Free Leonard Cohen and Philosophy by Jason Holt Page A

these different times and how they are related.
    The Future as Apocalypse
    In the lead song Cohen—or his prophetic persona—identifies himself as a servant of an unnamed higher power. His mission is to tell us of the vision of the future he’s been granted. That future is murder. It teems with grotesque scenes of torture,fire, and phantoms. In this future we might as well abort fetuses and destroy the last trees. Readers of the Biblical Apocalypse will recognize imagery drawn from that story about the end of the world, yet it is updated and filled with our time’s obsessive fears. Dehumanization, environmental disaster, loss of individuality and privacy, terror and humiliation are what the future has in store. Cohen’s future gives a voice to our fears.
    “The Future,” speaks prophetically from the standpoint of a world lost or transformed—post-catastrophe, post-disaster (after the final turn, after the terrible misalignment of the stars). Whether through the emergence of the beast from the abyss and Antichrist (as in Christian tradition), or in more contemporary terms through war, environmental collapse, pandemic, domination by a society of total surveillance, or global capitalism, from this visionary site the dreadful has already happened. Everything is over. This is why Cohen calls for the restoration of the Berlin Wall, of Stalin and Saint Paul.
    Yet why does the singer cry for the return of barriers and order, even those of tyranny, religious orthodoxy, and the Cold War? Christian theology offers a clue when it teaches that there is a “restraining force,” in Greek a katechon , that holds back the coming of the Antichrist and the world’s end. The Biblical source is the Second Letter to the Thessalonians attributed (doubtfully) to Paul; it speaks obscurely of a katechon in order to discourage premature expectations of the final tribulations and Christ’s return. From the song’s perspective, the katechon no longer works, the future we had hoped to delay is here: it is murder. Here is one perspective on time on the largest scale. Time as we know it can come to an end. In “The Future” there no longer is a future. It is a future robbed of futurity, of any sense of open possibility.
    The song begins with regret for a time that has been lost, a world that no longer exists. The singer (or chanter) wants back what has been taken. But this is not the deep unease with “time and its ‘it was’” that Friedrich Nietzsche analyzed as the deepest core of human resentment. It is a cry of distressat the loss of a specific kind of life that’s no longer possible in the future. What disappeared was a private, secret life reflected infinitely in a mirrored room. The catastrophe involves the disappearance of walls and borders within which the singer could enjoy his former broken nights, including delights like anal sex.
    Assuming a prophetic persona that owes much to both Jewish and Christian Biblical traditions (Simmons calls it “Jeremiah in Tin-Pan Alley”) Cohen speaks (like Isaiah or Ezekiel) as a servant told to say with absolute chilling clarity that “it’s over.” Like Isaiah and Ezekiel he’s seen nations triumph and decline. The “nations” are those peoples whose successions and relations constitute world history, the time of the world. That history comes to an end in “The Future.” Whether we think of the tribulations of the last days foretold by Hebrew prophets or John’s Apocalypse (which owes much to contemporary Jewish texts), or more recent fears of total disaster, it means that we are beyond measure, over the threshold, in a world of phantoms, road fires, your inverted and suspended woman, lousy Charles Manson–like poets, and the dancing white man. These can all be heard as rewritings of passages in Isaiah and Ezekiel (for example, see Isaiah 3:17–23 on the upside-down woman). The dancing white man surrenders his traditional position as privileged spectator and now becomes the