I walk out sometimes on October mornings in Japan, the sky as cloudless as in the High Himalaya, the first touch of winter bringing an edge of chill, a sense of dark, to the afternoons, and all I can think of, on occasion, is the end of Shakespeare’s early comedy
Love’s Labour’s Lost.
Berowne has charmed himself and us with his flights of fancy, and he is minutes away from escorting his paramour offstage, as comedy decrees, when suddenly a messenger appears, in black, out of nowhere. The princess’s father—he begins. Is dead, she says, knowing what he will say before he says it. Moments before its culmination, the comedy is upended, and everything is left wide open.
If he would truly have her hand, his love now says, turning to Berowne—though they had been about to walk off together, into a happy ending—he must take himself away from her for a year. To let Time try him, in part—to outstay the impatience of his youth—but also to see how his love of words can help the “groaning wretches” and “speechless sick” of an infirmary.
“To move wild laughter in the throat of death?” he says. That’s hardly possible. In that case, she responds, what use are any of his words? Either he must forswear his language, or find a tonic use for it.
I walk through the chill, sharp streets, the sky quite cloudless, the leaves turning, and what I see is what the play is saying, in a different key: everything falls away from us—the light, the dark, the warm afternoons—and all we can do is cry out in affirmation of our joy.
SUN AFTER DARK
I will visit a place entirely other than myself. Whether it is the future or the past need not be decided in advance.
—SUSAN SONTAG
A GATHERING AROUND A PERPLEXITY
In the falling mountain darkness, I pull my car off the high winding road, into a rough parking lot, and a man comes out to greet me: an older man, stooped a little and shaven-headed, in tattered black gown and woolen cap and glasses. He extends a hand, gives me a bow and, picking up my case, leads me off to a cabin. He worries about my “long drive,” asks if I’ll be okay here, heats up a pot of tea and slices some fresh bread for me. As night falls, he tells me to feel at home and says he knows a young woman he thinks I should be married to.
Then, since I will need some special clothes to join him in the austerities for which he has invited me, he leads me, this Old Testament gentleman, off into the chill, unlit night, to collect a gown and cap and pair of canvas sneakers for me. His home is a markedly simple place, a small black welcome mat outside its door. Inside are a narrow single bed, a tiny mirror, a dirty old carpet, and some puppies cavorting under the legend “Friends Are All Welcome.”
Farther inside, a pair of scissors, a few Kleenexes, a small shoulder bag with a Virgin Airlines tag attached to it, and, on a chest of drawers, a menorah. “This place is really quite a trip,” he tells me, smiling. “You enter a kind of science-fiction universe, which has no beginning and no end.” His own ragged gown, I notice, is held together with safety pins. The small Technics synthesizer in the next room is unplugged.
Leading me out into the dark, he climbs a steep path to where there are tall pine trees, and the outline of monks in the distance, a thousand stars. We slip into a cold, empty room, and he gives me instructions on how to sit. “The bottom half— the legs—should be really strong,” he says. “The rest should be fluid.”
Then, assessing my posture as serviceable, he leads me out into the mountain dark and into the
zendo,
or meditation hall, next door. Thirty or so figures, all in black, are sitting stock-still in the night. They are in the throes of a winter retreat,
rohatsu,
in which they will sit like this, all but uninterruptedly, for seven days. Monks patrol the aisles with sticks, ready to hit anyone who threatens to drop off. Every forty-five minutes or so, the practitioners are allowed to break from their
zazen
positions to relieve themselves in buckets in the woods, or in rough outhouses known and feared throughout the Zen community. Most of them use the breaks, however, to continue their meditation unbroken, marching, in spellbound, silent Indian file, round and around a central pine tree. My host, I notice, is probably thirty years older than most of the fresh-faced young men and women in attendance; yet as they walk around the tree, at top speed, he seems at least thirty years stronger, too.
At 2:00 a.m., after I head back to my cabin to get some sleep, there’s a knock on my door, and a flashlight in the dark, and it’s the rabbinical-seeming elderly man again, ready to vault up rough stone paths to join in morning chants. For half an hour or so, to the beat of a steadily pounded drum, the assembled students race through twenty-four pages of Japanese syllabary that mean nothing to them—my host, like many others, reciting the entire
Heart Sutra
from memory. Then he leads me back through the frosty night to his cabin, to show me the ninth-century text on which we’ll be hearing a
teisho,
or Zen discourse. It’s a fearless scripture, as bracing as a sudden blow to the skull. “Anything you may find through seeking,” the Zen master Rinzai warns, “will be only a wild fox spirit.”
