I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

by Sylvie Simmons

  With Rebecca gone from his life, and having taken his leave of the music business, there was no reason for Leonard to remain in L.A. The reason Leonard himself gave for going to the monastery was “for love”10—not so much love of Buddhism and the idea of living as a monk, but love of Roshi, the old man with whom he could sit in silence on this broken hill. As Leonard described it, “Something like this you can only do for love. If Roshi had been a professor of physics at Heidelberg University, I would have learned German and gone to Heidelberg to study physics. I think that one approaches a master in many various conditions. If you want a master, he becomes your master; some people want a disciplinarian, so there’s a strict regime available for such people. I was more interested in friendship, so he manifested as a friend. When I finished my tour in 1993 I was approaching the age of sixty; Roshi was approaching ninety. My old teacher was getting older and I hadn’t spent enough time with him, and my kids were grown and I thought it was an appropriate moment to intensify my friendship and my association with the community.”11

  Leonard had gone there ostensibly to be of service to Roshi, but the arrangement worked for him and Roshi both. He had also been drawn to the monastery, he understood a few years later, by “the sense of something unfinished, something that would keep me alive.”12 He likened the Zen Center to a mountain hospital and he and his fellow residents to “people who have been traumatized, hurt, destroyed, maimed by daily life,” sitting in the waiting room, all waiting to see this small, rotund Japanese doctor. Whatever its hardships and deprivations might be, the monastic life had its own voluptuous luxury for a man with an appetite for discipline, who was harsher on himself than any punishing regime an old monk with a bagful of koans could devise. The emptiness and silence, the lack of distractions, the sense of order counteracted the confusion of words and anxieties in his head. Here Leonard was no one special. He was a cog in the machine, everyone and everything interconnected, simply one of a small and constantly changing community who all dressed alike, shared chores and ate together at the same time from identical plastic bowls. Leonard had no problem with that in the least. Right now he had very little interest in being “Leonard Cohen.” What he was looking for was a kind of emptiness—something he had sought in many different ways throughout his adult life, be it through fasting, sex or Scientology auditing. It was “this emptiness” that had first attracted him to Roshi’s monastery. “It’s a place where it’s very difficult to hold fast to one’s ideas. There is this sort of charitable void that I found here in a very pure form.”13 At Mount Baldy Zen Center he had no decisions to make, he was told what to do and when and how to do it, but—unlike a record company contract or a marriage—there was an escape clause. Leonard could leave if he wanted to.

  On a few occasions he did. Hanging his robes on the peg, he would drive down the mountain, past the signs that warned against throwing snowballs, and join the freeway traffic heading northwest to L.A. He was going back not for some decadent lost weekend, but to be alone. A small monastery on a mountain might sound like an isolated existence, but it did not appear that way to Leonard: “There’s very little private space and private time. There’s a saying in the monastery, the monks are like pebbles in a bag; one is always working shoulder to shoulder, so it has the same quality as life anywhere, the same sensations of love, hate, jealousy, rejection, admiration. It’s ordinary life under a microscope.”14 Leonard’s first stop was McDonald’s, to buy a Filet-O-Fish; he would wash it down later with a glass of good French wine. But after a day or two at home watching television—The Jerry Springer Show was a favorite—having been reminded of how his life would be were he not in the monastery, Leonard drove back up the mountain and slipped back into his robes.

  The days ran into one another, divided into segments of near-constant, mostly regulated activity. “You don’t sleep for very long and you work many hours a day and sit in the meditation hall for many hours a day, but once you get the hang of it,” Leonard said, “you go into ninth gear and kind of float through it all.”15

