Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  SLD: But do you have this feeling that you can be more satisfied and happy in the moment now?

  LC: I do, and I’m very grateful to Roshi and to the periods of training I’ve gone through with him and to his friendship, an unconditional acceptance, for that feeling of relaxation.

  SLD: Is there an easier way to reach that stage or do you have to go through this hard Roshi school?

  LC: I think it just happens. I don’t even think it’s because of Roshi. He’s the instrument somehow, which makes these things possible sometimes. I don’t think it’s anything he does. I don’t think it’s anything you do. I think that this anxiety dissolves from time to time and it may return. But for the moment somehow it’s dissolved and I was able to do good work.

  SLD: So the depressions that you suffered from very much in your earlier days—

  LC: They’ve lifted. They’ve lifted completely.

  SLD: So aging is quite nice?

  LC: In my case, it’s been a great blessing.

  SLD: But there must be some hard part of it.

  LC: Well, I think the collapse of the body is an aspect to it. I’m not in old age. I think I’m in my good period before the onset of the diseases that eventually kill you. I think it was Tennessee Williams who said, “Life is a fairly well-written play, except for the third act.” It’s a very bad third act. [Chuckles.]

  SLD: But for you it was the best so far.

  LC: Well, just beginning the third act is fine. I don’t know how the third act will unfold, but it doesn’t unfold very well for anybody. So I’m probably in the most graceful period that I’ve ever experienced before the onset of the unpleasant destruction of the body, which is inevitable. I’m very lucky to be in that period.

  SLD: Do you see there is a big difference between aging for a man and for a woman?

  LC: Women say it is. Most of the women I talk to about it say, “You’re lucky, we’re finished at whatever-it-is.” But I know a lot of women my age who are also dealing with it very gracefully—and very gratefully. A lot of people, men and women, are just relieved that a certain aspect of the struggle is over.

  SLD: Which aspect is this?

  LC: Mating, courting, marriage. Or the ceaseless search for a companion. Finally, one senses that one is alone and that it’s not that bad—in fact, it even may be sweet. My sister’s in that situation also. She lost her husband a few years ago. They were married for thirty or forty years. And it was difficult at the beginning for her. But she’s a very active person. She’s five years my elder. And I see that she’s settled into a life without criticism, without commentary, no one to review her activities or her thought or her speech, and she seems to be experiencing a great deal of contentment from that.

  SLD: But don’t you miss a companion?

  LC: But I have companionship.

  SLD: But don’t you miss a woman in your life?

  LC: Oh, there are women in my life, but …

  SLD: A woman? The woman.

  LC: The woman. I don’t as yet. I don’t know what it will be like tomorrow or next week, but at the moment I have very close friends. There’s not the woman. But I don’t have a sense of unbearable loneliness or any sense of anxiety about it. And sometimes women are kind enough to sleep over in a less-intense capacity than I may have chosen before. So it’s not as though I don’t have the intimacy of women from time to time.

  SLD: Do you miss those intense experiences?

  LC: I was never very good at enjoying it. I was drawn to those intense experiences, and obsessed with those intense experiences for much of my life, but I can’t say that I really enjoyed them.

  SLD: How did you feel about them?

  LC: Well, I generally gave myself a bad review.

  SLD: So … you had to perform?

  LC: I think there was an aspect of performance and a severe review of the episode. And a sense that the performance had not really been stunning. But more accurately than that, there was a sense of anxiety that was the background of the whole enterprise, and that sense of anxiety seems to have lifted. So I find I can enjoy both men and women, because even when you meet men there is a kind of war dance going on; there’s a kind of sexual dance going on with women and a kind of war dance going on with men. And it’s very agreeable to have those dances confined to one or two steps rather than the acrobatics that usually attended them.

  SLD: You wrote once that a man never gets over the first sight of a naked woman.

  LC: I think that’s true and certainly our Western art confirms that. And I love doing nudes also … drawings. Yes, and I marvel at the insistence of that mechanism that is placed in us because it never disappears and one is always shocked, stunned, surprised, delighted by that apparition of “the other,” especially at the height of her reproductive capacities, that youth, that promise, that vitality. That is the great sustaining energy in the human situation. So no, we’re designed not to grow tired. We don’t get a chance to see it that often as we get older, but when we do … And of course the culture completely understands that, so it’s continually presenting us with pictures, whether they actually occur in the flesh in our lives it’s really not important anymore, because there are so many opportunities to see beauty, to see beautiful people. They’re on the screen, they’re on the billboards, they’re everywhere. I don’t see that as some sort of indication of the degeneration of our civilization. I see it as the affirmation of that mechanism that is in all of us.

  SLD: You’re talking about actors, actresses, everything …

  LC: Yes, it’s there.

  SLD: I’m thinking of one of the poems again that you wrote. I don’t know it by heart but … “Because of a Few Songs.”

  LC: Oh yeah. I like that poem.

  SLD: Could you read that please? It’s about what we are talking about now.

  LC: [Reads poem.] I was happy with that little poem.

  SLD: Why?

