Leonard Cohen and Philosophy (26 page)

Unlike Cohen, who has flourished in the romantic realm and given to the world an array of beautiful and moving love poems that clearly speak of his rich, complex life of the heart, Schopenhauer experienced few, and dismal, romantic relationships. He had an affair with a servant in Dresden who gave birth to an illegitimate daughter; she was born and died in 1819. Then there was an ill-fated relationship with a nineteen-year-old opera singer. Finally, at the age of forty-three, as described by Alexander Rosenthal, he fell for a girl of seventeen who noted in her diary after he offered her a bunch
of grapes at a party: “I didn’t want the grapes because old Schopenhauer had touched them, so I let them slide, quite gently, into the water” (“Christmas Celebration Speech,” p. 43). Later, bitterly, alone, he wrote: “In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one’s rights and double one’s duties” (
Parerga and Paralipomena
, p. 622).

Schopenhauer’s dismal history with the opposite sex could not be further from Cohen’s experience of and attitude toward women. He has had longtime collaborations with female artists, including musicians Jennifer Warnes, Sharon Robinson, and his current partner, Anjani Thomas. He famously said (to Jack Hafferkamp in
The Rolling Stone
in 1971): “Women are really strong. You notice how strong they are? Well, let them take over. . . . The premise being, there can be no free men unless there are free women” (“Ladies and Gents, Leonard Cohen,” par. 7).

Of his reputation as a Lothario, with liaisons ranging from the legendary beauty Marianne Jensen (inspiration for “So Long, Marianne”) to singer Janis Joplin to actress Rebecca De Mornay and many others, he told Nick Paton Walsh of the
Observer
in 2001:

I read with some amusement my reputation as a ladies’ man. My friends are amused by that, too, because they know my life. Even when I was younger I was never aware of it, to tell the truth, so I could not take advantage of it. But for someone who has that sort of reputation and has spent so many nights alone, it has a special bitter amusement attached to it. (“I Never Discuss My Mistresses or My Tailors,” par. 21)

Indeed, in Cohen’s writing about women, as in all of his subject matter, loss and sorrow preside over even the most dazzling passions, as if he knows that ultimately he will be alone with his thoughts and words—as if he knows he must be. “Tower of Song” perfectly conveys the crucially necessary loneliness that artists (or philosophers) must not only face, but also embrace with a devotion that painfully wrenches them away from other affections, over and over, in an endless
cycle of intimacy and retreat to the cloistered chamber of creation.

From early songs such as “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,” to middle-period compositions like “Take This Waltz” and “Closing Time,” and especially “Love Itself,” Cohen discovers the most profound expressions of love in its inevitable passing. The poem, or the song, contains the finest and most beautiful aspects of the physical relationship, given unassailable substance in words found only in the silence of his “little room.” And this room in his aesthetic tower also offers him the sanctuary to apprehend and comprehend the sometimes twisted passions, obsessions, complications, and heartbreaks of love.

Creation

The creative crucible, for Cohen and Schopenhauer, takes precedence over worldly matters. Each, in his way, retreats to advance ideas about the deceptive limitations of the physical sphere. Each recognizes, one as practitioner, the other as practicing observer, the power of art to transcend the anguish of what Schopenhauer calls “the Will” and Cohen, “the World” (“Night Comes On”) or “the Big World” (
Flowers for Hitler
). Both Cohen and Schopenhauer commit themselves fully to explorations of the Will, or World, that is each of us in our urges and desires.

But even the transformative power of thinking and writing in the privacy of a room far away from the wants and whims that their willed worlds exact can seem insufficient, and Cohen and Schopenhauer then look to spiritual practice as a possibly greater solution to mundane frustration and suffering.

In 1994, after a tour to promote his recently released album
The Future
, Cohen retreated to the Mount Baldy Zen Buddhist monastery in the San Gabriel Mountains of California, where he had spent much time periodically during the previous decade. He was in poor health, reeling from shattered relationships and intense depression, and he saw
the monastic life as a chance to reclaim his life. For five years, that seemed to be the case: Cohen fulfilled the rigorous daily routine, was ordained as a monk and given the monastic name Jikan, which, ironically, means “silent one.”

But he could not stay silent; he wrote poem after poem during his time in the monastery, and in the end found it impossible to yield himself to a lifetime of Buddhist practice. Although he did say later that his Judaism was strengthened by his experience as a Zen monk, there was no doubt that he would choose a single path, and no doubt which one it would be. It’s difficult to counter many generations of rabbinical practice; it’s hard to ignore the fact that one’s own name, Cohen, means “priest.”

His biblical references are numerous and thrillingly proprietary, and so are his sometimes anguished, sometimes wry allusions to Jewishness in the post-Holocaust world. Buddhist principles do arise in Cohen’s work, as in the enjoinder in “Anthem” to forget our “perfect offering,” but Cohen’s spiritual allegiance and practice now belong to the faith he grew up in, the faith of his ancestors; both his grandfathers were rabbis.

In an extraordinary conversation with American author and editor Arthur Kurzweil, just after his
Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs
(1993) came out, Cohen responds to Kurzweil’s question about a certain line from “The Future”:

Oh, I
am
the little Jew who wrote the Bible.
I am the little Jew who wrote the Bible
. “You don’t know me from the wind. You never will, you never did”—I’m saying this to the nations. I’m the little Jew who wrote the Bible. I’m that
little one
. . . .

