Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  “Poke around, make yourself at home,” he offers, ushering me into his study. The room looks like any office—a couple of high-backed grey caster-wheel chairs facing a large wooden desk, on top of which are a fax machine, a Macintosh computer, and a printer. The one thing that denotes Cohen’s profession is the black Technics synthesizer that occupies the center of the desk like an oblong spaceship. Nearby is a glass-doored stained cabinet that contains Cohen’s notebooks and sketches. It’s a disarmingly modest setup, the kind of place one would expect to find a struggling writer with a day job toiling in obscurity. Cohen’s earlier description of his modus operandi suddenly seemed very apt: “I’m always scratching away, y’know, I’m always working. I’m a very hard-working fellow. But I don’t have any luxury in the matter. I don’t have any choice. There’s no virtue involved. Unless I keep working at it diligently, I tend to begin suffering very acutely.”

  Sitting cross-legged on the floor in his grey suit, Cohen is now leafing through a notebook filled with his scribblings, reciting lines from a new song he has half written. The notebooks are filled with pencil sketches and computer-graphic renderings of a voluptuous black woman who visits regularly to pose nude for him. He holds aloft one sketch, a back view of her naked in the bath. “Beautiful ass,” he murmurs appreciatively.

  Cohen’s life suddenly seems like it would have its salutary moments. When the telephone rings, he lifts his head expectantly. “I wonder,” he intones gravely, “if that’s someone who wants to spend the night with me?”

  COHEN CLIP

  On His Typewriter

  “I once had drawn a bath and I put pine oil in it and I noticed the pine oil stained the water the same color as my Olivetti. I was in a mood of some extravagance and I put the typewriter in the bathtub and tried to type underwater. Then I threw my manuscript for Flowers for Hitler in the bath and tried to scrub it with a nailbrush. This was during a particularly tense period one winter in Montreal. Then I took the typewriter out of the bathtub and in a rage over some imagined injustices a woman had done to me, flung it across the room…. The Olivetti cracked. I thought it was finished and I just stowed it in a corner of the house. About a year later I went to the Olivetti factory on Nun’s Island and brought the thing to the front desk. The man there just looked at it and said ‘not a chance.’ Then—I don’t know why—when the fellow’s back was turned I walked in the factory proper, toward a workbench where an elderly man was working on some typewriters. I approached him and I said I really needed this typewriter. He told me to come back in a few weeks, and when I did he had repaired it meticulously.”

  —from interview with Scott Cohen in the book Yakety Yak, 1994

  COHEN CLIP

  On Whether Zen Stops Him from Thinking

  “Nothing can stop you from thinking. The human mind is designed to think continually. Something I wrote quite a few years ago was, ‘The voices in my head, they don’t care what I do, they just want to argue the matter through and through.’ It is a common mistake, to think you’re going to go into some kind of spiritual practice and you’re going to be relieved of the human burdens, from human crosses like thought, jealousy, despair—in fact, if anything, these feelings are amplified.”

  —from interview with Anjelica Huston, Interview, November 1995

  TV INTERVIEW

  STINA LUNDBERG DABROWSKI | September 1997 | Swedish National Television (Scandinavia)

  Leonard Cohen didn’t do a lot of talking, at least to outsiders, during his years with the Buddhists on Mount Baldy. In 1997, however, he met there with Swedish journalist Stina Lundberg Dabrowski. Her obvious rapport with the artist produced a revealing conversation.

  The year before, on August 9, 1996, Cohen had been ordained as a Zen Buddhist monk. Dabrowski found him dressed in robes, with a shaved head, and with ostensibly no interest in commercial pursuits. At the time, Columbia was about to issue More Best of Leonard Cohen, which came out October 7 and included two previously unreleased songs. But Cohen wasn’t exactly pushing the record: it was Dabrowski who brought it up, near the end of the interview. And when she did, Cohen responded that he had no plans to promote it. —Ed.

  Leonard Cohen: Come on in. Seriously speaking, if you would like to rest, there’s a little bed in there. I’ve got whiskey.

