Read Leonard Cohen and Philosophy Online

Authors: Jason Holt

Tags: #Philosophy, #Essays, #Music, #Individual Composer & Musician, #Poetry, #Canadian

Leonard Cohen and Philosophy (27 page)

BOOK: Leonard Cohen and Philosophy
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A
RTHUR:
What is that? It’s beautiful.

        
L
EONARD:
It’s a traditional gospel song. Inspired by the Bible. Isaiah: “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

        
A
RTHUR:
Oh.

        
L
EONARD:
My goodness, Arthur, surely you have something more to say than “Oh,” given your extensive commentary on the “Jewish Bible” and the hierarchy of the races.

        
A
RTHUR:
Ah, Leonard. A poet, a musician—which I applaud, by the way—
and
a Jew? Of course. Of course I know who you are, in this state of knowing-beyond-knowing I find myself in, suddenly embarrassed, suddenly ashamed—not feelings I was wont to experience in life, yet corporeal sensations all the same.

        
L
EONARD:
Embarrassed? Ashamed? Haven’t we all had such feelings? And couldn’t they be part of the foundation of the compassion you wrote about so eloquently? Couldn’t your state of knowing-beyond-knowing be the fertile ground in which that great tree grows—“And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations”?

        
A
RTHUR:
Yes, Socrates. (
Leonard laughs heartily
.) I know that passage; it’s from the Book of Revelation.

        
L
EONARD:
New Testament.

        
A
RTHUR:
New Testament, Old Testament—they seem interwoven now. I’m not sure why I saw such a rift between them, and between Jew and Gentile, and between the sexes, and the races. . . . Perhaps, in my ceaseless and intense efforts to understand the forces
of the Will and the anguish of the individual, I was as much an example of that conflict as the rest of humanity that I was describing.

        
L
EONARD:
That’s a good insight.

        
A
RTHUR:
And then, I was so unhappy. . . .

        
L
EONARD:
I understand unhappiness very well. I don’t know any artists, thinkers, creators who haven’t been unhappy. It’s a question of having to express the most difficult matters of life.

        
A
RTHUR:
But you’re not unhappy now.

        
L
EONARD:
No. But it wasn’t some great act or event that lifted the sadness of a lifetime. It was more a recognition of and appreciation for the ordinary gifts of daily life—a garden in bloom, my daughter’s smile—

        
A
RTHUR:
I do regret not having had a family. My relationships were terrible, destructive. It’s quite probable that my diatribes against women arose from those experiences, not that it’s any excuse.

        
L
EONARD:
Again, as you said, your own philosophy provided exceptional perceptions of the nature of suffering and conflict, and the means, like compassion, to transcend them. But it seems you were not able to partake of them in your own life. Or even now.

        
A
RTHUR:
Even now? Even now that I understand?

        
L
EONARD:
But do you extend your understanding of compassion to
yourself
?

        
A
RTHUR:
Do you?

        
L
EONARD:
(
laughing
): You must be part Jewish, Arthur, to answer a question with another question like that. But to answer, yes. Not always, maybe not even that often, but I can be kind, compassionate, merciful to myself. Many sages say, and I agree, that otherwise we can’t really be good to others.

        
A
RTHUR:
“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. This is an error of the intellect as inevitable as that error of the eye, which lets us fancy that on the horizon heaven and earth meet.” I’m sorry to quote myself, but it seemed apt.

        
L
EONARD:
That’s wonderful. When did you write that?

        
A
RTHUR:
Well, in the late 1840s or so; the essay was published in 1851 (“Further Psychological Observations,” p. 40). That’s when my life was just starting to become successful; I mean, my work was. So when you speak of occasional happiness, I suppose I was at least superficially happy. The kind that comes from approval. It was better than nothing at all. But the kind you describe, that a poet and musician can describe in the minutiae of life, that, no. My own words accuse me of a limited scope.

        
L
EONARD:
But you’ve said it yourself, Arthur—the
limited scope
, within which great beauty resides, within each of us. Your powerful words need not accuse you: they can set you free.

        
A
RTHUR:
Am I not free now?

        
L
EONARD:
We can’t equate freedom and death, although they may sometimes seem alike. Have you not expressed to me remorse, regret, a yearning to experience the liberating compassion and happiness you lacked? Could these not be the great mortal strivings that arose from your monumental philosophical endeavours and endure beyond death?

        
A
RTHUR:
(
smiling
): Yes, Socrates. That’s true.

15

Dear Heather
in a Dark Space

C
HRISTOPHER
K
ETCHAM

Sable night, mother of dread and fear . . .