  This level of acceptance did not come immediately. He and Kigen, being considerably older than many of the people who came to Mount Baldy for the sesshin, would commiserate with each other over the severity of the place. “The landscape is austere and that altitude very challenging. Leonard said it was designed for people with a ton of energy,” says Kigen. “But what a lot of the practice is about is being able to go with confidence to a place that normally you would become very insecure about, and realizing that you can make your home there, that you can actually live and thrive and find peace in those extreme places.” Leonard felt more at peace for longer stretches of time than he cared to remember. “They just work you to death so that you forget about yourself,” Leonard said, “and forgetting about yourself is another kind of refreshment. There is a strict sense of order, but I like that sort of thing. Once you overcome your natural resistance to being told what to do, if you can overcome that, then you begin to relax into the schedule and the simplicity of your day. You just think about your sleep, your work, the next meal, and that whole component of improvisation that tyrannizes much of our lives begins to dissolve.”16

  It is a popular belief that an artist or writer needs an element of disorder, misery and improvisation in order to create. As Leonard himself said, “It’s true that God himself, as it relates in Genesis, uses chaos and desolation to create the order of the universe, so chaos and desolation could be understood as the DNA of all creativity.”17 But the highly structured existence, in conjunction with his desire to forget who he was and overcome his ego, appeared to free up Leonard’s creativity. That last might appear paradoxical, when the urge to create would seem to come from an expression of the artist’s ego. But the removal of internal distractions—anxiety, expectations—from his Zen practice was as important as the lack of external distractions in these plain, orderly surroundings. In the precious, circumscribed hours between duties, Leonard was busy writing, drawing and composing music on his synthesizer—delicate, poignant music he described as “a lot like French movie music from the fifties.”18 Some of this poetry and artwork would appear in Book of Longing, but that would be a decade in the future. Working in the back room of his little cabin, Leonard gave no thought to publishing a book or releasing an album. He worked for the sake of the work, with as little attachment to its outcome as a man who had not yet attained satori (enlightenment) could muster.

  Busy as Leonard’s life was on Mount Baldy, time seemed to stand still. Although the world outside went on without him, Leonard showed little interest in the details, letting it slip off the reel like an old film he had no real desire to see again. Months went by, then years, marked only by the changes in season and the periodic earlier alarm calls that signaled the start of another rigorous sesshin. During the many long hours Leonard sat in zazen, his mind would wander from the pain in his knees to the songs he was writing in his head, or even to sexual fantasies. “When you’re sitting for long hours in the meditation hall you run through all your numbers. It takes a while to exhaust those things and maybe they’re never fully exhausted, but after a while you get tired of running your own Top 40 scenarios about the girl you want or lost or the one you need to recover.”19 Though they were fewer in number than monks, there were nuns on Mount Baldy. They had their own quarters, and liaisons with the male residents were not encouraged. Of course, they went on. “The situation offers up certain erotic possibilities,” Leonard said. “It’s a lot easier than cruising the terrace cafés of Paris. For a young person with energy—since there’s not much free time—it’s a very promising environment.” When he was younger, Leonard “had several brief, intense liaisons” at Mount Baldy,20 but he was no longer “terribly active in that realm.”21

  He was not entirely devoid of female companionship. Chris Darrow, whose band the Kaleidoscope played on Leonard’s debut album, lived in Claremont, at the base of Mount Baldy, and was surprised to spot Leon
ard sitting in the sun on the patio of the local Greek restaurant, Yanni’s, drinking a Greek coffee, in the company of a beautiful nun. Were it not for the black robes and shaved heads, it might have been Hydra. Darrow went up to their table. “Hi, Leonard, remember me?” They had not seen each other since the Songs of Leonard Cohen session in 1967. “Sure,” said Leonard. “You saved my record.”

  While Leonard showed no interest in making a new album, in September 1995, after he had been living in the monastery for two years, another tribute album was released. Tower of Song differed from I’m Your Fan in a number of ways. The first tribute had been an independent album, a labor of love compiled by a French rock magazine, on which predominantly young, edgier rock artists covered Leonard’s songs. Tower of Song, by contrast, was a major-label album set in motion by Kelley Lynch, produced by her romantic partner Steve Lindsey, and featuring more mainstream, big-name acts. At Lynch’s urging, Leonard had taken a few days away from the monastery to assist her in contacting some of the musicians on the wish list. He tackled the uncomfortable task with humor, sending a message to Phil Collins that asked, “Would Beethoven decline an invitation from Mozart?” No, Collins replied, “unless Beethoven was on a world tour at the time.”

