Banjo

Aside from “Going Home,” the cheeriest-sounding song on Leonard Cohen’s new album is surely “Banjo”:

There’s something that I’m watching

Means a lot to me

It’s a broken banjo bobbing

On the dark infested sea.

What is this broken banjo, and why does it mean a lot?

It’s not terribly obscure. The broken banjo is the lyre of Orpheus, which also floated on the dark sea, after Orpheus’s death (“out of someone’s grave,” suggests Cohen). Orpheus, in Greek mythology, was the first poet and the first musician. Symbolically, the broken banjo is Cohen’s craft, his art.

But despite the cheerful tone, there is a darkness here: of the banjo, Cohen sings,

It’s duty is to harm me

My duty is to know.

Cohen may simply mean the truth that the artist must always suffer for his art. Almost all real artists are, clinically speaking, chronic depressives; those that aren't are manic depressives. They suffer constantly for their close appreciation of the spiritual world. It makes the evils and imperfections of this world to horribly obvious. In addition to this, the spirit world includes not just heaven, but hell.

But since he has invoked the legend of Orpheus so directly, Cohen may also be referring to Orpheus’s own fate--the fate that left his banjo, which Cohen must now pick up, floating on the dark infested sea.

Orpheus was torn to pieces by the Maenads, ecstatic followers of Dionysus. There are two traditions as to why. Aeschylus writes that they killed him for being a monotheist, insisting on worshipping only the one true God. Ovid writes that they killed him for turning away from the love of women.

These are indeed the risks an artist takes, especially as he grows older. People love songs and poetry when they think they are about romantic love. When it becomes apparent they are instead prayer, acts of worship, unless the artist has always been understood in that way, the general audience can quickly turn on him.

All great art is prayer, an act of worship. Most of it is disguised as something else.