Leonard asked if he might add some material of his own to the website. He submitted early versions of lyrics for songs, including “Suzanne,” and drafts of new songs and poems. He wanted to “make the process clear, or at least throw some light on the mysterious activity of writing,” he wrote. He also sent copies of his artwork, which ranged from drawings on napkins to digital art. Leonard particularly enjoyed creating art on a computer. He just liked computers. “They say that the Torah was written with black fire on white fire. I get that feeling from the computer, the bright black against the bright background. It gives it a certain theatrical dignity to see it on the screen.”29 His interest in Macs started early on, thanks in part to the Apple company giving away free computers to select Canadian writers—among them Leonard, Irving Layton and Margaret Atwood—and sending tutors to their homes to show them how to use them.
Leonard said in an interview with Billboard in 1998 that he had been “posting a lot of original material on the Finnish site.” He said, “I don’t know what the ramifications are. Speaking as a writer toward the end of his life, where most of my work is out there, I’ve collected royalties on it, I’ve been able to live and maybe even provide for a respectable retirement. I’d be happy to publish everything on the Internet at this stage of the game.”30 His record company did not share his sentiments. When he included the website addresses of the Leonard Cohen Files and other related sites on the back sleeve of More Best Of, they told him to take them off, talking about “permissions” and “compliance.” But Leonard insisted and the URLs remained in place.
Leonard had taken to the Internet wholeheartedly—and this some considerable time before the decline of the recording industry and the expansion of the Web made it a necessity for artists. For someone who had essentially cut himself off from the world, it allowed him to communicate with the world on his own terms. He could keep in touch with his fans around the globe without having to get out of his robes and onto a plane. He could keep his work in the public eye without having to go through an intermediary, like the record company. He was already living, to some degree, a virtual existence up there in that remote spot a long way above the ground and a longer way from heaven; in the Internet he’d found a perfectly Cohenesque way of being both not there and never more fully present.
Leonard logged off for the night. There was a good bottle of cognac on the table that he’d picked up on his last grocery run to Claremont. Tucking it underneath his arm, he crunched up the hill in his flip-flops to Roshi’s cabin.
Autumn 1998. Leonard had been living in the monastery for five years. He was as thin as the air; his long black robes hung loosely on his body. During countless hours of meditation, he had had out-of-body experiences and moments when “the sky opens up and you get the word.” There had been periods during his life on Mount Baldy when Leonard felt contentment and when everything seemed to make sense. This was not one of them. Pulling himself out of his bed in the middle of the night, putting the water on for coffee, fingers waxy from the cold, what Leonard felt was despair. In the meditation hall, where he sat listening to Roshi’s familiar voice deliver the teisho from the lectern-throne at the front of the room, he realized that he no longer had any idea what Roshi was saying. “I used to be able to understand, but my mind had become so concerned with dissolving the pain that my critical faculties had become really impaired.”31 The anguish did not abate; it deepened. His doctor prescribed antidepressants, telling him they would put a floor on how low he could go. But “the floor opened up,” Leonard said, “and I fell right through it.”32
One day Leonard was taking Roshi to the airport—Roshi was flying to New Mexico to lead one of his periodic sesshins at his second monastery in Jemez Springs—and he needed to go back to Mount Baldy for something. Driving up the mountain’s switchback roads, Leonard was suddenly seized by a panic so crippling that he had to pull over. He reached into the backseat for his knapsack and pulled out the shaving kit in which he kept his antidepressants. His heart pounding, he took out the pills, then threw them out of the car. “I said, ‘If I’m going to go down, I’m going to go down with my eyes open.’ There’s something obscene about taking this stuff and going down. And then I went back to Mount Baldy,” Leonard said, “and I really went down.”33
He was unable to find his way back up. The winter months felt crueler than ever; Roshi’s teisho sounded like gibberish. After five and a half years in the monastery and in the deepest pit of depression, Leonard felt that he had “come to the end of the road.”34 On a cold early January night in 1999, Leonard walked up the hill to Roshi’s cabin. It was black and starless; there was snow in the air. Roshi, shrunken with age, peered over the reading glasses whose magnification made his eyes look profoundly deep. The two sat together in stillness, as they had so often done. Leonard broke the silence. “Roshi,” he said, “I’ve got to go. I’m going to go down the mountain.” Roshi said, “How long?” Leonard said, “I don’t know.” The old man looked at him. “Okay,” Roshi said. “You go.”
