A Broken Hallelujah by Liel Leibovitz
By the early 1990s when everyone else was depressed, Cohen - the Dr. Kevorkian of pop music - began to have fun, cutting music videos, graciously accepting awards…
"... Look, Leonard, we know you're great, but we don't know if you're any good." It was Yetniloff's way of telling Cohen that the label had decided not to distribute his latest album.. in the US. It wasn't, Yetnikoff said, contemporary enough. The culture eventually caught up with Cohen.
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the Cohen, Lerner thought, looked like someone who might do your taxes, not like someone who could stir your soul.
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People say that a song needs to make sense…. Leonard proves otherwise. It doesn't necessarily make sense at all, it just comes from so deep inside of him, it somehow touches deep down inside other people.
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He's something more intricate, the sort of man whose pores absorb the particles of beauty and grief and truth that float weightlessly all around us yet so few of us note. He is attuned to the divine, whatever the divine might be…
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We called men like him prophets, meaning not that they could foresee the future, but that they could better understand the present by seeing one more layer of meaning to life.
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About Jewishness:
To have been chosen means having to spend eternity wondering what it means to have been chosen. ←--- how funny! Or sad!
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… Cohen was back to the same question that had been haunting him since he first found Lorca: how to be a poet in a world that increasingly expected its poets to either to act up on television or languish in obscurity.
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Speech of 1964 at Jewish Library in Montreal
What came before the speech were good poems, neatly symbolic and pleaantly profound and easy to admire. What came after it was daring work - poems and prose about Hitler and fucking and cruel sacrifice
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An artist, Cohen said, should become one of two things: a priest or a prophet.
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He was obeying Falubert's old dictum, which help that a writer ought to be orderly in life so that he may be violent in his work. He was in the words of one insightful critic, an “author auditioning himself for all the parts in an unwritten play,” engaged in a “process of self-recovery and self-discovery.”
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But Cohen wasn't just the oedipal tinkerer some his critics accused him of being. He was exploring these family dynamics not make a personal point, or to explore the machinations of psychology, but rather to comment, for the first time in his career, on politics.
What was less obvious was that behind all the quips and the jokes, the outrageous performances on TV and the spotlights in seedy clubs, Cohen was never lost in the fun house. Jokes, he realized, and televised spectacles, were the only language his generation spoke fluently. Even if he could fashion himself into a Canadian Lorca , who, in the last 1950s and early 1960s, would want to listen to his sad and soulful tales?
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Power of music:
... rock was not entertainment but something closer to religion
… cults whose celebrations relied heavily on muic as a conduit of ecstasy
...trancelike dancing. Loud music and lewd behaviors
… Music's power didn't dininish with the rise of the church
… Plato described a moment of elation that occurred wheneve he attended church and heard a moving hymn
… of all senses at our disposal, it is hearing - rather than vision or touch or smell - that connects us to the divine
… Music Attali cotinued, terrified and enchanted our ancestors; rather than communicate directly and immediately, the way words did, music was seen as an interruption, a senseless squeal that released the same sort of emotions previously reserved
for the altar and the knife.
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His answer was simple but inspired. He would blend truth and artifice until his audiences didn't know which was which. He would entertain, but deliver the sort of punch lines that carried a real and existential punch..
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Around 30 or 35 is the traditional age for the suicide of the poet”, he said. That's the age when you finally understand that the universe does not succumb to your command.
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Music is instrumental in helping us reach a much-needed equilibrium, as it “presents tension, not as obstructions, but as themselves vehicles to the achievement of resolution. In other words, to enjoy music and enjoy life , is to enjoy tension and see it not as a older blocking the path to a desirable goal but as the path itself.
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Paolo Coelho expressed similar views about mental hospitals
exprience of a lot of people in mental hospitals would especially qualify them to be a receptive audience for my work.
In a sense, when someone consents to go into a mental hospital or is committed he has already acknowledged a tremendous defeat. To put it another way, he as already made a choice. And it as my feeling that the elements to this choice, and the elements of this defeat, corresponded with certain elements that produced my songs, and that there would be an empathy between the people who had this experience and the experience as documented in my songs”
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He was channeling one of Judaism's core traditions, which held that despite their divine origin. God's decrees were not exempt from human scrutiny.