  Among the lineup on Tower of Song were Collins’s former Genesis bandmate Peter Gabriel as well as Elton John, Don Henley, Willie Nelson, Billy Joel, Tori Amos, Suzanne Vega and Aaron Neville. Sting and the Chieftains teamed up to perform a Celtic “Sisters of Mercy,” while Bono took a break from U2 to record an ambient Beat poetry-gospel version of “Hallelujah.”

  “Nobody,” the author Tom Robbins wrote in the album’s liner notes, “can sing the word ‘naked’ as nakedly as Cohen.” This was probably not the best endorsement for an album of Leonard Cohen songs not sung by Leonard Cohen. But Leonard, who had also been persuaded to do a few interviews to help promote the album, told the press he was very pleased with it. “Except for being written, this is the best thing that has happened to these songs and I am deeply grateful to these eminent artists, who could so easily have done without this project, for their kindness and solidarity.”22 Reviewers, however, were not kind. As a sales ploy, the record company sent free copies to bars and cafés (and this long before Starbucks became a music-marketing machine) that had what they referred to as the “Leonard Cohen vibe.” Presumably what they had in mind were sophisticated, elegant establishments. Certainly not a small wooden cabin on a rock-strewn hill, which Leonard returned to as swiftly as etiquette allowed and which he showed no inclination to leave.

  On August 9, 1996, three years into his life in the monastery, Leonard was ordained a Zen Buddhist monk. Steve Sanfield, the friend through whom Leonard first became acquainted with Roshi, drove up for the ceremony and Esther, Leonard’s sister, flew in from New York. Leonard, dressed in robes, his head shaved, turned to Sanfield and whispered wryly, “You got me into this, can you get me out of it?” Leonard had agreed to the ordination not as a step toward sainthood, nor as a step away from the religion he was born to. As he wrote in his 1997 poem “Not a Jew,”

  Anyone who says

  I’m not a Jew

  is not a Jew

  I’m very sorry

  but this is final

  So says:

  Eliezar, son of Nissan,

  priest of Israel;

  a.k.a.

  Nightingale of the Sinai.

  Yom Kippur 1973;

  a.k.a.

  Jikan the Unconvincing

  Zen monk,

  a.k.a.

  Leonard Cohen . . .*

  He had agreed to ordination to “observe protocol.”23 Roshi had told him it was time for him to become a monk, and so that is what he did. Leonard had also recently taken on responsibilities for which official status might be deemed appropriate: Roshi had asked him to preside over his funeral. The old man, now approaching his ninetieth birthday, instructed Leonard that he wanted a traditional, open-pyre cremation. If Leonard would like to, Roshi said, he could keep one of his bones.

  At the ordination ceremony, Leonard was given a new name: Jikan. “Roshi doesn’t speak English very well so you don’t really know what he means by the names he gives you,” Leonard said. “He prefers it that way because he doesn’t want people to indulge themselves in the poetic quality of these traditional monks’ names. I have asked him what Jikan meant many times, at the appropriate moment over a drink, and he says ‘ordinary silence’ or ‘normal silence’ or ‘the silence between two thoughts.’ ”24 Dangerously poetic. And deliciously ironic for a singer and a man of words.

  In all, the silence of the monastic life seemed to suit Leonard. There were occasional visitors, however. Adam Cohen, who had just signed a record deal with Columbia, came and discussed with his father the lyrics for the songs he was working on for his first album. Leonard gave his son a song that he had been “working on for years” and knew he’d “never get around to doing,”25 “Lullaby in Blue.” Sharon Robinson, who knew the Zen Center, having been there herself on retreat, drove up and, over a bottle of wine, listened as he played for her on his synthesizer the latest of his countless versions of “A Thousand Kisses Deep.” Among the uninvited guests, in Kigen’s words, was “a beautiful young lady who came up one evening and was wearing rags and feathers, literally. ‘Where’s Leonard? I’m here for Leonard.’ ” But really there were remarkably few celebrity-seekers; Kigen says he could count them on one hand.

