Leonard Cohen and Philosophy (28 page)

I thought of Eugene Minkowski’s concept of lived space and how the dark in dark space is more personal than the light in light space (p. 405). Dark space envelopes the skin and when you move in dark space, it seems to touch back ever so gently. I wanted to keep the dark space close but already its darkness was fading with every passing moment of light. Then I recalled what Minkowski had also said, that the auditory space, the space where music penetrates, was also a dark space (p. 406). I could close my eyes to listen to Cohen and abstract myself from the light and plunge myself into the world of his sound and his stories. So I did. I closed my eyes and released the light space from its hold on me and let the darkness of Cohen’s music cloak me as the dark space had only moments before.

I Can No Longer Hear You

As I listened to song after song I felt the presence of death. It was as if while listening to
Dear Heather
, I was before death. Martin Heidegger reminds us that death comes only when we are
all in
—when there is no more to experience (p. 280). This
all in
, of course, could come at any time. But it is what we have left to experience which is dear to us, as dear to us as what has been experienced until now. As Cohen reminisced about lost loves, a dead nightingale, and innocence lost on 9/11, he himself was before death, but not in the way Heidegger described as
not yet
. We can’t escape death, but we can
be
before it and embrace the possibilities remaining for our being in the world. We are thrown into this world and remain anxious about the possibilities of becoming and this is so also in the face of death. I felt betrayed by Cohen.

His world had contracted, shrunk, and become deformed: a city made smaller by the death of people and its tallest buildings; women who cared for him still even though he had
become more of a burden than companion; being there for someone not himself; the stealing of a piece of his world—a lover at a simple dance. Then, there was no more time to roam. On and on, farther and farther inward he penetrated my own waning soul without mercy.

I stopped listening and with eyes still closed I returned to the dark space of the earlier blackout. I felt the presence of Freud. Freud saw pleasure as a kind of release mechanism working against ego instincts that thrust us towards death through repressive forces—a protective mechanism against too much stimulation (p. 96). The ego instincts tend to assist the pleasure instincts in being towards death as a way of releasing tension. I heard and felt Cohen trying to reduce the tensions of bitterness and loss with wry twists to his remembrances—his transcendental moments of morning glory. A perverse release of pleasure? Had Cohen fallen into that Freudian trap, the so-called death wish? I wanted to wring it out of Cohen but that was not possible.

Then I realized that I wanted to wring it out of me, that my own release was the despair, the funk, and the depression that had crept over me and penetrated me as deeply as had the darkness. It had crept into me, the unobtrusive death wish, and I had let it dwell without challenging it, without facing it down. The nausea had crept into me. I was Roquentin again in his café. I was listening, absorbed in the music, and Cohen had become the mellifluous voice of Roquentin’s black jazz singer who embraced me with the music . . . and then, like Roquentin, my own nausea disappeared with the end of the song (p. 34).

I realized that Heidegger was right. It wasn’t about being towards death, a downward spiral of ever fewer moments towards the inevitable. No, it was being thrown towards my own potentiality for becoming, for being (p. 279). I had been barreling towards demise instead of traveling outward towards the horizon of my own possibilities. But had Cohen let me down or was this his intention in the first place?

I remembered from Cohen’s first novel,
The Favourite Game
, that his main character Breavman loved the paintings
of Henri Rousseau because they stopped time (p. 39). In Rousseau’s paintings the improbable became the probable, with lions not eating shepherds and men riding tigers. But within these works was the hint of darkness in black shapes with minimal relief that played hidden songs or peered through thick undergrowth. The beasts in the heart of darkness stare, stare at you from a dark space as if they know your every move.

Cohen had taken me and I traveled with him into his dark space to feel around in it with him. The smell of death was everywhere and the stench was like smelling salts to snap me out of my funk. My dark space complemented his until I realized that what I had cloaked myself with was the same funk of depression over loss and frustration that Cohen sang about. Sure, my experience had been a kind of Tennessee waltz and precious time had been stolen from me, or I had just let it pass. Cohen had stopped time for me as Rousseau had stopped time for Breavman. And Breavman had stopped time for Heather, his family’s maid, when he hypnotized her and in this state took her to his bed. It felt like I too had just woken after being locked in a state of violation (pp. 36–38).

