13
COHEN COULD see the flames from South Central Los Angeles reflected in his kitchen. The 1992 riots skirted his life, destroying the grocery store, musical supply store, and electronics store that he patronized. “From my balcony I could see five great fires. The air was thick with cinders [but] having been writing about such things for so long, it was no surprise.” Los Angeles has always seemed an odd city for Cohen. He had grown up in the tight urban community of Montreal and spent time in seclusion on Hydra; L.A. offered the advantages of neither. It was a disembodied sprawl with a gift for the superficial and a civic amorality. The air was bad and the film industry had spread its corrupt charm, but the winters were mild. Jack Kerouac had described the city as a place where “those soft California stars … are lost in the brown halo of the huge desert encampment L.A. really is.” But it had certain advantages; there were musicians and studios. And there was Roshi.
Cohen lived close to the Cimarron Zen Center. There, and at the Mt. Baldy Zen Center, Cohen continued his study of what he called “a training in self-reform.” Cohen redefined himself to suit his context. “It’s very dangerous for someone to describe themselves as a poet. I just think I’m a songwriter living in L.A. and, as Serge Gainsbourg said of himself, I’m kind of a pseudo-poet. I like that.”
In a recent poem, “The Mist of Pornography,” Los Angeles served as a backdrop:
When you rose out of the mist of pornography
with your talk of marriage and orgies
and I was a mere boy of 57 trying to make a fast buck in the slow lane
and it was ten years too late when I finally got the most beautiful girl
on the Hollywood hill
to go with her lips to the sunless place
and the art of song was in my bones
and the coffee died for me and I never answered any phone calls
and I said a prayer for whoever called and didn’t leave a message
and this was my life in Los Angeles[.]
In an earlier poem, “My Life in Art,” he had a similar feeling about the city’s gift for destruction. “Six-fifty. Ruined in Los Angeles. I should start smoking again. I want to die in her arms and leave her.”
In the Los Angeles Times Cohen described himself as a committed songwriter who rarely ventured out into the maelstrom of the city, although he observed it constantly and found in it a healthy level of discomfort. He thought the incongruities of the city were fascinating: through Zen and the Cimarron center, L.A. was the source of his spiritual life; through the music and record business, it was the source of his popularity.
Geologically and politically unstable, Los Angeles was the harbinger of the next millennium, a perfect backdrop for his album The Future, Cohen’s first in four years. Originally titled “Busted,” the record was to be recorded in Montreal, but when he started to work in Los Angeles with Jennifer Warnes again as a backup vocalist for “Democracy,” he saw the value of staying there to do the entire album. Musicians from the 1988 tour contributed, notably Bobby Metzger, Steve Meador, and Bobby Furgo.
“Democracy” was culled from more than eighty verses that had been written over the past several years. Don Henley performed the song at the MTV ball in Washington celebrating the January 1993 inauguration of President Bill Clinton. “Closing Time,” with its hoedown feel, received radio play, but had the same difficult genesis. Cohen had recorded another version of the song, the result of wrestling with the verses for over two years, but he came “to the painful decision that I hadn’t written it yet.” He put down several tracks but felt he “couldn’t get behind the lyric.” He dumped the tracks and started over in March 1992 with a new melody and verses.
“Anthem” was borrowed from Kabbalistic sources, especially the sixteenth-century rabbi Isaac Luria. It was one of the most difficult songs Cohen had ever written, taking almost a decade to complete. He recorded it three times, with one version for Various Positions and another for I’m Your Man, mixed with strings, voices, and overdubs. It was finished, he explained, “but when I listened to it there was something wrong with the lyric, the tune, the tempo. There was a lie somewhere in there, there was a disclosure that I was refusing to make. There was a solemnity that I hadn’t achieved.” Only when he reworked it for The Future did he “nail it.” Songwriting begins for him not in the form of an idea, but in the form of an image. He explained:
the way I do things is that I uncover the song and discern what it’s about through the actual writing of it. Every song begins with that old urgency to rescue oneself, to save oneself. And it’s quite a powerful gnawing at the spirit. It’s not at all evident at the beginning of the process what it [the song] is about.
