by Jeff Burger
So this culture refuses to affirm death. And it is the central myth of our culture, both the Crucifixion and the expulsion from Paradise, but we refuse to affirm that we have been expelled from Paradise, and we develop utopian theories—socialism, fascism, democracy—to bring us back to Paradise. But there is a crack in everything, because this is the realm of the crack, the realm of failure, the realm of death, and unless we affirm failure and death, we’re going to be very unhappy. The more we affirm death, the happier we get. The more we affirm failure, the more successful we get.
AM: On this album I miss finding a formally religious song, which you usually include in your recordings—songs like “Hallelujah” or “The Guests.” Is this because your spiritual thirst has been quenched?
LC: I suppose my thirst has been satisfied. It’s not a thirst, but … I know what you mean. I miss that in this record also, but that’s the only record I could produce at the time and I think it’s … an old soldier putting on his uniform and his medals and his cane and walking across the battlefield with as much strengthened dignity as he can gather just before he falls down. I feel there’s something brave about the record, something poignant. I think it’s a record that I can forgive myself for having produced.
AM: I’m also missing some more personal songs on this album …
LC: Yes, I think I should write some very personal songs now. My song “My Secret Life” was really about my secret life, but I couldn’t manifest it. I couldn’t finish it. I’ll try to go back to work on that song. My song “Blue Alert” also examines the intoxication of love, of sexual love. I hope my next record will have that very personal feeling to it.
AM: Still referring to that kind of spiritual song in your work, one would say that they exude a certain “saintly” quality. What do you think about that?
LC: I don’t know what to say to that. I always loved the music that is called holy, the cantorial music of the church and of the synagogue, I always loved that music. I don’t know what the quality of it is, but I think it’s the word we use—holy—to describe the quality, but … I don’t know what to say about it. I think maybe they take place in a moral landscape where there’s something to be won and something to be lost. I think that gives the impression of some kind of spiritual struggle going on.
AM: Your last book, Book of Mercy, seems to be a book of prayer in essence. Is prayer a way of finding silence and peace for you?
LC: Prayer is a good way. Swimming is a good way. Making love is a good way. Dancing is a good way. But the real prayer is when none is praying. Every religion has a technology to produce the silent one in which the father and the mother have dissolved, in which the man and the woman have dissolved, in which night and day have dissolved, and the silent one arises, the silent sage arises. Every religion has a technology that arises to produce this experience. After this experience, when the ordinary self is reborn, it’s born with the residue of this experience and can deal more compassionately and more sensitively and more intelligently with the other elements that arise with him, that are born with him. When the silent one arises in the heart, he embraces the whole world. He embraces God, he embraces the Devil, and not one ant is left out of this embrace; not one atom is left out of this embrace when the silent one arises.
AM: For many years you have practiced Zen meditation. Do you think that path has manifested itself in your songs?
LC: That’s right. I don’t know any other form of meditation because I’ve never studied any other form. I met a man twenty-five years ago and I liked what he said, and I liked who he was and I began to study with him. His name was Roshi Sasaki. He was a roshi; that is a teacher in the Rinzai tradition of Zen. And I suppose if he had been a professor of physics in Heidelberg I would have learned German and studied physics, but he happened to be an old monk, so I began to study with him in his own terms.
And that was in a meditation hall on a mountain near Los Angeles, Mount Baldy. And I don’t know if I’ve made any progress and I don’t know if there’s any progress to be made. I know that I like to go there often and sit there, especially in the mornings with the other monks. I like the smell of the incense. I like the quiet, the smell of ozone in the air. I like the fraternity of the other monks and nuns. For the past few years I’ve stopped trying to place my mind anywhere in the meditation hall. I merely work on my songs, so I’m probably doing something inappropriate. I just follow my songs and I work on the rhymes and the lines when I sit there in the morning and the evening.
AM: From what you say, it seems to have to do more with the person than the doctrine. Knowing your close relationship with Roshi, one could come to the conclusion that he has taken on the figure of your father. You have always had friends older than yourself …
LC: I don’t know anymore. I’ve forgotten who he is. I’ve forgotten what he’s teaching. We became friends. But I think you could look at things that way. That’s a popular style of thinking of things today, a psychological style. Sometimes I take care of Roshi; he seems like my child, not like my father. So yes, he’s an older man, and I’ve always had older friends, but I’ve always had younger friends. So it’s difficult to apply these explanations, but I wouldn’t resist it. The guide, your spiritual friend, sometimes mother, sometimes brother, sometimes child. The spiritual guide does not take on a specific persona. In fact, the whole essence of a spiritual guide is to present to you a self that is not fixed. A good spiritual guide will never become solid in your life; he will present the other possibility of a relationship that is not solid, is not fixed.
AM: On one occasion you said that Roshi was the only person from whom you could learn something.