The light has come back to the austere settlement, and the huge boulders outside my room look as if they’re buried in snow when I hear a knock again, and follow my sleepless host up again, through the black-and-white silence, to hear the
roshi,
or teacher of this community, deliver his daily talk. A small round figure in huge orange robes comes in, and two attendants help him onto a kind of throne. “What is this thing called love?” the man says, speaking in the old-fashioned tones of his northern Japanese dialect, translated by a young apprentice. “A child can befriend a dog and lick its rear end. Is that love? Is love just shaking hands? Dogs and cats and insects mate; is that love?
“You’ve been hypnotized,” he goes on. “You’ve got to take your mind to the laundry. Get it clean.” And, he concludes, “When a man is with a woman, he has to occupy her fully.”
Afterwards, we head out into what is now a dazzling blue-sky day. “Nine o’clock,” says Leonard Cohen, a penetrating glint in his eye, “and we’ve had several lives already today.”
Leonard Cohen is for most of us a figure of the dark, sitting alone sometime after midnight and exploring the harsh truths of suffering and loneliness. It’s four in the morning, the end of December, as one of his mournful songs begins, though in his recent work, like Thomas Merton in his way, he has seemed to look so intensely at the dark that something else comes through (there is a crack, a crack in everything, he sings, and that’s how the light gets in). His songs and poems have always been about letting go and giving things up, the voluntary poverty of a refugee from comfort.
Yet even those who see in him an explorer of chosen limits and the dark—even those who know that he turned down the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in Canada when he was thirty-four, lived in a bare house on the Greek island of Hydra that he bought with a $1,500 inheritance, and wrote, scored, and directed an entire film called
I Am a Hotel
—may be surprised to hear that the definitive ladies’ man and husky poet of the morning after is living now, year-round, in the Mount Baldy Zen Center, 6,250 feet above sea level, in the dark San Gabriel Mountains behind Los Angeles, serving, as he says, as “cook, chauffeur, and sometimes drinking-buddy” to a ninety-one-year-old Japanese man with whom he shares few words.
Cohen has, in fact, been a friend of Joshu Sasaki ever since 1973, though he has not made a fuss about it, and votaries will get clues to this part of his existence only from a couple of tiny elliptical vignettes in his 1978 book,
Death of a Lady’s Man,
and occasional songs—for example, “If It Be Your Will”—that, like his 1984 collection of psalms,
Book of Mercy,
express absolute submission. Apart from a twenty-six-year-old son, Adam, and a twenty-three-year-old daughter, Lorca, the Japanese
roshi
seems to be the one still point in Cohen’s endlessly turning life, and now the singer accompanies the man he calls his friend to Zen centers from Vienna to Puerto Rico, and goes through punishing retreats each month in which he does nothing but sit
zazen,
twenty-four hours a day for seven days on end.
The rest of the time, he works around the Zen center, shoveling snow, scrubbing floors, and—most enthusiastically— working around the kitchen (he tells me, with mischievous pride, that he has a certificate from the County of San Bernardino that qualifies him to work as waiter, busboy, or cook). For the monk here known as Jikan (or “Silent One”), all the things he’s famous for—a command of words, beautiful suits, a hunger for ideas, and a hypnotist’s ease at charming the world—are thrown aside. “In the
zendo,
” he tells me, not unhappily, “all of this disappears.” (“This” referring, I think, to his name, his past, the life he carries around within him.) “You don’t notice if this woman’s beautiful or ugly. If that man smells or doesn’t smell. Whoever you’re sitting next to, you just see their pain. And when you’re sitting, you feel nothing but the pain. And sometimes it goes, and then it’s back again. And you can’t think of anything else. Just the pain.” He pauses (and the
chanteur/enchanteur
slips out again). “And, of course, it’s the same with other kinds of pain, like broken hearts.”
The icon who’s been entertained and idolized by everyone from Prince Charles and Georges Pompidou to Joni Mitchell and Michelle Phillips; the regular visitor to the top of the European charts who’s inspired not one tribute album (like most legends) but a dozen; the Officer of the Order of Canada recently described, in
The United States of Poetry,
as “perhaps the continent’s most successful poet” seems to thrive on this. He’s too happy to write anymore, he tells me soon after I arrive (though, one day later, he’s showing me things he’s writing, towards a new
Book
of Longing
). And though the face is still strikingly reminiscent of Dustin Hoffman—especially if he were acting as Harold Bloom—it’s well hidden in the bobble cap that his
roshi
“commanded” him to wear. “This whole practice is mostly about terrifying you,” he says cheerfully. “But there’s a lot to be gained in those terrors. It gets you so efficiently into a certain place.”
