I'm Your Man (49 page)

    
So says:

    
Eliezar, son of Nissan,

    
priest of Israel;

    
a.k.a.

    
Nightingale of the Sinai.

    
Yom Kippur 1973;

    
a.k.a.

    
Jikan the Unconvincing

    
Zen monk,

    
a.k.a.

    
Leonard Cohen . . .
*

He had agreed to ordination to “observe protocol.”
23
Roshi had told him it was time for him to become a monk, and so that is what he did. Leonard had also recently taken on responsibilities for which official status might be deemed appropriate: Roshi had asked him to preside over his funeral. The old man, now approaching his ninetieth birthday, instructed Leonard that he wanted a traditional, open-pyre cremation. If Leonard would like to, Roshi said, he could keep one of his bones.

At the ordination ceremony, Leonard was given a new name: Jikan. “Roshi doesn't speak English very well so you don't really know what he means by the names he gives you,” Leonard said. “He prefers it that way because he doesn't want people to indulge themselves in the poetic quality of these traditional monks' names. I have asked him what Jikan meant many times, at the appropriate moment over a drink, and he says ‘ordinary silence' or ‘normal silence' or ‘the silence between two thoughts.' ”
24
Dangerously poetic. And deliciously ironic for a singer and a man of words.

In all, the silence of the monastic life seemed to suit Leonard. There were occasional visitors, however. Adam Cohen, who had just signed a record deal with Columbia, came and discussed with his father the lyrics for the songs he was working on for his first album. Leonard gave his son a song that he had been “working on for years” and knew he'd “never get around to doing,”
25
“Lullaby in Blue.” Sharon Robinson, who knew the Zen Center, having been there herself on retreat, drove up and, over a bottle of wine, listened as he played for her on his synthesizer the latest of his countless versions of “A Thousand Kisses Deep.” Among the uninvited guests, in Kigen's words, was “a beautiful young lady who came up one evening and was wearing rags and feathers, literally. ‘Where's Leonard? I'm here for Leonard.' ” But really there were remarkably few celebrity-seekers; Kigen says he could count them on one hand.

Two separate, small film crews also made their way up the mountain, one from France, the other from Sweden. The result was two insightful TV documentaries, Armelle Brusq's
Leonard Cohen: Portrait: Spring 96
and Agreta Wirberg's
Stina Möter Leonard Cohen
. The French film showed Leonard working in the monastery kitchen, sitting in the meditation hall, reading the chants through a large pair of tinted spectacles and marching outside with the other monks. He assured Brusq that his life wasn't one of isolation. Real life was far more solitary, he said. When a tour ended, he would return to the “tyrannical solitude” of home, where he might spend days alone, speaking to no one, doing nothing.

The Swedish presenter, Stina Dabrowski, questioned Leonard about love, and he answered like a man who'd had the time and space to think about it. “I had wonderful love but I did not give back wonderful love,” he said. “I was unable to reply to their love. Because I was obsessed with some fictional sense of separation, I couldn't touch the thing that was offered me, and it was offered me everywhere.” Nonetheless, at times when the world started feeling bright again, he would forget now and then that he lived “in this sixty-three-year-old body” and he would think about finding a young girl, marrying her, buying a house and getting a real job, maybe working in a bookstore. “I could do that now. I know how to do it now,” he said. When he was asked the inevitable question about coming back to music he answered no, saying, “I can't interrupt these studies. It's too important for me to interrupt . . . for the health of my soul.” Quoting the Jewish sage Hillel the Elder, “If I'm not for myself, who will be for me? And if not now, when? But if I'm only for myself, who am I?” Leonard asked his fans to please forgive him. He was trying to learn some things, he said, that would result in “songs that are deeper and better.”
26

In the absence of Leonard or any word of a new album from him, in 1997 Columbia Records released a compilation,
More Best Of
(1997). Twenty-two years had passed since the first
Best Of
album—or
Greatest Hits,
as it was called in the UK and Europe, where Leonard actually had hits—and Leonard had felt “no great urgency” for another. But it was the thirtieth anniversary of his having signed to Columbia; he said, “Although I myself feel very little nostalgia, I went along with it.”
27
Leonard was asked to choose the songs, which he did—enough songs to fill a double album. In the end the label decided on a single album, which they wanted to focus on his more recent material. They also asked Leonard if he had any new songs he might give them. Leonard had actually finished a jaunty and self-deprecating number titled “Never Any Good.” Another new song was a short, computerized piece called “The Great Event,” its melody a backward
Moonlight Sonata,
its vocal a synthesized version of Leonard's own real voice.

Leonard had been working in the monastery on experimental music. One idea he had come up with, but had been unable to realize on his elderly computer and synthesizer, was to create a vocal that sounded “like some broken-down speaker that was left after the destruction of the cosmos, just filled with some kind of absurd hope for regeneration”
28
—the next step from “The Future,” as interpreted by a Zen monk. Around this time, Mount Baldy for the first time had connected to the Internet—a slow, dial-up connection through the monastery's one and only phone, but Leonard was online.

Jarkko Arjatsalo, an accountant living in Finland, was surprised to receive a message from a monk in California, asking if he would call him. Leonard had heard about the Leonard Cohen Files, a website devoted to his work that Arjatsalo and his teenage son Rauli had created in 1995. If Arjatsalo could create a website, Leonard thought, perhaps he could answer his technical questions (this being pre-Google, and the connection being so painfully sluggish). “Leonard was looking for software that could imitate his voice—not a perfect copy, something that was obviously mechanized though recognizably him,” Arjatsalo remembers. Through his website's global network he found a scientist at the University of California at Berkeley who came up with a solution. It was the start of a close association and friendship between Leonard and the man he dubbed “the general secretary of the party.” LeonardCohenFiles.com would become known as Leonard's digital archive and the communications hub for the international fan community.

