Laurence Coupe
Academia Letters, Article 5297 (2022)
I have discussed Leonard Cohen’s work before in a previous article for Academia Letters, in which I focus on the song ‘Suzanne’ (1967) – seeing it as both song and poem. There, of course, the text had been a written poem initially, and then put to music; but my argument was that great writing should always be taken seriously, and if necessary read closely line by line, whether it take the form of poem or song. That is not to say that the music does not matter; but with the most interesting songs, the tune is there to give full force to the text.
With the theme of ‘song as poem’ in mind, I want to emphasise Cohen’s little-known interest in country music, and to indicate why that genre might have appealed to him. This interest may seem odd, given that country is a genre which is frequently dismissed as a shallow form of diversion for unthinking and insensitive consumers. However, we know that Cohen did not subscribe to that dismissive viewpoint. The first band Cohen ever performed with was ‘the Buckskin Boys’, and they played chiefly country music. Later in his career, Cohen was explicit in his admiration for Hank Williams, a leading pioneer of the genre.[1] Cohen even referred humorously to Williams’ influence in ‘Tower of Song’ (1988), seeing him as a fellow-inhabitant of a tall, monumental building where the great poets live out their last days.[2]
In the discussion of Cohen in my book Beat Sound, Beat Vision, I explore the tension in his work between the ‘profane’ world of experience and the ‘sacred’ world of illumination – a tension which becomes a persistent dialectic.[3] There is the sphere of suffering and that of salvation, and they constantly interact in our imaginations. They do not make full sense if we view them apart. For example, in ‘If It Be Your Will’ (1984), which takes the form of a prayer, Cohen seems to be espousing an orthodox monotheism, the basis of a doctrine of salvation for the righteous; but the imagery simultaneously celebrates the suffering sinners. He speaks for all those ‘on this broken hill’, dressed in ‘our rags of light’; and asks that ‘all these burning hearts in hell’ be made ‘well’ at last.[4] A plea for mercy from a God of justice, the song dwells chiefly on the frailty of humanity; but paradoxically, this frailty is the very source of its spirituality. Only in the depths of the profane does the sacred need to be made manifest.
To give a more succinct example of the dialectic of the profane and the sacred, here is the refrain of ‘Anthem’ (1992): ‘Ring the bells that still can ring. / Forget your perfect offering. / There is a crack in everything. / That’s how the light gets in.’ [5]
***
Everyone interested in country music would agree that Hank Williams was a songwriter of rare genius. Indeed, he has more than once been referred to as the great ‘Poet of Pain’. My instinct is that ‘Poetry of Pain’ is a perfect description of some of the best ever country music.[6] Here is a verse from Williams’ ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ (1949): ‘Did you ever see a robin weep / When leaves began to die? / Like me, he’s lost the will to live: / I’m so lonesome I could cry.’ To me, those lines are reminiscent of verses penned by the likes of Tennyson, Dickinson, Hardy and Housman – all known for their melancholy reflections. This other verse is unforgettably striking: ‘The silence of a falling star / Lights up a purple sky, / And as I wonder where you are / I’m so lonesome I could cry.’[7] Here, as with Cohen’s work, we can see how, with beautiful economy of expression, Williams is able to convey a powerful apprehension of the tragedy of human existence, set against a cosmic order. Here is solitude and sadness; there is sublimity and serenity.
Only a year before, Williams wrote and sang ‘I Saw the Light’ (1948). Here we have the ‘aimless life filled with sin’; but it is in the depths of the night – a night symbolising the miserable state of the sinner – that ‘my dear saviour’ comes to him. Just to enforce the message, the sinner is seen as ‘a blind man’ who ‘wandered along’ until ‘God gives back his sight’ to him. Sin, suffering and salvation are the elements of a total vision.
***
There’s a talented country artist with whom the poetry of pain is at its most intense, seemingly without reprieve: Townes Van Zandt. In his work there is very little by way of Biblical allusion, and not much talk of salvation. The pain is stark and it has to be honoured. One of his first songs – ‘Waitin’ Around to Die’ (1968) – gives us his bleak impression of life’s journey unadorned. There is no apology in these words: ‘Sometimes I don’t know where this dirty road is takin’ me, / Sometimes I don’t even know the reason why. / But I guess I keep a-gamblin’ / Lots of booze and lots of ramblin’. / Well it’s easier than just a-waitin’ around to die.’[8]
‘Waitin’ Around to Die’ might be said to set out Van Zandt’s challenge to himself. Is life just one damned thing after another, as the saying goes? Is there no redemption? A later song of his, ‘Rex’s Blues’ (1978), is rather more complex. It explores the paradoxical nature of the human condition: ‘Legs to walk and thoughts to fly, / Eyes to laugh and lips to cry, / A restless tongue to classify: / All born to grow and grown to die.’ Now, looking back, he realises how he came to feel as though he is ‘…chained upon the face of time, / Feelin’ full of foolish rhyme.’ But it is in this moment of realisation that he is open to revelation: ‘There ain’t no dark till something shines: / I’m bound to leave this dark behind.’[9] The paradox of listening to Van Zandt is that, though he faces the worst, and though he uses what he modestly calls his ‘foolish rhyme’ to do so, he really does help you — for the duration of the song, at least – to leave the dark behind. Perhaps all country music, at its best, does exactly that. In doing so, it deserves to be celebrated alongside Cohen’s own work.
Finally, it is worth pondering those last two lines or ‘Rex’s Blues’ further. Could it be that Cohen had heard the song himself, prior to writing ‘Anthem’ – in particular, that chorus we quoted earlier?[10] For surely the revelation granted by each song is very close: they both articulate with superb economy of expression the dialectic of dark and light, profane and sacred, suffering and salvation. Certainly, I would presume to claim that Van Zandt stands as one of the greatest songwriters ever, and that it would be no insult to Leonard Cohen to see Van Zandt as a fellow-inhabitant of his in that ‘tower of song’.
[1] Sylvie Simmons, I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen (London: Vintage Books, 2013), pp. 39-41, 206.
[2] Leonard Cohen, ‘Tower of Song’, Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993), p. 363.
[3] Laurence Coupe, Beat Sound, Beat Vision: The Beat spirit and popular song (Manchester: MUP, 2007), pp. 182-194.
[4] Leonard Cohen, ‘If It Be Your Will’, Stranger Music, p. 343.
[5] Leonard Cohen, ‘Anthem’, Stranger Music, p. 373.
[6] See Laurence Coupe, ‘The Case for Country Music as a Poetry of Pain’, PopMatters https://www.popmatters.com/author/laurence-coupe
[7] Hank Williams, ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ (1949) https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/hankwilliams/imsolonesomeicouldcry.html
[8] Townes Van Zandt, ‘Waitin ‘Round To Die’ (1968) https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/townesvanzandt/waitingroundtodie.html
[9] Townes Van Zandt, ‘Rex’s Blues’ (1978) https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/townesvanzandt/rexsblues.html
[10] I am indebted to my friend Dominic Williams for alerting me to this possibility.
Green Letters 11 (Summer 2009), pp 9-22
Laurence Coupe
A Yiddish proverb tells us, ‘If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.’ But to make God laugh still louder, try telling Him what His plans are.
Anne Primavesi
As someone who has written on both mythology and ecology, I am particularly interested in the way stories of origin have been interpreted from a green perspective. While there are other kinds of myth which merit attention – hero myth, for example – it seems to me that creation myth is the richest field of enquiry. Essential to its importance is that it almost always makes an explicitly religious affirmation about the relationship between the gods who create and the earth that is created. Thus, it is appropriate that my main focus will be on Genesis, the first book of the Bible – the most famous creation narrative of them all, perhaps, as well as the most famous religious text. I will approach it by way of the work of Anne Primavesi. I choose her work, partly because I have been very impressed by it, and partly because her name seems to be very little known within green studies. Perhaps the fact that she is known primarily as a theologian rather than an ecological philosopher may have something to do with this. Whatever the reason, I hope that a brief exposition of her ideas may encourage others to use her as a guide to a fascinating field of enquiry.
In order to appreciate her achievement, I will need to say something about the example set her by her mentor, James Lovelock, in his reading of the ancient Greek myth of Gaia. For it is in finding parallels between Genesis and Gaia that Primavesi has done her most impressive work – work that has been warmly praised by Lovelock himself.
The Turn To Antiquity
By way of preface, and in case the reader is tempted to think that Lovelock and Primavesi are exceptional in believing that narratives from the distant past can illuminate our present environmental needs, it may be worth considering briefly how another thinker has looked back to antiquity in order to find his bearings on the present. I am thinking of Michel Serres’ reading of On the Nature of Things by the Roman poet Lucretius, who lived in the first century BCE. This six-volume poem provides Serres with his main evidence that contemporary science has more in common with ancient myth than we might at first think possible. For it was Lucretius who put into verse the philosophy of Epicurus, and in so doing made a powerful case for the idea that the origin of the earth, and so of humanity, lay in the motion of minute particles, or atoms. Though Epicurus’ reputation is for hedonism, his main contribution to human thought, according to Lucretius, and so to Serres, is his ‘atomist’ theory of creation. According to this theory, the reason why there is something rather than nothing is that in the dim past there came about within the ‘void’ a subtle variation in the movement of atoms, a variation which Lucretius called the clinamen. The new contact made between atoms because of this swerving movement generated life, resulting eventually in the world we know.