I began to realize that time and possibilities are intertwined, leading to the scarcity of both. Therefore, I needed to absorb Heidegger’s argument for pushing, always pushing forward and use mindfulness and reflection to consider and reconsider who I want to become and in the fullest possible measure be that person. No it wasn’t self-actualization, because as Cohen had shown me we never complete ourselves as we might want to even in a full life. But conceptually, I saw that a kind of resoluteness would bring meaning back into my own being.

I released myself from the dark space of my thinking and listened to the music once again. Cohen was repeating, over and over, “We rise to play a greater part,” and I understood that he first had to lead me down into my own fetid space before he could release me back into a shared space where I could begin again—begin again to rethink my existence as
being towards my own future possibilities rather than what had come before. My freedom to do this is temporary because all mortals die; but freedom is the
we’re not there yet
which is the only experience humanity can have because death is just the end of experience.

After a time the music ended and Raven made no move to change the state of silence. I heard the whir of a compressor and my own breathing and the occasional whoosh of late-night traffic. A far-off horn. A sigh from Raven as she turned the page of her newspaper. I closed my eyes. I felt comforted again back in this dark space.

My own psychopathology reminded me of the schizophrenic patient Minkowski described who spent more and more time retreating into himself to ward off the possible blows of life (p. 411). He had withdrawn into his past and dwelled there to prevent the same from also becoming his future. His lived space had become smaller and smaller. I thought how too, like this schizophrenic, I had tried to shield myself from the exigencies of being in the world by restricting my lived space. How I had pushed the boundaries between me and others and the things in the world as far away as I could so that I would not have to interact with them. But how could I now back out of this diminished life space and push the envelope of its horizon towards a being towards, not a being away from?

My life space had become irrational not only because of its diminished size but because my lived time had been limited to the past and the past from which I wanted to be protected in the future—and which I kept returning to over and over again in my downward spiral. It had become my own singsong, my own
Dear Heather
of overripe memories representing my self-limiting possibilities for the future. I felt a sense of dread. It was as if a short circuit in the causal chain of my existence had finally been discovered. I had only to reset the circuit breaker. But it wasn’t that easy. My ascent from funk would require something and I didn’t know quite what. All I did know was that I would need to keep a piece of the dark space at hand to feel it cloak me as I pushed out the
boundaries of my lived space and pressed into forward from reverse my lived time. I was not sure how I would be able to accomplish this.

She Comes Dancing through the Darkness

I opened my eyes. From this dark space I had come into the light again. I realized that light’s warmth was a false security, a false security of being in the world without being at all; that one can with eyes open wander through this life blindly when in the dark one can see. I resolved to take this dark space with me and bring it to the fore when I needed it again. And I knew that I would need it again.

I began to see the world and it seemed new and different now in its everydayness. Life was suddenly more precious. I did not want to look back from my seventies with remorse or even longing for what had been. I could no longer afford to waste life chasing after impossibilities and lamenting lost loves. My eyes scanned the café in the light but from the lingering perspective of dark space. The walls bulged with dimension and the floor heaved up towards me in recognition of my new sight. Raven was hunched over behind the counter, staring into a newspaper. She twirled a strand of hair with her finger.

My cup was empty. It was late, probably colder still. My home wasn’t. I could walk out of the café and trundle down the path that so many have into an inauthentic being just like I had before, and like others, follow Cohen’s lyrics down and into the funk of being, just being in the world with everyone else being in the world. What had been once clear and precise in the light had become obscured in the darkness. But this darkness was not nothing; rather it was a rich space of possibilities as well as dangers and mystery. But the dark space also beckons for close attention and a stepping away from the clarity of the everyday. The night, the darkness reveals mysteries, it doesn’t obscure them. In the dark space there are other possibilities for being.

