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The Archetypes of Self in Leonard Cohen's Suzanne.
“Love is that activity that makes the power of man and woman (…) that incorporates in your own heart, where you can embody man and woman, when you can embody hell and heaven, when you can reconcile and contain, when man and woman becomes your content, and you become her content, that’s love"
In the final years of the twentieth century, during an intimate conversation broadcast in 1997, Leonard Cohen, then aged sixty-three and recently ordained a Zen Monk Buddhist at Mount Baldy monastery, responded to Stina Dabrowski's question "What is Love?". He further revealed how throughout his life he had felt “unable to reply to love (…) obsessed with some fictional sense of separation (…) some fictional barrier (…) some fictional disease (…) from the thing we want the most, which is a sense of ourselves and a sense of being at home with ourselves” (BURGER 2014: 419).
As evidenced by his own description, Cohen's “fictional” sense of separation may be (abstractly) reconciled through love. For the sake of space and concision- which might risk an entire attempt struggling to define the age-old meaning of "love"- I will confine this investigation to exploring Cohen's notion of love as distilled by his own description; an embodiment of perceived opposites- i.e man and woman- as "content" of the mind. I will elucidate this proposition through a critical reading of Cohen’s Suzanne, and attempt to locate what exactly is meant by terms such as 'embodiment', and the concept of man and woman as psychic as “content” of the Self.
Space permitting, I will respond to feminist and queer and gender criticisms, incorporating Simone De Beauvoir's The Second Sex and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble to problematise and then rebuttal claims concerning the character and identity of the feminine and masculine "subject" and raise the notion of gender performativity.
(Photo: Leonard Cohen in conversation with Stina Dabrowski)
Conjunctio and The Union of Opposites
Cohen’s description of love corresponds to the alchemical concept of conjunctio, from which I will establish the first notion of "embodied opposites".
Philosopher Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) in De Docta Ignorantia (1440) outlined the notion of ‘coiuncti coincidentia oppositorum’ which upheld God- the Christian maker- as an ‘absolute Maximum (…) the enfolding of all things, even of contradictories’ (HOPKINS 1990: I.22 36-7). The nexus between matter and conceptual form performs a coinciding of oppositions, a ‘trinity of Oneness’ (HOPKINS 1990: I.10 17) as illustrated in the fifteenth century manuscript Donum Dei (1628), as twelve frames depict the process of conjunctio- the allegorical transformation of chemical and corporeal bodies.
Among these frames (figure 1) the transmutating distillations of Solutio, Solutio Perfecta,
Putrefactio, Cinis Cinerum, Rosa Alba and Rosa Rubea, the illustrated process.
In the distillation glass, the anointed couple meet together in solutio, above the firmament of earth below amid the water they walk hand-in-hand: by solutio perfecta, the naked embracing in the water raises the winged-spirit of life: together they are fallen in putrefaction, to black rigor mortis in death and decay; to the crucible of Cinis Cinerum, as the furnace dissolves the solution, perfected and putrefied to the "White Queen" Rosa Alba and the “Red King” Rosa Rubea.
The transformation of the chemical and corporeal bodies in conjuncto are purified materia, as precious metaled silver and gold personified in human form. The didactic prescription of the Donum Dei informs the alchemist, who administers the transformation, to “return (to) the nature of the four elements, and soon you will see what you seek, but to return nature means making corpses into spirits in our mastery”. (2)
This maxim appears in Rosarium Philisophrum (1550) as corporeal, chemical and celestial bodies unify in conjunctio (figure 2): the royal man and woman embrace in the water, personified as the golden sun and silver moon; the winged couple as parents of the crowned hermaphrodite. This illustration from Rosarium was adapted and featured as Leonard Cohen’s fifth studio album cover in 1974, for New Skin for the Old Ceremony (figure 3).
The extent of Cohen’s awareness of any alchemical process was revealed in 1976, when he said in an interview “the alchemical process is the process of change (…) of interior change, just an allegory of changing base emotions and feelings into something that is higher”. (3)
The change of feelings and emotions from lower into higher states formed forms an alchemical allegory: introspective and individual yet, a symbolic illustration of love and the creative process.
Carl Jung considered the symbol of conjunctio as reflecting a psychic affinity in the integration of the conscious and unconscious mind:
‘the image of conjunctio has always occupied an important place in the history of the human mind (…) on the one hand to shed light on the mystery of chemical combination, whilst on the other it became the symbol of the unio mystica, since as a mythologeme, it expresses the archetype of the union of opposites (…) an a priori image that occupies a prominent place in the history of man’s mental development’ (JUNG: 2013 5-6)
The erotic embrace forms the lower union of corporeal bodies materia with water solutio of mind, perfecting and putrefying to silver and gold: corresponding to the higher union of Sun and Moon, reflecting the erotic corporeal and celestial power of love. Cohen echoed this integration of equal corporeal and celestial bodies as unified “content”:
‘There has to be an understanding that there really is an absolute equality of power. Different kinds of power, obviously; different kinds of magic, different kinds of strength, different kinds of movement that is as different as night and day. And it is night and day, and it is the moon and the sun, and it is the land and the sea, and it is plus and minus, it is heaven and hell: it is those antimonies, but they’re all equal’. (BURGER 2014: 419).
Cohen’s description of an equal becoming in love as embodying a woman’s “content” is simultaneously the embodiment of psychic, earthly and cosmic phenomena, as opposites contained in the self. By this meaning love becomes a unifying act of embodying perceived opposites and spaces of “separation” between corporeal and cosmic bodies.
The sense of disconnection and “disease” of perceived separation, alludes to William Blake’s 'Voice of the Devil' in Marriage of Heaven and Hell who judges the ‘Errors (...) That Man has two real existing principles: Vitz: a Body and Soul (…) (since) Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that Body is a portion of the soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age’ (BLAKE 1928: 1991). In order to clarify such notions of “self” and “archetypes”, I will outline a literary and psychoanalytic framework to interpret the theme of conjunction- as the union of opposites- before applying this theory to a reading Suzanne.
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Sources
BLAKE, William (1927), Poetry and Prose of William Blake, edited by Geoffrey Keynes,
London, The Nonesuch Press.
DIMERY, Robert (1988) Leonard Cohen in His Own Words London: Omnibus Press.
DIZERTAČNÍ, Prace (2016), Leonard Cohen: The Modern Troubadour PALACKÝ
University, Olomouc
HOPKINS, J (1990, English. translation of CAUSANUS, N. De Docta Ignorantia (1440)
Minneapolis, Arthur J. Banning Press)
JUNG, Carl Gustav (2013), The Psychology of Transference, London: Taylor and Francis
ROOB, Alexander (2014), The Hermetic Museum: Alchemy & Mysticism, Los Angeles:
Taschen.
(3) Leonard Cohen and Andre De Bruyn at the Cirque Royal, Brussels 1976 (Allan
Showalter): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF8SAq1W0zE
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