What On the Nature of Things tells Serres is that life proceeded from the joyous dance of atoms, with its capacity for spontaneous variation of motion. Thus we should respect chance and diversity, not try and impose abstract ideas of necessity or hierarchy upon the rich variety of existence, the sheer beauty of things. We should regain Lucretius’ notion of creation through divergence. For, rather than impose order, the poet is telling us to discover the organic order that underlies apparently random events and entities; but this order is so complex that it cannot be understood through the unaided reason. Hence Serres insists that science needs poetry in order to appreciate the ‘orderly disorder’ of the world.
Poetry in turn needs myth, and Serres has much to say about the opening of On the Nature of Things, in which Lucretius offers his tribute to Venus, the Roman fertility goddess. This may seem odd, given that in the rest of the poem he goes to some pains to repudiate religious beliefs, but it makes imaginative sense when we see that he is praising Venus by contrast with Mars, the god of war:
The hymn to Venus is a song to voluptuousness, to the original power, victorious – without having fought – over Mars and over the death instinct, a song to the pleasure of life, to guilt-free knowledge. The knowledge of the world is not guilty but peaceful and creative. It is generative and not destructive. (Serres 1982: 98)
What Venus represents is the fruitful ‘disorder’ that is actually an order so subtle that we are usually not aware of it: in that sense, she goes way beyond the doctrines of religion. From her we learn a mythic reverence for plurality and process, rather than a rigid religious hierarchy. Her vision is one of immanence, by which the whole proceeds from the part, the global from the local, forming a ‘fragile synthesis’.
Gaia: A Living Myth
Once we accept the connection between ancient mythology and contemporary ecology, we may appreciate the significance of a contemporary scientist’s choice of language to describe his intuition about the way nature functions. Here, then, we turn briefly to James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia theory’. The technical name for this is ‘Earth System Science’, but it to Lovelock’s credit that he knew immediately, when the novelist William Golding suggested it to him, that the name ‘Gaia’ was perfect. The idea that Lovelock has been developing for decades now is that the earth is a self-regulating organism – or, more exactly, that the biosphere (the part of the earth where life exists) is a kind of grand ecosystem, involving subtle interactions of the different parts. Accused by some fellow-scientists of being unscientific because of his decision to use a mythic name for the earth, he still sees no need to apologise: ‘I know that to personalize the Earth System as Gaia … irritates the scientifically correct, but I am unrepentant because metaphors are more than ever needed for a widespread comprehension of the true nature of the Earth and an understanding of the lethal dangers that lie ahead’ (Lovelock 2007: 188).
In trying to bring home to fellow-scientists and to the public the disastrous consequences of the way we are polluting the earth, Lovelock has at various times tried to spell out the importance of mythology to human thought:
In times that are ancient by human measure, as far back as the earliest artefacts can be found, it seems that the Earth was worshipped as a goddess and believed to be alive. The myth of the great Mother [sic] is part of most early religions. The Mother is a compassionate, feminine figure; spring of all life, of fecundity, of gentleness. She is also the stern and unforgiving bringer of death. … At some time not more than a few thousand years ago the concept of a remote master God, an overseer of Gaia, took root. (Lovelock 1989: 208)
Taking our cue from Lovelock, we ought here to remind ourselves of the Greek creation myth in which Gaia plays so important a part. From Hesiod’s Theogony, written in the 8th century BCE, we can distil the following basic narrative.
In the beginning there was Chaos, the formless void. From Chaos there eventually emerged Eros (Love) and Gaia (the Earth-Mother). Gaia produced Uranus (the Sky-Father). Then Gaia coupled with her son Uranus; their children included the twelve Titans, among whom was Oceanus and Chronus. Uranus resented his children and wished them harm, so Gaia hid them within herself until they caused her too much discomfort. Then she arranged for her son Cronus to castrate Uranus, so that he could rule in his father’s place.
It is by hearing this story again that we realise how shrewd Lovelock has been in choosing the name of Gaia: she encompasses both life and death, both maternal affection and violent revenge, both reward and punishment. We flout her authority at our peril, therefore – which is exactly what we have been doing with the biosphere. As the pollution and destruction of the natural environment worsens, so Lovelock has emphasized more and more the dark side of the earth mother: his latest book is called The Revenge of Gaia, in which he warns humanity that it will very likely not survive the eco-catastrophe to come; and it may be in the best interest of the planet that we do not, so that Gaia can regain her balance once more.
‘Uncommon Perceptions’
I would like to move from Lovelock to Primavesi by way of a philosopher who has had a significant influence on her, namely Paul Ricoeur. Most relevant here are his reflections on the religious function of myth in one of his later works, Figuring the Sacred. Ricoeur pays particular attention to the question of how the sacred has traditionally been thought to manifest itself. In doing so, he lays great emphasis on the role of nature. Drawing on the vocabulary of the historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, he reminds us of the ‘hierophany’, or revelation of the sacred, that is made possible by thinking of divinity as immanent in nature rather than transcendent of it. The sacred is manifest, then, in ‘the fertility of the soil, vegetative exuberance, the prosperity of the flocks, and the fecundity of the maternal womb’ (Ricoeur 1995: 52). For in the perspective of the dimension of the holy, traditionally understood, ‘there are not a few living beings here and there, but life is a total and diffuse sacrality that may be seen in the cosmic rhythms, in the return of vegetation, and in the alternation of life and death’ (Ricoeur 1995: 52). Drawing his reflection on natural hierophany to a close, he observes:
And few images in this regard have marked religious humankind more than that of Mother Earth. One Homeric hymn celebrates her as follows: ‘Solid earth, beloved of the gods, who nourished everything in the world … you are the one who gives life to mortal beings and who takes it away again.’ It is also Mother Earth who is sung of by Aeschylus’s Corephore: ‘You who have given birth to everything, raise them and receive them again into your womb.’ Even the Rig-Veda echoes this when in speaking of funerals it says: ‘You who are earth, I place on the earth.’
(Ricoeur 1995: 52-3)
Primavesi draws out the implications of Ricoeur’s reflection for us in the course of her own reflection on the importance of Lovelock’s work. Ricoeur is, she says, effectively addressing ‘the systemic bonding between life and environment’ presupposed by Gaia theory:
Where Lovelock offers the concept of ‘self-regulation’ as an emergent property of the entire system, Ricoeur offers the word ‘sacred’. Sacredness attaches to totalities, to ‘wholes’ that we tinker with at our peril. For Ricoeur the emergent property of total and diffuse sacrality in life can only be conveyed in symbols that express and articulate the physical, material bonds that support life. … From this perspective all is sacred, or nothing is.
(Primavesi 2003: 126)
It is this fundamental assumption – that ‘all is sacred, or nothing is’ – which informs her three most recent works: Sacred Gaia (2000), Gaia’s Gift (2003) and Making God Laugh (2004) – the latter being in part a revision of her earlier book, From Apocalypse to Genesis (1991).