  LC: I wanted to thank everybody. I wanted to thank the women who had bent over the bed and covered me up like a baby that is shivering.

  SLD: But why do you think women have been so kind to you? Why do women want to show themselves naked?

  LC: Well, I’m not the only guy that has this experience. This is what goes on between men and women. I don’t want to break this news to you, Stina. [Laughs.]

  SLD: [Laughs.] … but it is not news either that you have a special gift, that there are an abundance of women who will happily do that for you …

  LC: Where are they now that we need them?

  SLD: Well, I have a bunch of friends at home …

  LC: You get stuck with a certain kind of reputation that, like all reputations, have some truth to them but mostly are deeply inaccurate and I certainly don’t feel any mastery in this enterprise.

  SLD: But you’re not unhappy with the reputation either?

  LC: Well, I’ve met a number of women in my life who refused to come close to me because of that reputation. There are a lot of women—I’m talking over the years when I say a lot of women; there’s not bevies of women that are waiting for me outside of every door. But there have been a number of women who have refused any kind of intimacy—I’m not talking about sexual intimacy—because they just didn’t want to be a name on a list. And there never really was a list. But there were women, modest women, who had a certain sense of themselves, who simply didn’t want to be numbered among the women that I was supposed to have enjoyed. So it’s not always been a benefit. On the other hand, having had the reputation as a poet or a writer or a singer, I often was not obliged to have to present my credentials to everybody. So that was agreeable.

  SLD: When you write about Marianne and the time you spent a very long time ago on Hydra with her and you present her as a woman who gave you a lot of nice warmth and order and flowers on the table, a sandwich when you needed it—

  LC: Yes, she did.

  SLD: Is that a kind of romantic era in your life?

  LC: I don’t think my characterization
of it is romantic; I think it’s accurate.

  Marianne happened to be on the island the last time I was on Hydra, which was just two years ago. I hadn’t been there for many years and she happened to be visiting the island at the same time and we spent a very pleasant evening together. I made dinner for her and we talked and it was a very sweet moment. But she was very, very helpful to me. Helpful hardly begins to describe it. She created the atmosphere in which I could work. And for that, of course, she has my gratitude.

  SLD: But you don’t feel sad that you couldn’t stay within this …

  LC: I was constitutionally unable to stay with anybody at that time. We had a long association. The periods of absence began to get longer and longer until we realized we weren’t really living together. But we did live together for some years and that was a period of great enrichment.

  SLD: Can you give your son advice or would you like to teach him how to avoid the most difficult mistakes?

  LC: I listen to him for advice. He seems to have a better handle on it than I do. He’s very competent in these matters.

  What I do enjoy in my relationship with my son is that we have the same work. That’s really a wonderful thing to have with one’s child. I’ve been going to his concerts around town. He’s been playing in small clubs. I have a drink with him or a cigarette backstage and I see he’s nervous and he knows that I understand that feeling. And I watch him play his songs. They’re wonderful. And we have that in common. And it creates a real bond above and beyond just the filial relationship—the fact that we know the work of the other.

  SLD: He’s brave because it must be very difficult to be in the same trade as a very … his father had so much fame …

  LC: I know, I know. He is. He has a lot of courage. But I was speaking to a journalist yesterday who had interviewed Adam when he came here for a concert. And she asked him that question. She said, “Isn’t it hard to have Leonard Cohen as your father and begin in the music business?”

  SLD: He will have that question many times.

  LC: And he said, “He’s my dad.” Which I thought was a very sweet answer to my ears.

  SLD: Why do you think that you had such a hard time reaching to the state of mind that you’re in now?

  LC: I don’t think anybody determines it or understands it. I don’t think we can really penetrate into these matters.

  SLD: You’re not so interested in the psychological explanation?

  LC: No, I don’t trust them. As I say in that song, “I know that I’m forgiven but I don’t know how I know / I don’t trust my inner feelings, inner feelings come and go.” I think that psychological explanations can be valuable and psychotherapy can be valuable for some people. But the fundamental question of how and why people are as they are is something that we can’t penetrate and is part of a plan that we simply cannot grasp and the feelings that arise we don’t determine. What we’re going to see next we don’t determine, what we’re going to hear next, taste next, feel next, or think next we don’t determine.

  And yet we have this sense that we’re running the show. So if anything is relaxed in my mind it’s the sense of control or the quest for meaning. I say in that song “Alexandra Leaving,” “You who were bewildered by a meaning, whose code was broken, crucifix uncrossed, say good-bye to Alexandra leaving, say good-bye to Alexandra lost.” Though I wouldn’t claim it as my own, I’ve had that temporary relaxation of concern for the meaning. It’s none of my business.

  SLD: Yeah, I like those lines very much: “I don’t trust my inner feelings, inner feelings come and go.” [Laughs.]

  LC: Yes, and it seems to me that the psychological establishment today has placed a great deal of emphasis on getting in touch with your inner feelings. Of course, it has some kind of value. But my experience is that there is no fixed self. There’s no one whom I can locate as the real me and dissolving the search for the real me is relaxation, is the content of peace. But these recognitions are temporary and fleeting. Then we go back to thinking that we really know who we are.