A confident people is not exclusive. A great religion affirms other religions. A great culture affirms other cultures. A great nation affirms other nations. A great individual affirms other individuals, validates the being-ness of others and the vitality. That’s the way I feel about this thing. (from the Cohen and Kurzweil conversation, titled “I
Am
the Little Jew Who Wrote the Bible,” p. 23)

Schopenhauer would have fervently and fiercely disagreed. In a disturbing 1850 essay, “On the Sufferings of the World,”
he writes: “Judaism is inferior to any other form of religious doctrine professed by a civilized nation; and it is quite in keeping with this that it is the only one which presents no trace whatever of any belief in the immortality of the soul” (p. 14). Within the “despotic theism” of the Old Testament, he contends, humanity is ruled by law alone; the New Testament liberates man from the yoke of law and offers the kingdom of grace, attained by faith, love of neighbor (except, perhaps, adherents of Judaism), and self-sacrifice.

But most practicing Christians don’t come off much better under Schopenhauer’s cutting gaze; their only mitigation is that they’re irretrievably trapped by the base justice and rigid rules of the Old Testament, which, if done away with, might lead to the true “path of redemption from the evil of the world.” The path of Christ, he says, “is undoubtedly asceticism, however your protestants and rationalists may twist it to suit their purpose” (“Sufferings of the World,” p. 16). Asceticism, to Schopenhauer, is the denial of the will to live—a highly desirable outcome: “To those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours, with its suns and galaxies, is—nothing.” (
Will and Representation
I, p. 412).

Self-abnegation, Schopenhauer’s interpretation of the practice of Christ and certain saints, and of the Eastern mystics, offers a means to neutralize the horrendously cruel, violent, ubiquitous effect of the Will he sees as the all-powerful force ruling the physical world. Although this isn’t particularly Cohen’s view, he’d likely be less resistant to it than to living completely or permanently in the manner prescribed—discipline, he would probably argue, is quite a different process from self-denial.

Even more influential on Schopenhauer than his biblical readings were his explorations of the Upanishads, the founding texts of Hinduism, which he first read in his mid-twenties, pored over all his life, and referred to widely as the summit of wisdom (for example,
Will and Representation
I, p. 355). He was also, like Cohen, drawn to Buddhist teachings, in particular that life entails suffering rooted in desire
or ignorance, and that the cessation of suffering is possible. In his major work on ethics,
On the Basis of Morality
(1837), he gives voice to a fundamentally Buddhist principle of liberation from anguish within “the everyday phenomenon of
compassion
. . . the immediate
participation
, independent of all ulterior considerations, primarily in the
suffering
of another, and thus in the prevention or elimination of it” (p. 144).

But what Schopenhauer fails to address is that in religious practice the world over, fulfillment and joy are attainable through the very processes he touts as ideals. Buddha’s Third Noble Truth says not only that suffering can be overcome, but also that happiness and liberation can thus be achieved in oneself and in the service of others. Christ is cited in John 16:24 as saying: “Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full.” Or, from the Vedantic tradition: “Seek happiness not in the objects of sense; realize that happiness is within yourself.”

Asceticism, in the great traditions, is not so much the eradication of self—of the Will, as Schopenhauer would have it—as the “extinguishing” (the literal meaning of the Buddhist term “nirvana”) of the flames of greed, hatred, and delusion that attack and distort a person’s character, that promote misery and disable happiness. Schopenhauer spent a lifetime brilliantly and meticulously mapping the very real misery and suffering of the human condition—of the world as he thought it to be—but it’s as if he couldn’t bring himself even to recognize, let alone seek, joy in spiritual practice any more than in any other realm. Not for him the open-hearted religious explorations that Cohen has undertaken over the decades—or the celebratory reaffirmation of his ancestral faith in recent years.

Schopenhauer had little to celebrate. He was denied fame until the last decade of his life; he was unrelievedly unhappy in love; and he lived alone from 1833 until his death in Frankfurt in 1860—except for the company of a series of poodles, one of which he named Atman, the Hindu term for the essential self, the eternal spirit.

An Imagined Dialogue

Suppose Leonard Cohen and Arthur Schopenhauer could meet—in a third room, as it were—and discuss the matters that unite them and set them apart. Since this encounter is imaginary, obstacles such as geography and language wouldn’t exist. The two men would have some prior knowledge of each other and could freely discuss will and world and word, art and asceticism, love and, yes, even death, as known to each of them on—at present—either side of the great divide:

        
L
EONARD:
It’s extraordinary, Arthur, that we share, at opposite ends of life, a unique relationship with the date September 21st.

        
A
RTHUR:
The autumnal equinox, which is supposed to be a day equally divided between light and darkness.

        
L
EONARD:
Supposed to be? Oh, perhaps you mean that you dwell in a realm where such distinctions no longer signify.

        
A
RTHUR:
Not at all, for if that were so, this dialogue could not take place.

        
L
EONARD:
I’d say that I stand corrected, except that I’m seated.

        
A
RTHUR:
Very well then. I could elucidate—

        
L
EONARD:
It was meant as a joke.

        
A
RTHUR:
Oh, I see. I’m afraid humor usually eludes me. I think of such talk as an outgrowth of boredom we’re driven to as an anesthetic against the ravages of Time.

        
L
EONARD:
Yet here we are, outside the grip of Time, at least for a time.

        
A
RTHUR:
You are a poet.

        
L
EONARD:
Yes, after a fashion.

        
A
RTHUR:
A poet who delves into the dark places of life, the suffering that is the nature of everyday existence, the violence of individuation.

        
L
EONARD:
Yes, and the luminous ones as well.

        
A
RTHUR:
There’s that “darkness and light” again. Good and evil. As if in the everyday physical world such
distinctions are possible. Some observable, measurable celestial point—an equinox, during whose perfect balance the warring nations suddenly lay down their swords and shields—

        
L
EONARD:
(
singing
): “Down by the riverside, down by the riverside. I ain’t gonna study war no more.”