Sun After Dark (3 page)

Indeed, Cohen always seemed to have a gift for the last word. By the 1990s, the magazines that had long found him an irresistible target for put-downs were publishing articles with titles like “7 Reasons Leonard Cohen Is the Next Best Thing to God.” The head of one of New York’s most prestigious publishing houses was telling me that Cohen had “the best design sense of anyone I’ve met,” and the man who hadn’t performed live in New York for ten years was number one in Norway for seventeen weeks. Even the
New York Times,
his unwearying opponent for twenty-five years, was concluding, in 1995, “He is pretty extraordinary, when all is said and done.”

Now, as we sit in his cabin one cold December morning, a string of Christmas lights twinkling sadly from the roadside shack across the street, “Mike
Suzie” scrawled into the concrete, he’s telling me that he makes no claims to piety or knowledge: his training here is just a useful response to the “predicament” of his life. This “connection—the unavoidable presence of the Other— has driven us to religion,” he says, explaining why he thinks “the great religion is the great work of art.” We “form ourselves around these problems,” he goes on. “These problems exist prior to us, and we gather ourselves, almost molecularly, we gather ourselves around these perplexities. And that’s what a human is: a gathering around a perplexity.”

He sips some coffee from a cup with the logo of
The Future
on it, beside him the thick notebooks in which poems hundreds of verses long will get condensed, often, into a single six-verse song. Around us, as we sit, almost nothing else except a bottle of Sparkletts water, a few candles, a toothbrush, and, tucked into a light switch, a picture of the Winged Victory. Cohen has not slept, most likely, for six days. “It’s driven us to art,” he says, returning to his theme of the Other. “I mean, it’s so perplexing, the humiliations, the glories that are so abundant, and it’s such a dangerous undertaking. I was just looking through my notebooks, and I saw something nice. It was ‘I set out for love, but I did not know I’d be caught in the grip of an undertow. To be swept to a shore, where the sea needs to go, with a child in my arms, and a chill in my soul, and my heart the size of a begging-bowl.’ ”

And even on this lofty perch, with nothing visible but rock and tree and occasional sign prohibiting the throwing of snowballs, he doesn’t deny the “fixed self” that awaits him whenever he comes down from the mountain, and, in fact, goes out of his way to deride his presence on the mountaintop. “Everyone here is fucked-up and desperate,” he says brightly. “That’s why they’re here. You don’t come to a place like this unless you’re desperate.” Yet over and over, amidst the calculated irreverence, the gamesmanship and the crazy-wisdom subversiveness—one of the reasons he became a monk two years ago, he says, was “Roshi wanted me to do so for tax purposes”—I see something touching and genuine coming through. Leonard Cohen, I realize, is really trying, with all his body and his soul, to simplify himself as strictly as he does his word-strong verses.

One morning, at dawn, as we talk about Van Morrison and Norman Mailer and how “living in England is like living in a cabbage,” Cohen gets to talking of Cuba, and the time, just after the Revolution, when he was walking along the beach in his Canadian Army khaki shorts with his camping knife, imagining himself the only North American on the island, and got arrested as the first member of an invading force.

“So anyway, there I was, on the beach in Varadero, speculating on my destiny, when suddenly I found myself surrounded by sixteen soldiers with guns. They arrested me and the only words I knew at the time were
‘Amistad de pueblo.’
So I kept saying
‘Amigo! Amistad de pueblo!’
and finally they started greeting me. And they gave me a necklace of shells and a necklace of bullets and everything was great—”

Then, suddenly, he stops. “What time is it?”

I tell him and he says, “I shouldn’t be talking about my adventures when we’re about to listen to a wonderful
teisho.
” And Leonard Cohen disappears into the black-robed disciple again, and into a reverent silence.

Another day, another tale as short and abstract and mythic, almost, as any of his ballads about worshiping at the altar of beauty, as he suddenly volunteers to tell me about his last girlfriend. “When I met Rebecca [De Mornay],” he says, “all kinds of thoughts came into my mind, as how could they not when faced with a woman of such beauty? And they got crisscrossed in my mind. But she didn’t let it go further than that: my mind. And it did. And finally she saw I was a guy who just couldn’t come across.”

“ ‘Come across’?”

“In the sense of being a husband and having more children and the rest.” He stops. “And she was right, of course. But she was kind enough to forgive me. I had breakfast with her the other day, and I told her, ‘I know why you forgave me. Because I really, really tried.’ And she said, ‘Yes.’ ”

End of story, end of song.

At times, as I listened, spellbound against my will by this man with beautiful manners and a poet’s rare diction, moving back and forth between hippie existentialist and Old World scholar, now referring to “bread” and “tokes” and “beating the rap,” now talking in a high-pitched tone of “ancient” and “dismal” and “predicament,” I could see the coyote trickster who’s been working the press for three decades or more. I felt disconcerted, almost, by his very niceness, his openness, his courtesy, as he continually kept thanking me for “being kind enough to come here,” and tended to my every need as if I were the celebrity and he the poor journalist, referring to “what you’re nice enough to call my career.” I felt there was something excessive to his modesty, his unusually articulate and quick-witted sentences bemoaning his lack of articulacy and sharpness (“I’m sorry. You get this kind of spaciness at moments in retreats. They say
zazen
brings short-term memory loss”), his claiming not to know, after twenty years in L.A., how long it takes to drive to Santa Barbara.

I saw the seasoned seducer whom his friend Anjelica Huston recently called “part wolf, part angel,” and sensed that he could put “confidence” and “artist” together as easily as “pilgrim” and “mage.” Certainly a man so meticulous in clothes and manner was not going to be careless in his presentation of self—was, in fact, likely to be a master-craftsman of self.