  SLD: And who are you today?

  LC: [Laughs.] I’m your guest.

  SLD: Your “secret life” that you sing about—

  LC: I love that song. I loved it the moment Sharon brought it to me. I had been working on that lyric for years and I had about fifty verses and I pared them down and that was the first song we wrote together. I was so happy with that song when Sharon brought it to me with the melody.

  SLD: It’s wonderful, it’s really wonderful. You told me about honesty, being honest …

  LC: I say, “I smile when I’m angry, I cheat and I lie, I do what I have to do to get by / But I know what is wrong and I know what is right and I die for the truth in my secret life.”

  SLD: Is the truth important for you?

  LC: No, I’ve never been a great seeker after the truth. I wasn’t aware of any lies. I wasn’t aware that anybody was putting anything over on me or that God or the universe was trying to trick me. So I never had a sense of a quest for the truth.

  SLD: Did you have a quest for being honest?

  LC: I didn’t have a quest. I think that’s the background of any writer’s work is trying to be honest. Except for the typing, which is labor of itself, that’s what the work is: trying to approach some ideal of honesty. And you never really get there and you never really should. Because you don’t know the truth of this whole enterprise. No one knows the truth. I tried to say that in that song “Boogie Street”: “Though all the maps of blood and flesh are posted on the door there’s no one who has told us yet what Boogie Street is for.” You may have the maps of Boogie Street and the genetic code and all the mechanics may be displayed but what the whole enterprise is about … no one has a handle on that.

  SLD: Do you look back upon your life a lot?

  LC: No, I don’t.

  SLD: One always views you as a part not of the sixties movements but of your certain generation but you were always older than the generation you kind of belonged to.

  LC: Yes, in a sense that’s true. I was always at least ten years older than the great figures of the sixties.

  SLD: And you wore a suit.

  LC: I always wore a suit. I grew up in a family that manufactured clothing and my teenage years were spent before the popularity of blue jeans. So those were clothes that were never really natural to me.

  SLD: Did you take a bar mitzvah?

  LC: Oh, of course. I grew up in a world that has almost passed away. In a little corner of North America, the Jewish community of Montreal, which still is a very strong community with a very integrated sense of responsibility and hospitals and charity and—

  SLD: You have a poem about this too. “The one who says he’s not a Jew is not a Jew.”

  LC: Oh yeah. I said, “Anyone who says I am not a Jew is not a Jew. I’m sorry but this decision is final.” Because when I went up to Mount Baldy, there was criticism from certain circles that I’d abandoned my religion, that I’d converted to something. So I just wrote that joke.

  SLD: And you added that you were voted the most well-dressed man in Montreal or was it in Canada?

  LC: There was a list of credentials at the bottom of that poem. I think I removed them but maybe I’ll put them back because people seemed to think they were funny. I just listed a number of the most absurd credentials that I could come up with. Somebody sent me a clipping from a Montreal newspaper. It was determined that I was one of the best-dressed men in Montreal.

  SLD: The best-dressed man.

  LC: I may have said that. I may have exaggerated in the poem.

  SLD: So what do you think of what you see in Paris? Here you see a lot of very well-dressed people, very beautiful people, very rich—

  LC: Yeah, I’m not in their league.

  SLD: But what do you think of the way of life?

  LC: I don’t think I really know the way of life, although I’ve lived in Paris. I don’t think there is a way of life. There are certain styles and traditions in
these great cities. But people are just trying to get by.

  SLD: And do you have a feeling that you are helping them to get by, that you are helping people?

  LC: Well, I’m pitching in. Like you are, like everybody is. Doing my tiny part. But I think one learns early in this kind of activity that the part one plays is very, very limited.

  SLD: But now the part you play is going to be very much more exposed.

  LC: But even so, even with a great hit song, which I probably won’t have, but even with that … there are so many other activities and influences and forces at work on a human psyche that it would be supremely ignorant to believe that your effect has any precedence, or even prominence or even reality.

  SLD: But the fact that you are now releasing a new album … is that because you felt the need to publish your new songs and sing your new songs, or have you responded to a demand?

  LC: It’s part of the work, just like promoting it is part of the work. It’s my work, it’s my job. I’ve always felt that unemployment is a great distress, both in society and in the individual. So I’m very happy to be totally and fully employed, with the same intensity as the life I lived at Mount Baldy, so this is just the fruits of that work.

  SLD: Are you nervous?

  LC: No.

  SLD: Are you going back home to write the new album?

  LC: I’d like to. I don’t think of it as the new album but I would like to continue writing. I also have a record I’m working on, which is just my own songs but I would like to continue working with Sharon. We’ve got into the habit of working together now, the three of us every day, and we don’t seem to want to let each other go now. They came here just as a kind of treat. The record company offered them [the chance] to spend a week in Paris but I’ve involved them now in the interviews and they were supposed to go back after Paris while I continue on to Spain and Germany and Italy. But I asked them if they wanted to come and they’ve agreed. So we’re going to spend yet another two or three weeks together. We’ve spent the better part of the last two years together.