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Listening to Leonard Cohen in the Time of Trump

2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-4162551

2164-0041

David Sylvester,

Rhetoric and Communication Studies

This era of Donald Trump and Trumpism has unleashed a wave of physical and emotional violence so venomous that by now, it’s clear that this is more a form of spiritual assault than an aberrant political ideology. It contains a lust that won’t be satisfied by attacking any particular group of victims because it really seeks to destroy values. Donald Trump himself and those around him seem to delight in smashing the ethical norms and traditions that have historically provided the spiritual foundations for the healthy functioning of civil society. Peter Wehner, a conservative commentator, has accurately summed up this new zeitgeist: “Donald Trump is a transgressive personality. He thrives on creating disorder, in violating rules, in provoking outrage. He is a shock jock.”1For those of us who consider ourselves both spiritual and progressive, or perhaps simply people of good will: How do we respond? What do we do about this transgressive spirit that inspires hate crimes, attacks on mosques and immigrants, and denigrates women?Certainly, it’s essential to take direct political action, such as the Women’s March last January and the spontaneous demonstrations at airports to protect the rights of immigrants threatened with an ill-conceived travel ban. And it’s also clear that staying spiritually centered is equally important through prayer, meditation, and community spiritual practices at a time of fake news, lies, and the mockery of sacred values.However, I think there’s a more fundamental challenge: How do we combine outer action with inner peace? How do we confront the poisonous spirit of the counter-demonstrators in the streets without becoming poisoned ourselves? How do we respond to haters without hating or to the rageful without becoming enraged? How do we lead by exampleship, by being an example of our values of cooperation, dignity, and respect for all people in our behavior, not just our words? And do we sincerely mean to include the Trumpistas in that phrase, “all people”?In reflecting on this, I had a surprising insight shortly after the presidential election last November. I went back in a reverie to the 1960s and remembered how the horrors of the Vietnam War made the appearance of everyday normalcy seem ghastly and surreal. How did we maintain our sanity then? What came to me was this: Our musicians saved us—and specifically, our folksingers. Ever since the Depression and civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, the demonstrations, protests, and marches had been accompanied by the songs of Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, the Freedom Singers in the south, Phil Ochs, Mahalia Jackson, the early Bob Dylan and later, in the 1970s, Holly Near. The music maintained a connection to people’s spiritual core during the turbulence of protest. In 1963, when Joan Baez led the people at the Civil Rights March in Washington DC in singing “We Shall Overcome,” she was not only strengthening their faith and hope but also making a public assertion of victory. Baez, and the tradition of spiritual and socially conscious music, helped us find prayer-in-the-midst-of-action.This unexpected revelation emerged from my musings when I heard that, as fate would have it, the great prophetic and mystical Leonard Cohen had passed away at the age of 82 during the night before the presidential election. It seems too harsh to say Cohen died, because his mournful, meditative incantations seemed to presage his passing for years. Compared to the depth and beauty of his sensibility, his end seemed incongruously mundane. Apparently, he fell during the night of Monday, Nov. 7, went back to bed and drifted off into what his manager called a “sudden, unexpected and peaceful” death.2Compared to the more political folksingers, Cohen was different. There was no mistaking the message of songs like Phil Ochs’s “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” and Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” Instead, Cohen sang from a quieter angst. He sounded as if he knew what it felt like to stop marching entirely and to struggle against old patterns of living in the changing times. So one morning, after reading Leonard Cohen both the tributes to Cohen as well as the anguished reports about Trump, I clicked onto YouTube to console myself with some of his music, and I was transported back to the moment when I heard a Leonard Cohen song for the first time.3It was 1967, and a group of us were gathered at our friend Sally’s house, 16-year-olds about to be ejected into this allegedly adult world. We were sitting around her family’s dining room table, trying to make conversation, somewhat excited yet embarrassed to be together in our adolescent way. Sally was chattering as she put on the record In My Life by one of the new folk-singers. Suddenly, a voice emerged