Sun After Dark

by Pico Iyer

  And even on this lofty perch, with nothing visible but rock and tree and occasional sign prohibiting the throwing of snowballs, he doesn’t deny the “fixed self” that awaits him whenever he comes down from the mountain, and, in fact, goes out of his way to deride his presence on the mountaintop. “Everyone here is fucked-up and desperate,” he says brightly. “That’s why they’re here. You don’t come to a place like this unless you’re desperate.” Yet over and over, amidst the calculated irreverence, the gamesmanship and the crazy-wisdom subversiveness—one of the reasons he became a monk two years ago, he says, was “Roshi wanted me to do so for tax purposes”—I see something touching and genuine coming through. Leonard Cohen, I realize, is really trying, with all his body and his soul, to simplify himself as strictly as he does his word-strong verses.

  One morning, at dawn, as we talk about Van Morrison and Norman Mailer and how “living in England is like living in a cabbage,” Cohen gets to talking of Cuba, and the time, just after the Revolution, when he was walking along the beach in his Canadian Army khaki shorts with his camping knife, imagining himself the only North American on the island, and got arrested as the first member of an invading force.

  “So anyway, there I was, on the beach in Varadero, speculating on my destiny, when suddenly I found myself surrounded by sixteen soldiers with guns. They arrested me and the only words I knew at the time were ‘Amistad de pueblo.’ So I kept saying ‘Amigo! Amistad de pueblo!’ and finally they started greeting me. And they gave me a necklace of shells and a necklace of bullets and everything was great—”

  Then, suddenly, he stops. “What time is it?”

  I tell him and he says, “I shouldn’t be talking about my adventures when we’re about to listen to a wonderful teisho.” And Leonard Cohen disappears into the black-robed disciple again, and into a reverent silence.

  Another day, another tale as short and abstract and mythic, almost, as any of his ballads about worshiping at the altar of beauty, as he suddenly volunteers to tell me about his last girlfriend. “When I met Rebecca [De Mornay],” he says, “all kinds of thoughts came into my mind, as how could they not when faced with a woman of such beauty? And they got crisscrossed in my mind. But she didn’t let it go further than that: my mind. And it did. And finally she saw I was a guy who just couldn’t come across.”

  “ ‘Come across’?”

  “In the sense of being a husband and having more children and the rest.” He stops. “And she was right, of course. But she was kind enough to forgive me. I had breakfast with her the other day, and I told her, ‘I know why you forgave me. Because I really, really tried.’ And she said, ‘Yes.’ ”

  End of story, end of song.

  At times, as I listened, spellbound against my will by this man with beautiful manners and a poet’s rare diction, moving back and forth between hippie existentialist and Old World scholar, now referring to “bread” and “tokes” and “beating the rap,” now talking in a high-pitched tone of “ancient” and “dismal” and “predicament,” I could see the coyote trickster who’s been working the press for three decades or more. I felt disconcerted, almost, by his very niceness, his openness, his courtesy, as he continually kept thanking me for “being kind enough to come here,” and tended to my every need as if I were the celebrity and he the poor journalist, referring to “what you’re nice enough to call my career.” I felt there was something excessive to his modesty, his unusually articulate and quick-witted sentences bemoaning his lack of articulacy and sharpness (“I’m sorry. You get this kind of spaciness at moments in retreats. They say zazen brings short-term memory loss”), his claiming not to know, after twenty years in L.A., how long it takes to drive to Santa Barbara.

  I saw the seasoned seducer whom his friend Anjelica Huston recently called “part wolf, part angel,” and sensed that he could put “confidence” and “artist” together as easily as “pilgrim” and “mage.” Certainly a man so meticulous in clothes and manner was not going to be careless in his presentation of self—was, in fact, likely to be a master-craftsman of self.

  Yet the trouble was, Cohen seemed more wise to this than anyone. “Secretly,” he told me cheerily, “the sin of pride as it’s manifested here is that we feel we’re like the Marines of the spiritual world: tougher, more reckless, more daring, more brave.” Asked about his early years, he confesses, “I think I was more interested in the poetic life and everything around it than the thing itself.” Nominating himself as “one of the great whiners,” he says that the roshi looks at him sometimes and says, “Attention to the world: need more Buddhism!”