Given the above assertion, it is not surprising that Primavesi declares that, mythology being a ‘network’ of interrelated stories, she is interested in nature as a ‘network’ of interrelated organisms. For her, the word ‘autopoesis’ (self-making) is crucial:
The term refers to the dynamic, self-producing and self-maintaining network of production processes within live organisms. Whatever their components, an indispensable aspect of living beings is that the function of each component is to participate in the production or transformation of other components in the network. In this way the entire network can be said to continually ‘make itself’, even though its surroundings may change unpredictably. (Primavesi 2000: 2)
If transformation is characteristic of nature, it must surely be allowed its place in culture, she suggests: ‘we exist within a dynamic becoming, with a very dim beginning and a very open future’ (Primavesi 2000: 45). An understanding of the endlessly transformative power of myth can help us face this future; however, there are reactionary forces in the spheres of both religion and science. ‘Both religious fundamentalism and scientific conservatism are symptomatic of a reluctance to acknowledge change, whether in our environments, in ourselves, in our doctrines or in our perspectives. Just as Lovelock met incredulity from many of his fellow-scientists, who could not cope with a mythic way of looking at nature, so we find an alarming reaffirmation of literalism within Christianity. As a theologian, she is particularly concerned about the latter: using a phrase of a fellow-theologian, Catherine Keller, she notes the growth of a ‘foundationally apocalyptic’ response to millennial anxieties at the end of the twentieth century. Instead of the apocalypse being understood imaginatively, as a myth which suggests permanent possibility, it has been reduced to a literal explanation of current historical events – with the added appeal of making prophecy come true for those who cling to received doctrines (Primavesi 2000: 45). Against this reductionist fundamentalism she asserts the importance of metaphor and myth, which involve what Ricoeur calls ‘the power of disclosure’ (Ricoeur quoted in Primavesi 2000: 30)
Just as the last book of the Judaeo-Christian Bible – Revelation – needs to be read as an apocalyptic myth, so does the first book – Genesis – have to be read as a creation myth. We distort them by restating them as doctrines, by forcibly converting mythos (narrative) into logos (idea). Read without regard for its imaginative subtlety, Genesis seems to validate a stark opposition between different spheres of existence, but read with an awareness of interrelatedness – that is, with an understanding of mythology that is informed by an understanding of ecology – we can see that the option is not either/or but rather both/and. Primavesi reminds us that the Hebrew creation myth, in being read as absolute truth, has been used to support a divisive and oppressive ideology. Ecofeminist theology is necessarily committed to exposing and questioning the ‘hierarchical paradigm’ which has formed the basis of a false distinction, justifying ‘negative feelings’ about a significant part of creation. From God saying ‘Let there be light’ amidst the darkness, and proceeding to create by an act of division, a rationale for systematic subordination has been deduced:
In western religious and cultural history, matter has been distinguished from mind, nature from culture, woman from man, body from spirit, emotion from reason, earth from heaven in order to devalue one compared with the other, the devalued being described as unclean, polluting, inferior and/or profane. The de-valuation or de-grading has meant that emotion, matter, nature, woman and earth could then be treated as of lesser value, lesser importance. This degradation, in the case of women, nature and the earth, was taken to justify their exploitation. (Primavesi 2000: 34)
Inspired by Lovelock’s revival of the myth of Gaia, she is concerned to show that at the profoundest level of imagination, nature is celebrated by way of paradox. Gaia is not simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’: she is complex; she is comprehensive. As such, she is both benign and malign, both tender and violent, depending on the circumstances of the story. She represents the interpenetration of life and death, light and dark, order and chaos. Restored to its mythic context, Genesis too allows us to understand that, if the sacred is the whole, then it cannot be confined to one half of an abstract equation. As a myth, it opens up a ‘possible world’ (to use Ricoeur’s phrase), giving us an imaginative opening into a realm of rich diversity. It does not spell out an arid and abstract opposition: light/dark, heaven/earth. Rather, it demonstrates that the sacred whole is comprised of a ‘unity in diversity’ (Primavesi 2000: 169).
Of course, this is not the received reading of Genesis. We might think, for example, of how much has been made of the verse in which humanity is given ‘dominion’ over the rest of creation. Certainly, it has been invoked all too frequently to justify the ‘taming’ of the wilderness. One might have expected Primavesi to make more of this specific verse. There again, it is one that has been addressed by many other ecological thinkers, and her aim is rather more ambitious. She wants to query the more general assumptions that lie behind the received interpretation of the Biblical story of creation. It is urgent to do so, she reminds us, because that interpretation is becoming more not less influential in the present era:
God’s actions and words are read through a hierarchical grid in some of the following ways. He is male. And he creates man first. Both of these features of the story are taken to mean that man is superior to woman. God punishes them both because they reject his authority to tell them what to do and what not to do – and ultimately his power over their life and death. In such a theocracy, God exercises this power not only over them, but over the plants and animals as well, and therefore can decide to punish them too – not for anything they have done, but for the misbehaviour of the woman and man. Even though the earth has played no part in their actions, and the serpent only an indirect one, the former is cursed because of man and the serpent’s issue placed under the woman’s heel. They are to live under human control, a control delegated by God to man in a theocratic world.
(Primavesi 2004: 88)
According to this model, we would say that, though God intended humanity to be happy, he was far more interested in its being unconditionally obedient. Our ideal relationship to God is one of ‘submission to divine will’. It was failure to obey God that resulted in our present situation: man subject to God; woman subject to man; non-human subject to human. The ‘fall’ from paradise that resulted from disobedience is being re-enacted even now: ‘the inclination to disobey and its consequence, pain, are now part of our nature because our will to obey has been disordered by our ancestors’ refusal to obey God’s order. We continue to disobey and therefore know for ourselves what it is to suffer God’s judgments.’ The answer to this state of error is further submission: ‘If we accept suffering properly, that is, acknowledge it to be punishment for sin and a result of our flawed character, then God may readmit us to Paradise after our death’ (Primavesi 2004: 88-9).
Against such a dismal reading of Genesis, Primavesi insists that we look again at Biblical myth in the light of ecology – not forgetting the obligation to practise proper scriptural scholarship. An instance of this is the very question of how the word ‘man’ is to be understood. She ponders Genesis 2:7, which is translated as follows in the Revised Standard Version: ‘Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being.’
Querying this phrasing, Primavesi proposes that ‘in order to capture the flavour and meaning of the original text, the words adam (man) and adamah (dust) should be translated in ways that (a) are not gender specific and (b) that communicate the integral connection of humanity with earth.’ Drawing on the work of Carol L. Meyers, she offers a more accurate translation. While including an earlier name for the Hebrew’s god, it offers also a more promising designation of ‘man’: ‘Then God Yahweh formed an earthling of clods from the earth and breathed into its nostril the breath of life; and the earthling became a living being’ (Primavesi 2004: 82). This translation puts humanity in its place, ecologically speaking. It has the advantage of being more accurate, more interesting and more promising.
Sustained by the scholarship of her peers, she proposes some ‘uncommon perceptions’ of Genesis with which it might be timely to replace the ‘common perceptions’ she has just addressed. The first, which follows from the scholarly observation just made, concerns that of ‘man’:
Instead of the hierarchical male of the standard interpretation, placed in power over his female dependents and over the earth, man shares with them the common clay and breath of all living beings. There is no reason to believe that his will, his intellect, or his body is by nature at the mercy of disordered sexual desire. He is not seduced by woman from a proper relationship with God. His sexuality is an intrinsic part of that relationship and of his interaction with other living beings. He is not set apart from them in his spirit or in his body. With them he shares a relationship with God, and along with them, shapes the world in which each is created mortal by nature. He gives names to all the other living beings, and woman he names as mother of all the living. He toils to produce food from the earth, and presumably obeys his final and most solemn instruction from God – that he is to serve the earth, not the earth him. When he dies, he returns to that earth from which he came.
(Primavesi 2004: 109-10)
Primavesi does not quote it, but with this last statement she is obviously thinking of Genesis 3: 19: ‘for dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.’ In the ecological perspective, this sentiment becomes an affirmation of identity with the earth rather than an expression of regret about mortality.
If ‘man’ needs re-imagining, so too does ‘woman’. Neither silly nor wicked, but rather intelligent and inquisitive, she may rather be seen as entering into dialogue with nature, in the figure of the serpent. It is through her that the human race obtains self-awareness. Moreover, the very eating of the fruit and the fact of childbirth which follows from it make sense once we make the earth our focus: ‘Female fertility is celebrated by man as the source of all life in the world, and this life is sustained by eating the products of man’s interaction with the earth’s fertility’ (Primavesi 2004: 110).
Which brings us, inevitably, to the need for an ‘uncommon perception’ of the serpent itself: ‘This representative of the animal world is a symbol of the wisdom offered to humankind in interaction with that world. … The serpent exposes the complex problems involved in following fixed rules of conduct or imposed norms of behaviour.’ Not only that, but the serpent also ‘dramatizes the complexity of our relationships with the natural world. The woman personifies the potential consequences of those relationships. Do we utilize the insights offered by Nature as a pathway to a relationship with each other and with God?’ (Primavesi 2004: 110)
With this rhetorical question we proceed, via a few passing comments on our notions of God, to one of the most challenging of Primavesi’s proposed ‘uncommon perceptions’, that of sin. There is no idea of ‘original sin’ in the Biblical myth itself, she reminds us: it was introduced by St Augustine, who saw death as an unnatural event, to which we are all now tragically condemned. Death was, he believed, was made necessary by way of punishment for Adam and Eve’s surrender to the temptation of the serpent; it was the legacy of the ‘fall’ from Eden. As Primavesi has already hinted, we need to recover a pre-Augustinian sense of death as the natural complement of birth. We need to savour the beauty of the fact that death is the means by which we return, appropriately and inevitably, to the earth from which we came. In repudiating original sin, she develops the more ecologically promising notion of ‘structural sin’. Here she moves forward to the postscript to the myth of the Fall, told in the fourth chapter of Genesis, which concerns Adam and Eve’s sons, Cain and Abel. Both brothers offer God a sacrifice: Abel the herdsman has his accepted; Cain the farmer has his rejected. One may assume that this myth reflects the nomadic Hebrews’ suspicion of agricultural settlement, but Primavesi wants to go further:
It is therefore clear that I have not invented a new sin when with theologians of the poor of this earth I talk about sinful structures or structural sin. Nor am I attributing a specific sin, the fault of Cain alone, to abstract, impersonal agricultural systems. The central problem today, as it was then, is the creation and maintenance of structures and centres of power, whether urban or rural, that effectively block all forms of loving our fellow earth-creatures whether in public, in our church practices, or in our homes. By and large, these structures prevent the recognition and growth of diversity, and foster an us-versus-them attitude that remains the very essence of sin. Just such an attitude made Cain, a herdsman [sic], literally incapable of recognizing the gifts of the farmer.* In the context of our worship of God, the same drive to exclusiveness has fostered hatred, division, and war. In the context of our relationship with the more-than-human world, it has led us to deny the intrinsic worth of the rest of creation. [*Error in Primavesi’s text.]
