The Future

I was living in L.A. through the riots and the earthquakes and the floods and even for one as relentlessly occupied with himself as I am it is very hard to keep your mind on yourself when the place is burning down, so I think that invited me to look out of the window. ~Leonard Cohen

Along with the songs “Democracy” and “Anthem”, “The Future” forms the thematic backbone of Cohen’s album The Future. It is an album that invites us to consider not only our response to major events taking place in the world at large, but to contemplate the deeper question: If this is the situation now, then where are we headed? The Future was born out of the social and political upheavals of the late 80’s and early 90’s, and they were numerous and significant, a time which certainly had people asking themselves these questions, a condition similar in respects to the world we live in today – every generation faces its own critical issues – yet regardless of the gravity of the concerns the same questions keep being asked. And people have different ways of answering. Leonard Cohen’s “The Future” outlines a chilling response – a spiritual apocalypse with disturbing implications.

The song “The Future”, in its developmental stages, began with this straight forward premise:

If You Could See What’s Coming Next:

If you could see what’s coming next
If you could see the hidden text
You’d say give me love or give me Adolf Hitler
And you’d say give me back the Berlin Wall
Give me Stalin and St Paul
You’d say, give me Christ or give me Hiroshima
Just get me out of this mirror

If indeed we could see into the future it may be so terrifying, we might very well wish to keep the present with all its political and social tensions, its seemingly hopeless complications and brokenness. What conditions could there be that would have us plead for a return to a world in turmoil? From Leonard Cohen’s point of view, it would be the loss of the spiritual foundation of civilization, a kind of spiritual apocalypse. Not the takeover by some spirit-crushing totalitarian regime out of Orwell’s 1984, not the breakdown of law and order leading to the return to some kind of rule of the jungle, not even the absolute finality of the destruction of the world through some nuclear holocaust – as terrifying as these may be. It is the loss of our being human, the removal of the rules and standards that inform our lives and social interactions, the demise of our innate sense of justice, the inability to distinguish truth from falsehood, the elimination of the heart capable of extending and receiving mercy and compassion, the withdrawal of love from any consideration whatsoever. It is a desolate landscape Cohen draws, but intentionally so.

He begins the song with voices from the future offering testimony to the horrors that lie ahead and markers of the twisted minds that seek a return to this time: “Give me back my broken night / My mirrored room, my secret life”, and “Give me absolute control / Over every living soul”. There are broken voices that echo some of Cohen’s previous works: a desire to get back the hidden, deepest heart of the individual in “my secret life” (a Cohen song of the same title from the Ten New Songs album), the “absolute control” of the extremist mindset in “First We Take Manhattan”. The failure of any democratic solution to the global environmental threat in “Take the only tree that’s left / And stuff it up the hole in your culture”, the willingness to take back the “broken night” – the exclamations for relief continue and culminate in the unsettling final lines of the verse: “I’ve seen the future, brother / It is murder”. When asked about these lines Cohen offered the following:

People say my vision of the future is bleak. The future is here. I think the landscape that I describe in all the songs is here. It is that landscape which provokes these cries. Those are not my personal politics, these are the kinds of cries that arise in response to the catastrophe in which we find ourselves. Human beings have always found themselves in a catastrophe. The human predicament is catastrophic, but these are the cries: ‘Give me back the Berlin Wall, give me Stalin and St. Paul…lie beside me baby, that’s an order’. This is the mind shattered by the predicament. So that mind which says ‘give me crack and anal sex’, also says ‘I’ll be loving you always’. In other words, all kinds of expression, irresponsible, shattered, broken, fragmented, passionate, indifferent; all these cries arise from this shattered heart, that is the heart that I confess I have…

In prophetic tones Cohen gives dimension and form to the spiritual apocalypse that lies ahead in the chorus. Things will “slide in all directions” and there “Won’t be nothing you can measure anymore”. There is only confusion and chaos in a world where the reasoning we rely upon and the values we hold dear now are no longer anchored in our lives. Certainty in anything no longer exists. This is the “blizzard of the world” where the chilling cold of the absence of any accepted standard of values and the blinding confusion of the storm push us over the critical point where turning back is no longer possible – it has “overturned / the order of the soul”, the means by which we assess things with justice, truthfulness, trustworthiness, compassion and forgiveness.

The spiritual mechanism for reversing the downward spiral, resulting from the breaking of a spiritual law, and turning it into a positive outcome is available to everyone. Common sense tells us that you need to recognize that the behaviour is wrong and then correct it to provide a better outcome. It is often accompanied by an expression of regret or remorse because the errant behaviour is an affront to the heart, the touchstone of our spiritual sensibilities. In biblical terms the process is called repentance, a term with which Cohen was certainly familiar. He also understood that it is common for religion to be regarded with suspicion or ignored for the most part:

Well, there‘s a line in “The Future”: “When they said repent, I wonder what they meant.” I understand that they forgot how to build the arch for several hundred years. Masons forgot how to do certain kinds of arches, it was lost. So it is in our time that certain spiritual mechanisms that were very useful have been abandoned and forgot. Redemption, repentance, resurrection. All those ideas are thrown out with the bathwater. People became suspicious of religion plus all these redemptive mechanisms that are very useful.