as delicate as a child’s first song and feminine as the sky is blue:Suzanne takes you down,to a place by the river.You can hear the boats go by,You can spend the night forever.And you know that she’s half-crazy,that’s why you want to be there,and she feeds you tea and orangesthat come all the way from China.We fell silent, mesmerized by the mystery of words we had never heard before and a human voice more beautiful than I could ever imagine possible. We felt a presence that invited us into a place of tenderness, a haven for us to inhabit in the midst of anxiety and turbulence, a place of solace:And just when you want to tell herthat you have no love to give her,she gets you on her wavelength,and lets the river answerthat you’ve always been her lover.And you want to travel with her,and you want to travel blind,and you think you maybe trust her,for she’s touched your perfect bodywith her mind.Later, we may have wondered what the words meant, but somewhere inside, we already knew. These songs, written by Cohen and sung by Judy Collins, brought us together and gave us communion as friends and later, as a subculture. They floated into our consciousness and formed in us an interior space for healing and retreat from the world into which we were about to be plunged.Fifty years later, I was returning to the same songs, and I closed my eyes and found myself flowing back into this benevolent center, this most intimate self, and being comforted. Then, something quite startling began to happen. On the periphery of my awareness, other sensations began to crowd in, intrusions that seemed to make no sense. I resisted for a moment, then allowed them—and remarkably enough, the feelings of the song remained like an oasis while they were surrounded by vibrations and shocks of the earth convulsing, blinding lights and scalding heat, screams and wailing of villagers, perhaps families, running in lines down dirt roads with their peaked hats and babies, the B-52s roaring in, strafing and napalming the village and the forest.Yes, it was true, I thought to myself, that’s how it was. Then, as now, we lived in a double reality. Almost everyone seemed to go about their normal lives as if nothing unusual was happening, and yet over the horizon, even 8,000 miles away, the agony of the Vietnamese people came to us through the images on television and in the newspapers, in our conversations and demonstrations. Our country had invaded Vietnam, but Vietnamese were invading our spirit. We may have left their country, but their ghosts came and stayed with us.This fragmentation of American consciousness is what made songs like “Suzanne” so necessary. After the election of Trump, this brief auditory hallucination reminded me that no matter how bad things got in the outer world—and they got a whole lot worse after 1967, with the riots, anti-war demonstrations, the Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy assassinations, the election of Nixon and his “madman theory” of war4—we had Leonard Cohen’s vision to remind us of an elemental goodness in life, no matter how darkened by passing events. He did not sing of a simple, sunny goodness but one filled with grief and lamentation, yet charged with erotic longing and beauty all the same. He spoke about darkness, but he sang as if he felt surrounded by angels of light. His song Anthem comes from his album The Future in 1992:Ring the bells that still can ring.Forget your perfect offering.There is a crack, a crack in everything.That’s how the light gets in.Anyone familiar with this image will know it comes from Jewish mystical tradition. As Jonathan Freedland wrote in The Atlantic:According to the 16th century rabbi and mystic, Isaac Luria, God created vessels into which he poured his holy light. These vessels weren’t strong enough to contain such a powerful force and they shattered: the sparks of divine light were carried down to earth along with the broken shards. Put another way: There is a crack in everything, it’s how the light gets in.5This perspective came from Cohen’s reading of the Jewish mystical treatise, The Zohar, and he always identified as Jewish, both growing up in an Orthodox Jewish home in Montreal where his father and uncle were lay leaders, and specifying burial in an Orthodox ceremony.6 However, in spite of this, Cohen was a committed eclectic. His spiritual path delved into the Gnostic Gospels, Zen Buddhist meditation, grief, suffering, depression, drugs and multiple affairs that never culminated in marriage.7This eclecticism gave his music a mystifying poetic quality that eludes easy categorization. On stage, even in his late 70s, he was a magnetic presence, bowing down underneath a black fedora. He looked like “a Rat Pack rabbi, God’s chosen mobster,” as Sylvie Simmons put it in her biography of Cohen.and he groaned out his words to gorgeous and haunting melodies.8 For instance, “Dance Me to the End of Love,” released in 1984:Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin.Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in.Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove,And dance me to the end of love.Yeah, dance me to the end of love.The mood of yearning and tenderness is unmistakable. Who would guess that it’s a meditation on the Holocaust? In an interview with the CBC Radio in 1995, Cohen described the source of the song:. . . that came from just hearing or reading or knowing that in the death camps, beside the crematoria, in certain of the death camps, a string quartet was pressed into performance while this horror was going on, those were the people whose fate was this horror also. And they would be playing classical music while their fellow prisoners were being killed and burnt. So, that music, “Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin,” meaning the beauty there of being the consummation of life, the end of this existence and of the passionate element in that consummation. But, it is the same language that we use for surrender to the beloved, so that the song—it’s not important that anybody knows the genesis of it, because if the language comes from that passionate resource, it will be able to embrace all passionate activity.9His signature song, “Hallelujah,” has become wildly popular; k.d. lang performed it at the 2010 Winter Olympics and the Beyt Tikkun Synagogue of Rabbi Michael Lerner has incorporated it into its Shabbat service. But the words themselves defy explanation. At times, they are Biblical; at other times, lamentations over loves lost and humbling confessions:10You say I took the name in vain.I don’t even know the name.But if I did, well really, what’s it to you?There’s a blaze of light in every word.It doesn’t matter which you heard,The holy or the broken hallelujahHallelujah . . .I did my best, it wasn’t much.I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch.I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you.And even though it all went wrong,I’ll stand before the lord of song,With nothing on my tongue but hallelujahIs this a holy or a broken Hallelujah? Or both?In the last two years of his life, Cohen was suffering from fractures in his spine and sitting in an orthopedic chair at home, but he kept composing. His son Adam helped him finish his final album, “You Want It Darker,” released three weeks before his death. The title song is classic Cohen. He speaks in a common vernacular, echoes the opening line of the Kaddish, turns to the agony of Jesus and closes with Abraham’s response to God’s call: Hineni, “Here I am”:If you are the dealer, I’m out of the game.If you are the healer, it means I’m broken and lame.If thine is the glory then mine must be the shame.You want it darker,We kill the flame.Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name.Vilified, crucified, in the human frame.A million candles burning for the help that never came,You want it darker.Hineni, hineniI’m ready, my lord11From one perspective, Cohen’s darkness seems to lack the traditional prophetic call to repentance, teshuvah, with the promise of renewal, or faith in the goodness of a transcendent God, even in the midst of chaos. He echoes the words of the Kaddish but misses its distinctly Jewish affirmation of His Great Name sanctified while mourning the death of a loved one and remembering the undying faith that links one generation to another. Cohen sees the tragedy of Jesus crucified but not the Christian joy of resurrection. His Judaism seems more regretful than compassionate, more repentant than merciful, more Selichot and Yom Kippur than the exuberance of Simchat Torah, the Joy of Torah.Cohen has been called the poet of “erotic despair,” but I think it is the songs, not just his words, that take us to a deeper reality, a place where eros and thanatos are fused, where a person’s all-too-human unloveliness is part of the sacred, not to be scorned but to be embraced gently, tragically. To my ear, Cohen’s affirmation comes in his lovely melodies, the collage of images, and the trance he casts. To me, Cohen stands in the tradition of the Book of Ecclesiastes, the Teacher who calls himself a son of the King of Jerusalem and begins with:Utter futility!—said Koheleth—Utter futility! All is futile!What real value is there for a manIn all the gains he makes beneath the sun?One generation goes, another comes,But the earth remains the same forever.Yet these lines are so beautiful that Ecclesiastes is one of the most quoted books of the Bible. As Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, a song of grief transcends grief. Cohen has this same authenticity when he speaks of Jesus. It’s as if he, as a kohen, knew the true meaning of the words when he sang them in “Suzanne”:12And Jesus was a sailorwhen he walked upon the water,and he spent a long time watchingfrom a lonely wooden tower,and when he knew for certainonly drowning men could see him,he said, “All men shall be sailors thenuntil the sea shall free them.”This Jesus of Leonard Cohen was not the Jesus of the Christian churches, just as Suzanne was not some woman offering a romantic tryst. For Cohen, they are personal presences who offer to