Leonard’s note of apology to Roshi for his desertion read: “I’m sorry that I cannot help you now because I met this woman. . . . Jikan the useless monk bows his head.” The words were accompanied by a drawing of a female Hindu temple dancer.* Less than a week after leaving Mount Baldy, Leonard was in India. Leonard had left Roshi to be with not a woman but a man.
Ramesh S. Balsekar was eighty-one years old, a strip of a lad compared with Roshi. He had studied at the London School of Economics and had been the president of a leading bank in India until, in the late seventies, he became a devotee of Nisargadatta Maharaj, a master of the Advaita (meaning non-dual) school of Hindu philosophy. Ramesh now received students of his own in his apartment in South Mumbai. Among them, just days after having left Roshi’s monastery, and “in a state of acute depression and deep distress,” was Leonard.35
Leonard had first encountered Ramesh’s teachings while living on Mount Baldy. A few years earlier, someone at the monastery had given him a book called Consciousness Speaks, a question-and-answer session with Balsekar, published in 1992. At the foundation of Ramesh’s teaching is that there is one supreme Source, Brahman, which created everything and is also everything it created. Since there is only this one single consciousness, then there is no “I” or “me,” no individual doer of any action, no individual thinker of any thoughts, no experiencer of any experiences. Once the sense of self drops away, once a person deeply understands that he has no free will, no control over what he does nor over what is done to him, when he takes no personal pride in his achievements or personal affront at what might befall him, then that person becomes one with that single consciousness or Source. When Leonard read the book that first time, he liked it but could not say that he understood it. He put it aside, and during “those last dark days”36 at the monastery he found himself drawn back to it. This time when he read it, it seemed to make more sense. He even found that by applying Ramesh’s teachings to Roshi’s teisho, he could once again understand Roshi. But it was a purely intellectual understanding that did nothing to ease the intensity of his mental torment. Leonard drove to the Bodhi bookstore to look for more books by Balsekar and decided to go to India to hear him in person. He booked a flight to Mumbai.
The years Leonard had spent in the monastery had done nothing to dull his talent at sniffing out a nondescript hotel room. Kemps Corner was a two-star hotel in the south of Mumbai in a busy, built-up neighborhood. A small place—just thirty-five rooms—it was not more than a couple of hundred yards from the beach, though closer still to a highway overpass. The building was old but not elegant. There was a jaunty striped awning over the entrance door that led into a miniature, dimly lit lobby. Leonard took a small single room at the back of the building, where there was less street noise. There was a narrow bed, one side pushed up against the white-painted wall; an armchair; a wooden desk beneath a wood-framed mirror; a tiny TV; and a white-tiled bathroom.
/> In Mumbai Leonard once again kept to a fairly strict schedule. Every morning a little after eight he would leave the hotel, dressed in Western clothes—loose black shirt tucked into light-colored linen trousers, Leonard’s formal take on casual—and walk to the satsang, which was a mile away. He always took the same route, which led him through the congestion of people and traffic, beggars and eternal car horns, and onto Warden (now Bhulabhai Desai) Road, the main road that ran beside the beach and the Arabian Sea. The buildings he passed—the Breach Candy Club and Gardens, the U.S. consulate—grew increasingly privileged the closer he came to North Gamadia Road, the small, quiet lane where Ramesh lived on the top floor of a five-story art deco apartment building, Sindula House. This part of town was considerably more upmarket than Leonard’s, its residents a mix of old money, successful writers, well-known actors and retired bank presidents like Balsekar.
