Leonard Cohen and Philosophy (24 page)

Those of us who have lived into the Harper era (Stephen Harper became Canada’s Prime Minister in 2006) may fret
that we’ve now reverted to the Canada of Cohen’s Historian. But for Cohen, in 1966, the future is an open promise. Catherine Tekakwitha is long dead, and Cohen pleads for the sanctification of a transformed Catherine. There are three other Beautiful Losers: They, too, are all dead. One Aboriginal, one French, one English; one crushed by the machinery of the modern world, one shriveled by the madness of his lively passions and ambitions, and a confused and constipated one who finally relaxed and just disappeared. The novel is Leonard Cohen’s assessment of the state of his country, and his dream of its future.
¹

____________

¹
I first wrote about
Beautiful Losers
for a lecture series I gave to Canadian Studies and Philosophy students at the University of Vienna in 2006. I am especially grateful to those students, who loved Leonard Cohen and taught me many things about him and this novel.

13

Writing Poetry after Auschwitz

P
AWEŁ
D
OBROSIELSKI AND
M
ARCIN
N
APIÓRKOWSKI

T
he debate about the role of the Holocaust as a model for modern ethical understanding of memory was reflected in a proverbial way by philosopher and sociologist Theodor W. Adorno, when he claimed, “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz” (the actual line from p. 162 of “Cultural Criticism and Society” translates as “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”). Modern Western culture is characterized by a particular obsession with the past as an object of moral concern. The Holocaust plays a crucial role in this artistic, literary, and philosophical trend. Many philosophers have written on the topic of the Holocaust, which has been dubbed a defining event for Western culture.

The Holocaust clearly plays this vital role in Leonard Cohen’s
Flowers for Hitler
. Actually, the book can even be interpreted as a literary embodiment of the ongoing philosophical debate. What Cohen does is to prove Adorno wrong. What does it mean to write poetry that self-consciously highlights the fact that it’s written
after
the supposed end of all poetry?

Images and Dreams

Let’s start by asking a very basic, even naive question: What is the poet’s world made of? What are the basic elements that Leonard Cohen uses to create his poetry? The cover of the
first edition of
Flowers
suggests an answer. The cover contains a number of odd symbols which, despite the date of publication (1964), resemble weird icons on a computer desktop: flowers, food, a castle, a plane decorated with hearts, an arrow-pierced heart, a parachutist, two naked women, a dog, and finally the eponymous Adolf Hitler himself.

Even a cursory glance inside the book reveals the importance of such symbols. The repertoire of images used in this relatively big collection (over 120 pages) seems disturbingly repetitive. There are relatively few recurrent motifs that reappear in almost all the poems, as if the poet had used a pile of cards, shuffled and dealt them out over and over again. What’s even more intriguing than the very limited number of motifs is their apparent incoherency. Some of them come from Cohen’s spiritual repertoire, while others can be easily assigned to the common 1960s fascination with drugs and altered states of consciousness. There are also many historical and geographical references. But there are also some very unremarkable items that reappear again and again: telephone, radio, green grass, and, of course, flowers. Together they are like an annoyingly infectious song we hear in the morning and can’t get out of our heads throughout the whole day—a good enough way to start a horror.

Some of the most strikingly recurrent images and symbols, grouped in basic categories in a random order, are as follows:

      
•
  
(Astronomy) planet, star, moon, sky

      
•
  
(Drugs) opium/poppies, junkie, (alcohol) to be drunk

      
•
  
Burning (a body, oneself, books)

      
•
  
Concentration camp

      
•
  
Ashes

      
•
  
Oven and smoke

      
•
  
Telephone and radio

      
•
  
The Nazis: Hitler, Goering, Eichmann

      
•
  
(Hydrogen) bomb, mushroom (cloud)

      
•
  
(Family) father, grandmother, mother, sister (also:) house, room

      
•
  
(Geography) Ganges, Canada (Montreal), Cuba, Poland, Russia, America, Japan (and more . . . )

      
•
  
(Religions) Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, rabbi, priest, Zen-master, Jesus

      
•
  
Flowers, grass

      
•
  
Suit

      
•
  
Hair/naked body

      
•
  
History, museum

      
•
  
City Hall

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, whose theory of dreams influenced deeply both modern philosophical debate on memory and Cohen’s more surrealistic poetry, claims that an analyst should distinguish between the “material” of dreams and their meaning. “What are dreams
made
of?” then, is a basic question, preceding any possible attempt to explain them. In dreams it isn’t the images themselves that are significant (we may call them the
vocabulary
of dreams), but rather the relations between them, the
grammar
of dreams. Let’s consider, then, possible relations among the symbols Cohen uses.

We could reorganize the list, randomly combining elements, and that is actually what Cohen does throughout the whole volume. At least one of the above images appears in almost every single poem. Many of the poems are so saturated with recurring motifs, that they seem entirely built from some prefabricated building-blocks, or “poetry bricks.” Think of creating a do-it-yourself
Flowers for Hitler
generator that would produce an unlimited series of new poems by randomly juxtaposing these motifs (like: “Naked Goering enters a City Hall full of ovens, where he receives a phone call from Jesus,” and so on). Although it may seem odd to a devoted fan of the Canadian bard, this is exactly what the structure of the collection suggests. And it would not be, in any case,
diminishing
the value of Cohen’s poetry! Just the
opposite: we should rather admire the book as an
open collection.
To be honest, it seems that no single poem taken separately is a true masterpiece, but taken as a whole, the volume makes a “system” capable of expressing a lot.