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1985 in Poland. Intro to his concert:
You know, since I've been here many people have asked me what I thought just about everything there is in this vale of tears. I don't know the answers to anything. I've just come here to sing you these songs that have been inspired by something that I hope is deeper and bigger than myself. I have nothing to say about the way that Poland is governed. I have nothing to say about the resistance to the government. The relationship between the people and its government is an intimate thing. It is not for a stranger to comment. . .
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As Cohen's translation of Lorca's gorgeous poem so clearly demonstrates, one can marvel at the beauty of the world even while admitting that the world is irreparably broken. .. “Sometimes, when you no longer see yourself as the hero of your own drama, you know, expecting victory after victory, and you understand deeply that this is not paradise, somehow, especially the privileged ones that we are, we somehow embrace the notion that this vale of tears is perfectible, that you're going to get it
all straight. I found that things become a lot easier when I no longer expected to win.”
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In 1992 Cohen released The Future
the songs were sharp and unafraid of loudly declaring their preoccupations
“the light” he told an interviewer, “is the capacity to reconcile your experience, your sorrow with every day that dawns. It is that understanding , which is beyond significance or meaning, that allows you to live a life and embrace the disasters and sorrows and joys that are our common lot. But it's only with the recognition that there is a crack in everything. I think all other visions are doomed to irretrievable gloom.
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Cohen has outgrow his despair, crept out of his experments with form, and taught himself to write about human life with gentleness and persistence….
The same thing that had happened to “Hallelujah” was beginning to happen to Cohen's other songs, and to Cohen himself - he was being taken literally.
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1993+ 5 years among monks on Mount Baldy
“The most important liberation his friend facilitated was the liberation from being Leonard Cohen.
…. therefore I was began to wither, and the less I was of who I was, the better I felt.”
… The flesh beckoned; it wanted more than the company of silent monks. The mind, too, reeled - all that meditation hadn't freed Cohen of his acute depression, an affliction with which he had wrestled all his life. The only thing that could satisfy both, he knew, was work.
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… a reporter called to ask him how he felt about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he replied that “in the Jewish tradition, one is cautioned against trying to comfort the comfortless in the midst of their bereavement.” It was meant as a spiritual and political statement, but it applied as an artistic one as well - Cohen had little comfort to give.
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“the rest that precedes the great rest,” the kind of equilibrium one achieves only when all aspirations are abondoned and all desired quelled.
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Leonard Cohen was had No Voice since he began recording at 33. but he has more No Voice today at 70, than he did on Ten New Songs at 67 - the tenderness in his husky whisper of 2001, tenderness the way steak is tender, has dried up in his whispered husk of 2004, rendering his traditional dependence on the female backups who love him more grotesque.
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And then came the AVALANCE
Kelley Lynch, Leonard's lover and once close friend, has stolen most of his money from the bank.
Worse, she as forged documents and sold the right to many of his songs.
…..
his tours and concerts after this were waaay different than before
the new musicians played not for Cohen but with him….
… he was no longer the commander of a musical army, lost without his troops
...Nearly 5 decades after he first took the stage with Judy Collins, Leonard Cohen had finally eased into performing. In true Zen fashion, it turned out that all he needed to do to let his songs state their case was nothing but accept Lorca's definition of the duende and allow the tightly closed flowers of his spare arrangements to blossom into a thousand petals.
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He has spent a lifetime resisting the violent currents of politics. ....
In life as in music Cohen was never one for political grandstanding…
The relationship was different now. He had discovered an intimacy greater than the one he had grasped for as a young artist when he urged the audience to come closer.
But Leonard Cohen was no longer old, no longer timorous, no longer struggling with depressions or gradping for drus or pining for enlightenment of one sort or another.
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1992, The Future
A decade of rewrites had paid off: the songs were sharpt and unafraid of loudly declaring their preoccupations. You dont' know me from the wind/ You never will, you never did/
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Another song “Anthem” was even more bluntly prophetic “Ring the bell that still can ring” it declared. “Forget your perfect offering/ There is a crack in everything/ That's how the light gets in.”