  Two separate, small film crews also made their way up the mountain, one from France, the other from Sweden. The result was two insightful TV documentaries, Armelle Brusq’s Leonard Cohen: Portrait: Spring 96 and Agreta Wirberg’s Stina Möter Leonard Cohen. The French film showed Leonard working in the monastery kitchen, sitting in the meditation hall, reading the chants through a large pair of tinted spectacles and marching outside with the other monks. He assured Brusq that his life wasn’t one of isolation. Real life was far more solitary, he said. When a tour ended, he would return to the “tyrannical solitude” of home, where he might spend days alone, speaking to no one, doing nothing.

  The Swedish presenter, Stina Dabrowski, questioned Leonard about love, and he answered like a man who’d had the time and space to think about it. “I had wonderful love but I did not give back wonderful love,” he said. “I was unable to reply to their love. Because I was obsessed with some fictional sense of separation, I couldn’t touch the thing that was offered me, and it was offered me everywhere.” Nonetheless, at times when the world started feeling bright again, he would forget now and then that he lived “in this sixty-three-year-old body” and he would think about finding a young girl, marrying her, buying a house and getting a real job, maybe working in a bookstore. “I could do that now. I know how to do it now,” he said. When he was asked the inevitable question about coming back to music he answered no, saying, “I can’t interrupt these studies. It’s too important for me to interrupt . . . for the health of my soul.” Quoting the Jewish sage Hillel the Elder, “If I’m not for myself, who will be for me? And if not now, when? But if I’m only for myself, who am I?” Leonard asked his fans to please forgive him. He was trying to learn some things, he said, that would result in “songs that are deeper and better.”26

  In the absence of Leonard or any word of a new album from him, in 1997 Columbia Records released a compilation, More Best Of (1997). Twenty-two years had passed since the first Best Of album—or Greatest Hits, as it was called in the UK and Europe, where Leonard actually had hits—and Leonard had felt “no great urgency” for another. But it was the thirtieth anniversary of his having signed to Columbia; he said, “Although I myself feel very little nostalgia, I went along with it.”27 Leonard was asked to choose the songs, which he did—enough songs to fill a double album. In the end the label decided on a single album, which they wanted to focus on his more recent material. They also asked Leonard if he had any new songs he might give
them. Leonard had actually finished a jaunty and self-deprecating number titled “Never Any Good.” Another new song was a short, computerized piece called “The Great Event,” its melody a backward Moonlight Sonata, its vocal a synthesized version of Leonard’s own real voice.

  Leonard had been working in the monastery on experimental music. One idea he had come up with, but had been unable to realize on his elderly computer and synthesizer, was to create a vocal that sounded “like some broken-down speaker that was left after the destruction of the cosmos, just filled with some kind of absurd hope for regeneration”28—the next step from “The Future,” as interpreted by a Zen monk. Around this time, Mount Baldy for the first time had connected to the Internet—a slow, dial-up connection through the monastery’s one and only phone, but Leonard was online.

  Jarkko Arjatsalo, an accountant living in Finland, was surprised to receive a message from a monk in California, asking if he would call him. Leonard had heard about the Leonard Cohen Files, a website devoted to his work that Arjatsalo and his teenage son Rauli had created in 1995. If Arjatsalo could create a website, Leonard thought, perhaps he could answer his technical questions (this being pre-Google, and the connection being so painfully sluggish). “Leonard was looking for software that could imitate his voice—not a perfect copy, something that was obviously mechanized though recognizably him,” Arjatsalo remembers. Through his website’s global network he found a scientist at the University of California at Berkeley who came up with a solution. It was the start of a close association and friendship between Leonard and the man he dubbed “the general secretary of the party.” LeonardCohenFiles.com would become known as Leonard’s digital archive and the communications hub for the international fan community.