I’m more of an admirer than a fan of Leonard Cohen, so I didn’t have high expectations of the documentary Hallelujah, which was about the eponymous song and its writer. By the end, however, the film had helped me sharpen my thoughts about the role of art in making sense of life, and the failings of self-help.
Cohen was often described by others in the film as a “seeker” who was both “spiritual” and a “poet”. Philosophers are seekers too, but in the West today they are more rational and prosaic than spiritual and poetic. Poets revel in the ambiguity of language, philosophers hate vagueness and seek clear definitions. The spiritual dwell in mystery, philosophers seek to eliminate it.
But sometimes artists can capture and convey truths about the human condition more vividly and insightfully than philosophers or scientists, even though – perhaps because – what they produce cannot be translated into straightforward factual claims.
A recurring theme of the film was what the song “Hallelujah” meant. For an hour and forty minutes, I didn’t find any of this very illuminating. The best treatment of the questions was given by the song’s producer, John Lissauer, who said he never asked Cohen what his songs meant. “I wanted to make of the lyrics what they were to the listener. I didn’t want to know too much. I think it’s insulting in a way to ask someone to explain his art. It has to explain itself.”
That sounds right. But in the last words we hear from Cohen himself, he does go some way to explaining himself and the song. “You look around and you see a world that is impenetrable, that cannot be made sense of. You either raise your fist, or you say, ‘Hallelujah’. I try to do both.”
Those words made retrospective sense of much I had been watching. Cohen often wrote about the brokenness of human beings and instead of offering the hope that we can be healed, his consolation is that life can be joyous nonetheless. This is perhaps most famously summed up two lines from another of his songs: “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.”
This resonates with me. For a long time, the best expression of this I knew was the Japanese concept of mono no aware, sometimes translated as “the pathos of things”. As I understand it, this captures the inescapably bitter-sweet taste of life, where the good and the bad, the happy and the sad, are alway cheek-by-jowl. In Japanese culture, this is most evident in the tradition of hanami, the spring celebration of the transient beauty of flowering, especially cherry blossom. Hanami would not be meaningful if it were only about the beauty. It is significant because the enjoyment comes with an acute awareness that it will pass, as will all good things. This sadness intensifies the joy, and the joy intensifies the sadness.
Cohen’s recurring exploration of the brokenness of human life echoes this, but pushes it to darker places. It is one thing to appreciate the bitter-sweet pleasures of spring blooms. It is quite another to be heartbroken, defeated, desolate and still them be able to feel that it is nonetheless a wonder to be alive.
That’s why in the song, the ‘“hallelujah” is repeatedly described as “broken”. We do our best and although if we’re honest it isn’t good enough, we have to make sure it is good enough for us, because the alternative is defeat. So in one verse, Cohen says “I did my best, it wasn’t much” but “even though it all went wrong / I’ll stand before the lord of song / With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah.” Not even love can save us unless we accept that it doesn’t conquer all: “Love is not a victory march / It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.”
One of the most intriguing things about Cohen is how he doesn’t fit comfortably into the category of the religious or the secular. In many ways, he led an obviously secular life, unobservant of any religion. However, the film shows that religion was clearly important to him. But maybe there is only a puzzle here if we think of the divide between the religious and the secular as sharp. His long practice of Zen, including years in a monastery, reflects this. Zen Buddhism is not a religion, at least not in the mould of the world’s great faiths. But it has a clear religious character in that it is all about spiritual discipline, weakening attachment to self and submitting to the unknown other. Its disinterest in creed, however, sets it apart from most religion.
I get the impression Cohen felt that a religious orientation to life was essential, even though he placed no importance at all on religious belief. That’s how I make sense of his musing that “When you see the world and you see the laws of brute necessity which govern it, you realize that the only way that you can reconcile this vale of suffering … to sanity is to glue your soul to prayer.” On hearing that, it sounded strangely, explicitly religious. But of course prayer is a practice, and if it is not fixated on petition or declarations of faith, it can be a kind of meditation, a way of being still, trying to get in the right frame of mind to see yourself and world properly.
For Cohen, it seems the challenge is to orient ourselves to the world and others in the right way, one that is unblinking and yet which ultimately asserts the value of being alive. Whether we do this by means of religion, art or just mindful living isn’t important: “It doesn’t matter which you heard / The holy or the broken Hallelujah.”
This, I realised, was why I get so annoyed with almost everything that is written about self-improvement today. In even the mostly sensible stuff, there is almost an implicit or explicit promise that if we can just understand this or that, change our thinking or habits thus, then we need not be broken at all. We are promised healing, contentment, happiness, or something similar. This, I think, is a lie. The only way to escape the pain of the world is to turn your eyes away from it and have the good fortune not to suffer it yourself. The first part is callous, the second highly improbable.
We can learn to live better, more fulfilling lives. But they are still broken ones. Muddling through is the best we can do. That, not salvation, has to be enough to evoke a defiant, grateful and celebratory “hallelujah”.
As I said, the philosopher writes in prose, not poetry and maybe too much of Cohen’s insights have been lost in my translation. Watch the film, listen to Leonard Cohen, or just find time for art and poetry of any kind. Even if there is no heaven, there are still more things on earth than can be be dreamed of by philosophy alone.
News
I reviewed Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop by Max H. Bazerman for the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ is owned by Rupert Murdoch. Am I guilty of complicity?
I was on the Philosophy Takes on the News podcast’s special episode on the 2022 US mid-term elections talking democracy, trust, compromise, Trump, information, media and all the rest. With Fiona Macpherson, Chris Carman and host Simon Kirchin.
I’ve reclaimed the rights to my 2008 book Complaint so I’m able to make a PDF of the entire book available to supporters. I have a big soft spot for this one. It was well and widely reviewed but didn’t sell very much, for various reasons, including the failure of the publisher to make anything of the series it was supposed to be part of.
On my radar
I hadn’t heard the phrase “Purity Spiral” before coming across Gavin Haynes’s article in UnHerd about how the worlds of Instagram knitting and Young Adult Fiction descended down their own hellish versions of one. If the article whets your appetite, his BBC Radio Four programme goes into more detail
One of my supporters (thanks Matt!) alerted me to the strange connections between the failed cryptocurrency firm FTX and the effective altruism movement. This article in Vice covered it very thoroughly, while this Guardian one is good but shorter. Back in 2015 I wrote about effective altruism and my reservations about it for the New Statesman.
Whether you are a diligent recycler or someone who likes to scoff at the futility of it all, you’ll be interested to hear about how a leading ethical retailer has abandoned compostable packaging … because most of it doesn’t compost. The take-home for me is: don’t put it in your food waste as the it will be assumed to be plastic. Put it in the bin, unless you have a very good (preferably hot) composter in your garden.
I have finally seen the excellent film After Love, in which a British Muslim convert suddenly finds herself a widow, only to soon suffer an even greater shock. I’ll avoid spoilers but if you’re in the UK it’s currently free to view on the BBC iPlayer.
There are some new bonus-style episodes of Gabriel Gatehouse’s excellent The Coming Storm on conspiracy theories and populism in America over on BBC Sounds and other podcast platforms.
That’s it for now. Remember that if you buy books online, you can avoid the tax-dodging giant and buy through my affiliate shop which gives 10% to independent bookshops and 10% to me.
Until next time, if nothing prevents, thanks for your interest.