  Stina Lundberg Dabrowski: Whiskey, please.

  LC: Now you’re talking. [They move to a meditation room.] So this is the room we come to in the very early morning after we have our tea.

  SLD: So how many hours do you spend in here?

  LC: There’s close to an hour in the morning and then during the sesshin [days of intense practice] an hour in the afternoon and then another hour listening to the old master. So during the retreats close to three hours a day.

  Meditation in most people’s minds has a goal. You want to get somewhere. This kind of meditation, the assumption is that you’re already there and you just want to manifest that reality that you already embody. So you’re not trying to get free or go someplace. You’re just trying to be what you really are.

  SLD: How do you sit when you do your meditation?

  LC: We sit on a cushion like this [demonstrates] or we sit on a bench. But the idea is to find a position that supports the back. So generally you make a kind of tripod out of your body where your knees will be two feet of that tripod and your butt will be the other. Some people sit in different ways. A good full lotus is considered the best kind of position.

  SLD: I have my skirt. Otherwise I would do it myself.

  LC: Go on, do it. Please do it.

  SLD: Well, I have the skirt.

  LC: Pull your skirt up. We’ll give you a robe.

  SLD: [Laughs.] So why did you flee from this place the first time you came here?

  LC: Well, first time I came here I was in real trouble. The head monk was German and they were waking me up very, very early in the morning. We were building this dining hall over there and repairing it and there were no windows and the snow would come in over your rice and you’d be walking through the ice in sandals and they’d be beating you in the zendo and I thought—

  SLD: Why beating you?

  LC: It appeared to be beating at that time. When you fall asleep or you doze and your posture would decay, they’d come over with a stick. I’ll show you that stick. They’d come over with the stick and they’d strike you very sharply twice on either shoulder. It felt like getting beaten to me. It all seemed like the revenge of World War II. They’d gotten a bunch of American kids up here and were torturing them to death. I didn’t want any part of it so one day when they were filing out for breakfast I just dropped out of the line and when they were sitting down here I sneaked below window level, down to the parking lot, got in my car, and drove down to Mexico.

  SLD: What made you come back again?

  LC: A sense of something unfinished, a sense of something vital, something that would keep me alive. You have to have an experience that is not of the world in order to enjoy the world.

  SLD: So you couldn’t enjoy what you had?

  LC: I can now.

  SLD: But you could not enjoy—

  LC: I don’t have it all now. [Cohen and Dabrowski laugh.]

  SLD: So when you had it you couldn’t enjoy it and now you can enjoy it and you don’t have it.

  LC: I don’t have it.

  SLD: So which is worse?

  LC: Both are pretty good.

  SLD: But you seem happier now.

  LC: Yes, I feel OK these days. I like being up here. It’s a good life. It’s a rigorous life. It’s a severe life. But if I didn’t have these kinds of rules and regulations I’d be lying in bed watching television, scratching myself. I need a lot of order, a lot of form.

  SLD: Why do you need that hard discipline?

  LC: I don’t know. I’m just lazy and self-indulgent and full of self-pity. I need a lot of fences and hedges and regulations and rules. Otherwise I’d just collapse into some kind of relentless form of useless sel
f-examination.

  SLD: You were experiencing discomfort all the time?

  LC: Yeah. Discomfort from anguish, through deep paralyzing anguish for no reason at all, one thought. Red wine was pretty good …

  SLD: Red wine?

  LC: Yeah, red wine was pretty good in addressing this problem. But you can’t stay drunk forever, although I did try. But it really doesn’t work. It’s just another kind of medication that doesn’t work. It works for some people. I know some people who have managed to stay drunk their whole life and they really do it well.

  SLD: You took a lot of drugs, too.

  LC: Yeah, they work pretty good temporarily. The problem is that they don’t work on any ongoing basis so they just wreck you, make you feel worse. That was my experience with it. So it’s experience like that that brings you to this kind of hospital up here in the mountains, which is a place where you start again at the beginning. You learn how to sit, you learn how to walk, you learn how to eat, you learn how to be quiet, you learn how to sit still. And you have the opportunity for self-reform. Put the thing back together again.

