Leonard Cohen and the rhetorical art of timing

It's called kairos, and it's key to the art of persuasion.

Toward the end of his life, Leonard Cohen received an award in Spain, and in a speech he told this story:

When he was a young man living alone, he went to visit his mother in Montreal. Walking around the city, he heard a flamenco guitarist, a Spaniard, playing in a tennis court. “Teach me,” Cohen said. The guitarist agreed to go to Cohen’s mother’s house. He showed how to tune the guitar and played the six chords that underlie all flamenco music.

Cohen was terrible. The Spaniard placed his fingers, moved the guitar into the right position, and Cohen tried again. The Spaniard came back several days in a row, and the young man became deeply familiar with the chords.

Then one day the Spaniard failed to show, and Cohen called the man’s boarding house. The person who answered the phone said, “He took his own life.”

Cohen didn’t know much about the guitarist—what he was doing in Montreal, why he had been playing in that tennis court—but many years later, Cohen told his Spanish audience what those chords meant to him. They underlay every song he wrote, including Hallelujah. Cohen told that audience, “Now you can understand how deeply grateful I am to your culture.” He said, “Thank you for letting me put my signature at the bottom of the page.”

Leonard Cohen was such a mensch. But what interests me most about the story is what he did with a single opportunity. Think of the people who heard that guitarist many years ago, the ones who sat and listened in the tennis court, or who merely overheard as they walked by. How many asked the Spaniard for lessons, took those six chords, and inspired people around the world? And what does any of this have to do with the art of persuasion?

Everything.

We see a disagreement as something unpleasant to be avoided. As with a street musician playing strange music, we want to hasten past a disagreement or avoid it altogether. We even think, without these discords, the world would be a better place. But through discord can come the greatest harmonies. Through disagreement we can discover new things and test the validity of ideas. And we can make the best choices and come together to carry them out.

Not all disagreements have to do with argument. In science, for example, discoveries get made when an observation disagrees with a prevailing theory. In your own life, your daily routines may disagree with what Aristotle called your soul’s true needs.

I won’t prate about how rhetoric, the original liberal art, helped found republics and create the world’s greatest literature. Instead, let’s get back to the opportunity. A disagreement is an opportunity.

In rhetoric, opportunity is itself an art. You have to know when you see one, and then be willing to do something with it. The ancient Greeks called this art kairos. The ancient Romans called it Opportunas. The ancients worshipped the concept as a living god.

Kairos takes patience. You have to be ready for it. The greatest disagreements aren’t resolved in one encounter. In future posts, I’ll delve further into the tools of kairos. The concept lies behind the art of persuasion, as well as the art of persuading yourself. I found myself writing a whole chapter on kairos in my upcoming book.

Oh, and if you want a healing dose of Cohen, read Maria Popova’s recent edition of her newsletter, Marginalia.