Authors: Ira B. Nadel
His musical profile had rarely been higher. He appeared on Elton John’s record
Duets
, singing Ray Charles’s “Born to Lose” with John, and “Everybody Knows” had been used on the soundtrack of Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan’s
Exotica
. “I’m Your Man” was featured in Nanni Moretti’s Italian film
Caro Diario
and “Waiting for the Miracle,” “Anthem,” and “The Future” were all on the soundtrack of Oliver Stone’s controversial film
Natural Born Killers
. Johnny Cash covered “Bird on a Wire” on
American Recordings
.
In honor of Cohen’s sixtieth birthday on September 21, 1994, a book of poems, analyses, and appreciations of his work was published. Titled
Take This Waltz
, it included contributions by Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Louis Dudek, Allen Ginsberg, Kris Kristofferson, Jack McClelland, Phil Spector, and Jennifer Warnes. Otherwise, his sixtieth birthday, spent flying to Vienna with Roshi, passed with little attention: “
I was ready to pass it off as another irrelevant occasion.” But the congratulations offered by numerous friends and well-wishers forced him to reconsider it. Months after the event, he began to understand its significance:
I remember when I was about forty-five going into a
sanzen
with Roshi and his saying, ‘Your generation is finished.’ And it was such refreshing news. For somehow when you grow up in North American underground culture, you always feel you’re representing the cutting edge and that you speak for the young and you speak for the alternative…. Forget it, Leonard, you’re not that any more. Look at yourself. It was refreshing news. It’s for the young…. So it was with the 60th birthday, although I had been prepared to ignore it, as I ignored all my birthdays. There was something about it that was indisputably connected with the threshold of old age. It was a landmark of some kind in my own tiny little journey.
As soon as I absorbed it, I was able to relax in a way that I had never relaxed before because I really thought, well, it was okay, it is the end of one’s youth so to say…. In this culture you can extend it, you really can extend a personal vision of your own youth up to the age of sixty and then there is something indisputable about the end of youth; now you can begin something else. Well it is the threshold of something else.
A poem published in June 1994 articulated some of these feelings:
On the path of loneliness
I came to the place of song
and tarried there
for half my life
Now I leave my guitar
and my keyboards
my drawings and my poems
my new Turkish carpets
my few friends and sex companions
and I stumble out
on the path of loneliness
I am old but I have no regrets
not one
though I am angry and alone
and filled with fear and desire.
In June 1995
Dance Me to the End of Love
was published, a book that merged the lyrics to his song from
Various Positions
with twenty-one images by Henri Matisse. Musically, he thought of preparing an album of fourteen short songs, none more than three minutes in length. One song was recorded, “I Was Never Any Good at Loving You,” but he quickly realized that he had “
a ponderous mind that seems to need eight or ten stanzas to uncover the idea of the song.” The project was put aside.
In August 1995,
Tower of Song
, his third tribute album, appeared. More of a mainstream effort than
Famous Blue Raincoat
or
I’m Your Fan
, the album contains performances by some of the most acclaimed singers in pop music: Billy Joel, Tori Amos, Sting, Bono, Elton John, Peter Gabriel, Suzanne Vega, Don Henley, Jann Arden, Willie Nelson, and Aaron Neville. Grateful for the effort, Cohen remarked that “
I am very very happy when anybody covers any of my songs. My critical faculties go into immediate suspension. … Whatever good things happen to my songs are deserved because they’re not casually made.” In appreciation, Cohen sent silver letter openers to each artist on the album.
The novelist Tom Robbins wrote the liner notes, summarizing
Cohen’s life in this fashion: “
A quill in his teeth, a solitary teardrop a-squirm in his palm, he was the young poet prince of Montreal” who found direction in language and song. As rock music weakens and “the sparkle curtain has shredded,” Cohen sits “at an altar in the garden, solemnly enjoying newfound popularity and expanded respect.” His lyrics, Robbins muses, “can peel the apple of love and the peach of lust with a knife that cuts all the way to the mystery.” Cohen’s voice, he concludes, was “meant for pronouncing the names of women. Nobody can say the word ’naked’ as nakedly as Cohen.”