Cohen knew that his audience at large may not have much faith in formal religious observance, but he continued to use biblical references, imagery and terms because they are still remembered, they endure in our culture even if not deeply understood. Like the mason’s loss of knowledge, our loss of spiritual knowledge is apparent – to our detriment. So why even mention the issue? Because spiritual problems require spiritual solutions. There are solutions but they require our understanding and willingness to employ them if they are to be successful, and so the lines: “When they said ‘Repent, Repent’ / I wonder what they meant”. A final note on this point – even though the spiritual dilemma is a dangerous threat and Cohen presents it bare and bleak he is not evangelical about it, there is no attempt to proselytize here in either word or tone. It is an observation and a caution, an alert, if you like.

In the second verse Cohen provides a theological foundation for the apocalypse. He uses the biblical symbol of wind to represent God and, by extension, Christ: “You don’t know me from the wind / You never will, you never did / I’m the little Jew who wrote the Bible”. Then, drawn from the wisdom of Christ, we are given an assessment of the political history of humankind: “I’ve seen the nations rise and fall / I’ve heard their stories, heard them all / But love’s the only engine of survival”. There have been countless societies at various stages of community development, whether local, tribal, city state or nationhood. They have utilized a variety of forms of government from warrior leaders to war lords, from governors to kings, whether dictatorial, authoritarian, totalitarian, fascist, republic, oligarchs or rule by divine right – whatever the form none have survived. They may be short-lived or last a few centuries but every one of them fail to perpetuate themselves. They either do not know or do not apply the means to do so.

It is in the teachings of Christ, Cohen suggests, that the answer can be found: “…love’s the only engine of survival”. Love, in this basic sense, means attraction, not only for partnering or bonding, but for ideas and qualities too – we pursue ideas out of fascination and expand our knowledge base and begin to apply it. It builds technology and feeds medical and scientific developments. We can love qualities too – our innate attraction to justice, for example, fuels our need to follow the rule of law. Our love of the beautiful and our curiosity drive our artistic and creative endeavours. It is an interesting argument to consider, as is the flip side: an attraction to injustice or hate or cruelty, for example, can lead to significant social problems and, if they reach a critical point, can endanger a society.

Cohen takes the issue further. If we lose or disregard this “engine of survival” for too long what are the consequences? The remaining lines in the verse announce precisely that condition:

Your servant here he has been told
To say it clear, to say it cold
It’s over, it ain’t going any further
And now the wheels of heaven stop
You feel the devil’s riding crop
Get ready for the future
It is murder

“Your servant here”, whether we take that to be Cohen as the narrative voice or Christ speaking on behalf of the Divine, is telling us that it is over. The animating force behind the human spirit has been withdrawn – prepare for an existence without it. The verse that follows illumines that landscape.

Like Hieronymus Bosch’s 15th century painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, this fourth verse is filled with imagery meant to portray the eerie desolation of the spiritual apocalypse. It begins with the “breaking of the ancient western code” and by way of explanation Cohen adds: “Your private life will suddenly explode”. He explained further in an interview with Paul Zollo:

There’ll be the breaking of the ancient Western code, I mean your private life will suddenly explode.” That is this whole investment in private space that the West has painfully established over the centuries. That is specifically what is going to collapse. “There will be phantoms, there’ll be fires on the road” — a return to suspicion, superstition, return to the tribal paranoia and the white man dancing. It evokes a scene of the end of things but with certain variations.

The imagery continues with “…a woman hanging upside down / Her features covered by her fallen gown” and add to that “…all the lousy little poets coming round / Tryin’ to sound like Charlie Manson”. The invocation of Charles Manson’s name and the murderous cult he headed in the late 1960’s only adds to the sinister and alarming vision of the apocalypse.

As the song moves forward we are brought back to elements of the first verse only now we are, perhaps, a little more prepared to absorb the weight of lines like: “Give me back the Berlin Wall / Give me Stalin and St. Paul” and a bit more understanding of the warnings echoing from the chorus.

The lyrics of “The Future” draw a picture of a desolate and uncompromising landscape. Cohen knew it and made the following observation:

People seem to know what ‘The Future’ is about. It’s humourous, there’s irony, there’s all kinds of distances from the event that make the song possible. It’s art. It’s a good dance track, it’s a hot number. It’s captivating — it’s even got hope. But the place where the song comes from is a life-threatening situation. You’ve got to go to some risky terrain. That’s why the record takes so long to make, and that’s why you’re shattered at the end of it.