  A lot of people who think that I’ve changed my religion look very suspiciously or even scornfully or even express great disappointment that I’ve abandoned my own culture, that I’ve abandoned Judaism. Well, I was never looking for a new religion. I have a very good religion, which is called Judaism. I have no interest in acquiring another religion.

  [Cohen walks with Dabrowski in the rain.] This is very sweet and soft. We don’t get this very often.

  SLD: It’s very nice. Do you watch TV?

  LC: We don’t have any TV up here. But I love TV. [Cohen and Dabrowski arrive at his cabin and sit at a table with drinks.] Now, let’s get down to business, kid.

  SLD: By the way, in the monastery I was a bit surprised to … [Holds up drink.]

  LC: I know, this is terrible. I don’t know why I’ve let you Swedes corrupt me. I knew you’d get me to drink.

  SLD: What does your master say about this?

  LC: It’s very good to drink on a cold day.

  SLD: It’s cold today?

  LC: Yeah, well, a rainy day. When one isn’t working and one is entertaining, it’s entirely appropriate to drink. In fact, it would be a great breach of hospitality if I didn’t offer you something to drink. If you want to keep a bottle of Scotch in your room and take a nip now and then and still follow the regime, letter by letter, you can do that. If you want to keep a chocolate bar in the corner of your room and eat something besides our very, very good vegetarian … fine. If you want to fall in love with a beautiful young nun and somehow you can incorporate this into your practice, go ahead. It usually doesn’t happen that way. Usually that bottle stays for a year.

  SLD: Even in your—

  LC: Even in my cabin. People are worried that I’m not working hard enough or suffering enough, I know. Or that I’m not following the regime as strictly as I should. But let them rest assured I am. Even though I smile from time to time and raise my glass, I am suffering sufficiently and I am following all the rules.

  SLD: OK. So tell me about your suffering, please.

  LC: I can’t. I’m not permitted while I’m being a host. It would again violate the rules of hospitality to tell you how bad I feel.

  SLD: But you had it all. You had what a lot of men are striving, struggling, trying so hard to get. You had the success, you had the money, you had the fame, you had the women—

  LC: Not enough.

  SLD: Not enough? Is that the reason you’re suffering?

  LC: The cover story looked very good. I think people could legitimately say, “What’s he complaining about?” Yes, it’s true.

  SLD: But why were you complaining?

  LC: I don’t think I was complaining. I was just saying “ouch!” because it hurt. I tried everything they had.

  SLD: Like?

  LC: Well, the things that you mentioned. Wine, women, song, money, career, drugs, art, every kind of extravagance, every kind of restraint.

  SLD: And what helped?

  LC: Everything helped in its way in the sense that it said, “This doesn’t work.” I think that’s the greatest help you can get from anything is to find out that it doesn’t work. Because nothing works. Nothing in this human realm is meant to work. So once you can deeply appreciate that, for one thing the mind of compassion grows if you understand that everybody’s up against it. I remember reading some works of Simone Veil, a French woman who lived in France during the war and she said there’s only one question worth asking anybody and that question is, “What are you going through?”

  SLD: What are you going through?

  LC: “What are you going through?”

  SLD: What are you going through?

  LC: Well, when I look back at my life, I see that it was very contracted. Now maybe in relation to other people it was expansive and it was free and it was admirable and maybe it really was that. But a lot of the time from the inside it felt … it didn’t have anything to do with ambition … it wasn’t that I wanted to make it. It wasn’t to do with money, it wasn’t to do with fame, it wasn’t even to do with love. It was just some fundamental sense that this was not flowing with the authentic motion. There was something stopping everything. I had that feeling very, very deeply until recently.

  Now of course it changed and often at a concert—I laugh about this but it doesn’t make it any less true—with a couple of bottles of red wine under my belt and a good band and good songs, the good songs that I wrote, they’re not bad songs, they’re good songs … I know all that. And sometimes with the love of the audience, the interest, and looking at the faces of people that are looking at me as I’m singing and everything is working, I’ve felt completely at home and completely at the center of something that was creating love. The very source of things. I felt very, very good. That’s what kept me touring.