Yet the trouble was, Cohen seemed more wise to this than anyone. “Secretly,” he told me cheerily, “the sin of pride as it’s manifested here is that we feel we’re like the Marines of the spiritual world: tougher, more reckless, more daring, more brave.” Asked about his early years, he confesses, “I think I was more interested in the poetic life and everything around it than the thing itself.” Nominating himself as “one of the great whiners,” he says that the
roshi
looks at him sometimes and says, “Attention to the world: need more Buddhism!”

And so, as time passes, I really do begin to feel I am watching a complex man trying to come clear, a still jangled, sometimes angry soul making a heroic attempt to reduce itself to calm. As day passes into night and day again, he comes into focus, and out again, like the sun behind clouds, now blazing with a lucent, high intensity, now more like the difficult brooder you might imagine from the records. “He’s a tiger,” I remember a woman in New York telling me, “a very complicated man. Complicated in a very grown-up way. I mean, he makes Dylan seem childish.” The first time she met him, she explained, he congratulated her on a book she’d written. As their meal went on, he added, “Your writing is a lot more interesting than you are.”

Cruelty has always been as disconcerting a part of his package as perversity. Yet when I talked to the people who tour with him I felt I was speaking to the Apostles. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone as gracious, as graceful, as generous as Leonard,” said Perla Batalla, who has been singing with him for eight years. “Once I’d been out on the road with Leonard, I couldn’t go out with anyone else.” His other backup singer, Julie Christensen, left a newborn baby at home to go out on tour with him—having seen her friends who’d been in his band come back “changed, philosophically changed, really on this kind of heightened awareness level.” His longtime accompanist, Jennifer Warnes, even recorded a whole album of Cohen songs she wanted to re-bring before the public.

All of them talk of how Cohen the singer seems of a piece with Cohen the Zen practitioner, making them sing and sing and sing the same song till sometimes they’ll break into tears, and wearing them out with his indefatigable three-hour, twelve-encore concerts. But all speak of his tours as if they were a kind of spiritual training. “He’ll give the same attention to the president of the country or to someone who’s just walked up to him on the street,” says Batalla, recalling how he rode on the bus like just another technician. Others mention his racing off to buy aspirin for them when they’re sick, or inviting them to his hotel room at night to drink hot chocolate made with water from the sink.

“In the ancient concert halls of Europe,” says Christensen, “you got this feeling that you’d really have to run if you weren’t telling the truth. It was a mystery bigger than me, and if I’d figured it out, I would be bigger than it.” Then, almost sheepishly, she adds, “I thought that kind of thing was corny before I toured with Leonard.” Batalla sometimes visits his home just to sit in absolute silence with her boss.

And so the days on the mountain go on, and every day at dawn young monks with clean, pure faces appear at my door with trays of food, and every day, when I visit Cohen in his cabin, he gives me green tea in a wineglass, or shows me paintings—flowing nudes and haggard self-portraits—he’s done on his computer, or reads me poems about the dissolution of self from a book he is putting together, which, like all his best work, sound like love songs or prayers or both, addressed to a goddess or to God.

One morning, in his bathroom, I come upon
The Shambhala
Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen.

“I like the fact they distinguish between Buddhism and Zen,” he says when I come out.

“What is the difference?”

He disappears—good Zen solution—into the bathroom to clean cups.

Another day, as the retreat is drawing to a close, the sky above my window grey and shriven and severe, he shows up with his hands dirty from fixing his toilet, and I try to get him to talk about his writing. “For me,” he says, his voice soft and beautiful, with a trace of Canada still hiding inside it, “the process is really more like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I’m stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it’s delicious and it’s horrible and I’m in it. And it’s not very graceful and it’s very awkward and it’s very painful”—you can hear the cadences of his songs here—“and yet there’s something inevitable about it.” But most of the writers he admires, preempting one’s criticism again, “are just incredible messes, as human beings. Wonderful and invigorating company, but I pity their wives and their husbands and their children.”

A crooked smile.

As for the songs, “I’ve always held the song in high regard,” he says, “because songs have got me through so many sinks of dishes and so many humiliating courting events.” Sometimes, he goes on, holding me with his commanding eloquence, his ill-shaven baritone compounded of Gauloises, Courvoisier, and a lifetime of late nights, he’ll catch a snatch of one of his songs on the radio, “and I’ll think: these songs are really good. And it’s really wonderful that they have been written, and more wonderful that they should have found a place in the heart. And sometimes I’ll hear my voice, and I’ll think: this guy has got to be the great comedian of his generation. These are hilarious: hilariously inept, hilariously solemn and out of keeping with the times; hilariously inappropriate.”

A line he’s used for years, I know, but still more than you’d expect from a man whose songs are covered by Willie Nelson and Billy Joel. “To me,” he continues, scraping at his sneakers with a knife, “the kind of thing I like is that you write a song, and it slips into the world, and they forget who wrote it. And it moves and it changes, and you hear it again three hundred years later, some women washing their clothes in a stream, and one of them is humming this tune.” His conversation like the outline of a ballad.

At last, as the 168 hours come to an end, I walk up the mountain to join the students in what will be their final session of
zazen,
the stars above the pines thicker than I have seen in thirty years of living in Southern California. By now, nearly all of them are exhausted to the point of breakdown—or breakthrough—some of them with open wounds on their feet, others nodding off at every turn, still others lit up and charged as electrical wires.

And then, at two in the morning, on the longest night of the year, suddenly the silence breaks, and people talk, and laugh, and return to being maths professors and doctors and writers again as they collect the letters that have been accumulating for them, and drink tea, and, in the great exhalation, I can hear a woman saying, in exultation, in relief, “Better than drugs!”