The appearance of the album led to reassessments of Cohen’s work. His insistent pessimism had become the new reality; the world had caught up to Cohen’s vision. An essay in
Time
in the fall of 1995 entitled “
In Search of Optimism” featured Cohen and
The Future
, using his line from “Anthem,” “
there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in,” as a sign of a new philosophy that allowed many to see promise in the treacherous landscape (which literally occurred in 1994 when a Scottish clergyman attributed his
survival in a snowslide to his singing Leonard Cohen songs the entire night).
In an interview with Anjelica Houston that fall, Cohen articulated his optimistic view of love which, despite his personal defeats, he still believes is lasting. Although we don’t know what to do with it, “
when [love] can be assimilated into the landscape of panic, it is the only redeeming possibility for human beings.…We actually lead very violent, passionate lives and I think that we’re hungry for insights into this condition.”
Amid the publications and the albums, Cohen’s involvement with Roshi intensified. In 1993 he moved permanently to the isolated monastary, living in a sparsely furnished, two-room cabin, his only comforts a synthesizer, a small radio and a narrow cot. He eats, prays, and studies with the monks. Despite the meager surroundings, there is a richness of creative spirit, and a pattern emerges that originated in Cohen’s youth. Once his life becomes too cluttered, he moves to an empty room. He removes the debris and starts over again, seeking a clean slate that the bohemian life of Montreal, the remote island of Hydra, and the isolated forest of Mt. Baldy have variously given him. Spiritually, this parallels a shift from the ornate elements of Judaism to the austere practice of Zen; physically, it parallels his change from the dark suits and hip L.A. look to
the simple monk’s robes he dons when he arrives at Mt. Baldy. The sunglasses, however, often remain. For Leonard Cohen survival means reinvention and simplification. “
Nowadays my only need is to jot everything down. I don’t feel that I am a singer, or a writer. I’m just the voice, a living diary.”
At the monastery Cohen cooks, does repairs, and looks after Roshi, as well as participating in the daily rituals of Zen. He travels constantly with his teacher and assists with the administration of five new centers, including one in Montreal called Centre Zen de la Main, which opened in the summer of 1995 in The Plateau, his old neighborhood.
His relationship with Roshi has a playful complexity to it. Cohen has joked that his principal role has been to introduce Jewish food into Roshi’s diet and that Roshi’s has been to introduce Cohen to drinking. But it deepens when he expresses his admiration for Roshi’s incorporation of the spiritual with the sensual. “
With him,” Cohen has said, “there’s no sense of piety divorced from the human predicament.” More recently, Roshi has decided to study red wine under Cohen’s tutelage.
At Mt. Baldy, discipline and hardship reign, and Cohen rises at three a.m. and walks to the meditation hall in the snow. “
I love it, man. Everything’s perfect. It couldn’t be worse. I’ve always been drawn to the voluptuousness of austerity … [but] I’m working on a song while I’m sitting there.” The life is worth it. When asked what Roshi and Rinzai Zen contributed to his work and life, Cohen unequivocally answered, “Survival.”
Cohen explains his involvement with Zen as the fulfillment of what he understands as his priestly calling. He has made the symbolic decision to follow Buddha’s precept that at the age of fifty you renounce your possessions and walk about the world with only a bowl. “For me, it happened ten years later,” he noted. He has considered writing a commentary on the first verse of Bereshith (Genesis) emphasizing his view that the world was created out of chaos and desolation.
In 1994 Cohen summarized the importance of Zen to him by what it does not do:
[Zen] has a kind of empty quality. There is no prayerful worship. There’s no supplication, there’s no dogma, there’s no theology. I can’t even locate what they’re talking about most of the time. But it
does give you an opportunity, a kind of version of Hemingway’s “A Clean Well-Lighted Place.” It gives you a place to sit that is quiet in which you can work these matters out.
In 1992 Roshi celebrated thirty years of teaching Zen in America. A commemorative book entitled
The Great Celebration
, containing an interview with Roshi and a
teisho
, as well as a survey of Rinzai-ji centers, was published to mark the occasion, and his eighty-fifth birthday. Cohen and Kelley Lynch organized the commemoration in Los Angeles and oversaw publication of the book. Cohen also designed an emblem for the front cover. In the summer of 1995, he marked the occasion of Roshi’s thirty-three years of teaching in America by arranging a day of song and prayer at the Cimarron Zen Center.