Across from me at a table where little light fell sat a woman. Her dark parka was quilted, and there were many ski tags on the zipper draw. But the parka was stained and filthy and her brown hair was matted and greasy. The parka hung from her, betraying a slight figure underneath. Her face had been comely once but now was tarnished by living in or living too close to the streets. She was still a young woman but the ski tags seemed out of place. She had cupped her hands around a mug and was nodding, the nod of street sleepers who keep one eye open. Her fingernails were black with grime. She was beautiful. She was Suzanne, a long ago song from Cohen, with all her mysteries, sadness, and the freedom of living in the dusk world of the streets, among the castaways from the light world. I returned to the dark space again and reached towards her with my eyes closed. Only silence. But there was hope in the darkness. Hope.

I opened my eyes again and eased myself out of the booth. On the table I lay down cash for the coffee and a dollar as a tip. I thought my leaving might wake Suzanne and if it did I would approach her. I began to walk towards the door. Suzanne’s eyes opened. I turned and walked to her.

16

Can You Touch Someone’s Body with Your Mind?

R
ACHEL
H
ALIBURTON

P
oets and singers construct worlds for us, and—like philosophers and science-fiction writers—draw our attention to features of the world and elements of our experience that we normally don’t even notice. In the process, they take what seems ordinary and make it extraordinary, or transform what seems impossible into the stuff of everyday life. If they are good at performing these transformations, they, too, reveal things that seem true to us that we might never otherwise have noticed. Sometimes the worlds constructed by philosophers and the insights captured by poets come together, so that the latter can explain the former, and the former illuminate the latter.

Such is the case with “Suzanne,” a song that asks us to enter into a different world than the one we normally inhabit, and that raises deeply philosophical questions about the validity of subjective experiences, the ways in which we encounter and understand one another, and, ultimately, the nature of reality itself. This world prompts us to see features of ordinary life more clearly: it is a song that simultaneously takes the extraordinary and makes it ordinary, and transforms experiences we seldom notice into things which are transcendent and miraculous. In the process, the song helps us see that the world we actually live in is far more metaphysically interesting and puzzling than we normally think.
When Suzanne invites us to her home near the river, it’s a world that’s mysterious and fantastical, a place in which mundane experiences like eating oranges and drinking tea encourage us to think about distant lands, a space in which the river is both real (it is a conduit for shipping) and metaphorical (composed of a medium upon which only Jesus could walk, and in which we must risk drowning if we are to be saved), and a place in which castoffs bought from the Salvation Army take on a transcendent aspect as golden sunlight shines down upon them.

Above all, it is a world in which the seemingly impossible becomes possible, a space in which physical bodies can be touched by immaterial minds. What might it mean to touch someone’s body with your mind? There are two ways this thought can be understood: first, as a pleasingly poetic but ultimately meaningless turn of phrase; or, second, as an invitation to think about the possibility that thoughts themselves are real, as real as the physical objects our bodies perceive, and among which those bodies can be placed. What kind of metaphysical position underpins Suzanne’s world? What metaphysical commitments might we have to make if we want to join her there?

A consideration of how it might be possible for minds to touch bodies will take us to the heart of some of the most difficult metaphysical questions that philosophers can ask—questions about what exists and how we can determine this—and places us at the center of a current philosophical controversy about the nature of reality and the role of consciousness within it. Exploring these issues will require us to consider two very different ways of understanding our experiences, perceptions, and purposes. Indeed, if Suzanne invites us into a distinct world, each side in this debate does so as well. As it turns out, the metaphysics of Suzanne’s world are teleological, not materialist, because it is only in a teleological world—a world where not just human activities but everything has built-in purposes, and human beings are not mere physical objects—that we can touch someone’s body with our mind. We will also need to think about what kind
of world we live in, and whether we can perform this feat here as well.