  And so, as time passes, I really do begin to feel I am watching a complex man trying to come clear, a still jangled, sometimes angry soul making a heroic attempt to reduce itself to calm. As day passes into night and day again, he comes into focus, and out again, like the sun behind clouds, now blazing with a lucent, high intensity, now more like the difficult brooder you might imagine from the records. “He’s a tiger,” I remember a woman in New York telling me, “a very complicated man. Complicated in a very grown-up way. I mean, he makes Dylan seem childish.” The first time she met him, she explained, he congratulated her on a book she’d written. As their meal went on, he added, “Your writing is a lot more interesting than you are.”

  Cruelty has always been as disconcerting a part of his package as perversity. Yet when I talked to the people who tour with him I felt I was speaking to the Apostles. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone as gracious, as graceful, as generous as Leonard,” said Perla Batalla, who has been singing with him for eight years. “Once I’d been out on the road with Leonard, I couldn’t go out with anyone else.” His other backup singer, Julie Christensen, left a newborn baby at home to go out on tour with him—having seen her friends who’d been in his band come back “changed, philosophically changed, really on this kind of heightened awareness level.” His longtime accompanist, Jennifer Warnes, even recorded a whole album of Cohen songs she wanted to re-bring before the public.

  All of them talk of how Cohen the singer seems of a piece with Cohen the Zen practitioner, making them sing and sing and sing the same song till sometimes they’ll break into tears, and wearing them out with his indefatigable three-hour, twelve-encore concerts. But all speak of his tours as if they were a kind of spiritual training. “He’ll give the same attention to the president of the country or to someone who’s just walked up to him on the street,” says Batalla, recalling how he rode on the bus like just another technician. Others mention his racing off to buy aspirin for them when they’re sick, or inviting them to his hotel room at night to drink hot chocolate made with water from the sink.

  “In the ancient concert halls of Europe,” says Christensen, “you got this feeling that you’d really have to run if you weren’t telling the truth. It was a mystery bigger than me, and if I’d figured it out, I would be bigger than it.” Then, almost sheepishly, she adds, “I thought that kind of thing was corny before I toured with Leonard.” Batalla sometimes visits his home just to sit in absolute silence with her boss.

  And so the days on the mountain go on, and every day at dawn young monks with clean, pure faces appear at my door with trays of food, and every day, when I visit Cohen in his cabin, he gives me green tea in a wineglass, or shows me paintings—flowing nudes and haggard self-portraits—he’s done on his computer, or reads me poems about the dissolution of self from a book he is putting together, which, like all his best work, sound like love songs or prayers or both, addressed to a goddess or to God.

  One morning, in his bathroom, I come upon The Shambhala Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen.

  “I like the fact they distinguish between Buddhism and Zen,” he says when I come out.

  “What is the difference?”

  He disappears—good Zen solution—into the bathroom to clean cups.

  Another day, as the retreat is drawing to a close, the sky above my window grey and shriven and severe, he shows up with his hands dirty
from fixing his toilet, and I try to get him to talk about his writing. “For me,” he says, his voice soft and beautiful, with a trace of Canada still hiding inside it, “the process is really more like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I’m stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it’s delicious and it’s horrible and I’m in it. And it’s not very graceful and it’s very awkward and it’s very painful”—you can hear the cadences of his songs here—“and yet there’s something inevitable about it.” But most of the writers he admires, preempting one’s criticism again, “are just incredible messes, as human beings. Wonderful and invigorating company, but I pity their wives and their husbands and their children.”

  A crooked smile.