Cohen was channeling milllenia of Jewish thought - the crack is a favorite kabbalistic metaphor - and compsing an anthem that celebrated what most anthems dared not acknoledge, namely the irreparable condition of human life.
“the light” he told an interviewer, “is the capacity to reconcile your experience, your sorrow with everyday that dawns. It is that understanding, which is beyond significance or meaning, that allows you to live a life and embrace the disasters and sorrows and joys that are our common lot. But it's only with the recognition that there is a crack in everything. I think all other visions are doomed to irretrievable gloom.”
I'm not reading the book “Hurry down Sunshine”, a memoir of a father whose daughter got into a hospital with accute Bipolar disorder. Well, the fater, Michael Greenberg, has a strong Jewish background as well (he admits somewhere in the book). And he had the same Crack idea in this writing
“it's something of a sacrilege nowadays to speak of insanity as anything but the chemical brain disease that is on one level it is”…
… “I'm in the gip of an unshakable sobriety, compensation perhaps for the psychic drunkenness of Sally (his daughter). It is as if her crack-up has made me saner than I wish to be...”
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Are you an Extra ?
...by the time he got around to shooting a music video for “Closing time” he was so famous that even his own crew had no idea who he was. The song was a country-and-western tune, all about whiskey and dancing and the devil, and the shoot was booked at a Toronto club called the Matador. It was winer, and dozens of men and women - extras, assistants, musicians, hangers-on - were packed on the club's floor…
To keep the place in order the production had set up two tables, one at each end of the room. One was marked “Crew only” and was loaded with nuts, vegetables, dips and other goods; the other, marked “Extras only” offered more humble refreshments like chips and cheeses.
Dressed in a dark-gray striped double-breasted suit and a black T-shirt, Cohen moseyed over to the crew's table, selected a celery stick and took a bite.
Immediately, a production assistant pounced. “Excuse me, “ the man demanded officiously, “Are you an extra?”
“Yeah,” Cohen said, “I'm an extra.”
“Well”, said the production assistant, “would you please get your food from the extras' tray.”
Cohen obeyed. And he wasn't being coy - or not only. He truly felt superfluous: Now in his mid-fifties, he's reached that must uncanny of plateaus for rock stars - no longer a vibrant youth, not yet a dignified elder. His songs too were in limbo
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About Buddism:
When he returned home, Cohen drove up to Mount Baldy, convinced that caring for Roshi was the panacea he needed. He stayed there for 5 years. He wore gray robes and marched with the other monks in a line amid the compound 's gray rocks and slim trees. He sat at a long wooden table and drank water from a small bowl. He was silent most of the day, as were those around him. And artist trained in abandoning his art, Cohen might have decided to condemn his music to the same fate as his poetry and this novels. He could have stopped writing songs, or written rarely, or concluded that he no longer felt any need to communicate his enlightenment to others. But writing, he now realized, was ritual, remarkable less for bringing its practitioner closer to God than for enforcing a sort of maniacal discipline, a commitment to control and austerity not so different from the one constantly on display on Mount Baldy.
Speaking to a reporter vising him at his quarters there in 1996, he equated writing with sitting zazen (Zen meditation, usually performed in the lotus position.) and meditating. “You have to dive into it,” he said. “You have to to sit in the very bonfire of that distress, and you sit there until you're burnt away, and it's ashes, and it's gone. By “it” he meant his songs: They, he stated repeatedly, were like ashes, blowing in the wind, blowing right through their listeners, pure in their essence but nothing more than remnants of life once lived.
If the songs were ashes, Roshi, increasingly, was the fire. “I don't feel like acing on a sense of despair,” Cohen said. “Or, maybe this whole activity is a response to a sense of despair that I've always had. The quality of the relationships that is possible with Roshi is very instructive. He's both a friend and an enemy to your self-indulgence, an enemy to your laziness, he is going to be a friend to your effort… He's going to be all the things that he has to be to turn you away from depending on him. And finally you just say this guy is absolutely true, he really loves me so much that I don't need to depend on him. His love is a liberating kin of love and his company is a liberating kind of company, so he's only interested in you making an effort to be yourself. So that's a very very helpful kind of friend. And that's the kind of friend we should be to each other.