(Primavesi 2004: 111-12)
The shift from ‘original’ to ‘structural sin’ brings an ancient narrative startlingly up to date. Such insights make reading Primavesi a constant reward. Radical, too is her preference for David Abrams’ phrase ‘more-than-human’ to the conventional ‘non-human’. Her choice of words conveys the radical nature of her Christianity, which seeks nothing less than a redefinition of God, of humanity and of the world to which they both relate.
The Wisdom Of The Earth
A possible objection to Primavesi’s thinking is that the Biblical text, being a product of late antiquity, is more likely than not to espouse a patriarchal, hierarchical ideology that is hostile to nature. It is bound, so the argument would go, to demean the natural world just as it demeans the female sex; we simply have to accept that that is how they thought in those times. But we have already considered the Greek myth of Gaia; and we have also considered a major work by the Roman poet, Lucretius. Despite the fact that they arose within an urban civilisation which originated in the rise of a warrior class earlier in antiquity, they retained the respect for Mother Earth that most anthropologists and palaeontologists believe to have preceded the aggressive cult of male individualism. Moreover, if we turn our gaze from the ancient West to the ancient East, Primavesi suggests, we find that the Biblical text is complemented by one that appears at first sight to be remote from it. She is referring to the Tao Te Ching, the ancient Chinese work concerning ‘the Way and its power’. The ‘Way’ is the force that informs all of nature, and to which human beings are recommended to adapt themselves and to subordinate their own selfish interests.
Primavesi invokes the Tao by way of emphasising that it is a mistake to think that one has understood the sacred by making statements about it. It is better to approach it through the mythic imagination, conscious that it will always remain elusive. She quotes the opening of the Tao Te Ching – ‘The Tao that can be spoken of / Is not the everlasting Tao’ – in order to remind us of the mysterious nature of ‘nature’. For whether we call it ‘Tao’ or ‘Gaia’, its creativity and generosity can never be fully realized, but has to be approached through the language of paradox (see Primavesi 2000: 29-32; Primavesi 2003: 62-5). Similarly, Christians need to accept the limitations of their understanding of God. Whatever language we use to describe his status and his relationship to us – whether it be ‘father’ or ‘king’ – we must acknowledge that this is a figurative approximation. If we start treating the metaphor as literal fact, then proceed to make pronouncements about ‘God’s plan’, we are guilty of arrogance. The best lesson to learn is one of ‘ecological humility’ (see Primavesi 2000: 29-32; Primavesi 2003: 62-5; Primavesi 2004: 119-28).
Thereby we might begin to realise that the God of Genesis is like the Tao, not only in being unknowable, but also in being inclusive. Where orthodox interpretation posits an arid dualism – light v dark, male v female, culture v nature, spirit v body, life v death, heaven v earth – this God endorses the co-existence of each pair (see Primavesi 2000: 31). Citing the work of the historian of religion, Sarah Allan, Primavesi reminds us that the religion of Taoism assumes an inter-animation of apparent opposites – that is, of contraries that turn out to be twin aspects of the same being:
In her discussion of ‘root metaphors’ in Taoism (a classification that with its organic overtones says much about how they emerge and evolve), Sarah Allan says that the complementary forces that imbue and define all life came to be known as yin, darkness, and yang, light. Both terms were originally associated with landscape. Yin refers to the shaded areas of a river valley and the term is conventionally used to describe dark valleys and rain. Yang, on the other hand, refers to bright mountain peaks. She makes the point that this complementary pair came to subsume other earlier ones, including water and fire, female and male, below and above. And that yin and yang, as principles that refer to the physical world (darkness and light, valleys and mountains, water and fire) are also applied to human life and society.
(Primavesi 2003: 107)
On this basis Primavesi is able to affirm the rich complexity of the deity invoked within the verses of Genesis:
Allan’s point that darkness and light symbolize the complementary forces and principles that imbue and define all life is important here. As is the fact that they have an undisputed reference to the physical world even when used as abstract concepts. Her defining them as ‘root metaphors’ is itself a metaphor for the organic growth of language forms based on analogy with the physical world. It is hardly surprising then that the common human experience of that world is also expressed in the Hebrew account of the origins of life on earth as water/darkness and sun-fire/light.
(Primavesi 2003: 107)
This is a God who is present in the darkness as much as in the light, and in the depths of the sea as much as in the heights of the heavens.
Having moved easily between Chinese and Hebrew thinking, Primavesi moves easily between ancient myth and contemporary scientific theory:
It is not surprising either that when I asked James Lovelock to clarify some point about Gaia’s evolution he wrote on the customary back of an envelope as follows:
In the beginning
the Earth evolved chemically and physically.
Sometime after its birth
the first living organisms appeared, probably at a single place.
Gradually
life spread over most of the planet.
It was mostly ocean.
During this period life and Earth evolved separately.
As life grew abundant
it began to change the environment
until its evolution and the Earth’s evolution
merged into a single process:
the dynamic system
Gaia
(Personal communication, April 1999)
The important thing about his account is that, as in the Genesis text, the potential for the creation of life lies in ‘the waters’ of earth. Scientists generally agree that it was from this ‘deep time’ ocean, then covering most of the earth, that living entities did in fact emerge. Their emergence was made possible because the life-giving properties characterizing the water of those oceans had themselves evolved through change and interaction powered by some form of death.
(Primavesi 2003: 108)
If Primavesi’s God embraces darkness as well as light, he embraces death as well as life. They are inseparable. Instead of seeing ourselves as strangers and pilgrims on this earth, seeking salvation beyond it, we need to remind ourselves of our ‘Adamic’ status as ‘earthlings’.
Primavesi goes further, however. At the end of Making God Laugh, she claims that the ‘wisdom of the Earth’ which is ‘personified in Gaia’ is anticipated explicitly by the Bible. She here supplements her reading of the Book of Genesis with an allusion to the Book of Proverbs:
James Lovelock’s Gaia theory describes the Earth behaving as a single living system, with the evolution of its crust and atmosphere merging with the evolution of living organisms into a single dynamic geo-physiological process. This process provides and sustains conditions that allow life forms to emerge. Over time, these conditions are subject to variations that favour some forms of life over others: and if those variations persist, the latter forms dwindle, or even become extinct. This fact about the life of every organism and species, including our own, was noted by a well-known sage: ‘To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up’ (Proverbs 3:1-8). Thus Gaia’s wisdom or ‘know-how’ can be seen as knowing how to regulate conditions favourable for life to emerge and to be built up, broken down and rebuilt in diverse forms over different time scales. It ‘knows how’ to keep itself in homeostasis, that state of dynamic equilibrium from which different life forms emerged and grew abundant, thereby changing the environment as their evolution and the Earth’s evolution merged into a single dynamic process.
(Primavesi 2004: 147)
The inference to be drawn seems inescapable: ‘This continually evolving process … has produced the planet’s many beautiful and awe-inspiring living artifacts. We are just one such life form, tightly coupled with our environments and dependent on Gaia for the resources that sustain our lives’ (Primavesi 2004: 147-8).
Living ‘As If’
It might be that I am insufficiently critical of Primavesi’s project – an ecological reading of the Bible and a revision of what we understand by religious faith – but I have to confess to being impressed by it. For me, she demonstrates the need for our postmodern, globalised world to recover the lost potential of premodern, nature-based myth. The fact that in the process she disturbs received notions of Biblical truth is, admittedly, part of the attraction. But more important is the audacious pairing of Genesis and Gaia: ancient and contemporary thinking meet, and their meeting brings new hope to us all. Religion substantiates science; science substantiates ‘green’ thinking. In this sense, Primavesi is surely right to speak of ‘Gaia’s gift’.
We come to appreciate that gift by using our imagination to get outside our usual anthropocentric worldview. Primavesi proposes a ‘revolution within ourselves’, which might have powerful consequences. Let us, she proposes, start thinking of ourselves in relation to ‘the whole earth community’. She invokes Vaclav Havel’s ‘prototypical “velvet” revolution (in which one lives in a far from ideal situation “as if” in an ideal one)’. This ‘suggests that such a change in self-perception can bring about real change’. The point is to query the present status quo, whether in the name of the future or of the past:
It is not true that the need for change in regard to our membership of the earth community is not as evident to us as it was for him when he and some other members of the Czechoslovakian State decided to live as if they were what they later became in fact – Czech Republicans. I am proposing a reverse revolutionary order: looking back through our species’ history and seeing ourselves as part of a much longer and older ancestry. Then instead of perceiving ourselves as somehow separate from the other members of the earth community, we remember ourselves as part of that larger one and live accordingly. We live as if we are what we have always been – members of the earth community.