  As for the songs, “I’ve always held the song in high regard,” he says, “because songs have got me through so many sinks of dishes and so many humiliating courting events.” Sometimes, he goes on, holding me with his commanding eloquence, his ill-shaven baritone compounded of Gauloises, Courvoisier, and a lifetime of late nights, he’ll catch a snatch of one of his songs on the radio, “and I’ll think: these songs are really good. And it’s really wonderful that they have been written, and more wonderful that they should have found a place in the heart. And sometimes I’ll hear my voice, and I’ll think: this guy has got to be the great comedian of his generation. These are hilarious: hilariously inept, hilariously solemn and out of keeping with the times; hilariously inappropriate.”

  A line he’s used for years, I know, but still more than you’d expect from a man whose songs are covered by Willie Nelson and Billy Joel. “To me,” he continues, scraping at his sneakers with a knife, “the kind of thing I like is that you write a song, and it slips into the world, and they forget who wrote it. And it moves and it changes, and you hear it again three hundred years later, some women washing their clothes in a stream, and one of them is humming this tune.” His conversation like the outline of a ballad.

  At last, as the 168 hours come to an end, I walk up the mountain to join the students in what will be their final session of zazen, the stars above the pines thicker than I have seen in thirty years of living in Southern California. By now, nearly all of them are exhausted to the point of breakdown—or breakthrough—some of them with open wounds on their feet, others nodding off at every turn, still others lit up and charged as electrical wires.

  And then, at two in the morning, on the longest night of the year, suddenly the silence breaks, and people talk, and laugh, and return to being maths professors and doctors and writers again as they collect the letters that have been accumulating for them, and drink tea, and, in the great exhalation, I can hear a woman saying, in exultation, in relief, “Better than drugs!”

  In his sepulchral cabin, Cohen breaks out the cognac and serves an old friend and me gefilte fish, Hebrew National salami, and egg-and-onion matzohs from a box. The two of them look like battle-hardened veterans—“non-commissioned officers,” as the friend says—and it’s not hard to see how this celebrated lady-killer called an early backup band “The Army” and one of his sweetest records “an anti-pacifist recording.”

  Yet even at his most ragged here, he seems a long way away from the one who cried out, so pitifully, on his 1973 live album, “I can’t stand who I am.” Leonard Cohen has always seemed, or tried, to inhabit a higher zone of sorts, and one that his parable-like songs, his alchemical symbols, and his constant harking back to Abraham and David and Isaac only compound. In trying to marry Babylon with Bethlehem, in reading women’s bodies with the obsessiveness of a Talmudic scholar, in giving North America a raffish tilt so that he’s always been closer to Jacques Brel or Georges Moustaki than to Bob Dylan, he’s been trying, over and over, to find ceremony without sanctimony and discipline without dogma. Where else should he be, where else could he be, than in a military-style ritualized training that allows him to put Old Testament words to a country-and-western beat and write songs that sound like first-person laments written by God?

  “I feel,” says Cohen a little later, when we’re alone, “we’re in a very shabby moment, and neither the literary nor the musical experience really has its finger on the pulse of our crisis. From my point of view, we’re in the midst of a Flood: a Flood of biblical proportions. It’s both exterior and interior—at this point it’s more devastating on the interior level—but it’s leaking into the real world. And this Flood is of such enormous and biblical proportions that I see everybody holding on in their individual way to an orange crate, to a piece of wood, and we’re passing each other in this swollen river that has pretty well taken down all the landmarks, and pretty well overturned everything we’ve got. And people insist, under the circumstances, on describing themselves as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative.’ It seems to me completely mad.”

  Of course, he says, impatiently, he can’t explain what he’s doing here. “I don’t think anybody really knows why they’re doing anything. If you stop someone on the subway and say, ‘Where are you going—in the deepest sense of the word?’ you can’t really expect an answer. I really don’t know why I’m here. It’s a matter of ‘What else would I be doing?’ Do I want to be Frank Sinatra, who’s really great, and do I want to have great retrospectives of my work? I’m not really interested in being the oldest folksinger around.

  “Would I be starting a new marriage with a young woman and raising another family? Well, I hated it when it was going on”—signs of the snarl beneath the chuckle—“so maybe I would feel better about it now. But I don’t think so.