Shaping the album is a darkening view of the political and moral developments of contemporary history, broadening the usual focus from his own despair. The title song, “The Future,” was originally called “If You Could See What’s Coming Next” and underwent extensive revision, occupying almost sixty pages in Cohen’s notebooks.
The album sold over one hundred thousand copies in Canada in its first four months, earning platinum status, and the video for “Closing Time” won a Juno award for best rock video of 1994. It featured a boozy Cohen in a honky-tonk club, Toronto’s Matador, singing:
And the whole damn place goes crazy twice
and it’s once for the Devil and it’s once for Christ
but the Boss don’t like these dizzy heights
we’re busted in the blinding lights
of Closing Time
Rebecca De Mornay partly directed and re-edited the video.
Cohen worked hard to promote the album, giving interviews, sharing his anguish over the songs with journalists and the public. At the Toronto launch party for the album, he signed a white leather shoe offered to him with his name and words borrowed from Beautiful Losers: “magic is afoot.” In the video accompanying “The Future,” Cohen was filmed standing in water which rises past the knees of his well-tailored suit. “A pessimist is someone who is waiting for it to rain,” he has said. “But I’m already soaked to the skin.” On March 21, 1993, Cohen won another Juno, this time for best male vocalist. In accepting Cohen said, “Only in a country like this with a voice like mine could I receive such an award.”
In April of that year, after six weeks of rehearsals on the large sound stage at The Complex in Los Angeles, Cohen toured to support the album, playing twenty-eight concerts in Europe. Unlike the ’88 tour, Cohen played larger halls, often stadiums or ice rinks, which created sound and recording problems. Soundchecks were problematic and the audiences often didn’t fill the vast halls. Cohen was also suffering neck and shoulder pain which made traveling and performing more difficult. De Mornay joined him for part of the tour.
A North American tour followed. Allen Ginsberg attended the show at New York’s Paramount Theater and remarked on Cohen’s “gritty realistic voice … and the elegant ease of irony with which he thanked overzealous screamers and demanders in the audience—the language bitter, disillusioning like a practiced (Buddhist) Yankee-Canadian, always surprising.” At the Vancouver concert Cohen was interrupted when he sang “let’s do something crazy,” from “Waiting for the Miracle.” From the back of the Orpheum Theatre a woman’s voice cried out, “Yessss, Leonard.” After the laughter died down, he repeated the line, and the woman again responded. A third attempt brought the same response, even more longingly shouted. Cohen strolled upstage with the mike, and looking into the darkness, said, “There is nothing like an idea whose force does not diminish with repetition.”
He was listed second among the top ten live performances in Boston in 1993, after Peter Gabriel. The Boston Globe wrote that “Leonard Cohen wrapped the most exquisite, sad poetry around exquisite chamber rock at the Berklee Performance Center.” After the tour and the hype and the publicity, Cohen had had enough. He canceled a proposed tour of Eastern Europe in favor of some rest and spiritual renewal, beginning his most intense and sustained involvement with Roshi.
In September 1993, an hour-long special on his work, “The Gospel According to Leonard Cohen,” was aired on CBC Radio with a long interview recorded in Montreal. Then, on October 5, 1993, it was announced that Cohen had won a Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for his contribution to Canadian music. Presentation of the ten-thousand-dollar award was made in Ottawa on November 26 by the Governor General of Canada with a gala tribute to Cohen and the other winners the following evening at the National Arts Center. One of the highlights of the gala was dinner with the acclaimed Quebec singer Gilles Vigneault, also a winner, and a third guest, Pierre Trudeau, whom Cohen had long admired for his leadership during difficult times. That fall, Cohen and Trudeau both had books on the bestseller lists.