(Primavesi 2003: 70)
Recovering that ancestry is impossible without reconsidering the texts and myths through which it has been mediated. It is surely appropriate that Primavesi, as Christian theologian, pays particular attention to the Bible. But even if this were not the case, it would be appropriate to draw on that text, since perhaps no other in the ancient world demands that its readers take the risk of a radical change of consciousness, the prelude to a radical change in behaviour. Given that the original summons has been submerged by centuries of ‘official’ commentary – based on a rejection of earth, a subordination of the female and a fear of death – it is surely time to go beyond the letter and recover its spirit. This means abandoning all claims to know God, and all claims to know His plans.
At the end of Sacred Gaia, Primavesi turns to the Gospels. But before doing so, and with typical ease in moving between sacred and secular discourse, she reflects on the significance of the moment in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ when the protagonist is released from the burden of guilt for slaying the albatross. Looking down at the water-snakes, he ‘blest them unaware’. Turning in this context to a pronouncement by Jesus in Matthew 25, where he speaks of the ‘last judgment’, of the moment when the blessed are divided from the damned, she reflects:
The blessed are named as those who have fed the naked, clothed the starving, given drink to the thirsty and so on. They are amazed and ask: ‘But when, Lord, did we do this?’ Like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, they did it unaware.
(Primavesi 2000: 179)
She suggests that such pronouncements ‘transform our perspective on the sacred by using language to subvert the notion that any chosen description, distinction or translation, whether theological or scientific, can fully express the reality of “all there is” (Primavesi 2000: 179). In Christian terms, ‘this realization of limit’ entails ‘the awareness that a God who eludes verbal categories has broken other bounds as well’. We are invited to challenge ‘the usual confines within which we place and then describe God’. The language of paradox ‘dismantles’ received categories sufficiently ‘to give God room: room to be God of the whole earth system: enchanting and terrible, giver of life and death’ (Primavesi 2000: 179).
I would hope that all of us who are engaged in a green practice – whether we believe in God or Gaia, or whether we prefer not to use such language – can see the benefits of living ‘as if’ and getting to a stage where we ‘bless unaware’. We are all committed, I am sure, to demonstrating how everything in nature interrelates, and how impoverished any culture is which lacks the capacity for empathy with the fellow-members of our earth community: not only other humans but also birds, tigers, forests, mountains. One does not have to be religious to appreciate the idea that nature should be revered; but it helps to know that religious myths of origin which date back to antiquity offer ways of imagining what that might involve.
References
Lovelock, James (1989) The Ages of Gaia: The Biography of Our Living Earth, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——(2007), The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back – and How We Can Still Save Humanity, London: Penguin.
Primavesi, Anne (1991) From Apocalypse to Genesis: Ecology, Feminism and Christianity, Minneapolis: Fortress Press.
——(2000) Sacred Gaia: Holistic Theology and Earth System Science, London: Routledge.
——(2003) Gaia’s Gift: Earth, Ourselves and God After Copernicus, London: Routledge.
—–(2004) Making God Laugh: Human Arrogance and Ecological Humility, Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press.
Ricoeur, Paul (1995) Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative and Imagination, Minneapolis: Fortress Press.
Serres, Michel (1982), Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy (eds Josue V. Harari & David F. Bell), Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Laurence Coupe
Source:
Laurence Coupe, Beat Sound, Beat Vision: The Beat Spirit and Popular Song (Manchester: MUP, 2007), pp 182-9
This discussion of Cohen’s work comes about halfway through the final chapter of the book: ‘ “Eco-Zen”, or “a heaven in a wild flower”: from Gary Snyder to Nick Drake’.
The term ‘Eco-Zen’ was coined by Alan Watts, who is the subject of the first chapter of the book.
The book was obviously written long before Cohen’s death; however, I have not changed present tense to past for the purposes of this extract.
***
We have used the phrase ‘Eco-Zen’ to characterise [Gary] Snyder; we are testing how far it might apply to certain songwriters, while simultaneously glossing it with Blake’s hope of seeing ‘a heaven in a wild flower’, and the tensions involved in such a prospect. [Jim] Morrison and [Joni] Mitchell speak in defence of nature, and of those cultures which revere it. They see nature itself as sacred. With our third songwriter, the ecological emphasis is not so insistent: rather, we may infer a broadly reverential view of nature informed by both mythology and mysticism. There again, he is notoriously difficult to categorise, and it would be advisable not to try. I am referring to Leonard Cohen.
Superficially, his kind of art seems to form a contrast with the Beats, given his taste for formality and ironic restraint. His work, however, must be of interest to those who take seriously the ideas we have explored throughout this book. In particular, I would emphasise his ability to bring to bear on his spiritual interests the power of Zen. It is this more than anything that links him with Snyder. That said, Cohen’s approach to Zen is very much his own.
Cohen is a Canadian poet and novelist who extended his talents to songwriting in the late sixties, for which he has been mainly known ever since. When his Poems1956-1968 appeared, Kenneth Rexroth, the poet admired by all the Beats and the man who gave his blessing to the Beat movement in the mid-fifties, wrote: ‘Leonard Cohen’s poetry and song constitute a big breakthrough … This is certainly the future of poetry… It is the voice of a new civilization.’[i] Moreover, Cohen began his career reciting poetry to a jazz accompaniment in Montreal in the fifties, inspired by the example of Jack Kerouac; he subsequently moved to New York, where he made sure to attend all the Beat performances he could.[ii]
Inevitably, Cohen was touched by the Beat Zen phenomenon. It was through the Beats that he became interested in gaining an eastern perspective on the faith of his childhood, namely Judaism. That said, he was equally preoccupied with, even obsessed by, the figure of Jesus Christ. Interestingly, his approach to Christianity was in terms of myth: his first volume of poetry was called Let Us Compare Mythologies, a title which gives us a flavour of his spirit of sincere but scrupulous enquiry. His preoccupation only deepened during the sixties. Towards the end of that decade Cohen declared: ‘Our natural vocabulary is Judeo-Christian. That is our blood myth… We have to rediscover the crucifixion. [It] will again be understood as a universal symbol… It will have to be rediscovered because that’s where man is at. On the cross.’[iii]
One cannot accuse Cohen of having only a passing interest in this subject. Twenty years later, he reflected on his view of Jesus: ‘He may be the most beautiful guy who ever walked the face of this earth. Any guy who said “Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the meek” has got to be a figure of unparalleled generosity and insight and madness.’[iv] What is intriguing is that he seems to think of Jesus in terms similar to Kerouac’s, identifying him implicitly with the fellaheen [the dispossessed of the given civilization, who are the true spiritual visionaries: see Chapter 2]. Again, there is the preoccupation with pain, and the appeal to the example of Jesus as a means of comprehending it. However, the difference between Cohen’s fascination with Jesus and Kerouac’s is twofold. For Kerouac, it comes out of his Christian upbringing and is associated with his idea of himself as a ‘crazy Catholic mystic’, whereas Cohen is interested in trans-cultural iconography. For Kerouac, the figure of Jesus becomes more and more important as he himself turns away from Zen, whereas for Cohen, Jesus remains a constant referent, which he finds to be wholly compatible with his interest in Zen. For him, Zen is the perfect way of realizing the potential he early on finds in Judaeo-Christianity. There is, then, an obvious affinity with Snyder, namely Zen itself; but there is also a contrast, since Snyder consistently associates Biblical faith with the oppression of indigenous communities and the exploitation of the earth.
That does not mean that Cohen is unaware of such associations. His second novel, Beautiful Losers (1966), an ambitious work of metafiction which moves between different times and places, and which employs multiple narration, centres on the historical figure of Catherine Tekakwitha (1656-80).[v] She was the daughter of a Christian Algonquin woman who had been captured by the Iroquois and then married a Mohawk chief. An epidemic of smallpox left Catherine orphaned; the disease also left her face severely scarred and badly affected her eyesight. Baptized at the age of twenty by Father Jacques de Lamberville, a Jesuit missionary, she was ostracized by her fellow-Indians. She fled, wandering 200 miles by foot to a Native American village in Canada which had adopted the Christian faith. Taking a vow of chastity, she acquired a reputation for asceticism and also for an ability to perform miracles. As she was dying, her scars miraculously vanished. After her death, her grave became a site of pilgrimage; she was regarded by many as a saint, and was subsequently beatified (thought not canonized) by the Catholic church.
Cohen’s choice of main character gives him, then, plenty of opportunity to explore the connection between Christian myth and Native American myth, and to investigate the way in which the values of a civilization may be internalized – but also intensified – by a colonized people. The unnamed ‘I’ of the novel is, by no coincidence, an anthropologist with a special interest in Native Americans: we learn a good deal about their myths, rituals and beliefs, which are given just as much status as the Catholic doctrines which are also explicated. Interestingly, the historical Catherine is known as the (unofficial) patron saint of ecologists, of people in exile and of people persecuted for their beliefs. Cohen in his fictionalized account gives full reign to the possibilities opened up thereby.
Returning to the question of myth, we note that in Beautiful Losers there is a comprehensive attempt to ‘compare mythologies’. Apart from the allusions to Indian and Christian myths, the novel makes an implicit identification between Catherine and the ancient Egyptian goddess of fertility, Isis, who was believed to have control over both the health of the earth and the fate of the soul in the afterlife. Isis it was who restored her husband, Osiris, after he had been dismembered, and ensured his annual revival in parallel with the cycle of vegetation. Catherine too is credited with a capacity to restore earth, body and soul to a state of harmony. A more obvious association is made between Catherine and the Virgin Mary: surrendering herself to God’s will, she is granted mystical insight.