The most important liberation his friend facilitated was the liberation from being Leonard Cohen. “As his said to me in one of our first personal encounters, formal encounters,” Cohen recalled, “he said, 'I not Japanese, you not Jewish.' So, Roshi not Zen master, and Leonard not Zen student. Other versions of ourselves might arise that are more interesting. And so he became part of my life and a deep friend in the real sense of friendship, someone who really cared, or didn't care. I am not quite sure which it is, who deeply didn't care about who I was, therefore who I was began to wither, and the less I was of who I was, the better I felt.” And on Mount Baldy, with Roshi Cohen felt good, good enough to spend a significant portion of the 1990s there.
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BBC Interview
Александр Баранов: у меня создается впечатление, когда я слушаю Коэна, что его внутренняя трагедия заключается в том, на мой взгляд, что он совершенно не способен жить здесь и сейчас. Как мы знаем, рецепт счастья - жить здесь и сейчас, в закрытом отсеке сегодняшнего дня. У Коэна такой взгляд - в вечность постоянно, он постоянно говорил о том, что у него мало времени. Я помню, что один из его биографов, - женщина, которая жила с ним вместе на острове Гидра в Греции, где он купил дом в свое время и жил там в такой коммуне, казалось бы, - в раю. Так вот, по ее словам, он работал, как подорванный, постоянно, по 20 часов, писал, писал лихорадочно и постоянно говорил о том, что у него времени не осталось совсем, что время его уходит, и мало времени. Ему было тогда 30 лет, у него полвека еще было впереди, но это ощущение временной трагедии постоянно в нем присутствует и пробивает сквозь сегодняшние мелкие чувства, ощущения и мысли в своей поэзии.
Александр Кан: Это очень интересно и очень важно, мне кажется, то, что ты подметил, что он стремился к уходу из повседневности. Не случайно он, несмотря на свою глубокую укорененность в иудаизме и в еврействе (иудаизм, еврейство для людей, живущих в Северной Америке, - это религия, в первую очередь, и он был воспитан в этой религии), тем не менее, уже в очень продвинутом возрасте в 90-е годы (ему уже было 60 или за 60) он обратился к дзен-буддизму. Он отправился в монастырь. Дзен-буддизм, буддизм был чрезвычайно популярен в Америке, в особенности в Калифорнии. Это были такие постхиппистские наслоения, - культурные, духовные, поиски новой духовности, и он в русле этих поисков обратился к буддизму и ушел в буддистский монастырь, - ритрит, как они его называют, - где-то в горах Калифорнии. Более того, он объявил, что уходит из музыки, что не будет больше ни выступать, ни записываться, и полностью отрешился от мира, и погрузился в мир этого духовного созерцания, если так можно сказать. Единственная причина, по которой он вынужден был из этого затворничества выйти, состояла в том, что нанятый им менеджер, человек, который распоряжался его финансами, поступлениями от продаж его более ранних записей, оказался мошенником, и, попросту говоря, обманул, надул Леонарда Коэна, который вдруг в своем буддистском монастыре в Калифорнии обнаруживает, что денег у него для того, чтобы продолжать такое благостное безбедное существование, больше нет. Он вынужден был вернуться на сцену и начать свою концертную деятельность.
....
Когда он после этого затворничества вернулся в 2008 году к сценической концертной деятельности, парадокс состоял в том, что (сколько ему уже было? - ему было 70 с лишним лет) человек в возрасте 70 лет обрел популярность такую, которая ему не снилась ни в 60-е, ни в 70-е, ни в 80-е годы. Он стал просто культовым героем, его концерты распродавались, и огромные концертные залы. Здесь в Лондоне он выступал в гигантском зале Арена О2, причем по несколько концертов подряд, - то, чего не было у него никогда. Под конец жизни этот парадокс, который случился из-за того, что с ним так непорядочно обошелся его финансовый менеджер, привел его к невероятному успеху. Ten New Songs, возможно, не самый лучший альбом, но зато я могу смело сказать, что последний альбом You Want It Darker, - это, действительно, великая пластинка. Надо сказать, что он чрезвычайно горд был ею. Это невероятная удача, что ему удалось буквально в последние месяцы своей жизни записать этот прекрасный альбом.