The attention and tributes created a curious blend of melancholy and satisfaction for Cohen. “I feel like a soldier,” he said just hours before receiving his award. “You may get decorated for a successful campaign or a particular action that appears heroic but probably is just in the line of duty. You can’t let these honors deeply alter the way you fight. If you do, I think you are really going to get creamed in the next battle. And I do feel like I am on the frontline of my own life.” When asked what these honors meant to him, Cohen laughingly answered, “The implication is—this is it!” But he welcomed the tributes in his own country: “It is agreeable to have this recognition.”
Coinciding with the Governor General’s award was the release on November 13, 1993, of his long-awaited collection of poems and songs, Stranger Music. It was a book that had been in the works since the mid-eighties. Jack McClelland had long urged Cohen to assemble a collection of his best work. In a 1989 video that Adrienne Clarkson made for CBC television, Cohen is shown at his kitchen table selecting works with her and joking that it should be called “Everything I’m Not Embarrassed By.” At other times, it was to be titled “New Selected Poems” and, later, “If the Moon Has a Sister, It’s Got to be You, Selected Poems and Songs.” Stranger Music, its final title, is a many-sided pun. It ironically refers to the nature of his writing and music and also alludes to the music publishing company he started up in the late sixties after “The Stranger Song” on his first album.
The original cover for the book was to be a “primitivist, protuberant purple derrière,” set against a tomato-red background. Instead, his publisher chose a moody but evocative black and white photograph of Cohen. He had trouble determining the content of the book; in addition to poems, he wanted it to contain his songs, or at least a good part of them. By 1990, he had done all the work and “came up with three books: a short book, a middle-sized book, and a long book. I established this index, and the long book was prepared. It’s done, it’s finished, but at a certain point I lost interest in the project. I thought it should have a preface. I thought it should have something else besides the poems and the songs, and then I became distracted with other matters.”
Cohen later admitted that another cause for delay was that he “could never get around to confronting the various dismalities that were presented [to] me, just the meagreness of the whole thing [the book project].” He turned to his friend Nancy Bacal to assist him, admitting that he didn’t know where to begin. For months the two worked daily to select, revise, cut, and restore texts. His goal, according to Bacal, was to “select the pieces that express the place he finally got to rather than the road taken there.” He wanted to eliminate the poems of searching or what he called “the messy ones.” He also wanted works of simple but refined language. Then Rebecca De Mornay became involved, often arguing for inclusion of the so-called “messy” works, which demonstrated not the finished precision of his best writing but items that spilled over with emotion and feeling.
Late night sessions, debates, and numerous faxes went back and forth among Cohen, Bacal, and De Mornay until the manuscript was finished. In his words, he wanted
a book that was a good, entertaining read from beginning to end. I tried to weed out the lyrics that didn’t stand up as poems, and weed out the poems that didn’t stand up on the page. I can never actually give up, so I keep moving words around. I don’t alter things substantially, but there are nuances that change, expressions that I can no longer get behind, and phrases that my voice doesn’t wrap around easily.
The final text of the book provides a chronological selection of his work, incorporating poetry, prose, and song. Noticeably absent, however, are any passages from The Favorite Game, his most autobiographical novel, perhaps an indication of his self-protective nature, even at this stage of his career. He also de-emphasizes the Montreal aspect of the collection, leaving out most of the poems about the city in favor of those dealing with foreign locales. The original selection from Beautiful Losers avoided sex, but then he realized it had to be there, since it was an essential component of the novel. The most widely cited text is Death of A Lady’s Man, reworked and in some cases re-ordered from the original book, with new headings for some sections. Cohen himself has said that he is happiest with this version of the work, for he at last made the book “coherent,” ridding it of a great deal that could not be penetrated in the original text.
Albums are only partially represented—“Dress Rehearsal Rag” from Songs of Love and Hate, “Heart with No Companion” from Various Positions, “Jazz Police,” from I’m Your Man, and “Be for Real” from The Future all missing. Some notable poetic works one would expect to see are also not present—for example, “Go by Brooks,” “Out of the Land of Heaven,” and “The Bus.” There are also some curious textual changes: the original version of “The Escape” was untitled in The Energy of Slaves and featured the line “I’m glad we ran off together.” In Stranger Music he elaborates this to read “I’m glad we got over the wall / of that loathsome Zen monastery.” The poetic forms of three songs—“Suzanne,” “Avalanche,” and “Master Song”—are replaced by their recorded versions. There is a section entitled “Uncollected Poems,” with eleven works ranging from 1978 to 1987 and written in Paris, Mt. Baldy, Hydra, and Montreal. This section caused some disagreement among the three editors, and two works were excluded from the finished manuscript, one dealing with Robert Hershorn.