Just as 1977 marked the “death of a lady’s man,” in the 1990s Cohen sees his relationship with Zen changing. A proposed omnibus collection, encompassing notebooks and poems from his archive, will have a section of new poems tentatively entitled “The Collapse of Zen.” The proposed title of the entire volume, “The Book of Longing,” suggests a possible shift in his personal practice of Zen after Roshi dies. With his teacher aging, his own position may alter, continuing what has been the defining characteristic of his career: movement, change, reinvention—the assumption of various positions in an effort to locate a vantage point from which he can operate in his quest for
kensho
, the experience of seeing into the true nature of things.
For almost thirty years, Zen and Judaism have interacted to provide a method for Cohen to deal with his spiritual life and public career. His life embodies the Zen view that harmony with the universe can only occur if each thing/event is allowed to be freely and spontaneously itself. This aspect of Zen belief, that immediate experience makes contact with the absolute, is part of the koan of
M
u,
or nothingness, which teaches that being is nothingness, and parallels the genesis of Hasidism in the
ayin
, or naught. Hasidic thought stresses knowing the absolute through direct religious experience rather than through theology or doctrine. Only through a concentrated focus on individual truth can one comprehend spiritual happiness. Discipline, integrity, spirit, and generosity—all ingredients of Zen—form the essential lexicon of Leonard Cohen. They
establish a basis not just of action but of belief that Judaism, Zen, music, writing, and learning have reaffirmed.
Women are the source of Cohen’s pain and loss: “
the crumbs of love that you offer me / are the crumbs I’ve left behind,” he sings. He longs “for the boundaries / of my wandering” but still leaves. He has been largely defenseless against the beauty and energy of women, writing
I’ll rise up one of these days,
find my way to the airport.
I’ll rise up and say
I loved you better than you loved me
and then I’ll die for a long time
at the centre of my own dismal organization,
and I’ll remember today,
the day when I was that asshole in a blue summer suit
who couldn’t take it any longer.
For all his despair, Leonard Cohen has led a life of unfettered romance, largely free of obligations or responsibility. It has been bolstered by faith and pitted with depression. In the late summer of 1995, Cohen observed that his life didn’t much interest him. “
I find that my life has become so much my own I don’t have an objective view of it any more … the things that happened to me I don’t look at objectively any more. They’re cellular.” Mastering his life has allowed him at sixty-two to enjoy it for the first time. Things from the past no longer get in his way; although he has not attained all he has desired, he is now able to see more clearly what is necessary to take him closer to his goals, aided in the last twenty-five years by his study of Zen.
On the wall of Cohen’s sunlit Los Angeles study is a Kabbalistic amulet or
kame’a
. It is the image of an open, ornate hand with golden Hebrew lettering inscribed on the palm and inside each of the fingers, which are surrounded by Hebrew texts of mystical importance and encompassed by a large silver “H” (pronounced “hey” in Hebrew). One of the prayers contains forty-two words, the initials of which form the secret forty-two-letter name of God, while the six initials of each of its seven verses form additional Divine Names.
Has this holy object warded off misfortune? Has the shrine to Catherine Tekakwitha, the Canadian saint-in-waiting, a few feet away in his kitchen, prevented disaster? Did the
zendo
, once located on the ground floor of his home, provide the meditational path he long sought? He would likely deny the individual power of any of these talismans and the worlds they represent, just as he would deny that he is happy. Like many of us, Cohen is unsure of what steps are necessary to secure one’s psychic and spiritual health. Yet the ability to love, write, compose, and practice both Zen and Judaism are for him the best protection against all that might father disorder. For Cohen, mastering the dawn as well as the night is a triumph.
S
INCE THE FIRST
appearance of
Various Positions
, Leonard Cohen has experienced triumph and disappointment: new work brought him praise and his life’s work brought him honors; financial duplicity brought near-ruin. He left his Zen monastery, made a pilgrimage to India and returned to Los Angeles to write, remaining out of the public’s eye for almost four years. By the spring of 2006, Cohen re-emerged with a new work of poetry,
Book of Longing
, and the CD
Blue Alert
, a collaboration with his current companion, Anjani Thomas, who does all the singing; while the worldwide release of a feature documentary confirmed that he could still inspire peers and impress a younger generation. At seventy-two, neither Cohen’s energy nor his charisma has dimmed. As he announced in his song, “A Thousand Kisses Deep:” “I’m turning tricks/ I’m getting fixed/ I’m back on Boogie Street.” In the first few years after my biography of him appeared in 1996, though, it seemed like Boogie Street was the last place Cohen wanted to be.