Leonard Cohen and Philosophy by Jason Holt

of Song.
    The human self is a constant work in process, Kierkegaard wrote in The Sickness unto Death (pp. 13–22). The path towards overcoming despair has not so much to do with gritting our teeth like Sisyphus and making our peace with the absurd but rather with constantly transcending ourselves, with letting go of our obsessions and our ego, and with committing ourselves to other people and to God (whatever we mean by that beautiful, mysterious word). In Book of Mercy Cohen writes: “Let me raise the brokenness to you, to the world where the breaking is for love” (psalm 49). We may never be perfect but that is exactly why we’re capable of such great love, a love as great as God’s. Suffering begets compassion, and compassion begets love. But this is only true as long as we resign ourselves to our brokenness and embrace it as the thread that binds us to our fellow human beings who also suffer. We’re all citizens of Boogie Street.Without that resignation we can neither offer love nor accept it. As Cohen puts it again in Book of Mercy : “Why do you welcome me? asks the bitter heart. Why do you comfort me? asks the heart that is not broken enough” (psalm 40).
    The term “joyful sorrow,” which originated in ancient Christian mysticism, perfectly encapsulates the beauty of Cohen’s art. There is, indeed, a great deal of darkness in the broken night. Yet Cohen reminds us that in that darkness there is light, in the sorrow there is joy. Cohen’s songs are uplifting because they are dark, unlike the cornucopia of sugary pop songs that assail us from the airwaves and which do nothing but exacerbate our despair with their forced “happiness” (if anyone is the grand master of melancholia it’s Justin Bieber, God bless him). The existentialism in Cohen’s art is the hopeful reassurance that our sadness is an essential part of what makes us human and that it is deeply intertwined with our joy. The fact that we’re not perfect, that we are shy and anxious and confused and suffering, is what makes us capable of love, which, as the poet W.H. Auden pointed out, is what being happy truly means. Or, as Leonard Cohen put it, “that’s how the light gets in.”

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    Why Cohen’s Our Man
    W IELAND S CHWANEBECK
    O ver the course of his career as a singer and songwriter (not to mention poet, philosopher, ladies’ man, and bearer of the gift of a golden voice), not only has Leonard Cohen been on a quest to spread wisdom and precious melancholia to the sounds of his guitar, and (lately) to outperform Bob Dylan as the most diligent touring artist in the world, but also he seems to have embarked on a personal mission to dedicate a song to every female first name there is. Yet don’t let all those Heathers, Suzannes, Mariannes, and Nancys fool you: the number of women he name-checks is no match for the variety of masculinities in his work, even though men are not as frequently evoked in name or shape. Already in 1970, Cohen’s fellow countryman Michael Ondaatje (in Leonard Cohen ) was one of the first to draw attention to the abundance of different masculinities in Cohen—better known as a poet than a singer back then—including “the magician, the wit, the aesthete, the wounded man”; Cohen’s women, on the other hand, tended to be “dangerously similar” (p. 13). This observation holds just as true for the impressive song catalogue Cohen has assembled over the decades, in which femininity always appears in similar embodiments: angels of compassion, sisters of mercy, and ladies of solitude.
    By looking at the masculinities evoked in Cohen’s songs (and his very own versatile performance as a singer andsongwriter), we can better assess the quality of his writing and his insight into human nature, for Leonard Cohen has a lot to say about gender relations and the dubious nature of traditional gender images. So let’s apply some Johnny Walker wisdom and find out just how many different masculinities Cohen’s songs and