"... Look, Leonard, we know you're great, but we don't know if you're any good." It was Yetniloff's way of telling Cohen that the label had decided not to distribute his latest album.. in the US. It wasn't, Yetnikoff said, contemporary enough. The culture eventually caught up with Cohen.
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the Cohen, Lerner thought, looked like someone who might do your taxes, not like someone who could stir your soul.
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People say that a song needs to make sense…. Leonard proves otherwise. It doesn't necessarily make sense at all, it just comes from so deep inside of him, it somehow touches deep down inside other people.
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He's something more intricate, the sort of man whose pores absorb the particles of beauty and grief and truth that float weightlessly all around us yet so few of us note. He is attuned to the divine, whatever the divine might be…
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We called men like him prophets, meaning not that they could foresee the future, but that they could better understand the present by seeing one more layer of meaning to life.
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About Jewishness:
To have been chosen means having to spend eternity wondering what it means to have been chosen. ←--- how funny! Or sad!
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… Cohen was back to the same question that had been haunting him since he first found Lorca: how to be a poet in a world that increasingly expected its poets to either to act up on television or languish in obscurity.
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Speech of 1964 at Jewish Library in Montreal
What came before the speech were good poems, neatly symbolic and pleaantly profound and easy to admire. What came after it was daring work - poems and prose about Hitler and fucking and cruel sacrifice
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An artist, Cohen said, should become one of two things: a priest or a prophet.
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He was obeying Falubert's old dictum, which help that a writer ought to be orderly in life so that he may be violent in his work. He was in the words of one insightful critic, an “author auditioning himself for all the parts in an unwritten play,” engaged in a “process of self-recovery and self-discovery.”
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But Cohen wasn't just the oedipal tinkerer some his critics accused him of being. He was exploring these family dynamics not make a personal point, or to explore the machinations of psychology, but rather to comment, for the first time in his career, on politics.
What was less obvious was that behind all the quips and the jokes, the outrageous performances on TV and the spotlights in seedy clubs, Cohen was never lost in the fun house. Jokes, he realized, and televised spectacles, were the only language his generation spoke fluently. Even if he could fashion himself into a Canadian Lorca , who, in the last 1950s and early 1960s, would want to listen to his sad and soulful tales?
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Power of music:
... rock was not entertainment but something closer to religion
… cults whose celebrations relied heavily on muic as a conduit of ecstasy
...trancelike dancing. Loud music and lewd behaviors
… Music's power didn't dininish with the rise of the church
… Plato described a moment of elation that occurred wheneve he attended church and heard a moving hymn
… of all senses at our disposal, it is hearing - rather than vision or touch or smell - that connects us to the divine
… Music Attali cotinued, terrified and enchanted our ancestors; rather than communicate directly and immediately, the way words did, music was seen as an interruption, a senseless squeal that released the same sort of emotions previously reserved
for the altar and the knife.
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His answer was simple but inspired. He would blend truth and artifice until his audiences didn't know which was which. He would entertain, but deliver the sort of punch lines that carried a real and existential punch..
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Around 30 or 35 is the traditional age for the suicide of the poet”, he said. That's the age when you finally understand that the universe does not succumb to your command.
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Music is instrumental in helping us reach a much-needed equilibrium, as it “presents tension, not as obstructions, but as themselves vehicles to the achievement of resolution. In other words, to enjoy music and enjoy life , is to enjoy tension and see it not as a older blocking the path to a desirable goal but as the path itself.
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Paolo Coelho expressed similar views about mental hospitals
exprience of a lot of people in mental hospitals would especially qualify them to be a receptive audience for my work.
In a sense, when someone consents to go into a mental hospital or is committed he has already acknowledged a tremendous defeat. To put it another way, he as already made a choice. And it as my feeling that the elements to this choice, and the elements of this defeat, corresponded with certain elements that produced my songs, and that there would be an empathy between the people who had this experience and the experience as documented in my songs”
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He was channeling one of Judaism's core traditions, which held that despite their divine origin. God's decrees were not exempt from human scrutiny.