The apartment was well appointed though not luxurious. It had four rooms, the largest of which, the living room, was used for the satsang. It could accommodate around forty people sitting on the floor. Leaving his shoes outside the door, Leonard sought out an inconspicuous spot in a back corner and sat there, cross-legged, eyes cast down. At nine A.M. Ramesh, a small, trim man, his hair white, like his clothes, entered from the next-door room and took his chair at the front. Following a short formal reading, the question-and-answer session began, which Ramesh would start by inquiring of someone—usually a newcomer—what had brought them to India and what their background was.
“Most of the attendees were foreigners—a lot of them from Israel—with maybe three or four Indians in a group of thirty-five or forty,” says Ratnesh Mathur, an Indian banker who became friendly with Leonard during Leonard’s first trip to Mumbai. Mathur had not heard of Ramesh until Leonard spoke about him and invited him to a satsang (the first of around forty satsangs Mathur would attend over the next four years) since Ramesh was relatively unknown as a spiritual leader among his countrymen. “Ramesh alienated himself from the cults,” Mathur says, “he didn’t target the Indian mass media. He was not a big publicity seeker and he was clearly living on a pension so there was no financial motive. His articulation was in English, his mannerisms were Western, his message was rather erudite and intellectual, and his style was not part of the Ramana Maharshi legacy.” Ramana was a popular guru and some of his followers had cast aspersions on Ramesh as a spiritual leader. “Really, he lived like a retired banker—he liked his occasional golf and whiskey—except that one or two hours a day he would leave it open to have people come to his home. People came mostly by word of mouth. It was a very respectable crowd, not the traditional hippie crowd,” although some seekers had come to Ramesh after visiting the Osho commune in Pune, two hours from Mumbai. (Its leader, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, had established an alternative living community in Oregon in the early eighties, before controversy and scandal, and the guru’s deportation, led to its closure.)
Ramesh was a straight-talker. He dealt with his satsang audience much as you might imagine he would his employees at the bank, imparting information and instructions in a direct, no-nonsense manner. Mathur says, “Ramesh easily lost patience with folks who spoke too much and tried to involve him in some esoteric argument. He would remind them that he charged no entrance fee”—if someone wished to make a donation they could do so later—“and then show them to the exit door.” When he spotted someone in the room who had been coming repeatedly for too long he would single them out and say, according to Mathur, “ ‘Don’t you have anything better to do? My main message to you is that God is everywhere, so you can’t just focus on religion, you don’t keep meditating your way to God.’ Basically he said, ‘Get a life.’ ” Ramesh never said this to Leonard, though, whom he had also seen privately and with whom he became friendly. “He was always very polite and nice about Leonard.”
After approximately two hours Ramesh would look at his watch, which indicated that the questions and answers had come to an end. When Ramesh left the room, a bhajan singer, Mrs. Murthy, came in to lead the gathering in the singing of the traditional Hindu songs. A paper was passed around the room with the words written in both the original Sanskrit and the Roman alphabet. “But Leonard didn’t need that,” Mathur remembers. “He knew every word.” When the singing stopped, everyone filed out past the table where Mrs. Murthy’s husband sold copies of Ramesh’s books and of the audiotapes made of every satsang. The tapes dating from Leonard’s earliest months of attendance—when he had asked Ramesh questions, rather than sit quietly, as he would do later, concentrating on what he was saying—proved a popular sales item once word started to spread about Leonard’s studying with Ramesh. Mathur started noticing that some attendees seemed to be seeking Leonard more than Ramesh. No one bothered Leonard during the satsang, but people would come up and talk to him by the table or on his way out of the building.
“He was normally very polite,” says Mathur. “He would talk to them. Occasionally if he found someone interesting, he would take them to a small tea stall,” an unassuming little spot some fifty yards away, the kind of place Leonard consistently found and frequented in whichever city he happened to be living. The workers in the tea shop all recognized him, greeting him with a smile and a respectful exchange of namaste. They did not know him as a celebrity but as a Westerner with short silver hair, a friendly man who came in regularly and always treated them well. “He told me most people didn’t recognize him on the street when he walked and he loved that about being here.” Leonard, Mathur observed, “deliberately avoided spending time with the Mumbai rich and famous.” People always came to him with invitations, Mathur included, to which Leonard would politely make his excuses, “but he told me once about going to some taxi driver’s slum home. I remember being surprised to see how he developed these bonds with folks who knew nothing of him as a famous singer-songwriter. Perhaps the folks who spent the most time with him in India are the cleaners of Kemps hotel and the workers at the tea stall.”
