Warm
weather calls for warm songs
By
Caitlin Ward
Suzanne
By Leonard Cohen
Suzanne takes you down to
her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by
You can spend the night beside her
And you know that she’s half crazy
But that’s why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges
That come all the way from China
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
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
And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower
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
And you want to travel with
him
And you want to travel blind
And you think maybe you’ll trust him
For he’s touched your perfect body
with his mind
Now Suzanne takes your hand
And she leads you to the river
She is wearing rags and feathers
From Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbour
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 the mirror
And you want to travel with
her
And you want to travel blind
And you know that you can trust her
For she’s touched your perfect body
with her mind
After weeks of dastardly
rain in Saskatoon, today it is warm. And warm weather calls for warm
songs. Perhaps not everyone thinks it’s such an apt fit, but to
me early Leonard Cohen is warm weather music.
Though Cohen is something
of an institution in my house, this idea that he is warm weather music
only started for me one unconscionably hot day when I was 20. My sister
and I had travelled to England in the middle of a heat wave. The few
days we spent in Stratford-upon-Avon were coloured by a heat we’d
never experienced before. It’s a wet heat — humid and overpowering,
the sort of days where you can’t leave the shade and the sort
of nights when you lay down without blankets and still, the bed beneath
you is too hot to sleep upon.
We spent an evening in the
uppermost balcony of the un-air conditioned Royal Shakespeare theatre,
squinting at a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and trying
not to murder the people in front of us, who brought handheld fans that
buzzed like irritated mosquitoes at irregular intervals throughout the
show.
Perhaps as a result, I don’t remember the productions we saw those three days particularly well. What I remember best is lying on a bed that felt like an electric blanket, staring out a third floor window as the early afternoon sun beat down through the trees into my room. I was listening to Suzanne. And I realized, in that moment, that it was the best way to appreciate the song. The gentle guitar and the lazy voice, the words steeped in mythology and theology, the tea and the oranges and the river.
It doesn’t work in
the winter. It only works when you are too hot to move.
The imperfect beauty of that moment with Suzanne in Stratford has been
tempered in the past five years by the decision to base my master’s
thesis in part on Leonard Cohen. It was a second unconscionably hot
day three years after my moment in Stratford that I began, briefly but
intensely, to despise Leonard Cohen. And ironically, it was because
of the song Suzanne.
There were two reasons it
happened, neither of which can be blamed on Cohen. My thesis experience
was not easy in general — it was beset by personal disasters (the
suicide of a good friend, the untimely death of another good friend’s
father, the ruptured aneurysm in the brain of my mother) — which
compounded the utter frustration of trying to write a thesis for a supervisor
who seemed to have made absolutely no investment in me or my work.
So near the end of the last
chapter of this ill-begotten thesis, I wrote a six-page exploration
of Suzanne, which first appeared as a poem in Cohen’s 1966 volume
Parasites of Heaven. Sitting once again in a third floor room without
air conditioning during a heat wave, I wrote about the universality
of the song, how writing in the second person involved the reader directly,
how it demonstrated growth and expansion from Cohen’s earlier
work which was preoccupied with anger and ethnicity, how the parallels
between Suzanne and Christ communicated our fear of both salvation and
freedom, and perhaps on some level, Cohen meant that they were the same
thing.
I then realized: the song
couldn’t really be classified as universal because of the line,
“you’ve always been her lover,” because it limits
“you” to one half of the population. A universal poem or
work of art is one that applies to all people, and this one
didn’t. As a heterosexual woman I’ve never been the lover
of any “her” and I’m doubtful I ever will be. So I
said Cohen limited the universality of his poem to “men, or at
a stretch, lesbians.”
I got in trouble for this.
I wasn’t particularly surprised. I have, in general, a tendency
to put things either too bluntly or too flippantly. Where my anger came
from was the fact that I was told that I was limiting the poem,
not Cohen. I was incensed then, and though I am no longer infuriated
by this criticism, I stand by my reading. Cohen is a male poet talking
about male things from a male perspective. There is absolutely nothing
wrong with that. However, the idea that a man talking about a female
lover applies just as well to women as it does to men makes no more
sense than saying a poem about the experience of giving birth is as
applicable to men as it is to women.
And thus, my hatred of Leonard Cohen was briefly but furiously born. I went back through his books of poetry and his albums of song and I realized that as a young man, in his writing he reduced women not only to their bodies, but to bits of their bodies: their mouths, their hair, their breasts. I know many women have been flattered by his attention and adoration of these things, but in my unnecessarily hot apartment that summer, I could only be angry that he never seemed to write about women as whole human beings. I couldn’t listen to Leonard Cohen or read his poetry for a year after I defended my thesis without getting immediately and irrationally furious.
But we all grow up. Cohen began to write about larger things in the
’80s and ’90s, and I slowly let go of my ire. I maintain
that most of Cohen’s poems are not universal, but I also realize
there is no reason to hate him for it. So today, in what feels like
the first proper day of summer, I listened to Suzanne. It is as imperfectly
beautiful as it was on that day in Stratford five years ago.
Ward is a freelance writer and aspiring documentary filmmaker based
in Saskatoon. You can find her short bursts of insight and frustration
at http://www.twitter.com/newsetofstrings
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