"Passion without flesh, love without climax"*

It’s high time we dragged Leonard Cohen through the depressogrinder. “Suzanne”** is a dud.

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river

You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night forever

And you know that she’s half-crazy but that’s why you want to be there

Why do you want to be there if she’s half-crazy? Are you a mental health clinician, a sadist, or a codependent caretaker? Do you think there’s gold to gain in someone’s helpless neurosis or psychosis? There is, but it’s a starved or crazymaking childhood, nothing spiritual or transcendent.

And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China

They come from China? Of no conceivable useful meaning.

And just when you mean to tell her that you have no love to give her

Then she gets you on her wavelength

And she lets the river answer that you’ve always been her lover

Total nonsense. Meaningless “gets you on her wavelength” business: Are you especially impressionable, easily led? Is she Tony Robbins? And please: The river didn’t say the damnedest thing. You, loveless, haven’t always been her lover. What you may be is an impotent stalker, an incel. Blame your epiphany on the river? You may need hospitalization, possibly jail.

And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind

And you know that she will trust you

For you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind

No, you don’t want to travel blind. You’re a grownup; you don’t want to lean wholesale on her vision. The rest is gibberish. “Oh! That’s why I trust you! . . .” Her body is not perfect, but your mind is jacked in a masturbatory stare. Get therapy or get a restraining order.

And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water

And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower

Pardon? Why is Jesus here? (a) He was not a sailor. (b) He didn’t walk upon the water. (c) Does Cohen the Jewish Buddhist really believe this, or is he kowtowing to Christians, money, and gullible fans?

And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him

He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them

But he himself was broken, long before the sky would open

Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone

Isn’t it more likely that Jesus would sink beneath your ignorance, not your wisdom, like an anchor, not a stone? I’m not sure how the sea shall free any man, other than being lost or drowned. And this is deity: Wouldn’t “uber human” be more appropriate than “almost human”?

Now, Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river

She’s wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters

And the sun pours down like honey on our lady of the harbor

And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers

There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning

They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever

While Suzanne holds her mirror

Why is this woman the Statue of Liberty? What are you looking for among the garbage? Not flowers, because they’re adjacent to the garbage. Is Suzanne a solipsist, for whom the world is mirrors?

A basic therapy rule is that the therapist shouldn’t work harder than the client. In Suzanne, the interpreter, spinning hopeful fantasies to comprehend the fuzzy meaningless, shouldn’t work harder than the poem.

Cohen was depressed for many decades, then he believed he was no longer depressed. That is incorrect. He was a man whose emotions and understanding were warped, dramatized, infused with abstract longing and confusion and bent to extra poignancy by being buried alive through the depressogenic process: loss of organic feeling in childhood in a parental atmosphere of religious (“Messianic”) and enervating intellect. Forty-year-old women who beg their husbands to touch them, look warmly at them, are children who were starved of love by cold mothers whose husbands cheated on them. One could say their feelings are dripping, cloying poetry, pure need, perfect bodies disembodied. Leonard, like David Foster Wallace, lived detached from touch at the deepest level, the stuff of life, the stuff of bond, and his only solace was more thought, more found feeling, more spirituality, more sexual hope for love, more rhyming crypts and spires.

Sing the song, listener, and you will be as anesthetized as Cohen was.

Your head and your music, at age 27*** or 82 or 46, will not save you from depression.

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* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Cohen.

** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3WOAqtRRvQ.

*** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/27_Club.