After tea Leonard left for the other regular item on his schedule, his midday swim. There were YMCAs with pools in Mumbai but nothing convenient, so Leonard joined the Breach Candy Club, an exclusive, private club on the seafront on Warden Road, which had a lap pool as well as an enormous outdoor pool, built in the shape of India.* The rest of the day was usually spent alone in his hotel room, meditating, sketching, writing and reading books written or recommended by Ramesh. Mathur had offered Leonard some books on related topics but he declined them politely; he did not want distractions. Early evening he would take himself off to a restaurant for a vegetarian meal, then return to his room, light some incense, put on a CD of Indian music and meditate and read some more. He had little interest in sightseeing, but he paid a visit to the Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue, which served a small Jewish community. Not far from the synagogue was a large, bustling record store, Rhythm House. He asked if they had any Leonard Cohen albums. They did. He could find them, he was told, under “Easy Listening.”
Leonard flew home back to L.A. in the spring. There he put the finishing touches to a song he was writing for an event in tribute to the late Canadian poet and intellectual Frank “F. R.” Scott, whom Leonard had known from his McGill University days. The song “Villanelle for our Time” was a Scott poem of the same name that Leonard had set to music. Working on the song, Leonard realized it needed a woman’s voice. He called Anjani Thomas, one of his former backing singers, and asked if she would come over. They completed the recording in a single afternoon.
Then Leonard drove to Mount Baldy. It had been almost four months since he had seen Roshi and he wanted to pay his respects. As they had done so many times, they sat with a cognac in the old man’s cabin, the world outside swollen up in darkness, moths pressed against the fly screen on the window like dried flowers in a poetry book. They talked little but when they did it was not about Leonard studying another discipline with a different master. Nor did Leonard discuss with Roshi what he had lear
ned from Ramesh. “Roshi doesn’t discuss,” not even his own teachings, Leonard said. “He’s not interested in perspective or talking. You either get it or you don’t. He doesn’t give you any astounding truths that we come to expect from spiritual teachers, because he’s a mechanic—he’s not talking about the philosophy of locomotion, he’s talking about repairing the motor. He’s mostly talking to a broken motor. Roshi is direct transmission.”37
Leonard did not stay in the monastery long. In June he came back down from the mountain. His close friend Nancy Bacal, who met with him in L.A., observed that “he was like a kid when he came back from Baldy; suddenly he could come and go as he pleased, do whatever he wanted. It took him a moment or two to figure that out, but when he did, it was a delight to see him so happy and so joyous. Baldy was wonderful for him. Now it was time to take the next step.”
For the first time in years, Leonard went back to Hydra. He packed the notebooks he had filled during his long stay in the monastery, and, in his old study, in the white house on the hill, he went to work on poems and songs in various states of completion. He also returned to Montreal and visited his old friend Irving Layton, now eighty-seven years old, suffering from Alzheimer’s and living in a nursing home. Leonard had been rereading a good deal of Layton’s poetry lately and was thinking about setting some of it to music, as he had done with F. R. Scott’s.
Leonard also returned to Mumbai, once again taking his old room at the Hotel Kemps Corner. In 1999 the room was his home for almost five months. He spent his last birthday of the millennium there. When Mathur met with Leonard that day, he could not fail to notice how happy Leonard seemed. Leonard celebrated after satsang with a birthday lunch. “There was one girl who had come along with us, a girl who had come to Ramesh’s sessions and was clearly enamored of Leonard. He had picked up a flower in the hotel vase and put it in the lapel of his jacket, and he smoked a cigarette or two that day, although I think he had given them up at the time. He said that he was very happy to be here, and this happiness was evident all the way through. It was on his face and in everything he was saying, which was all very, very positive.”
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen Page 43