The very title of the novel is worth dwelling on. The ‘beautiful losers’ are those who achieve that spiritual beauty known as beatitude by surrendering the whole idea of a separate self; in the perspective of materialism, they are absurd, but under the aspect of eternity they are saintly. They voluntarily become victims or scapegoats, suffering on behalf of others so that they too may be granted spiritual release. In this sense, the most obvious ‘beautiful loser’ is Jesus Christ, crucified and buried as a criminal but bringing redemption by way of his resurrection. Extending the idea, we may remind ourselves that the figure who is beaten down by civilization is for the Beat writers the one who is most likely to attain, and show the way towards, the beatific vision. We sense this in the paradoxical titles of some of Kerouac’s novels, which Cohen’s Beautiful Losers neatly mirrors: The Dharma Bums, for example, or Desolation Angels. We might think also of that key phrase from [Allen] Ginsberg’s poem, ‘Howl’: ‘angelheaded hipsters’.
The paradox contained in such phrases and titles takes us to the heart of Zen itself. The Zen lunatic, the holy fool who abandons all material security to wander on ‘the Way’, is the model for all such figures. One must give up the idea of ‘I’ in order to have access to the reality of ‘the One’. This idea clearly fascinates Cohen, and his fascination only gets more intense as he proceeds. The manifestation of the sacred in the profane is his primary concern, and his major songs articulate this possibility in their various ways.
Though we have stated that Cohen’s devotion to Zen is an implicit constant, we should take account of his increasingly explicit association with ‘official’ Zen. We can trace this quite simply, from his meeting in the early 1970s with a monk called Joshu Sasaki Roshi, with whom he began studying, to his financing of the Mount Baldy Zen Centre, near Los Angeles, and finally to his ordination as a Zen monk in 1996. Cohen has always denied, however, that his dedication to Zen practice has meant commitment to a new kind of faith, quite other than Judaism or Christianity: ‘I never really felt I was studying something called Zen. I never thought I was looking for a new religion. The religion I had was fine. So it was something else’ (1993). Again: ‘There are Jewish practitioners in the Zen movement. I don’t think the two are necessarily mutually exclusive, depending on your position. As I have received it from my teacher, there is no conflict because there is no prayerful worship and there is no discussion of a deity in Zen’ (1994). Or again: ‘I’ve never been interested in a new religion… I just know that [Roshi] has provided a space for me to do the kind of dance with the Lord that I couldn’t find in other places’ (1994).[vi]
It is probably fair to say, then, that no matter which period of Cohen’s work we choose, we find evidence of his Zen instinct, if by that we mean the urge to celebrate the here and now as if it were infinity and eternity. Take the first song on his first album, Leonard Cohen (1968). ‘Suzanne’ begins as a celebration of an artistic, eccentric woman that Cohen knew and admired during his young adulthood in Montreal: she had an apartment by the St Lawrence River, near to the chapel of Our Lady of the Harbour, which is dedicated to sailors. These anecdotal circumstances make the account of visiting her and being served tea by her all the more vivid. But the central idea of the song only becomes evident in the second verse, which refers to Jesus as a ‘sailor’ who waited watching on his ‘lonely wooden tower’ (his cross, presumably) before addressing ‘only drowning men’ (those in acute spiritual need). Suzanne and Jesus each offers a sacred gift: a capacity for revelation. The world refuses it: as Cohen points out to Jesus, ‘You sank beneath their wisdom like a stone.’ But the potential for revelation remains. The third verse has Suzanne as a guide around the harbour, showing us ‘where to look among the garbage and the flowers’, and alerting us to the ‘heroes in the seaweed’. The song, then, is a classic instance of the manifestation of the sacred in the profane: it is one of the most powerful instances of the beatific vision for which one could ask.[vii]
The fact that the imagery of the song is insistently Biblical does not detract from its Zen quality. Rather, it intensifies it, Jesus being the archetypal ‘beautiful loser’ who obtains beatitude precisely by immersing himself in the suffering of this world and thereby sanctifying it. Again, in a later song from Various Positions (1984), ‘If It Be Your Will’, Cohen prays to the God of the Jews and the Christians. He seems to be espousing an orthodox monotheism, the basis of a doctrine of salvation for the righteous; but the imagery simultaneously celebrates the suffering sinners. He speaks for all those ‘on this broken hill’, dressed in ‘our rags of light’; and asks that ‘all these burning hearts in hell’ be made ‘well’ at last.[viii] A plea for mercy from a God of justice, the song dwells chiefly on the frailty of humanity; but paradoxically, this frailty is the very source of its spirituality. Only in the depths of the profane does the sacred need to be made manifest. The subtlety of such a vision has been preferred by more than one commentator to the more explicit, extensive ruminations of a Ginsberg. Here is one such judgement:
[U]nlike many Jews who found refuge in Buddhism (e.g. Allen Ginsberg), [Cohen] never lost his monotheistic convictions; indeed, they appear to have become stronger over the years… Ginsberg’s dependencies were more often than not drug-induced and escapist. Suffice it here to note that [Cohen] did not force monotheistic (i.e. one-god) doctrines; he did not command theistic (i.e. personal-god) beliefs; nevertheless, those with ears to hear — and many without — could not fail to catch the point, ‘directly and immediately’; not out of contrivance or slick devising, but honestly — so that ‘everybody knows what’s going on.’ It was only through that ‘gateway’ that he could enter, and emerge: with a meaningful word. The songs are ‘mystical’; parabolic in their ability to say things at different levels: the sacred and the secular, the human and the divine; projecting the heavenly by means of promoting the earthly; ‘passionate romance’ and spiritual truth: an alpha and an omega – ‘understanding’ now at its peak.[ix]
Another commentator celebrates Cohen’s ability to use Biblical language while articulating a beatific vision that transcends religious categorization:
[M]uch of his life has been spent with his nose in the scriptures, whether they be Hebrew, Christian or Eastern, and has conducted his creativity in the form of a meditation, a search for metaphysical meaning, whatever the implications of his more earth-bound predilections. … Cohen’s recent compositions may well be, as Bob Dylan so shrewdly observed, ‘like prayers’, but the truth is that Cohen’s songs have been painted with a Judaeo-ecclesiastical patina throughout his musical evolution. Across the panoply of his hundred songs, from ‘Story of Isaac’ to ‘Anthem’, via ‘Who By Fire’ and ‘The Law’, there are many more direct examples of his use of the nominally religious form. [x]
This same commentator is impressed by Cohen’s capacity for finding the sacred in the profane: ‘It is Cohen’s ability to locate the redemptive and the spiritually profound within prosaic and sometimes visceral lyrical contexts that gives his work the poignant astringency in which his fans revel and at which his detractors balk.’[xi]
One of the songs mentioned above is worth quoting briefly: ‘Anthem’, from The Future (1992). But first we should consider the significance of that title. The OED defines ‘anthem’ as follows: ‘an elaborate choral composition usually based on a passage of scripture for church use’. Cohen would seem to be deliberately subverting that idea, for his song is non-scriptural and non-liturgical; it is, indeed, modest and reflective. It does not make pronouncements in justification of a religious doctrine. Rather, it looks to the minor beauties of this world for revelation: ‘The birds they sang at the break of day/ Start again, I heard them say.’ Having then proceeded to address the horrors of the world – wars, corrupt governments, and so forth – it laments, in language derived from Christian iconography, but not confined to it, that the ‘holy dove’ will always be ‘caught’ and ‘bought and sold’ again. However, the refrain of the song tells us that, despite this, there remains the possibility of spiritual freedom if only we can learn to value profane time and space as if they were sacred, and not torture ourselves in the pursuit of a distant, abstract perfection: ‘Ring the bells that still can ring./ Forget your perfect offering./ There is a crack in everything./ That’s how the light gets in.’[xii] This is pure Zen, comprehending in its simplicity all the subtleties of Judaism and Christianity. We understand now what Cohen meant in the interview quoted, when he said: ‘I’ve never been interested in a new religion… I just know that [Roshi] has provided a space for me to do the kind of dance with the Lord that I couldn’t find in other places’ (1994).[xiii][p 40]
‘Dance with the Lord’ is a neat phrase by which to indicate Cohen’s wish to honour the monotheism of his own culture, while being open to the non-theist freedom of Zen. He implies no confinement to any given religion; nor does he imply a spirituality that is entirely without roots. It is a matter of wearing one’s beliefs lightly, and being able to let go of those that obscure the manifestation of the sacred. Always the reality which must be faced is that of the profane realm, in which we are born, we live and we die. There is no escape from this obligation. Indeed, according to Zen, enlightenment involves complete acceptance of reality. As Watts would remind us: ‘This is IT.’
