“Did you ever go clear?”: Leonard Cohen’s brief investigation into Scientology
Trace through Leonard Cohen’s life, and a story emerges. It’s there in his music and writing, too, all telling the tale of one man’s hunt for religious belonging. Born into an Orthodox Jewish family, his life was lived running between schools on a mission for spiritual understanding. It took him from city to city, off to remote islands and up mountains to retreats. It took him from the hallowed temples of the most traditional religions to the new halls of modern approaches to spirituality, including one mysterious organisation that seems more like a cult than a church. For a brief while, Cohen’s hunt for God led him into the belly of Scientology.
Cohen’s life-long problem with religious faith colours his work. “I forget to pray for the angels / And then the angels forget to pray for us,” he sang on ‘So Long Marianne’, his second ever single, chalking the failure of the relationship up to religious weakness. “Maybe there’s a God above / But all I’ve ever learned from love / Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew ya,” he sings on some versions of ‘Hallelujah’ as his most outright religious track feels like him throwing in the towel and giving in on the whole idea. Even on some of his last-ever offerings to the musical world, ‘You Want It Darker’ sees him singing to Hebrew, returning to the mother tongue of his childhood religion.
It is a constant recurring theme. Religion and God haunt his work, whether used as a metaphor for love or being the topic at hand that he’s considering. It’s rare to find a Cohen track that doesn’t in some way touch on it, whether a life-long fascination or a life-long struggle. The artist’s life is marked by different phases ruled over by different beliefs: his Jewish youth, his more woozy beatnik spiritual days on Hydra, his run-ins with Christianity, his years at a Zen Buddhist monastery, and in the middle, during his New York years, a brief triste with Scientology.
After Cohen moved back to New York in the late 1960s to make a real go at his music career, he began drawing a map of his life there. There’s the Chelsea Hotel, where he lived briefly, the folk scene he existed in around Greenwich Village, and then there’s the Plaza Hotel, where, in the early 1970s, he took some classes in Scientology.
However, like with many of his religious jaunts, Cohen just couldn’t get into it. Instead, he sat on the outside like a fascinated onlooker, wishing he could fall for the message but never being able to. Noted in a 2016 profile in The New Yorker, the magazine wrote, “In the late 1960s, when he was living in New York, he studied briefly at a Scientology centre and emerged with a certificate that declared him ‘Grade IV Release’.” Whatever that means.
But that’s the thing with Scientology; no one knows what that means. In his track ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’, Cohen references this period directly with the line, “Did you ever go clear?” yet even that is a mystery. For those outside the religion, no one really knows what ‘going clear’ means other than a loose description that it’s a term afforded to people who no longer have a “reactive mind” and are now operating on a different spiritual realm, thanks to their teachings. In his call-out question after a song about remorse, grief and emotional questions, Cohen seems to make it clear that he never did, as he exists still in the foggy, emotionally conflicted state of a deeply reactive and movable mind.
However, his brief investigation into the organisation benefited him somehow. In the elevator up to the class he was taking, he met artist Suzanne Elrod, the woman who would be the mother of his children. It also clearly played a role in inspiring the 1971 track, even if the true meaning of the song and its use of the phrase will remain a mystery to anyone who doesn’t fancy falling into the cult just to understand Cohen better.
But that alone feels beautifully representative of Cohen, his mind and his relationship to religion; it was a confused and mysterious thing, capturing a man’s desire for spiritual understanding and his openness to letting that come in whatever mangled form it arrived or through whatever channel he was exploring at the time.
“Anything, Roman Catholicism, Buddhism, LSD, I’m for anything that works,” he once said. And while Scientology didn’t work, at least he could say that he tried.