accompany us on our journey through the difficulties of this world.But he himself was brokenlong before the sky would open;forsaken, almost human,he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.And you want to travel with him,and you want to travel blind,and you think you maybe trust him,for he’s touched your perfect body with his mind.For me, these words speak far beyond any literal meaning of one person’s experience; they capture the mood of our childhood in the postwar years, when it seemed, as it does now, that the whole world was being broken and the sky was opening and the ghosts of the dead were rising up, haunting our steps, troubling our sleep.These ghosts came from all over the world, speaking in accents that we couldn’t understand as children. For those of us born after the end of a world war, there were the ghosts of the 6 million, strangers who became friends and family from the photographs we lingered over and stories were read and re-read, each with a smile, a name, a fate. There were the ghosts from one fireball in Japan, then another, and their faces came in death like particles in the wind and settled on us children, like a dust that stuck to our skin as we played. There were the tens of thousands burned alive in atomic blasts, and fields of death in Normandy, Sicily, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. Later, the Vietnamese began to arrive in those waking moments at 4am, and the Jewish athletes in Munich, the Palestinian mothers, wrapped in headscarves, the families of Gaza, the campesinos of Guatemala, Monsignor Oscar Romero and the Catholic priests of El Salvador. In my subterranean life, they are all still with me, and Judy Collins and Leonard Cohen are still keeping me sane.Fifty years later, I can return to that moment as a 16-year-old, with Bob, Sally, and Kathy, gathered at that dinner table, taking refuge in this place of comfort amid the flames of this world, even in presence of the millions who died in America’s “good” years.Suzanne takes you down to a place by the river,you can hear the boats go by,you can spend the night forever.And the sun pours down like honeyon our Lady of the Harbor,And she shows you where to lookamong the garbage and the flowers.We are now in the midst of the battle for the soul of America. However long Trump remains in power, he has validated the most outlandish proposals of the most marginal of political figures, including Christian fascists13, neoconservative militarists14, neo-segregationists and white supremacists15, anti-science climate deniers16, plutocrats who are both incompetent and unprepared,17 as well as Wall Street and corporate predators. All have walked across the stage as the sorcerer’s apprentices in this unreality show of imperial power.As fate would have it, the Trumpists are also inheriting a governmental apparatus well prepared for them by George W. Bush and Barack Obama: national electronic surveillance, rule by executive orders, the Patriot Act, detention centers and mass deportations, drone assassinations in seven countries, and endless, futile foreign wars. At this writing, the imperial militarism that we directed at other countries seems destined to return home, and the anti-democratic style of government we imposed on so many other countries is now being imposed on us. The conservative Peter Wehner may have been accurate in his prediction when he said that “Donald Trump has given us many reasons to worry. A man with illiberal tendencies, a volatile personality and no internal checks is now president. This isn’t going to end well.”Yet this is not a time for despair and inaction. For this, we can thank the tradition of prophetic folksingers for offering us what Rabbi Michael Lerner calls “the holy moment.” He adds:Prayerful energy can keep us from sinking to Trump’s level, help us stop the police agents who always try to provoke demonstrators to violence and keep us on the spiritual level of nonviolence and love that are the only hope of transformation.”We need the holy moments of spiritually conscious, socially engaged music now more than ever as brutality gains strength. Last January, Mikhail Gorbachev became alarmed about the belligerence of military leaders and warned that the world “looks as if it is preparing for war.”18 If so, tens of thousands may perish and become ghosts that will haunt us and our children for decades. We can only hope that the 16-year-olds of today will find those interior havens of spiritual wisdom and solace that folksingers like Cohen helped us find decades ago, places that can protect, comfort, and ground us in a spiritual reality deeper than the chaos of the storms we all now face, a place for heroes and children, as Cohen sang at the ending of “Suzanne.”There are heroes in the seaweed,there are children in the morning.They are leaning out for love,and they will lean that way forever,while Suzanne holds the mirror.And you want to travel with her,and you want to travel blind,and you think maybe you’ll trust her,For you’ve touched her perfect bodywith your mind.