Just think of
Flowers
as if it were not a collection of
poems
, but a kind of
machine
programmed to produce them. (We don’t think the poet himself would take offense.)

Repression

We know already what Cohen’s poetic world is made from. Let’s try now to enter it. First of all, the world Cohen invites us into is
normal
. Despite being gravely influenced by surrealism, the landscape of
Flowers
is furnished with surprisingly typical items in more or less trivial configurations. And this is exactly where the horror begins! The world is
awkwardly
normal, given
what has recently happened
. It had been just two decades since the Holocaust, and yet everything looks as if all the atrocities of the two world wars had never taken place.

More than anything else, perhaps, it’s the apparent
normality
of everyday life that seems to horrify Cohen (or rather, that Cohen uses to horrify
us
): “It never happened / There was no murder,” repeats the voice of the poetic narrator in a frantic search for any evidence that will overturn this assumption. But the grass is not red—as we read in “The First Murder”—it’s just green, as it should be. The fact that the world goes on, that the grass
is
green, that people continue to be born, married, and buried in peace, makes all the atrocities of the past seem highly “improbable.”

But what happened, happened. There are
ashes
under the surface of the green field. Continuing the rhetoric of this horror, we may say that the dead are
not fully
dead. “I can’t get their nude and loving bodies out of my mind” reads “A Migrating Dialogue,” while “The Music Crept by Us” provides us with a Titanic-like picture of life as a party where “the band is composed / of former SS monsters.” “For My Old Layton” presents a similar picture of people living close to “the breathless / in the ground.” The image culminates in “The
Invisible Trouble,” where we see a man covering up numbers on his wrist that appeared there as a hallucination, a side effect of watching too many Holocaust movies. There are no numbers on
our
forearms, yet there is a burden—as we may interpret this metaphor. An author analyzing the image of the Holocaust in
Flowers for Hitler
, Sandra Wynands, accurately writes about “the inability to reconcile normality with the knowledge of horror” which is at the same time “the inability to imagine such horror in the presence of normality” (p. 206).

It all “just happened” suggests the title of one of Cohen’s poems (“How It Happened in the Middle of the Day”), causing
no change
in the way the world turns. Life still goes on, and people pass by the mass graves not even noticing their existence. There’s no difference, “not a single alien tremor / in the voices crying: tomatoes, onions, bread”—notes a disbelieving Cohen, unconsciously(?) paraphrasing a famous verse by Polish poet and Nobel prize winner Czesław Miłosz whose poem “Campo di Fiori” (1943) juxtaposes the burning ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto with the execution of Giordano Bruno burned at the stake in 1600. Even before the flames had died, observes Miłosz two decades before the publication of
Flowers
, life went back to normal, and merchants were selling such ordinary things as lemons and olives at the very same square the horror had taken place.

“How come the buses still run? / How come they’re still making movies?”—asks “A Migrating Dialogue.” The fact that the life goes on
despite
all the atrocities seems somehow more horrifying than the atrocities themselves. At the surface there are flowers, and grass, and music—people eat, drink, play, they even make love. But all this normality is founded on a kind of dark lie which, since Freud, we call
repression
—the lie we tell ourselves not to have to face the truth that will be too terrifying to bear.

The Discovery of Guilt

The Western world “rediscovered” the Holocaust only in the 1960s, more than fifteen years after the ovens in Auschwitz
went out. Until then the postwar boom was in full swing. In the 1950s rapid economic development, mass production of goods and babies, as well as the emergence of new lifestyles seemed much more important than facing the recent horror. The memory of the Holocaust was repressed in various ways. Survivors’ narratives were not particularly welcomed and often misunderstood. Western societies decided to turn their backs on the past and look hopefully towards the future.

During the war Germany had been perceived as the archenemy and Russia as an indispensable ally; afterwards, for political reasons, the roles shifted. As a result, the few depictions of the Holocaust produced during that time were particularly striking. For example,
The Diary of Anne Frank
, a 1955 Broadway box-office hit play adaptation of the Dutch text (adapted in turn into a film in 1959) was structured as a universal melodrama with a moving and uplifting ending—a quotation from the diary that read: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

Among various notable events that sparked widespread public interest in the Holocaust in the early 1960s, and finally resulted in what we see as the contemporary obsession with memory, one seems to be of particular importance not only in general but also to Cohen himself—the capture, trial, and subsequent death sentence for Adolf Eichmann, eponymous subject of one of Cohen’s poems. Although this event caught both the CIA and the American public by surprise, it coincided with favorable political and social conditions. With the death of Stalin, the Krushchev thaw, and the end of McCarthysim, the Cold War entered a new era. The need for a clearly defined enemy diminished. The West was now ready to face both the victims of the Holocaust and its perpetrators.

The court proceedings, which lasted for a few months, were broadcast on television and radio throughout Europe and in the US—a historical first. This had also been the first time since 1945 that the Holocaust received widespread newspaper coverage, including daily analyses, editorials,
contextualizing articles, and so on. People gathered to watch and listen to both Eichmann, the bureaucrat who logistically organized the destruction of European Jews, and an endless procession of witnesses who described the horrors they endured in minute detail. It was a spectacle—directed as such by Israeli authorities—through which the atrocities inscribed themselves in the Western collective imagination. Peter Novick has observed: “As part of this process there emerged in American culture a distinct thing called ‘The Holocaust’—an event in its own right, not simply a subdivision of general Nazi barbarism” (p. 144).