Jack McClelland was now acting as Cohen’s agent and he had to convince Doug Gibson, now publisher of McClelland & Stewart, that Cohen preferred informal agreements. In lieu of a contract, a letter of agreement was drawn up and Gibson accepted it, although he stipulated that the volume was to be a “major new book by Leonard Cohen with a heavily autobiographical slant, i.e., a lengthy introduction and a central text that contained his finest poems.” By January 1990, however, Cohen had lost interest in the project and his son’s accident in September of that year further delayed the book.
The matter of an introduction remained contentious. Cohen wanted a short statement and Gibson was pushing for an autobiographical essay. Disagreements slowed progress, while song lyrics were added. Everyone was becoming impatient. By August 1991, a proposed twenty-thousand-word introduction was dropped, although Gibson thought it would be the key selling point of the book. He suggested a less formal piece, perhaps “reflections on his career, reflections on his life … think of this as a riff; introductory by virtue of its placement in the book.” Cohen still refused, choosing to keep the book clean, free from any introductory declaration.
Nevertheless, Stranger Music provides the most comprehensive single-volume collection of poems and lyrics now in print. It is important because most of his poetry has been out of print for years. For a younger generation of fans, his activity as a writer was a surprise; they were startled to learn that he wrote anything but songs. The volume reaffirms the union between poet and songwriter, which Cohen never separated. Cohen himself thought of the book as a sort of poetic autobiography: “I tried to eliminate poems that suffered from those youthful obscurities and rambling intoxications of language, poems that really didn’t stand up. I wanted my better poems to be around. What is here are the poems that survived my scrutiny. In any case, it’s selected poems, not collected poems.”
Reaction to Stranger Music was positive, although there were quibbles over the failure to print every song and every poem (the only volume to come close to a full publication of his lyrics is the dual language, Leonard Cohen, Canzoni da una stanza, edited by Massimo Cotto [Milan, 1993]). The book quickly went to number four on The Globe and Mail national bestseller list and a second hardcover printing was necessary.
The book was also published in a limited edition: one hundred and twenty-five signed and numbered copies, specially bound and elaborately presented in a clamshell box which contained three signed, limited-edition prints drawn by Cohen. Even priced at three hundred and fifty dollars each, the books quickly sold out. The sudden reappearance of his earlier works in paperback prompted him to comment that “it’s very agreeable at fifty-eight to see these books you wrote at twenty-five, twenty-eight. I’m delighted. You do have that sense of vindication of people who were really misunderstood in their time and then re-discovered.” His reputation as a professional depressive, he felt, wasn’t entirely warranted. “I’m really not all that morose. But you get nailed with something and every time they call your name up on the computer it reads ‘depressed and suicidal.’ I’m probably one of the few people that actually have jokes and a few light moments in their songs and poems.”
Following the necessary publicity for Stranger Music, Cohen largely withdrew from public life to spend time with Roshi and act again as his principal secretary. This meant a grueling schedule, not only in the daily activities at Mt. Baldy but in the visits Roshi made to various Rinzai Zen centers in New Mexico, Puerto Rico, Vienna, and upstate New York.
In July 1994, Cohen came to New York to spend a day shooting the video of “Dance Me to the End of Love” from his new release Cohen Live. In between takes and re-takes, he visited his sister Esther and her husband Victor, who was suffering from a deteriorating illness. He extended his stay to be with them; within a month Victor had died.
