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.

Cohen Going Home

Old man with a guitar.

Leonard Cohen is a brave man. Emily Dickinson wrote, of the poet’s craft, “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant; success in circuit lies.” Cohen dares to say it plain, and he’s getting plainer of speech every year.

Consider “Going Home,” the first song on his latest album, “Old Songs.”

He begins by speaking of himself in the third person.

I love to speak with Leonard

He’s a sportsman and a shepherd

He’s a lazy bastard living in a suit.

But he does say what I tell him

Even though it isn’t welcome

He just doesn’t have the freedom to refuse.

Why does he do this odd thing? To absolve himself for what he is about to say in the chorus. He knows it will upset many listeners. Please don’t blame him, he is saying. He is only the messenger. He has no control over what he is saying.

The chorus:

Going home

Without my sorrow

Going home

Sometime tomorrow

Going home

To where it’s better

Than before

Going home

Without my burden

Going home

Behind the curtain

Going home

Without the costume

That I wore.

Cohen, a depressive all his life, is visibly cheering up. He’s cheered by the prospect, at 78, of dying soon.

One might well expect a large part of the audience to recoil in horror at this point. Just as they did when Jesus said they must eat his flesh and drink his blood. This is ghoulish, to most of us.

This is what Cohen was referring to back in the early nineties, as well, when he sang “I raise my glass to the awful truth/That must be kept from the ears of youth/except to say it isn’t worth a dime.”

And now he has said that awful truth, pretty plainly. Life is a time of exile. It is not the real world, but a costume ball. Death is the goal.

It is a hard truth to take when you are young, and facing many years of life. It makes you depressed. It becomes easy to accept once you are old. And, for those who are spiritually inclined, it is good news.

As Yeats also said it:

An aged man is but a paltry thing;

A tattered cloak upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress.

All or nearly all poets and artists understand this once they are old, I expect, for they are by definition spiritually sensitive; but few dare say it. It risks losing their audience. Most artists shut up by this point. Some start faking it. Some tell it slant, like Dickinson.

Cohen is taking considerable risks by speaking plainly. He still needs money.

But it’s nice to hear him happy at last.