Suzanne -- Cohen's greatest song, and here is why followed by reflection

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Many folks would name "Hallelujah" as Leonard Cohen's greatest song,

But I would argue that he wrote two greatest songs.

The other one is "Suzanne".

"Suzanne takes you down to her place by the river

You can hear the boats go by

You can spend the night forever

And you know that she's half crazy

That's why you want to be there

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

But just when you want to tell her that you have no love to give her

She gets you on her wavelength and let's the river answer

That you've always been her lover."

I recently sang this classic when my son was visiting

I noticed he was listening so I sang the words clearly

And when I was done he asked, "Who wrote that?"

His question, frankly, astonished me.

The fact is, it isn't covered that often.

He would have recognized it

If I had played Cohen's version,

But I have been "covering it" for decades,

Albeit only in private.

Why?

It feels like Leonard Cohen's song; it feels somehow private.

But that's not the real reason.

The real reason is it seems to belong in the sixties.

Suzanne, which was released in 1966,

Was like a passport to the 60s.

If you knew what it was saying, you were in.

If you didn't, you had your quest cut out for you.

You wanted to find out

Why this song was so haunting,

What the song was announcing was

Magic was coming back.

It was here.

Around the same time some friends of mine took LSD together

And they reported afterwards that they saw Pegasus.

All of them. They shared a vision of the mythical winged horse

Soaring through the clouds.

I had just begun my immersive studies of Jungian Psychology

So I understood that what LSD had done for them was

It opened their third eye,

Or should I say, their collective third eye,

To the archetypal realm.

I always make sure that anyone

Who is starting deep dream work understands

That the psyche is not just inside us,

We are inside the psyche.

That is why synchronicities happen,

When archetypes constellate (in dreams or visions)

(Such as Pegasus)

They create a fusion of the so-called inner and outer

Or subjective and objective realities.

In Suzanne, the narrator

Is inviting us into an archetypal experience.

He doesn't say, "Suzanne takes me down to her place. . ."

He says, she takes "you" down to her place.

And, suddenly, we are all out of our depth.

But, as with any archetypal experience

If one stays with it and trusts what is happening to lead the way

Then veils part, doors open, magic becomes the rule.

We think that we have no love to give

But Suzanne gently reveals that

We've always been lovers!

What Cohen is saying is,

If you are with Suzanne

You are outside of time

And maybe what is happening has happened before

In previous lives.

The second stanza comes out of nowhere

With the haunting image of Jesus in his lonely wooden tower

Lonely because he could see that the human race was not ready

For the kind of love that he was offering.

What Cohen is suggesting (in 1966)

Was that the possibility to change our fate

Was coming around again.

If the human race could have loved

They way Jesus was modeling for us 2000 years ago,

Then he wouldn't have had to die on the cross.

But for that to happen, humans would have had to

Learn to walk on water.

They would have had to step into the magic realm

That being lovers opens to us.

When I say that, most of us think of Hollywood or Bollywood love:

But, no, this is Agape, selfless love, love for everyone.

Love of life, loving each other, loving the world.

They were not ready to love this way,

To walk on water,

So he sank into his brokenness,

He gave up his human form

And his spirit rose to the heavens.

How about now?

What is the message that Cohen

Is communicating through "Suzanne"?

In the third stanza

He wants us to return

As in a recurrent dream

To the first stanza

After pondering the second stanza:

"Suzanne takes you down to a place by the river

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

And the sun pours down like honey on our Lady of the Harbor

And she shows you where to look amid the garbage and 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."

Now the question is: What is "forever"?

Forever is an endless moment that lasts

As long as we keep looking into Suzannes's mirror

That she is holding up to us.

Which we have to do until we finally realize

That we have always been lovers,

Not doomed sailors, not warriors,

Not all the things that perpetuate a broken world.

Suzanne is the anima, the archetypal feminine:

David Steindl-Rast has this to say about the anima (1990 interview),

That liberating the feminine within us

Has to happen before we take the next evolutionary step

Of liberating the child within us.

He goes even further to say,

"Our survival depends on the child in us being liberated."

We can, and need to, love those children who are "reaching out for love".

We need to thank those "heroes in the seaweed"

And then release them!

We don't need heroes anymore.

We just need to love.

The human race has a lot going for it.

The human mind is essentially infinite in its capacity

Not just comprehend the wonders of the universe

But we are also gifted with an equally capacious heart.

That is capable of loving, not just each other, but creation.

But more than that,

It has the capacity to allow magic back into its world view.

To do that we don't need to become Hippies again,

We just have to

Take a forever-moment to study ourselves in Suzanne's mirror.

Then liberate the anima (the feminine)

And then

(Take as much time as you want)

Liberate the child.

..............

Brother David Steindl-Rast - author, scholar and Beneditctine Monk - is beloved the world over for his enduring message about gratefulness as a true source of lasting happiness. Also known as the "grandfather of gratitude." A source of inspiration and spiritual friendship to countless leaders and luminaries around the world. (He is 98.)

...............

I keep being surprised that I still have important dots to connect. And this one is right up there. I think what always intrigued me most about this song was the second stanza that describes Jesus in his lonely wooden tower. It is one of those images that has floated up into my inner eye occasionally over the decades like a negative in an acid bath in a dark room. Now I wonder if it will leave me alone now that I have written about it as a key to my decoding of "Suzanne". I think it was reading Catherine Ingram's (1990) interview of Brother David Steindl-Rast that resurrected Cohen's depiction of the cosmically lonely, despondent Jesus, as Brother David was shuffling my mind like a chunky deck of archetypal cards like some kind of trickster-magician and out flew that card, and the card of Suzanne holding the mirror. L Cohen was born in 1934 so in 1965 (which is my educated guess for when he wrote "Suzanne"), he would have been 29. That sounds pretty young, but it also makes sense that that song came out of him then, when his brain would have been a caldron of activity. We owe him for that song, which carries a vital message for these times. As with the sixties, we are living in a time when magic is coming back. "It is here." And I would guess that Cohen would agree with me, that once again circumstance have coalesced to empower us to change our fate. The difference between 2024 and 1966 is, we may never get another chance.