by Ira B. Nadel
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 Mu, or nothingness, which teaches that being is nothingness, and parallels the genesis of Hasidism in the ay
in, 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.
AFTERWORD: BACK ON BOOGIE STREET
SINCE 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.
In August 1996 Cohen became ordained as a Zen monk, taking the name “Jikan” (“Silent One”) as an expression of his almost thirty-year involvement with the rigorous Rinzai Zen movement and continuing commitment to its leader, Joshu Saski Roshi. That same month, Cohen and his sister gave up their Montreal home, severing their familial tie with Westmount, although the opening that year of the Centre Zen de la Main in downtown Montreal established a new connection with the city for Cohen. While generally keeping a low profile, he did make a surprise appearance in March 1997 at Irving Layton’s eighty-fifth birthday celebration at the Centaur Theatre in Montreal.
In his remarks, Cohen reiterated the nature of their relationship, summarizing their often marathon conversations when Cohen would unveil his aspirations, and Layton would always respond with, “Leonard, are you sure you’re doing the wrong thing?” Cohen then recounted how they negotiated a fruitful exchange. Cohen would offer his sartorial expertise to Layton, who replied, “I’m going to make you a deal. You teach me about clothing and I’ll teach you how to live forever.” The deal lasted until Layton died at the age of ninety-three on January 4, 2006, after years of suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Cohen was a pallbearer for his mentor, looking grim-faced and distressed. He dedicated Book of Longing, published just three months later, to Layton, and included several poems about their long relationship in the volume.
While Cohen the man kept largely out of sight, his artistry continued to permeate popular culture, exerting a powerful influence on younger singers and artists. In Bruce Wagner’s 1996 Hollywood noir novel, I’m Losing You, Cohen apparently even had the power to redeem an entire Canadian city: “Hate Toronto, always have,” says a character. “The only good thing about it is Leonard Cohen, and he’s from Montreal, n’est-ce pas?” Breaking the Waves, an erotic/metaphysical movie by the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, which won the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes in 1996, features “Suzanne,” a song also highlighted in a March 1997 episode of the successful CBC-TV satirical series by Ken Finkelman The Newsroom. And Armelle Brusq, a young French artist, created a documentary about his life in retreat that aired on European TV in March 1997 with important footage of Cohen at the Mt. Baldy Zen Center and in Los Angeles. It shows Cohen composing on his synthesizer and computer in his cabin and ends with him singing “(I was) Never Any Good (at loving you),” released in October 1997 on the More Best of Leonard Cohen compilation.
Cohen continued to have his work reissued and new work recorded. But after the release of More Best of Leonard Cohen, which marked thirty years with his record company, he felt it was time to ensure his financial future. With the help of his longtime manager Kelley Lynch, he sold his music publishing company to the Sony Music Corporation in a deal that gave him a staggered payout of nearly $5 million in 1997 and then almost $8 million in 2001. It was a move that would prove to have both surprising and disastrous repercussions for him.
But Cohen’s focus at the time was more concentrated on the spiritual side of life. In January 1999, he made a decision to leave Mt. Baldy to make a pilgrimage to Mumbai to study with Ramesh Balsekar. A retired bank president educated in England who became a guru, Balsekar, who was then eighty-two, held dialogues seven days a week at his home in the Breach Candy district of Mumbai, near the Mahalaksmi Temple. Balsekar espouses a philosophy that “consciousness is all there is” and that there is “thinking but no thinker, doing but no doer, experience but no experiencer,” as he told Cohen in a set of dialogues recorded amid a background of birds, trucks, street noise, and laughter. In seeking to remove the ego—“there has never been a me” Balsekar teaches—Cohen found spiritual sustenance and a direction that supplemented the teachings of the Rinzai Zen movement. He found great meaning condensed in Balsekar’s statement that “understanding is consciousness disidentifying with me as the doer.”
The concept that so attracted Cohen was that creativity comes from outside the self: a poem, a song, a thought just happen—although in his case, slow
ly. Things “do” themselves and are not generated from within the self. Cohen’s humbleness concerning his “gift” reflects his acceptance and appreciation of inspiration as it moves him to write, to sing, or to draw. As he remarked in a recent interview, “I don’t operate at a buffet table where I can choose among the delicacies, a poem today, a sandwich tomorrow.” Art happens, although never easily: “Most of the time, you’re scratching the bottom of the barrel and nothing is coming.” Cohen initially went to Ramesh Balsekar because he found “resonances” between his teachings in such books as Ultimate Understanding and the teachings of Roshi. What Cohen didn’t know was that he was soon to face a personal crisis of potential ruin and deep betrayal in which Balsekar’s essential message—what happens, happens, and is to be accepted—would help him enormously. Cohen returned to Los Angeles to resume his writing.
Ten New Songs, his first album of original material since 1992’s The Future, came out in 2001. Within a week of its release, it was the #1 album in Denmark, #3 in Israel and #4 in Italy. In Canada, it went platinum. In all of these markets, his sales showed that he had more than a cult following. A minimalist work, Ten New Songs is a spare and musically direct album, beginning with its unadorned title, his most understated since Songs from a Room (1969). The songs, however, are lyrically rich, complex expressions with new favorites such as “In My Secret Life,” “A Thousand Kisses Deep,” “Here It Is,” “By the Rivers Dark,” and “Boogie Street.” They reflect an intensity that grows in clarity and force as a lyric from “In My Secret Life” expresses: “I know what is wrong, / And I know what is right./ And I’d die for the truth/ In My Secret Life.”
The recording method was unusual for Cohen. He gave Sharon Robinson, a former backup singer and now record producer, some demo tracks he’d recorded at Mt. Baldy, and she selected material she thought might form songs. She then began to write melodies, creating instrumental tracks from samples and adding her own scratch lead vocals. She then transferred the songs to an eight-track recorder for Cohen to work on; songs were literally built up in layers by the two of them.