Finally, then, it is worth pointing to a more recent song whose very title echoes this same idea. ‘Here It Is’, from Ten New Songs (2001), is one of Cohen’s most economical presentations of the mystical paradox that is common to Zen and to Blake alike, that ‘Everything that lives is Holy.’ Understanding this involves being able to affirm even the most degraded and demeaning of experiences, being able to grant their validity. One’s ‘love for all things’ necessarily must include ‘your drunken fall’, ‘your cardboard and piss’, ‘your bed and your pan’. The chorus sums up the Buddhist theme of impermanence with startling clarity: ‘May everyone live,/ And may everyone die./ Hello, my love,/ And my love, goodbye.’ But every word of the song – scarcely any of them longer than two syllables – brings home with great economy the meaning of ‘samsara’ (the wheel of existence, the cycle of living and dying): for example, ‘here is your death/ in the heart of your son’. Finally, we are struck by Cohen’s impulse to bring Jesus, the ‘beautiful loser’, into the picture. Cohen invokes him in the course of inviting us to embrace pain and mortality, and in so doing to know ‘nirvana’ (the extinction of ego): ‘Here is your cross,/ Your nails and your hill;/ And here is the love/ That lists where it will.’[xiv] The Biblical vocabulary is informed by Eastern wisdom. The beatific vision could hardly be made more simple (though not, we should add, simplistic). Cohen’s instinct that Zen complements rather than contradicts Western religion is borne out by his own work. By that I mean that, right through his career, you can see a wholly consistent attempt to articulate the beatific vision in accessible and compelling language. Though Cohen is a very different writer in many ways from Snyder, they concur on essentials; and the essence is Zen. Nor should his interest in mythology and Native American lore be overlooked.
Whether one would apply the phrase ‘Eco-Zen’ to Cohen’s work is another matter: he certainly celebrates nature in a spiritual, indeed mystical, perspective; but his is not an ostensibly ‘green’ Buddhism. However, his affirmation of the human potential to find meaning ‘among the garbage and the flowers’ is a nicely ambiguous echo of Blake’s dictum. At the very least, we may say that Cohen’s vision complements that of Morrison and that of Mitchell; and all three seem to make more and more sense as we explore their affinities with Snyder. Taken together, all four endorse and extend what we have understood by the term ‘Beat’.
[i] Kenneth Rexroth quoted by Loranne S. Dorman and Clive L. Rawlins, Leonard Cohen: Prophet of the Heart (London: Omnibus Press, 1990), p 213.
[ii] See David Boucher, Dylan & Cohen: Poets of Rock and Roll (New York: Continuum Press, 2004), pp. 15-17.
[iii] Leonard Cohen, Leonard Cohen In His Own Words ed. Jim Devlin (London: Omnibus Press, 1998), p 11.
[iv] Cohen, Leonard Cohen In His Own Words, p. 11.
[v] Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers (London: Panther Books, 1972).
[vi] Cohen, Leonard Cohen In His Own Words, p. 40.
[vii] Cohen, ‘Suzanne’, Stranger Music, pp. 95-6.
[viii] Cohen, ‘If It Be Your Will’, Stranger Music, pp. 343-4.
[ix] Dorman and Rawlins, Leonard Cohen: Prophet of the Heart, p. 301.
[x] David Sheppard, Leonard Cohen (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000), p 115.
[xi] Sheppard, Leonard Cohen, p. 116.
[xii] Cohen, ‘Anthem’, Stranger Music, pp. 373-4.
[xiii] Cohen, Leonard Cohen In His Own Words, p. 40.
[xiv] Leonard Cohen, ‘Here It Is’, www.leonardcohenfiles.com/tennewsongs [accessed 3rd January 2006].
Laurence Coupe
Article 2333, Academia Letters (2021)
‘Suzanne’, Parasites of Heaven (1966); Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967)
Apart from ‘Hallelujah’, this is probably Leonard Cohen’s most famous song. It is reassuringly familiar: we hear the first few gentle sounds of Cohen’s acoustic guitar and we anticipate that opening line: ‘Suzanne takes you down …’, and maybe mouth the words along with the singer. But it is precisely because it is so widely known that it needs looking into more deeply, to see if there are hidden meanings that familiarity tends to prevent us exploring.
What I want to do, then, is take up a few significant words and phrases from the song, roughly in the order in which they occur, and follow them through as far as we can go. Cohen was an artist of great intelligence and learning, who made his reputation as poet, novelist and singer-songwriter. In many cases, he would take an existing poem of his and turn it into a song. ‘Suzanne’ is a good example. Were we analysing it as poetry, it would be expected that we trace cultural allusions, religious references and so forth. For some reason, many critics hesitate to be equally thorough when it comes to interpreting song, as it is assumed to be an inferior medium. Cohen’s work consistently reminds us that the distinction is fallacious.
Before proceeding, however, I need to address an issue that inevitably arises in the reading of songs, as of poems: whose voice is it we hear? Because it is never possible with any song to state that the person who speaks – or, rather, sings – in it is an actual person, it is always best to refer to this figure as the ‘persona’. Certainly, s/he is not necessarily to be identified with either the songwriter or the singer. For example: the persona of ‘Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?’ is an unemployed veteran of the First World War, waiting for a food handout; he is neither E. Y. Harburg nor Bing Crosby. For example: the persona of ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ is a convict who is guilty of murder; he is not Johnny Cash.
Even when the persona and songwriter seem to be close, you have to be careful not to make assumptions. For example: the persona of ‘Blue’ is a woman desperate for real affection in a counterculture which seems to be all about love but which is really all about self-indulgence and exploitation; she is not necessarily Joni Mitchell. For example: the persona of ‘Graceland’ is a divorced man travelling to Memphis, Tennessee to visit the home of Elvis Presley in the hope of finding redemption; he is not necessarily Paul Simon. In both these cases – Mitchell and Simon – we may suspect that the persona does come pretty close to the songwriter, but that still does not permit us to make wild biographical speculations.
With Cohen, we need to be more careful than usual: after all, he has been too often taken to be merely giving vent to a mood of gloom (hence the sarcastic nickname, ‘Laughing Lenny’) rather than composing a subtly interconnected work of art.
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‘Suzanne takes you down’
The general consensus is that the original Suzanne was Suzanne Verdal (married name, Vaillincourt). Certainly, it cannot refer to Suzanne Elrod, the mother of Cohen’s children, Adam and Lorca. Alberto Manzana reports that Cohen himself stated that she was married to a sculptor friend of his in Montreal. He commented further: ‘She had a lot of courage, and in such a repressed society she used her courage to express what she wanted. She was a ballerina and on one occasion she invited me to eat oranges by the river.’
However, just as we have to be careful in matching up the ‘persona’ of the song with the songwriter, we have to be careful in matching up characters from songs with real people. Ultimately, the details of Suzanne Verdal’s way of life, and the nature of Cohen’s relationship with her, do not matter: they merely serve as starting points for an imaginative exploration of what it means for a person to achieve and maintain one’s vision.
‘The river … the boats’
In the mid-1960s Suzanne Verdal lived in an apartment by the St Lawrence River in Montreal. Nearby was the chapel of ‘Our Lady of Good Hope’, with a statue of the Virgin Mary facing onto the water, as if blessing the sailors setting off on their sea-voyages. This fact can help explain some details of the song, but we need to go beyond them in order to understand the song as a whole.
‘Half crazy’
In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Duke Theseus declares that ‘The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact’ (V.i.7-8). The duke’s own position is sceptical: he means to demean both love and poetry. However, their association with madness has usually been positively celebrated – particularly by poets since the Romantic era of William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others. This song is no exception. Suzanne comes across as an eccentric, bohemian, artistic figure, who might be dismissed as ‘half crazy’ by more conventional people, but who has certainly cast her spell over her male visitor.
Moreover, whether we insist on associating that visitor with Cohen or not, this particular ‘poet’ is using his ‘imagination’ to celebrate Suzanne both as a particular person and as an archetypal woman. In this context, Carl Jung would call her the positive ‘anima’: that is, the female ‘soul’ who stands as an ideal for the male ego in its quest to become a centred, spiritual ‘Self’. We might think also of the figure of Beatrice, whom Dante celebrates as the inspiration for his visionary journey from Hell, through Purgatory, and thence to Heaven.
It is interesting that Duke Theseus goes on to elaborate on his insight as follows: ‘And as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name’ (V.i.14-17). Reading this in a positive, Romantic perspective, we can say that Cohen manages to capture ‘airy nothing’, that is, the indefinable, elusive quality of the kind of woman he admires. He does so by providing circumstantial details about her way of life that convince us that she really exists: he gives her both ‘a local habitation’ and ‘a name’. We come to know and like Suzanne – know and like her sufficiently to ‘want to travel with her’.
‘Tea and oranges’
Most students of Cohen concur that Suzanne Verdal served a tea known as ‘Constant Comment’, a blend of tea-leaves and orange rind. But we do not have to think of a real person or a real event to register the rich sense of detail in the song. This particular detail is charged with significance, though it is not immediately obvious. Suzanne is very exact in her choice of beverage and the manner in which she prepares and provides it. We are reminded, surely, of the Japanese tea ceremony, the purpose of which is to make us realise that everyday actions such as eating and drinking, if carried out attentively, can be a source of religious awakening. Now the basis of such a ritual is Zen Buddhism, which derived originally from China – the place from where, the song tells us, Suzanne’s tea comes. By giving us the details of her ‘local habitation’, her way of life, Cohen simultaneously alerts us to its spiritual dimension.
