Sam Norton has a helpful reflection on the problem of suffering based on songs from Leonard Cohen's Old Ideas. My series of posts on the Suffering God here, here and here seem to cover similar ground.
The song from Old Ideas that I've been musing over is 'Going Home':
"I love to speak with Leonard
He’s a sportsman and a shepherd
He’s a lazy bastard
Living in a suit"
This opening verse sets up the ambiguity inherent in the song, as Leonard is singing about speaking with Leonard.
Just who is the first person character in the song? One suggestion from some reviews has been a manager-type figure. It is also possible that the character speaking in the song is intended to be God, who might command the kind of obedience attributed to Cohen within the song. That would also seem to fit with 'Show Me The Place' where the singer of the song speaks of himself as the slave being told where to go. Where he is to go seems to be to do with incarnation ("Where the Word became a man") and resurrection ("Help me roll away the stone") and therefore it would seem that he is characterising himself as the slave of God.
In 'Show Me The Place' this slavery seems to be accepted but in 'Going Home' it seems more ambiguous and more sinister:
"But he does say what I tell him
Even though it isn’t welcome
He just doesn’t have the freedom
To refuse"
As an alternative, I want to suggest that Leonard the man is speaking to Leonard the persona. All performers seem to need to create a stage persona that is in some way separate from the reality of who the person actually is. On this basis, the song is to do with the experience of leaving the stage in order to experience reality - "Going home / Behind the curtain / Going home / Without the costume / That I wore."
It seems to me that this is a good fit with Cohen's experience of spending five years in a Buddhist retreat only to return to performing when his retirement savings were plundered by his personal manager. Not that 'Going Home' is a confessional song. It's ambiguities mean that it can be read on several different levels but this reading makes sense of both it's central premise - Leonard talking to Leonard - and the stage-related imagery of the song's chorus.
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Leonard Cohen - Going Home.
2 comments:
I had been reading the song (Going Home) as an expression of a Jeremiah-like sense of vocation, reaching some sort of culmination in death. That reading was somewhat thrown when I realised that a chap called Paul Leonard was co-writer on some of the songs from the album!
I have no idea what to make of the 'sportsman' reference though...
PS you can settle for the book next time we meet.
Yes, I agree that all the going home imagery can be read in terms of death. Hadn't picked up on the co-writer's surname which adds an additional level of ambiguity. I think the song resonates on several different levels - and that is a strength - but for me, at the moment, the idea that he is in conversation with his stage/public persona is the one that I find most compelling.
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