Both/or

On Leonard Cohen, paradox, and the blades we carry.

I haven’t written an original essay since that Gaza one. For the past month, I couldn’t bring myself to sit down with words. Something shifted — and yet it felt too early, too raw, to capture in writing.

In conversation with ChatGPT about Leonard Cohen’s Thanks for the Dance — his final, posthumous album that reads like a summing-up of a long and complicated life — we spoke about legacy, paradox, and mystery. I was challenged to imagine my own song in Cohen’s style, something that would speak from my own heart.

I called it Both/or. ChatGPT offered to turn my reflections into a poem. To my surprise, it touched me:

I held the blade of either/or
It cut me into two
I swore my life to both/and peace
It split me through and through

I dropped the question in the well
It echoed back as mu
The silence was an ancient song
Too vast for me, too true

And what became of all my wars
My victories, my scars?
They vanished in the open sky
That isn’t mine, or ours

“I held the blade of either/or, it cut me into two…” Who among us hasn’t been cut in two? We can count ourselves lucky if it doesn’t push us into the depths of depression or worse, as it does for so many. Yet it’s the first blade life places in our hand.

Then comes the temptation of both/and peace. But that blade cuts just as sharply, if less obviously. Go searching for both/and peace in Gaza and tell me what you find.

Zen is famous for its don’t know mind approach. In theory it’s beautiful: openness, flexibility, freedom from dogma. But even mu can become another blade. When I want to scream “I fucking need to know!” and the answer is silence, “too vast for me, too true,” the blood flows again.

And yet, if we’re lucky, there comes a moment when we find ourselves standing in awe, under that open sky that belongs to no one, filled with gratitude simply for being alive.

Both/or. The paradox, the mystery, the very texture of life itself.

Photo by Chris Boland on Unsplash