             
—S
HAKESPEARE
,
The Rape of Lucrece

I
t was a particularly nasty night, the kind of wet cold that freezes the skin and forces drafts through the weave of the best wools. I shivered. My mood was no less foul, as I’d spent the better part of the evening at the university library on a thorny research problem which did nothing but stymie me. That and a text message at about eleven that said, “I’m leaving.” I did not want to go home to a now empty apartment so I wandered the city for a while until my chin was numb and I was muzzy.

The neon sign glowed CA E; the F was dark. It was warm inside but not all that inviting a place: a few booths and plain round wooden tables with no linens. Dotted around the tables were two, three, or five spindle-backed wooden chairs that I knew would screech when I pulled one out. I chose a booth. There were maybe three people sitting at the tables and the other booths were empty. I was not in the mood to notice much else about the place. I ordered coffee from a waitress with the longest straight black hair I had seen in years. Her long nose and that hair made me think of a raven. But she didn’t strut or cackle and just took my order and nodded. The coffee was warm, and bitter. Fitting.

I began to slide down into the booth and pain throbbed in my thawing chin as if to chastise me for taking it outside. I heard Leonard Cohen, coming from somewhere. His was the disembodied voice that speaks to schizophrenics, beckoning me to listen. Not just to listen to his punctuated monotone but to penetrate through the drone to his words and then to their meaning in context where he wanted to take me. It was from his album, his gift on his seventieth birthday,
Dear Heather
. He kept repeating “I was there for you” which, of course, guided me straight back to the subject of the text message. Cohen’s line is what I should have texted back to her, but I had done nothing. No, that’s not true, I had deleted the message. My coffee had cooled; I didn’t want to go back outside; I didn’t want more caffeine.

Come, Civil Night, Thou Sober-Suited Matron, All in Black

The lights flickered; Cohen stuttered and returned to his song. Then the lights dimmed and the demonic voice dropped an octave, then stopped suddenly. Silence and blackness. “Shit,” from somewhere—a different voice from Cohen’s, higher—maybe the raven. Newspaper, yes it was newspaper rustled—over there, wherever there was. My eyes struggled with a false halo from the sudden shift from light to dark. There should have been emergency lights or at least someone was a smoker. But the darkness remained. For how long had it been dark?

In the light, the space of the café had been before me—it was separate from me. But the dark seemed to cloak me. It touched me. I could feel the air as I reached for my cup to down the last drops of coffee. The cup rang as loud as if I were in a bell tower. I felt unsettled, peculiar, for the darkness was not absence as the light was; darkness enveloped me—no it even penetrated the very core of my being. I felt the back of the booth as if it had grown into me, become me. No, I was not in a Kafka story; I was not Gregor Samsa who awoke one morning as a bug. But this was a kind of metamorphosis, for
I had become part of the dark space of this café—no, the dark space had become part of me. I was for a moment Antoine Roquentin in Café Mably in Sartre’s
Nausea
, where his nausea had come out of him—there on the walls of the café, making him one within the nausea (p. 31). But I did not feel the same sickness as Roquentin; I felt only the mysterious but gentle dark space in which I was enveloped.

Actually it wasn’t all that unnerving after a time. Rather, it had become exhilarating in a way I had not experienced before. Nor was I panicked to find the light again.

Muted lights passed by the store window and the glow was as from Plato’s cave where those inside can only see the shapes and shadows on the other side of a veil and this is their world. My darkness was a different world from Plato’s shadowy cave and in the dark the café was somehow clearer than it was in the light.

As the car lights passed, silhouettes of two people appeared, separate from me, but close, so close—and then they reconnected me to the returning blackness. I was part of them and them me, linked by the fabric of space: the café.

The dark space had become personal. It was more mine than the pitiful café of the light. Then as suddenly as the darkness came I wanted to know the raven and the two silhouettes that had appeared briefly. I reached out to them with my thoughts—my space to their space. But there was nothing; no one touched back. I put out my hand, thinking that it could trace the limits of their space, but I touched only the darkness of space. Only the cloak of blackness touched me back.

Strangely I felt free, free from the dilemma of my work and my Dear John text message. It was as if the dark space had flowed into my consciousness, stroking my ego with black salve. I could have panicked, but felt strangely calm. Beyond the expletive, nothing else was spoken. No one else shuffled. No one else seemed to move. Had the dark space enveloped them as well? I wondered.

The lights flickered on after a while, I don’t know how long. But the dark space had not withdrawn with the coming
of the light. It was as if the dark space had supercharged the light that came back on. Cohen crooned “O love, aren’t you tired yet?” But I wasn’t.

BOOK: Leonard Cohen and Philosophy
3.04Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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