Cohen Live featured performances from his 1988 and 1993 tours, mixing new versions of old songs. Cohen felt that this album represented “the final pages of a chapter” that began with Various Positions and continued with I’m Your Man and The Future. “These are old songs refashioned,” he said. “The voice has deepened after fifty-thousand cigarettes.” The critical reception was mixed. Time magazine wrote, “This glum, melancholy collection should be dispensed only with large doses of Prozac.”
After the promotional tour for the live album, Cohen concentrated on Zen and his writing, admitting that the quiet of the monastary was only occasionally disrupted by the sound of his composing on his electric keyboard. And occasionally a glass: “I only drink professionally,” he told one interviewer in late 1993, “I don’t practice meditation anymore. I practice drinking. My Zen master gave up trying to instruct me in spiritual matters but he saw that I had a natural aptitude for drinking.”
Cohen narrated The Tibetan Book of the Dead for the National Film Board of Canada, lending his authoritative voice to the project. Barrie McLean, co-producer and director of the NFB film, first asked Cohen to revise the original narration, which had been prepared for the Japanese version. Cohen declined, recommending Douglas Penick, a Buddhist expert, who rewrote it. Cohen then recorded the narration for the two-part film, the first entitled “A Way of Life;” the second, “The Great Liberation.” A co-production between NHK Japan, Mistral Film, France, and the National Film Board of Canada, the film was a remarkable portrait of life in the Himalayas and the rituals of Buddhist practice. In the film, monks read the Bardo thodol, or Tibetan Book of the Dead, to the dying and then reread it during the forty-nine days after physical death to assist the consciousness in choosing the right path. Roshi believed the book to be “a Tibetan fairy tale” and Cohen partially shared his view. “I respect the book and I respect the tradition,” he said, “but it’s not the one I’m studying in. But fairy tales have within them deep truths, even if they are expressed as paradoxes…. the major advice [in the work] is to view all things that happen to you as projects of your self. Not to run from them but to embrace them, and that is always valuable.” When asked himself if he was afraid of death, Cohen answered that it’s not the event that is worrying, it’s the preliminaries: “the event itself seems perfectly natural.”
His musical profile had rarely been higher. He appeared on Elton John’s record Duets, singing Ray Charles’s “Born to Lose” with John, and “Everybody Knows” had been used on the soundtrack of Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan’s Exotica. “I’m Your Man” was featured in Nanni Moretti’s Italian film Caro Diario and “Waiting for the Miracle,” “Anthem,” and “The Future” were all on the soundtrack of Oliver Stone’s controversial film Natural Born Killers. Johnny Cash covered “Bird on a Wire” on American Recordings.
In honor of Cohen’s sixtieth birthday on September 21, 1994, a book of poems, analyses, and appreciations of his work was published. Titled Take This Waltz, it included contributions by Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Louis Dudek, Allen Ginsberg, Kris Kristofferson, Jack McClelland, Phil Spector, and Jennifer Warnes. Otherwise, his sixtieth birthday, spent flying to Vienna with Roshi, passed with little attention: “I was ready to pass it off as another irrelevant occasion.” But the congratulations offered by numerous friends and well-wishers forced him to reconsider it. Months after the event, he began to understand its significance:
I remember when I was about forty-five going into a sanzen with Roshi and his saying, ‘Your generation is finished.’ And it was such refreshing news. For somehow when you grow up in North American underground culture, you always feel you’re representing the cutting edge and that you speak for the young and you speak for the alternative…. Forget it, Leonard, you’re not that any more. Look at yourself. It was refreshing news. It’s for the young…. So it was with the 60th birthday, although I had been prepared to ignore it, as I ignored all my birthdays. There was something about it that was indisputably connected with the threshold of old age. It was a landmark of some kind in my own tiny little journey.
As soon as I absorbed it, I was able to relax in a way that I had never relaxed before because I really thought, well, it was okay, it is the end of one’s youth so to say…. In this culture you can extend it, you really can extend a personal vision of your own youth up to the age of sixty and then there is something indisputable about the end of youth; now you can begin something else. Well it is the threshold of something else.
A poem published in June 1994 articulated some of these feelings:
On the path of loneliness
I came to the place of song
and tarried there
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 ayin, 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.