  SLD: Wasn’t it enough?

  LC: It was too dependent on things.

  SLD: On success, on that things went well?

  LC: Things had to go well. It’s a terrible feeling that I never took a concert casually and I don’t think any musician or singer I’ve ever worked with has taken one of our concerts with anything but real seriousness so if it doesn’t go well you do feel that you’ve betrayed yourself and you’ve betrayed people and you’ve wasted their time and you’ve wasted their money. It’s a very bad feeling. On the other hand, when it goes well, it is as I’ve described it. But besides all that you’re dependent. You’re dependent on the wine, dependent on the applause, dependent on the song, dependent on the love.

  SLD: [They walk in the rain again and arrive at a dining room.] This is a dining room?

  LC: This is our dining room, yes.

  SLD: [Addressing a chef.] But now you’re cooking for everybody here?

  Chef: At the moment yes, but there’s only nine people, ten people here. It’s a small group.

  LC: The last group was about forty.

  Chef: Yeah, there were more then, but then I had a lot of help.

  LC: How many was it we had?

  Chef: I think forty-three last time.

  LC: Forty-three. Three meals a day and cookies at night. That was a lot of work. So can we eat?

  Chef: Please.

  [Cohen and Dabrowski are shown eating, then back in his room.]

  SLD: But why did you decide to go into a monastery? A lot of people experience this anguish that you went through …

  LC: Well, I consider myself extremely fortunate in that I bumped into this practice a long time ago and I was able to taste it. I was able to experience something that I had experienced nowhere else. It was clean. It didn’t have any dogmatic information. Nobody told you anything. You were invited to work this out by yourself. You were given some guidelines and more importantly you were given the living example of a very human guy and an old man who had already experienced and resolved these questions at the fundamental level of consciousness.

  SLD: But you
never believed in therapy …

  LC: I don’t say I never believed in it. There didn’t seem to be the moment when I wanted to go into it…. There seemed to be some flaw in the reasoning. Now I know therapists will say, “He’s in denial, he’s trying to delay the moment when he comes to us.”

  [After an interlude that includes a snippet from “Tower of Song” and some old photos of Cohen, the conversation resumes.]

  LC: There was quite a lively group of Scandinavian writers when I first arrived in Hydra … Johan Tengstrom and I started writing our first books together at the same table in my house.

  SLD: But he’s still a writer. You’ve passed through a lot of stages.

  LC: Oh, terrible. I’m a traitor to the craft. Johan Tengstrom polished his talent until he stands on the brink of a Nobel Prize, where I became just a vulgar popular singer.

  SLD: Are you really a writer who failed his—

  LC: Completely. I’m a writer who failed his promise.

  SLD: So what are you?

  LC: But I have a new book over there. You see that?

  SLD: Yeah.

  LC: I think I might be able to redeem myself.

  SLD: Is it true?

  LC: Yes.

  SLD: So you are writing now.

  LC: I don’t know. I’m blackening pages but I don’t know if it’s writing.

  SLD: You’re very humble.

  LC: As I think Gore Vidal [Actually, it was Truman Capote. —Ed.] said about Jack Kerouac, “That isn’t writing, that’s typing.”

  SLD: In what ways have you experienced love in your life?

  LC: Oh, wonderful love … I had wonderful love but I did not give back wonderful love. There were people who loved me very, very deeply and very genuinely and I was unable to reply to their love.

  SLD: Why?

  LC: Because I was obsessed with some fictional sense of separation that I couldn’t reach across the table for it. I couldn’t reach across the bed. I couldn’t reach across the moon. I couldn’t reach across my song. I couldn’t reach and touch the thing that was being offered me. It was being offered me everywhere and it is always being offered everyone. It is offered at all times, at all moments, and we create a fictional barrier, we succumb to a fictional disease, and we buy into a fictional separation from the thing we want the most, which is a sense of ourselves and a sense of being at home with ourselves.