‘Perfect body … mind’
The relationship between male and female in the song seems to be Platonic: that is, spiritual rather than physical. But the refrain of each verse serves to query the distinction between mind and body, spirit and flesh. Putting this another way, we may say that the song assumes that we know the difference between what we call the ‘sacred’ and what we call the ‘profane’, and then takes us to the point where we realise they are ultimately one.
The standard definition of ‘sacred’ is ‘dedicated to a deity or religious purpose; relating to or used in religious worship’. ‘Profane’, on the other hand, means ‘showing disrespect for God, any deity, or religion; not connected with or used for religious matters; not initiated into sacred or secret rites’. What Cohen does in the song is deliberately to subvert the distinction: to reveal the sacred in the profane. In doing so, he is following the example of such visionary poets as Blake, for example, who famously declared it possible ‘To see the world in a grain of sand / And heaven in a wild flower / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour’.
‘Jesus was a sailor’
It is typical of Cohen to talk of one sphere of existence in terms of another. That is partly why he effortlessly moves from the figure of Suzanne in the first verse to that of Jesus in the second. The transition to Jesus works particularly well because Cohen has already set up this association, with his stress on the river and the boats. But there is more to say about the idea of Jesus as ‘sailor’.
Cohen, brought up as a Jew in Montreal, was early on introduced to Christianity by his Catholic nanny, who instilled in him a lifelong fascination with the figure of the crucified Jesus. In 1968, the year of the release of this album, we find him reflecting as follows: ‘Our natural vocabulary is Judaeo-Christian. That is our blood myth. … We have to rediscover the crucifixion. … It will have to be rediscovered because that’s where man is at. On the cross.’ [Leonard Cohen in His Own Words (ed. Robert Dimery, Omnibus Press, 1988, p 10]
Though the reality of the crucifixion is never far away from Cohen’s mind, the specific event which he evokes here is one of Jesus’s many miracles. We may recall that his disciples were instructed to take a ship out to sea in order to meet him after he had spent time praying on a mountain on the other side. However, a storm began to blow, and they became afraid. Just then they saw Jesus walking across the water towards them.
It is clear that Jesus’s purpose in walking on the water is not only to calm the fears of his disciples but also to demonstrate his divine powers. Moreover, his miracle has symbolic force. In the first chapter of Genesis, the first book of the Judaeo-Christian Bible, we are told that ‘darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters’ (Genesis 1: 2). That is, the establishment of the cosmos involves conquest over chaos, here represented by ‘the deep’. Jesus’s action echoes the act of creation. It echoes too the episode in the Book of Exodus, in which Moses leads the Hebrews out of Egypt, where they have been held captive as slaves, thanks to God miraculously parting the waters of the Red Sea. Life comes out of death; freedom comes out of slavery.
How does Cohen use the story, and what does he add to it? He dwells on the human aspect of the character of Jesus, depicting him as waiting patiently before attempting to walk on the water, calculating that this will have most impact when his disciples are at their most vulnerable. It is then that his promise to liberate humanity from their enslavement, their immersion in the waters of death, will be most effective. Brilliantly, Cohen then immediately brings onto the horizon that other event, the crucifixion. Despite Jesus’s triumph, he knew he would have to fall: he would have to be ‘broken’ on the cross, condemned by the ‘wisdom’ of this world (Roman rule, or whatever forms it has taken in our supposedly less barbaric era). But then again, it is precisely when Jesus sinks beneath the weight of worldly authority that he is, for Cohen, most glorious. As the innocent victim, tortured and killed, he is the scapegoat who takes upon himself the burden of all our sins, from which he thereby releases us. His very defeat is his victory. We would be best abandoning our certainties in order to ‘travel blind’ and to ‘trust him’.
Finally, it is worth bearing in mind the title of Cohen’s second novel: Beautiful Losers (1966). It is a telling phrase, and it indicates Cohen’s love of paradox, which is the key to his worldview. Jesus is for him precisely a ‘loser’ in terms of our selfish, materialistic civilisation; but it is this very fact that makes him ‘beautiful’, for he offers a vision that lifts us beyond the terms of that civilisation. As Cohen himself has declared: ‘I’m very fond of Jesus Christ. He may be the most beautiful guy who ever walked the face of this earth. Any guy who said “Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the meek” has got to be a figure of unparalleled generosity and insight and madness.’ [Leonard Cohen in His Own Words, p 11] As with Suzanne, we may know that he’s ‘half crazy’, but that is why we want to be with him.
There are other instances of a phrase or reference in ‘Suzanne‘ which merit further commentary, but that would result in an article almost twice as long. ‘Our lady of the harbour’ is certainly one, as is ‘Suzanne holds the mirror’. I’ll have to leave those for other readers to explore, but I hope that I’ve made a valid case for Cohen as an artist of complexity and depth.
Academia Letters, Article 89, December 2020
It is twenty years since my Green Studies Reader was published by Routledge. In the general introduction, I addressed some of the assumptions of cultural and literary theory, suggesting that it was time to challenge them. I wrote:
In various schools – formalist, psychoanalytic, new historicist, deconstructionist, even Marxist – the common assumption has been that what we call ‘nature’ exists primarily as a term within a cultural discourse, apart from which it has no being or meaning. That is to say, it is a sign within a signifying system, and the question of reference must always be placed in emphatic parentheses. To declare that there is ‘no such thing as nature’ has become almost obligatory within literary and cultural studies. The great fear has been to be discovered committing what might be called ‘the referential fallacy’. On the one hand, the scepticism of theory has proved salutary: too often previous critics assumed that their preferred works of literature told the ‘truth’ about the world. On the other hand, it has encouraged a heavy-handed culturalism, whereby suspicion of ‘truth’ has entailed the denial of non-textual existence. It is a mistake easily made, perhaps, once one has recognised the crucial role language plays in human sense-making. But it should still be pointed out that, in failing to move beyond the linguistic turn … [and in] seeking to avoid naivete, [theory] has committed what might be called ‘the semiotic fallacy’. (1)
I returned to this theme later in the introduction:
So green studies does not challenge the notion that human beings make sense of the world through language, but rather the self-serving inference that nature is nothing more than a linguistic construct. Kate Soper … makes the point dramatically: ‘In short, it is not language which has a hole in its ozone layer; and the real thing continues to be polluted and degraded even as we refine our deconstructive insights at the level of the signifier.’(2) [‘Coupe, ‘Intro’, GSR, p. 3]
I should also mention that, in subsequently addressing the question of vocabulary, I acknowledged the complexity of the concept of ‘Nature’, and I stressed the need to be careful in using the term. I summarised my position as succinctly as I could: ‘green studies debates “Nature” in order to defend nature.’ [‘Coupe, ‘Intro’, GSR, p. 7]
When I wrote that introduction, I anticipated a negative reaction from the more dogmatic ‘culturalists’, and even mockery of my own stance as sheer simplification. However, my formulation of ‘the semiotic fallacy’ seems to have passed into the critical lexicon without much fuss. Oddly, as I now realise, I’ve never sought to expand on my initial formulation of that principle – despite the fact that nearly all my books address the theme of ecology. However, in the course of reviewing a remarkable work by Robert Macfarlane, namely Landmarks (2015), I instinctively felt that the principle was exactly apposite. I began by quoting a line from a song by The Smiths, a British band that dominated the pop culture of the 1980s: ‘Nature is a language – can’t you read?’ I continued:
What their lyricist Morrissey offers here is a way out of what I call ‘the semiotic fallacy’: the bizarrely widespread assumption that, because human words give human shape and significance to the non-human world, the latter is otherwise inarticulate.
We could never accuse Robert Macfarlane of committing that error. Over the past decade or so he has produced a series of books that really does help us ‘read’ the natural world. Now, in Landmarks, he gives himself scope to be extensively explicit about the way that human language can complement an already vocal landscape. …
Looking back over Macfarlane’s writing career, it occurs to me that for him etymology and ecology have always been inseparable. Now, with Landmarks, the potential of the English language to counter what he calls the ‘desecration’ of nature and to promote its ‘re-enchantment’ is richly demonstrated. (3)
Let me say that I still stand by my judgement of that book, and I still think that the principle of ‘the semiotic fallacy’ helps us appreciate its importance. Moreover, I hope that it’s a phrase that expresses what a lot of ecological citizens have been thinking, without using that exact wording. Whether that is the case or not, I hope that readers will understand my desire to come to terms, as it were, with my own terminology. We all agree, I’m sure, that language merits our constant attention!
(1)Laurence Coupe, ‘General Introduction’, The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism (2000), p. 2. [Further references given in parenthesis after the quotation.]
(2)Kate Soper, What is Nature?, Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, p. 151.
(3)Laurence Coupe, Review of Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks(Hamish Hamilton, 2015), Times Higher Education, 26 February 2015.
For full review see: https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/landmarks/