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1985 in Poland. Intro to his concert:
You know, since I've been here many people have asked me what I thought just about everything there is in this vale of tears. I don't know the answers to anything. I've just come here to sing you these songs that have been inspired by something that I hope is deeper and bigger than myself. I have nothing to say about the way that Poland is governed. I have nothing to say about the resistance to the government. The relationship between the people and its government is an intimate thing. It is not for a stranger to comment. . .
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As Cohen's translation of Lorca's gorgeous poem so clearly demonstrates, one can marvel at the beauty of the world even while admitting that the world is irreparably broken. .. “Sometimes, when you no longer see yourself as the hero of your own drama, you know, expecting victory after victory, and you understand deeply that this is not paradise, somehow, especially the privileged ones that we are, we somehow embrace the notion that this vale of tears is perfectible, that you're going to get it
all straight. I found that things become a lot easier when I no longer expected to win.”
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In 1992 Cohen released The Future
the songs were sharp and unafraid of loudly declaring their preoccupations
“the light” he told an interviewer, “is the capacity to reconcile your experience, your sorrow with every day that dawns. It is that understanding , which is beyond significance or meaning, that allows you to live a life and embrace the disasters and sorrows and joys that are our common lot. But it's only with the recognition that there is a crack in everything. I think all other visions are doomed to irretrievable gloom.
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Cohen has outgrow his despair, crept out of his experments with form, and taught himself to write about human life with gentleness and persistence….
The same thing that had happened to “Hallelujah” was beginning to happen to Cohen's other songs, and to Cohen himself - he was being taken literally.
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1993+ 5 years among monks on Mount Baldy
“The most important liberation his friend facilitated was the liberation from being Leonard Cohen.
…. therefore I was began to wither, and the less I was of who I was, the better I felt.”
… The flesh beckoned; it wanted more than the company of silent monks. The mind, too, reeled - all that meditation hadn't freed Cohen of his acute depression, an affliction with which he had wrestled all his life. The only thing that could satisfy both, he knew, was work.
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… a reporter called to ask him how he felt about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he replied that “in the Jewish tradition, one is cautioned against trying to comfort the comfortless in the midst of their bereavement.” It was meant as a spiritual and political statement, but it applied as an artistic one as well - Cohen had little comfort to give.
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“the rest that precedes the great rest,” the kind of equilibrium one achieves only when all aspirations are abondoned and all desired quelled.
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Leonard Cohen was had No Voice since he began recording at 33. but he has more No Voice today at 70, than he did on Ten New Songs at 67 - the tenderness in his husky whisper of 2001, tenderness the way steak is tender, has dried up in his whispered husk of 2004, rendering his traditional dependence on the female backups who love him more grotesque.
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And then came the AVALANCE
Kelley Lynch, Leonard's lover and once close friend, has stolen most of his money from the bank.
Worse, she as forged documents and sold the right to many of his songs.
…..
his tours and concerts after this were waaay different than before
the new musicians played not for Cohen but with him….
… he was no longer the commander of a musical army, lost without his troops
...Nearly 5 decades after he first took the stage with Judy Collins, Leonard Cohen had finally eased into performing. In true Zen fashion, it turned out that all he needed to do to let his songs state their case was nothing but accept Lorca's definition of the duende and allow the tightly closed flowers of his spare arrangements to blossom into a thousand petals.
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He has spent a lifetime resisting the violent currents of politics. ....
In life as in music Cohen was never one for political grandstanding…
The relationship was different now. He had discovered an intimacy greater than the one he had grasped for as a young artist when he urged the audience to come closer.
But Leonard Cohen was no longer old, no longer timorous, no longer struggling with depressions or gradping for drus or pining for enlightenment of one sort or another.
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1992, The Future
A decade of rewrites had paid off: the songs were sharpt and unafraid of loudly declaring their preoccupations. You dont' know me from the wind/ You never will, you never did/
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Another song “Anthem” was even more bluntly prophetic “Ring the bell that still can ring” it declared. “Forget your perfect offering/ There is a crack in everything/ That's how the light gets in.”
Cohen was channeling milllenia of Jewish thought - the crack is a favorite kabbalistic metaphor - and compsing an anthem that celebrated what most anthems dared not acknoledge, namely the irreparable condition of human life.
