Cohen’s many quests: (To) lovers in all degrees of anguish

Inner directed adolescents, lovers in all degrees of anguish, disappointed Platonists, pornography peepers…(Cohen quoted by David Remnick)

These were some categories of people he considered to be his ideal readership, Leonard Cohen is said to have affirmed to his publisher in what was a rather poetic pitch. With Plato and pornography becoming neighbours at all, let alone cordial or not, is a peek into Cohen’s range. Body and spirit, light and shadow, with furrows of silence, rapture, longing and anguish in between.

Cohen is a consummate myth maker. He aspires to astonishing grandeur, like of the lobby (in Vienna) with nine hundred windows. In this tendency of mythologising experience, here is a myth he made of himself: “…a history of injustice in his heart, a face too noble for revenge, walking the night along some wet boulevard…” The power of this self portrait as intriguing for its precision as self-consciousness. It is the same self-consciousness that drives him to be a perfectionist who spends five years chiselling Hallelujah. Or turning a bundle of nerves on stage because there’s always that unbridgeable gap between what one is and what one aspires to be. It touches a chord though, in a world getting too brazenly conceited. Self doubt is the marrow of art.

He mythologises with an intimacy that is at once grandiloquent as comforting. He catapults his musical space out of the urban jungle to a lake or an island, maybe that is his Canadian archetypal nostalgia: “I’ll be wearing a river’s disguise/The hyacinth wild on my shoulder/My mouth on the dew of your thighs.” On the way he “takes Manhattan”, brutally feeding the yearning to flee the metropolis. There is a quest for the mythic in the quotidian and he often lifts the material of his life to those proportions. Probably owing to solid literary antecedents. Chiefly, his affinity with King James Bible, which, for him stands out as a fountainhead, a literary model for its stunning simplicity and clarity. His songs, took him years to perfect. He reportedly laboured over many verses in an underwear, banging his head on alien hotel floors. (Remnick) And amongst his formidable antecedents are counted Borges and Tolstoy, Proust and Cervantes. As for him, he is foremost a poet. Allen Ginsberg is said to have remarked that Dylan blew everyone’s mind but Cohen’s. And Dylan, on his part, said about Cohen’s songs that they sounded like prayers. Synagogue music and working class songs were a definite influence on Cohen since childhood.

And you know that she will trust you/For you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind

His women are no next door Janes, they are gypsy women, recluses, travellers, solitary adventurers, women who could be milling around Jesus’ nativity or crucifixion, the glorious “tangle of matter and ghost.” When I was totally swept by Cohen (amongst other things) in University days, my then boyfriend, now husband, remarked that Cohen somehow reminded him of Joni Mitchell. There were undeniable echoes. At that time he didn’t know much of Cohen and I didn’t know much of Mitchell. He asked me to try Mitchell. I believe people who introduce you to good music are important. Turned out Cohen and Mitchell were a couple for sometime. The continuing wave of influence was unmistakable. Mitchell, though, later wrote of him unflatteringly as “boudoir poet.” There was something very polyphonic, very multilayered about our personal discovery of the Cohen-Mitchell relationship. If their affinity was because of their uncanny similarity or vice versa one will never know. And then there is the capillary action in love, at least for some years when identification with the lover is intense. The sea floods into the backwaters, creating new life sustaining landforms.

In Hydra, Greece, that surreal medieval island Cohen called home for a few years, he found Marianne, a single mother with a son. Remnick evocatively sums up the key ingredients he found “...spare page, empty room and eros after dark.” Their companionship was idyllic for the time it lasted : “So Long Marianne” “That’s no way to say Goodbye” amongst others were his tribute to her. There were other women too he loved on the way. Constancy in love was not really his chief attribute: he could use spaces in relationships and yet, for the most part, inspire trust in his women.

Cohen moved to the Mt Baldy Zen Center in 1994, serving the Japanese Zen teacher Kyozan Joshu Sasaki. Cohen was ordained as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk and given the dharma name Jikan, which is, Pali for “silence between two thoughts.” Pico Iyer who visited him there recounts: “Sitting still”, he said with unexpected passion, was “the real deep entertainment…real profound and voluptuous and delicious entertainment. The real feast that is available within this activity.” Therein was a glimpse of an ideal life and he had yielded “to the flood of (its) beauty).”

Author teaches English Literature