And the place is one that Cohen has been journeying towards all his life, in a sense. “There’s a bias against religious virtue here,” he assures me, grinning, one morning, as bells toll outside and I smell sweet incense in the air and hear clappers knocking in the distance, “and it’s very appealing. So you never have the feeling that it’s Sunday school. And you never have the feeling that you’re abandoning some cavalier life, or getting into some goody-goody enterprise. Not at all. Not at all.” When a Buddhist magazine recently asked Cohen to conduct an interview with Sasaki, he gladly agreed, provided they could talk about “wine, women, and money.” And, to be sure, we’ve hardly been introduced for the first time before the disarming sinner-songwriter is using “pussy” and
“shunyata”
in the same sentence.
It’s not so much that Cohen has given up the world—he still has a duplex that he bought with two friends near the Jewish district on Fairfax (where his daughter currently lives), and when I visit him at two one morning, I hear the crackle of a transistor radio in his bedroom. The man with a gift for being in tune with the times is still doing things like providing the songs that are heard on the sound track of Oliver Stone’s state-of-the-art
Natural Born Killers,
appearing at Rebecca De Mornay’s side at the Academy Awards, and inspiring a new generation of grunge poets—to the point where Kurt Cobain famously sang, “Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld so I can sigh eternally.” But he’s nonetheless managed to come to L.A., archetypal center of spoiled sunshine, and turn it into a high, cold mountain training more rigorous than the army.
In some ways, he’s been there since the beginning. His songs, after all, have always been about obedience and war, pain and attention and surrender, and he’s always seemed a curiously old-fashioned, even forbidding figure who abhors clutter and goes it alone and yearns to be on his knees as well as on his toes— focused and penetrating and wild. The dark skies and spare spaces and mythic shapes around Mount Baldy feel uncannily like the landscape of a Leonard Cohen song.
Besides, the self-styled “Voice of Suffering” has never chosen to diversify his themes; he just goes deeper and deeper into them. The refrain that lights up his recent song “Democracy” actually appears in his novel
Beautiful Losers,
from thirty-two years ago; the poem he recently recited as a prologue to the album
Rare on
Air,
volume 1, was one he wrote for his first book, composed in part when he was in high school. Even thirty years ago, when he was known as a woman-hungry, acid-dropping, enfant terrible provocateur, he was writing, “Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.”
And for half a century almost, he’s been slipping in and out of view, playing games with the entity known as “Leonard Cohen.” There’s the small, upper-middle-class Jewish kid taking lessons in hypnotism, forming a country-and-western band called “The Buckskin Boys” and, while studying English at McGill, reciting verse over jazz at midnight like some wintry Kerouac. There’s the slightly older figure, scrupulously dissolute, and already the author of six books when he read his poem “Suzanne” over the phone to Judy Collins and she persuaded him to sing it himself, which led to his appearing, this uncertain-seeming theologian, at the Monterey Jazz Festival, at the Isle of Wight Festival, and on the client list of John Hammond (the man who discovered both Dylan and Springsteen). There’s the leading young poet in Canada who not only delivered lectures on “Loneliness and History” and composed a whole opera in the sixteenth-century verse form of
The Faerie Queene,
but also lost his rights to “Suzanne,” with the result that his first and most famous song to this day brings him no money at all.
He lived on the Greek island with his Norwegian love in the 1960s. He acquired a “small, cupboard-sized room” in the Chelsea Hotel, where Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Jimi Hendrix came through now and then. He took over a twelve-hundred-acre homestead in Franklin, Tennessee (rented from the writer of “Bye, Bye Love” for seventy-five dollars a month), and posed for photos in a Stetson. He got dissected by the novelist Michael Ondaatje in a book-length work of literary criticism; sold excerpts from his work to
Cavalier,
the skin magazine; appeared at one concert riding a white horse; and greeted an audience in Hamburg with the cry
“Sieg Heil!”
Cohen showed, in fact, an almost disquieting readiness to live out every romantic myth, from staying in a garret to moving to Greece (for its “philosophic climate”), to telling all his women that being true to them meant being untrue to his Muse. What this provoked, understandably, was a sense in many quarters that he was brashly courting success by pretending to ignore it. “If you listen carefully,” the
New York Times
said in 1973, “you are sometimes rewarded with a poet’s profound thoughts, sometimes with a pop star’s put-on.” Undeterred, Cohen continued to subvert his success with puckish gestures, following a book of poems called
The Spice-Box of Earth
with another called
Flowers
for Hitler,
scribbling up aphorisms on walls—“Change is the only aphrodisiac”—and then ascribing them to the Kama Sutra. Even his career seemed a game he was playing, as he teamed up with, of all people, Phil Spector, for the 1977 album
Death of a Ladies’
Man,
in which dark and serious inquiries into the nature of the soul got buried under a foot-thumping “Wall of Sound.” (Cohen himself called the album “a grotesque masterpiece.”) The final irony was that this overblown Vegas casino of a production may in fact have paved the way for the fuller, richer sounds of later albums that brought Cohen surging back onto the charts in his mid-fifties.