LC: Well, maybe I said that but it isn’t true. You can learn from many people. You of course are continually learning from your friends. And if they’re good friends, they are always calling you on something. They stop you from going too far and they stop you from not going far enough. If you’ve got good friends, you can depend on them to tell you what your situation is at any time, but also with a friend you forget who they are. It’s just someone you’re very comfortable with. And it’s more on the level of friendship now that I see Roshi. Of course, I know that he’s a great teacher but I’ve given up learning from Roshi and I think he’s given up teaching me, so now we just eat together.
AM: I’ve heard you have been helping Roshi to open some meditation centers in the States.
LC: I’m now one of the older people around, so it’s natural that I participate in a small way in helping the community keep going.
AM: When you began meditating in the seventies, you recorded two of your most dramatic and desolate albums, Songs from a Room and Songs of Love and Hate. At that time, you even became known as “the most powerful nonchemical depressive in the world.” In your case, the depression, the sadness, seemed to be a great source of creativity.
LC: You live with it like a friend, and you know that if you make too many mistakes this friend is going to sit on your head. So it’s not something that is objective. It is like a shadow that you live with, and it never goes away, and you just begin to conduct yourself in a certain manner so that it does not overwhelm you. It’s like living with eczema, a skin disease: if you eat the wrong things, your skin will become red and swollen, and you won’t be able to move, you won’t be able to sit, and you won’t be able to lie down. That’s the way it is with depression. If you absorb the wrong thing, you’ll become too uncomfortable to continue.
AM: There is a certain opinion about you that says that the more you suffer, the better you are, creatively speaking.
LC: It’s a curious process. I don’t pretend to understand it. I know that when I begin seriously working on some song, I become very uncomfortable with myself, and I have to start discarding versions of myself that make me uncomfortable…. When I hear [one of these versions] speaking to me, I say, “That’s a lie, you have to go,” but he doesn’t want to go. I have to make him go. And then the next one arrives and says, “I
am you and this is what I think.” “No, you’re not me and you’ll have to go too.” So each one of these figures arises and they have to be killed, or they’re dying when they speak to me, and that’s uncomfortable. You come to the place where you get the language you can accept, and you can become comfortable. It seems to be a long way, and a very stupid way of doing things. But that’s my way.
AM: People used to say, “When you feel really bad, there’s nothing better than Leonard Cohen.”
LC: I appreciate that connection, and I think that is very valid. The slaves have always come to a moment where they can no longer be slaves, and they rise up. The blacks come to a certain point where they can no longer be treated as blacks, and they rise up. The women come to a point where they can no longer be treated as women and they insist that their situation must be revised. They ask for new versions of themselves; they ask it from themselves and they ask it from others.
I think the next category of slaves to arise will be those who suffer from depression. And I think this is a real, universal constituency that transcends borders and cultures, and the next great uprising, and perhaps the one we’re waiting for, is when the depressed—to call them by a term that does not really describe them—the hungry ones will arise.
We don’t have the luxury yet to arise, because we know that our condition is not yet as urgent as the condition of those who are really hungry, the condition of the ones who are hungry in the body. But somewhere along the line the next hungry ones will arise and demand a revision of their predicament, from themselves and from the others. And in some way I hint at this possibility.
AM: Going back to the terrain of spiritual teachings … What do you think has been the reason for the failure of the majority of spiritual teachers who have arrived in the West to teach a spirituality supposedly richer than ours?
LC: Oh yes, they all got wrecked in the West. I don’t want to name their names, but many Zen masters became alcoholic or began sleeping with their students or the wives of their students. Many Indian masters fell into the spell of American women and practices. American sexuality is powerful, American women are powerful. There are very few spiritual masters who have achieved the power of an American woman. They’re like children in the hands of an American woman.
The East has a lot to learn from America. It’s a popular position that America is an infant, a country with little to teach and the masters come from the East with the ancient wisdom, but they all shipwreck in America. None of them can survive America. They all have to get down on their knees and begin studying America. America is the great spiritual experiment. Roshi often turned to me and said, “I studied women with you, Cohen.”
AM: But East needs West, a soul needs a body …
LC: Of course we need each other like the fingers on the hand. The little finger needs the thumb to hold onto something.
AM: After the shipwreck of your marriage [As noted earlier, Cohen never actually married. —Ed.], have you found a shore?
LC: I’ve been rescued many times, but I don’t have any … It’s very kind of you to address me like I might know something, but I really am that guy who’s shattered. I’m not someone who speaks about this shattering as a literary device. I do get shattered by this world, and it’s really being shattered, and I’m just speaking to you from holding onto an orange crate in the flood.
AM: You have ruined your knees meditating and have spent your life kneeling before women. Do you think you will be able to get up?
LC: Oh yes, I can stand. I’m sick of pretending I’m broken from bending. I’ve been too long on my knees. I’m going to get up now. [Cohengets up.]
AM: Oh, it wasn’t something literal … Only a few questions more and we’re finished. Recently, they have named you Doctor Honoris Causa at the McGill University in Montreal, where you studied. How did you find that experience?