“the light” he told an interviewer, “is the capacity to reconcile your experience, your sorrow with everyday that dawns. It is that understanding, which is beyond significance or meaning, that allows you to live a life and embrace the disasters and sorrows and joys that are our common lot. But it's only with the recognition that there is a crack in everything. I think all other visions are doomed to irretrievable gloom.”
I'm not reading the book “Hurry down Sunshine”, a memoir of a father whose daughter got into a hospital with accute Bipolar disorder. Well, the fater, Michael Greenberg, has a strong Jewish background as well (he admits somewhere in the book). And he had the same Crack idea in this writing
“it's something of a sacrilege nowadays to speak of insanity as anything but the chemical brain disease that is on one level it is”…
… “I'm in the gip of an unshakable sobriety, compensation perhaps for the psychic drunkenness of Sally (his daughter). It is as if her crack-up has made me saner than I wish to be...”
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Are you an Extra ?
...by the time he got around to shooting a music video for “Closing time” he was so famous that even his own crew had no idea who he was. The song was a country-and-western tune, all about whiskey and dancing and the devil, and the shoot was booked at a Toronto club called the Matador. It was winer, and dozens of men and women - extras, assistants, musicians, hangers-on - were packed on the club's floor…
To keep the place in order the production had set up two tables, one at each end of the room. One was marked “Crew only” and was loaded with nuts, vegetables, dips and other goods; the other, marked “Extras only” offered more humble refreshments like chips and cheeses.
Dressed in a dark-gray striped double-breasted suit and a black T-shirt, Cohen moseyed over to the crew's table, selected a celery stick and took a bite.
Immediately, a production assistant pounced. “Excuse me, “ the man demanded officiously, “Are you an extra?”
“Yeah,” Cohen said, “I'm an extra.”
“Well”, said the production assistant, “would you please get your food from the extras' tray.”
Cohen obeyed. And he wasn't being coy - or not only. He truly felt superfluous: Now in his mid-fifties, he's reached that must uncanny of plateaus for rock stars - no longer a vibrant youth, not yet a dignified elder. His songs too were in limbo
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About Buddism:
When he returned home, Cohen drove up to Mount Baldy, convinced that caring for Roshi was the panacea he needed. He stayed there for 5 years. He wore gray robes and marched with the other monks in a line amid the compound 's gray rocks and slim trees. He sat at a long wooden table and drank water from a small bowl. He was silent most of the day, as were those around him. And artist trained in abandoning his art, Cohen might have decided to condemn his music to the same fate as his poetry and this novels. He could have stopped writing songs, or written rarely, or concluded that he no longer felt any need to communicate his enlightenment to others. But writing, he now realized, was ritual, remarkable less for bringing its practitioner closer to God than for enforcing a sort of maniacal discipline, a commitment to control and austerity not so different from the one constantly on display on Mount Baldy.
Speaking to a reporter vising him at his quarters there in 1996, he equated writing with sitting zazen (Zen meditation, usually performed in the lotus position.) and meditating. “You have to dive into it,” he said. “You have to to sit in the very bonfire of that distress, and you sit there until you're burnt away, and it's ashes, and it's gone. By “it” he meant his songs: They, he stated repeatedly, were like ashes, blowing in the wind, blowing right through their listeners, pure in their essence but nothing more than remnants of life once lived.
If the songs were ashes, Roshi, increasingly, was the fire. “I don't feel like acing on a sense of despair,” Cohen said. “Or, maybe this whole activity is a response to a sense of despair that I've always had. The quality of the relationships that is possible with Roshi is very instructive. He's both a friend and an enemy to your self-indulgence, an enemy to your laziness, he is going to be a friend to your effort… He's going to be all the things that he has to be to turn you away from depending on him. And finally you just say this guy is absolutely true, he really loves me so much that I don't need to depend on him. His love is a liberating kin of love and his company is a liberating kind of company, so he's only interested in you making an effort to be yourself. So that's a very very helpful kind of friend. And that's the kind of friend we should be to each other.
