Free Leonard Cohen and Philosophy by Jason Holt Page B

spectacle. All that’s left to do, the voice bitterly declares, is to join in the general murder and destruction, including abortion and ecocide.
    The refrain exhibits Cohen’s mastery of ironic ambiguity, not knowing what “they” meant by “repent.” Does the prophet fail to understand his own instruction? Or is he channeling Spinoza, who said that “one who repents is doubly unhappy and weak”? And who’s claiming credit as the Bible’s Jewish author? Is it God, traditional author of the Pentateuch through Moses, the actual writers who severely edited and added to older texts, or Cohen himself, who here and elsewhere rewrites the Bible? Questions about time have yet to be answered.
    Waiting for the Miracle
    The end-of-the-world scenario is only one form of time that Cohen sings of on this album. If the main point of view in the first song is theological and cosmic, the second, “Waiting for the Miracle,” mercilessly reveals the very private life of lovers who’ve repeatedly postponed their union, perhaps until it’s too late. No doubt we all dwell on those moments when “if only” we had responded to that invitation, taken that chance, or chosen a different path everything would have been better and different. It’s all about missing the right time, failing to seize the opportunity, because we vaguely imagined that a miracle—something totally outside our power—would come along, resolving our life’s uncertainties and indecisions. There may also be the suggestion that the poet too waits passively and too long for his inspiration. While Cohen speaks to a single person, the “I” and the “you” here could be anybody, could be you.
    Stoic philosophers, like Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, harshly criticize the conventional time experience of waiting and deferral. Instead we should be alert for the opportune time, the temporary imbalance that provides an opening that could be seized to effect a major transformation of individual or collective life. In “Waiting for the Miracle” Cohen gives a stronger and more moving critique of waiting than do the Stoics. The song explores the dark side of delay and deferral, the time of the katechon in which we stretch out time to the maximum, fearing to take a chance or make a decision. The singer confesses to wasting his time, waiting for the miracle. Waiting here is the dark side of mere succession, of time as one damn thing after another, the devouring time that the Greeks call chronos and which the philosopher John Locke termed “perpetual perishing.” The miracle would be (in Greek thought) the kairos , the transformative, decisive event or opportunity, the opposite of chronos . Cohen sometimes calls it a “transcendental moment,” showing that he too can use a philosophical vocabulary. In this song the miraculous kairos is a wan hope, thedream of someone who’s collapsed on the road of life, lying in the rain, drenched in regret.
    Sylvie Simmons interprets this song and the album as Cohen’s proposal of marriage to Rebecca de Mornay. This would surely be one of the most melancholy proposals imaginable, since he’d be asking the lover to adopt a life of parallel solitude with him while they continue to wait for the miraculous event. But if we understood the collection of songs from this point of view, we might be haunted by the suspicion that it is composed in a somewhat private lovers’ language. In this light the album cover illustration—a bird, a heart, an open pair of handcuffs—invites speculation about binding and unbinding in several registers, and presents a number of interpretive options. Perhaps more specifically it’s the emblem of ambivalence. Love (the heart) serves as a perch for either being proverbially “free as a bird” or the “bird on the wire,” who, like Cohen, has no choice but to sing. Open handcuffs suggest the play of restraint and captivity, maybe an SM bondage game, one that both highlights the theme and questions any