LC: It’s very touching to be recognized by your old university, to go there and wear a red cap and gown and be called a doctor. [But] there’s a menacing side to those moments. You really think you’re finished … it sounds like a funeral service. I think when Dylan was honored by Yale [Actually Princeton. —Ed.] he wrote a song called “Day of [the] Locusts” about all those grasshoppers that come and eat everything up, and leave nothing behind. There’s a feeling like you’ve made some terrible mistake to be at this moment when they’re honoring you for your poems and your songs. But also it’s a great feeling. It’s your old university. You’re standing in your old hall.
AM: And what do you think of the homage album which the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles has devoted to you, with a new collection of bands doing versions of your songs?
LC: Those are my young brothers who were singing my songs. It’s a good feeling, but … there’s something very final about these kind of honors. There’s something funeral about it. When some guys do your songs, when your younger brothers do your songs, it’s really a nice feeling.
AM: Why were you not part of the concert in homage to Dylan?
LC: I think I was invited, but I made a joke. Don Ienner, who’s the president of Columbia, mentioned this concert to me and I made a joke. He said that there would be a Dylan tribute. I said, “Bob Dylan, that commie. He singlehandedly destroyed society.” I said, “My daughter wrote on the edge of her book: ‘Your sons and your daughters are beyond your control.’ Thanks a lot, Bob.” And I don’t know if they thought I was serious or not. Then I was never asked again.
AM: What do you think of the rejection of the Irish singer Sinead O’Connor by Dylan’s fans?
LC: I don’t know. I wasn’t there. They say that some people were laughing, were clapping, some people were booing … The industrial democracy of America is not the same as a society like Ireland. Basically Americans feel that all religions should be affirmed, and that they should not be attacked, because America was formed by a lot of people whose religion was being attacked. That’s why they came to America. So an attack on religion, although it’s tolerated in America, isn’t really enjoyed because the foundation of America was people escaping from religious persecution….
AM: What do you think should be the true role of a singer, of a poet, in this society?
LC: What we want our artists to tell us is the truth, and as we get older we produce a wide variety of speakers, of artists, of painters, because our appetites are very wide. We want the modest poet, the arrogant poet, the alcoholic poet, the ascetic poet, the sad singer, the happy singer, the austere singer. We want the singer who has retreated, the singer who is hiding, the singer who is dancing. We need to produce a whole variety of artists to address our own situation, which is so vast that we can hardly locate it. There’s a line from a Hebrew prayer: “Our needs are so manifold we dare not declare them.” Our needs are so vast that we cannot even begin to locate them. So we produce a whole number of figures to speak to us and nobody speaks to us clearly enough or perfectly enough. So we all have work to do.
AM: Once you said that an artist must shatter his ego to produce a masterpiece.
LC: It’s very important for an artist to cultivate a very strong ego. Without the strong ego, the artist cannot survive, because the world is always saying to the artist, “Shut up and go home.” … Without a really strong ego he really will shut up and go home. But within his work, if he holds onto this position of himself, he can’t create his work….He has to dissolve his ego into the work. And that’s what I mean by “the ego must be shattered.” If he comes to the work, if he comes to the prayer, and says, “I am the artist” and “I am praying to God” and “I am creating a masterpiece” and “the music is me,” then of course we are justified in laughing at him, and then he becomes a comedian.
The comedian is the one who does not dissolve his ego and he holds the ego up to us as something that is laughable. The comedian never loses his ego; that’s why he’s funny. He’s always holding onto his own version of himself in the midst of catastrophe. That’s the difference between the comedian and
the artist—that in the midst of the catastrophe that we all know we’re in, the artist shatters his ego in front of the catastrophe and enters into it. The comedian holds onto it and we think it’s funny, and when the artist dissolves his ego into the catastrophe we think it’s art.
AM: What do you think of the ego trip of the majority of pop stars?
LC: We seem to support the notion that our singers and poets have strong personalities in public…. We seem to be amused when they break their guitars onstage or trash hotel rooms or speak impolitely to their elders or develop arrogant and extravagant personalities. We seem to like it, to encourage it. And I think for the young, these positions are completely understandable and necessary.
The young feel impotent. The young feel that they cannot penetrate into society. They feel they cannot operate the levers in the mechanisms of society, that they will not be noticed. So they produce representatives that have a contemptuous point of view towards these mechanisms the adult world represents. So they produce their guerrilla artists and that’s what I think the rock-and-roll artists are. They’re representatives of the youth that threaten the order and break down the walls and produce openings into the world. The young will always produce these leaders that disdain or disrespect the elder world. In that way the gates are broken and the young can enter into the elder world. So I think this kind of artist that the young produce is necessary and appropriate as things are constituted now.
What we want as we get older is something different. As we get older, we know that this world was not worth penetrating, that it was not worth breaking down the doors to enter this world. Because when you find yourself in that world as you grow older you see that it’s nothing special, that there’s no need to resist the world. But from the point of view of the young there seems to be this mysterious world of the adults who seem to have all the power and so we produce these representatives to challenge that power.