The most important liberation his friend facilitated was the liberation from being Leonard Cohen. “As his said to me in one of our first personal encounters, formal encounters,” Cohen recalled, “he said, 'I not Japanese, you not Jewish.' So, Roshi not Zen master, and Leonard not Zen student. Other versions of ourselves might arise that are more interesting. And so he became part of my life and a deep friend in the real sense of friendship, someone who really cared, or didn't care. I am not quite sure which it is, who deeply didn't care about who I was, therefore who I was began to wither, and the less I was of who I was, the better I felt.” And on Mount Baldy, with Roshi Cohen felt good, good enough to spend a significant portion of the 1990s there.
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BBC Interview
Александр Баранов: у меня создается впечатление, когда я слушаю Коэна, что его внутренняя трагедия заключается в том, на мой взгляд, что он совершенно не способен жить здесь и сейчас. Как мы знаем, рецепт счастья - жить здесь и сейчас, в закрытом отсеке сегодняшнего дня. У Коэна такой взгляд - в вечность постоянно, он постоянно говорил о том, что у него мало времени. Я помню, что один из его биографов, - женщина, которая жила с ним вместе на острове Гидра в Греции, где он купил дом в свое время и жил там в такой коммуне, казалось бы, - в раю. Так вот, по ее словам, он работал, как подорванный, постоянно, по 20 часов, писал, писал лихорадочно и постоянно говорил о том, что у него времени не осталось совсем, что время его уходит, и мало времени. Ему было тогда 30 лет, у него полвека еще было впереди, но это ощущение временной трагедии постоянно в нем присутствует и пробивает сквозь сегодняшние мелкие чувства, ощущения и мысли в своей поэзии.
Александр Кан: Это очень интересно и очень важно, мне кажется, то, что ты подметил, что он стремился к уходу из повседневности. Не случайно он, несмотря на свою глубокую укорененность в иудаизме и в еврействе (иудаизм, еврейство для людей, живущих в Северной Америке, - это религия, в первую очередь, и он был воспитан в этой религии), тем не менее, уже в очень продвинутом возрасте в 90-е годы (ему уже было 60 или за 60) он обратился к дзен-буддизму. Он отправился в монастырь. Дзен-буддизм, буддизм был чрезвычайно популярен в Америке, в особенности в Калифорнии. Это были такие постхиппистские наслоения, - культурные, духовные, поиски новой духовности, и он в русле этих поисков обратился к буддизму и ушел в буддистский монастырь, - ритрит, как они его называют, - где-то в горах Калифорнии. Более того, он объявил, что уходит из музыки, что не будет больше ни выступать, ни записываться, и полностью отрешился от мира, и погрузился в мир этого духовного созерцания, если так можно сказать. Единственная причина, по которой он вынужден был из этого затворничества выйти, состояла в том, что нанятый им менеджер, человек, который распоряжался его финансами, поступлениями от продаж его более ранних записей, оказался мошенником, и, попросту говоря, обманул, надул Леонарда Коэна, который вдруг в своем буддистском монастыре в Калифорнии обнаруживает, что денег у него для того, чтобы продолжать такое благостное безбедное существование, больше нет. Он вынужден был вернуться на сцену и начать свою концертную деятельность.
....
Когда он после этого затворничества вернулся в 2008 году к сценической концертной деятельности, парадокс состоял в том, что (сколько ему уже было? - ему было 70 с лишним лет) человек в возрасте 70 лет обрел популярность такую, которая ему не снилась ни в 60-е, ни в 70-е, ни в 80-е годы. Он стал просто культовым героем, его концерты распродавались, и огромные концертные залы. Здесь в Лондоне он выступал в гигантском зале Арена О2, причем по несколько концертов подряд, - то, чего не было у него никогда. Под конец жизни этот парадокс, который случился из-за того, что с ним так непорядочно обошелся его финансовый менеджер, привел его к невероятному успеху. Ten New Songs, возможно, не самый лучший альбом, но зато я могу смело сказать, что последний альбом You Want It Darker, - это, действительно, великая пластинка. Надо сказать, что он чрезвычайно горд был ею. Это невероятная удача, что ему удалось буквально в последние месяцы своей жизни записать этот прекрасный альбом.