Just because Cohen doesn’t know where the song comes from doesn’t mean it doesn’t “come from” him. He is just unaware of how it comes from him. Of course it doesn’t “come” exclusively from him; he is trading on a history of song writing styles, vaguely remembered melodies, and other influences.
If you minimally admit there is some source beyond the author that created the art, you also must admit an inability by the author to fully explaim the meaning of the art.
We probably disagree as to the extent the art originated in the author, but we needn’t debate that point as to how much to disprove the suggestion that the artist remains an authoritative source of interpretation for the art that he provides.
But if we were to debate the extent the art is fully the product of the author, you would have to dismiss Cohen’s comments as hyperbole, which I don’t think he meant them. His description of the source of creation was to describe their source as “a mystery.”
Your comment that they must come from within him is tempered with the acceptance that some part does not, which you describe generally as societal influence without addressing whether some of those influences originally emanated from human nature. In other words, why does certain music move us and other not, and can that really be explained by reference only to societal influences?
Cohen’s commentatary of “where the good songs come from” isn’t just the bizarrely idiosyncratic view of an overly artistic mind, but it aligns with Carl Jung’s belief that the artist is a vehicle for the unconscious, which seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. Both view the creative source as external to the personal ego, with Jung describing the artist as “collective man” carrying the psychic forms of humanity.
That is, the creative expression, in order to constitute the highest form of art, must reveal a commonality among us. What that art therefore means can only be known by exploring what those commonalities are, which is not accomplished by simply asking the artist.
Since I already said that the artist is not the sole arbiter of the meaning of his art, I agree. I have no idea why you think I believe otherwise. Perhaps you are responding to Amadeus.
Also, of course the artist doesn’t work in a vacuum. An author uses language, which he didn’t invent. A musician uses scales and instruments which he didn’t invent. The painter didn’t invent paint. Nonetheless, the artist’s “unconscious” is within him, so if art is a “vehicle for the unconscious” it comes from within him. Like Leonard Cohen, we may not always understand our subconscious, but it remains a part of us.
Does the highest form of art “reveal a commonality among us”? If, as Tolstoy suggests, art “infects” the reader or viewer with an emotional response, I suppose that response reveals such a commonality. But some art seems aimed at revealing exceptional traits, rather than commonalities. Think of Ahab, or Roland, or Milton’s Satan. I suppose each of us may have, lurking deep within, the obsessive and retributive nature of Ahab, the hubris and nobility of Roland, or the rebelliousness of Satan. Does Jung think that “commonality” is what gives these characters artistic value, or is it their exceptionality that resonates for us?