  “What would I be doing? Finding new drugs, buying more expensive wine? I don’t know. This seems to me the most luxurious and sumptuous response to the emptiness of my own existence.

  “I think that’s the real deep entertainment,” he concludes. “Religion. Real profound and voluptuous and delicious entertainment. The real feast that is available to us is within this activity. Nothing touches it.” He smiles his godfatherly smile. “Except if you’re courtin’. If you’re young, the hormonal thrust has its own excitement.”

  Before I leave, he catches my eye, and his voice turns soft.

  “We are gathered here,” he says, “around a very, very old man, who may outlive all of us, and who may go tomorrow. So that gives an urgency to the practice. Everybody, including Roshi, is practicing with a kind of passionate diligence. It touches my heart. It makes me proud to be part of this community.”

  Before I leave the following morning, the roshi invites me, with Cohen, to his cabin for lunch. It’s a typically eclectic meal, of noodles and curry, taken quietly and simply, in a small sunlit dining area. As ever when the roshi is around, Cohen sits absolutely humble and silent in one corner, all the tension emptied out of his face; everything about him is light, like a clear glass once the liquid’s drained.

  He tells me a little about how he was once fascinated by Persian miniatures. He talks of the intensity of “living in a world of samples.” He cleans up around the kitchen, and asks his old friend, very gently, if he’s tired. When we go out into the parking lot, a woman comes up and starts telling him how much his songs have meant to her, and Cohen gives her his warmest smile and leaves her with a kind of blessing. “A practice like this,” he tells me, “and I think everyone here would say the same thing, you could only do for love.”

  “So if it weren’t for the roshi, you wouldn’t be here?” I ask.

  “If it weren’t for the roshi, I wouldn’t be.”

  And as I set off down the mountain—listening with new ears now to the old songs, and seeing the shadow of an old Japanese man behind the love songs and the ballads about “the few who forgive what you do and the fewer who don’t even care”—I realize that the whole stay has affected me more powerfully than any trip I’ve taken in years. Why? Mostly, I think, because of a sense of the deep bond between Sasaki and Cohen, and the way neither seems to need anything from the other, yet each allows the other to be deeper than he might be otherwise. “Roshi knows me for who I am,” Cohen had s
aid, “and he doesn’t want me to be any other. ‘International Man,’ ‘Culture Man,’ he calls me; he knows I am an ‘International Man.’ ” And, by all accounts, he will take everything Cohen brings him—his selfishness, his anger, his ambition, his sins—and, while holding him to them, accept him.

  It’s touching in a way: the man who has been the poet laureate of those in flight, who has never found in his sixty-three years a woman he can marry or a home he won’t desert, the connoisseur of betrayal and self-tormenting soul who claimed, twentyfive years ago, that he had “torn everyone who reached out for me,” and who ended his most recent collection of writings with a prayer for “the precious ones I overthrew for an education in the world”—the man, in fact, who became an international heartthrob while singing “So Long” and “Goodbye”—has finally found something he hasn’t abandoned and a love that won’t let him down.

  “Roshi said something to me the other day that I like,” Cohen told me just before I left. “ ‘The older you get, the lonelier you become; and the deeper the love that you need.’ ” For the old and the deep and the lonely, change, it seems, may not be the only aphrodisiac.

  1998

  MAKING KINDNESS STAND TO REASON

  Though the Dalai Lama is increasingly famous as a speaker, his real gift, you see as soon as you begin talking to him, is for listening. And though he is most celebrated around the world these days for his ability to talk to halls large enough to stage a Bon Jovi concert, his special strength is to address twenty thousand people—Buddhists and grandmothers and kids alike—as if he were talking to each one alone, in the language she can best understand. The Dalai Lama’s maxims are collected and packaged now as books to carry in your handbag, as calendar items and as advertising slogans, but the heart of the man exists, I think, in silence. In his deepest self he is that being who sits alone each day at dawn, eyes closed, reciting prayers, with all his heart, for his Chinese oppressors, his Tibetan people, and all sentient beings.