Down The Snakes And Up The Ladder With Leonard Cohen

So we struggle and we stagger
down the snakes and up the ladder
to the tower where the blessed hours chime [emphasis mine]

– From “Closing Time” by Leonard Cohen

Why Is Leonard Cohen Singing About Snakes And Ladders?

Before going further, I will stipulate that for a large proportion of the population the question on which this post is based  is superfluous.  I may be, in fact, the only individual who is both fascinated with the lyrics of Leonard Cohen and (until recently) unaware of the origins of this specific fragment of those lyrics – namely, “down the snakes and up the ladder.” Nonetheless, on the chance that there may be one or two others in that category, I blog onward.

This excerpt from the albertnoonan video of “Closing Time” from the Leonard Cohen July 11, 2009 Weybridge concert begins just before Cohen sings “down the snakes and up the ladder.”

Leonard Cohen – Closing Time (Weybridge, July 11, 2009)

What’s Leonard Cohen’s Game?

The short answer to the question of the origins of  the lyrics, as anyone who spent his or her childhood years in a British-speaking (rather than American-speaking) region knows, is the children’s name first called – and in the UK, still called – Snakes and Ladders.

The confusion arises from those always troublesome American colonies now calling themselves the United States, where the game became known as Chutes and Ladders.

In the Milton Bradley game sold in the US,  snakes

… have been replaced by chutes, AKA playground slides.

Now, a  psychiatrist trained at a psychoanalytically oriented institute might well comment that there are certain implications of  a changing a game sporting phallic snakes to one  featuring yonic chutes.

Consider it so commented.

But there is, inevitably, more.

The Morality Play

This may be another “everybody knows” thing that was a revelation to me only because my childhood toys included neither Chutes and Ladders or Snakes and Ladders.¹ In any case, I was unaware of the game’s  blatant moral didacticism.

The V&A Museum Site (which is also the source of the image of the 1920s  Snakes and Ladder game pictured earlier in this post) includes this description of the game:

Snakes and Ladders has been a favourite race game in Britain for over 100 years. When it was originally devised Snakes and Ladders was a moral game with virtues in the shape of the ladders, allowing the players to reach heaven quickly, while the vices, in the shape of snakes, forced the player back down. Snakes and Ladders is probably based upon a very old Indian game called Moksha-Patamu, which was used for religious instruction and had 12 vices but only 4 virtues. According to Hindu teaching, good and evil exist side by side in man: but only virtuous acts – represented by the ladders – will shorten the soul’s journey through a series of incarnations to the state of ultimate perfection. Human wrongdoing symbolised by the head of the snake leads to reincarnation in a lower, animal form.

Wikipedia’s (Wikipedia is also the source of the illustration of  a 1954 Chutes and Ladders game show previously) description of the Chutes and Ladders version follows:

The most widely known edition of Snakes and Ladders in the United States is Chutes and Ladders from Milton Bradley (which was purchased by the game’s current distributor Hasbro). It is played on a 10×10 board, and players advance their pieces according to a spinner rather than a die. The theme of the board design is playground equipment–children climb ladders to go down chutes. The artwork on the board teaches a morality lesson, the squares on the bottom of the ladders show a child doing a good or sensible deed and at the top of the ladder there is an image of the child enjoying the reward. At the top of the chutes, there are pictures of children engaging in mischievous or foolish behavior and the images on the bottom show the child suffering the consequences.

Leonard Cohen Has His Way With Words

The image below is a  page from an early draft of “Closing Time” with the three sections containing “down the snakes and up the ladder”  in boxes (added by me):

For convenience, a printed version of the handwritten words follows with the three sections containing “down the snakes and up the ladder” emboldened (by me):

We’re (broken) lonely & we’re frantic
& the cider’s laced with acid
and the holy spirit’s crying, Where’s the beef?
it’s summer & we’re naked
and the very night is fragrant
with the precious distillations of relief
and I follow my companion
down the snakes & up the ladder
to the tower where the rescued hours chime

and she (holds) calls me & I dance her
down the snakes & up the ladder
to the tower where the rescued hours chime

and I hold her & I dancer
down the snakes & up the ladder
to the tower when the lonely (rescued) hours chime

we’re safely at the other side of closing time

and I watch my baby growing old
the shadow on her shades of gold
the fiddler gay & the wind is cold
and one by one our kisses sold
to closing time

and the planets watch us growing

In a song like “Closing Time,” rife with cunningly memorable phrases (e.g., the Johnnie Walker wisdom running high, all the women tear their blouses off and the men they dance on the polka-dots, and I swear it happened just like this: a sigh, a cry, a hungry kiss,  the place is dead as Heaven on a Saturday night, busted in the blinding lights of closing time, and the Holy Spirit’s crying, “Where’s the beef?”), the object of our attention today,

So we struggle and we stagger
down the snakes and up the ladder
to the tower where the blessed hours chime [emphasis mine]

is just one more phrase that pays, easily lost in the richly laden lyrics.

Which is why I take it upon myself to point out that …

Leonard Cohen Struggles And Staggers Within A Mythic Perspective

The imagery evoked by these lines is precisely on point (especially in the final version compared to the earlier iterations), not only within the context of the song but also as its own free-standing, compact, powerful portrayal of individuals contending together, however transiently, in a desperate effort to claim a bit of happiness within the restraints of  their self-imposed intrapsychic restrictions, the absolute limitations imposed by time, and the explicit and implicit restrictions of social mores.

And that’s how Leonard Cohen has fashioned a few words alluding to a Canadian child’s game into a distinctively serviceable contemporary version of the Sisyphus myth.

Just another day in the iconic singer-songwriter biz.

Credit Due Department: I was first informed of the existence of the Canadian/British version of the game, Snakes and Ladders, by bridger15

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1. I should point out that the reason I didn’t have time to play such games was that I was too busy attending various church services where our morality lessons were served straight up – usually in the form of sermons describing the grotesque punishments of an eternity spent in hell – rather than disguised as a leisure activity.  Snakes and Ladders? We didn’t need no stinking Snakes and Ladders. [↩]