Inspiration as bondage, inspiration as freedom

The central conceit of the Leonard Cohen song "Going Home" is that, instead of Leonard Cohen singing about God, it's God singing about Leonard Cohen.

I love to speak with Leonard
He’s a sportsman and a shepherd
He’s a lazy bastard living in a suit 

But he does say what I tell him
Even though it isn’t welcome
He just doesn't have the freedom to refuse

He will speak these words of wisdom
Like a sage, a man of vision
Though he knows he’s really nothing
But the brief elaboration of a tube

This would seem to be a literalistic twist on the familiar metaphor of the inspired man as the mouthpiece of the Lord -- for what is the mouthpiece of a clarinet or a trumpet but "the brief elaboration of a tube"?

Cohen here describes himself as completely passive, playing no role in the creation of his "words of wisdom." He may speak "like a sage, a man of vision," but this is an illusion. His words no more belong to him than they belong to his microphone, both being mere passive media through which the Lord speaks. It's the auditory equivalent of Meister Eckhart's ideal of being "a clear glass through which God can shine." (The point of such a role has never been clear to me. If a clear glass is better than a clouded one, surely best of all is no glass at all!)

Nor does Cohen have any choice in the matter, any more than his microphone does. "He just doesn't have the freedom to refuse" to pass on whatever message the Lord gives him. He is being used -- an "instrument in the hands of God," to borrow a phrase from the Book of Mormon.

He wants to write a love song
An anthem of forgiving
A manual for living with defeat 

A cry above the suffering
A sacrifice recovering
But that isn’t what I need him to complete 

I want him to be certain
That he doesn’t have a burden
That he doesn’t need a vision
That he only has permission
To do my instant bidding
Which is to say what I have told him to repeat

"Burden" is here being used in the biblical sense of "prophetic message" -- as when Isaiah prefaces each of his oracles against the nations with "the burden of Tyre," "the burden of Moab," etc. (The etymological connection is that the prophet "lifts up" his message before the people.)

Again Cohen emphasizes the unfree and almost mechanical nature of his role. He doesn't have permission to write what he wants to write, only to repeat verbatim what the Lord dictates to him. And he "doesn't need a vision" -- needn't have any personal understanding of the message he is relaying. His is not to question why, but simply to execute commands, soldier-like. I don't pay you to think, Leonard!

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How similar -- and yet how completely different! -- is Nietzsche's description, in Ecce Homo, of his own experience of inspiration. (And Nietzsche was -- who can deny it? -- far more deeply inspired than Leonard Cohen.)

Has any one at the end of the nineteenth century any distinct notion of what poets of a stronger age understood by the word inspiration? If not, I will describe it. If one had the smallest vestige of superstition in one, it would hardly be possible to set aside completely the idea that one is the mere incarnation, mouthpiece or medium of an almighty power. The idea of revelation in the sense that something becomes suddenly visible and audible with indescribable certainty and accuracy, which profoundly convulses and upsets one -- describes simply the matter of fact. One hears -- one does not seek; one takes -- one does not ask who gives: a thought suddenly flashes up like lightning, it comes with necessity, unhesitatingly -- I have never had any choice in the matter. . . . Everything happens quite involuntarily, as if in a tempestuous outburst of freedom, of absoluteness, of power and divinity.

Nietzsche, too, admits to feeling as if he were a mere "mouthpiece or medium"; to acting "with necessity," "quite involuntarily"; to not having "any choice in the matter" -- but then, after saying all that, he goes on to characterize the experience as "a tempestuous outburst of freedom."

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How is it that such similar experiences felt like freedom to Nietzsche and like its opposite to Cohen? Presumably because Nietzsche, proudly refusing to countenance even "the smallest vestige of superstition," saw the commanding voice as coming from an aspect of himself rather than from an external God. "Wherever I found living things," his Zarathustra says, "there heard I the language of obedience. All living things are obeying things. And this heard I secondly: Whatever cannot obey itself, is commanded. Such is the nature of living things."

Self-control or self-command is a familiar concept, and it can only mean one aspect of oneself obeying another. Is Nietzschean obedience to oneself, then, just the same thing from a different point of view? No. Anyone who has experienced both ascetic self-command and inspired self-obedience will know that they are not the same experience at all, that on the contrary it is the same part of oneself -- the one we think of as simply "I" -- that commands in the one case and obeys in the other. This implies that there are at least three parts of the self: the higher that commands, the lower that obeys, and the central that is free to obey or to disobey, to command or to abdicate command.

To Cohen, who externalized the voice and saw himself as a mere instrument, we might imagine Nietzsche saying, "Could it be possible? This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that GOD IS DEAD!"

"God is dead" was the inchoate expression of a very deep truth which the religious have not as yet even begun to face up to or assimilate -- but of course it is not the whole story, either. What is needed is further thought on the relationship between God-without and God-within, such as Bruce Charlton attempts here.