thinking that this time might be different or even that the mere attempt is all that can be asked, but because the imperfection of the offering of song is part of what makes the song an intimate art form. The most intimate singer would thus not be one who manages to spackle over all the flaws and inconsistencies in her position, but one who lets the light get in.

The Bleak Side of Irony

This sets a pretty high bar for the successful songwriter. In order to hold together all of these thoughts, Cohen relies on
a great deal of multiply embedded irony. In a typical verse, a surface expression of disappointment with love incompletely hides a willingness to forgive, and for this irony to work Cohen must assume the listener can perceive both the disappointment and the forgiveness at once. At the same time, in order for the sincerity of this expression of forgiveness to be apparent, Cohen must also make clear that he still feels wounded by the experience, and yet that this woundedness is not an absolute obstacle to a genuine connection. Moreover, to avoid putting undue pressure on the listener or appearing too ardent, Cohen must also recognize that there is nothing special about his reaction—that’s just the way love works—at the same time that he insists that he still finds
this
connection important or even sacred.

With all this weight put on a single ironic expression, we should not be too surprised that Cohen at times allows his irony to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. This bleaker side of irony can be found in “Tower of Song.” The song begins with its irony in full force, as the narrator acknowledges his desire while simultaneously trying to eliminate every hint of a request: “And I’m crazy for love, but I’m not coming on.” But as the narrator continues we realize that he is really not offering any kind of connection at all apart from the pure dissemination of feelings through song. The song is strikingly earnest in its acknowledgment of the pain previous romantic failures have caused him, but it refuses to acknowledge any vulnerability in the present. Cohen is, to be sure, his usual charming self, modestly acknowledging his lowly position in the Tower relative to such greats as Hank Williams, but the Tower is less a symbol of phallic incompleteness than a fortress from which he can only observe the world passively. When the song shifts from the lofty third-person perspective to the intimate second, it fails to betray Cohen’s customary vulnerability. He finds himself stunned that the gulf between him and his lover has grown so wide and despairs, “All the bridges are burning that we might have crossed, but I feel so close to everything that we lost,” but he catches himself and ruefully observes, “We’ll
never have to lose it again.” From his new position in the Tower, love is merely the raw material of song. His love will thus persist indefinitely in its present form: “You’ll be hearing from me, baby, long after I’m gone. I’ll be speaking to you sweetly from a window in the Tower of Song.” Here the notion that love is inseparable from its simulation, which such songs as “Closing Time” and “I’m Your Man” merely leave open as a possibility in order to solicit further intimacy, is acknowledged as an insuperable fact. He has been telling us all along that every promise of genuine intimacy had to be false, and yet we were innocent or stubborn enough to believe these promises anyway.