“Don’t go home with your hard-on” is the name of a Leonard Cohen song. It’s probably my favorite Cohen song. I can see you raising your pitchfork to defend the honor of “Hallelujah”, but honestly you only like it, you probably only know it, through the lens of Jeff Buckley’s cover made famous in that one episode of West Wing where Mark Harmon dies. It was a great episode and to this day I will tear up when it plays. But that’s about Buckley and not Cohen.
Cohen does not do sentimentality well. He’s a great lyricist, but he cannot play or compose music worthy of the occasion. His hedonist tracks, however…. He’s most persuasive as a psychoanalyst prescribing us to enjoy our symptoms. “Don’t go home with your hard-on” is the epitome. The tune works and it stands as good advice.
It is not advice to seek out and fulfill your desires. Rather, only your most immediate desires. After all, if you have a hard-on then you are sufficiently proximate to the object of desire to do something about it. We’ve learned how to suppress our wants as functioning creatures in a society. The hard-on is somatic consciousness. Biologists will talk about diminishing blood to deliver oxygen to the brain. Even metaphorically, however, it represents a loss of will and control. It demands to be taken care of and home (read: locked up and private and not necessarily in a home) is not the place to do so. The hard-on remind us of our sociality and our need to be sociable. In a way, Cohen is telling us to just work it out.