Leonard asked if he might add some material of his own to the website. He submitted early versions of lyrics for songs, including “Suzanne,” and drafts of new songs and poems. He wanted to “make the process clear, or at least throw some light on the mysterious activity of writing,” he wrote. He also sent copies of his artwork, which ranged from drawings on napkins to digital art. Leonard particularly enjoyed creating art on a computer. He just liked computers. “They say that the Torah was written with black fire on white fire. I get that feeling from the computer, the bright black against the bright background. It gives it a certain theatrical dignity to see it on the screen.”
29
His interest in Macs started early on, thanks in part to the Apple company giving away free computers to select Canadian writers—among them Leonard, Irving Layton and Margaret Atwood—and sending tutors to their homes to show them how to use them.

Leonard said in an interview with
Billboard
in 1998 that he had been “posting a lot of original material on the Finnish site.” He said, “I don't know what the ramifications are. Speaking as a writer toward the end of his life, where most of my work is out there, I've collected royalties on it, I've been able to live and maybe even provide for a respectable retirement. I'd be happy to publish everything on the Internet at this stage of the game.”
30
His record company did not share his sentiments. When he included the website addresses of the Leonard Cohen Files and other related sites on the back sleeve of
More Best Of,
they told him to take them off, talking about “permissions” and “compliance.” But Leonard insisted and the URLs remained in place.

Leonard had taken to the Internet wholeheartedly—and this some considerable time before the decline of the recording industry and the expansion of the Web made it a necessity for artists. For someone who had essentially cut himself off from the world, it allowed him to communicate with the world on his own terms. He could keep in touch with his fans around the globe without having to get out of his robes and onto a plane. He could keep his work in the public eye without having to go through an intermediary, like the record company. He was already living, to some degree, a virtual existence up there in that remote spot a long way above the ground and a longer way from heaven; in the Internet he'd found a perfectly Cohenesque way of being both not there and never more fully present.

Leonard logged off for the night. There was a good bottle of cognac on the table that he'd picked up on his last grocery run to Claremont. Tucking it underneath his arm, he crunched up the hill in his flip-flops to Roshi's cabin.

A
utumn 1998. Leonard had been living in the monastery for five years. He was as thin as the air; his long black robes hung loosely on his body. During countless hours of meditation, he had had out-of-body experiences and moments when “the sky opens up and you get the word.” There had been periods during his life on Mount Baldy when Leonard felt contentment and when everything seemed to make sense. This was not one of them. Pulling himself out of his bed in the middle of the night, putting the water on for coffee, fingers waxy from the cold, what Leonard felt was despair. In the meditation hall, where he sat listening to Roshi's familiar voice deliver the
teisho
from the lectern-throne at the front of the room, he realized that he no longer had any idea what Roshi was saying. “I used to be able to understand, but my mind had become so concerned with dissolving the pain that my critical faculties had become really impaired.”
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The anguish did not abate; it deepened. His doctor prescribed antidepressants, telling him they would put a floor on how low he could go. But “the floor opened up,” Leonard said, “and I fell right through it.”
32

One day Leonard was taking Roshi to the airport—Roshi was flying to New Mexico to lead one of his periodic
sesshins
at his second monastery in Jemez Springs—and he needed to go back to Mount Baldy for something. Driving up the mountain's switchback roads, Leonard was suddenly seized by a panic so crippling that he had to pull over. He reached into the backseat for his knapsack and pulled out the shaving kit in which he kept his antidepressants. His heart pounding, he took out the pills, then threw them out of the car. “I said, ‘If I'm going to go down, I'm going to go down with my eyes open.' There's something obscene about taking this stuff and going down. And then I went back to Mount Baldy,” Leonard said, “and I
really
went down.”
33

He was unable to find his way back up. The winter months felt crueler than ever; Roshi's
teisho
sounded like gibberish. After five and a half years in the monastery and in the deepest pit of depression, Leonard felt that he had “come to the end of the road.”
34
On a cold early January night in 1999, Leonard walked up the hill to Roshi's cabin. It was black and starless; there was snow in the air. Roshi, shrunken with age, peered over the reading glasses whose magnification made his eyes look profoundly deep. The two sat together in stillness, as they had so often done. Leonard broke the silence. “Roshi,” he said, “I've got to go. I'm going to go down the mountain.” Roshi said, “How long?” Leonard said, “I don't know.” The old man looked at him. “Okay,” Roshi said. “You go
.
”

Leonard's note of apology to Roshi for his desertion read: “I'm sorry that I cannot help you now because I met this woman. . . . Jikan the useless monk bows his head.” The words were accompanied by a drawing of a female Hindu temple dancer.
*
Less than a week after leaving Mount Baldy, Leonard was in India. Leonard had left Roshi to be with not a woman but a man.

Ramesh S. Balsekar was eighty-one years old, a strip of a lad compared with Roshi. He had studied at the London School of Economics and had been the president of a leading bank in India until, in the late seventies, he became a devotee of Nisargadatta Maharaj, a master of the Advaita (meaning non-dual) school of Hindu philosophy. Ramesh now received students of his own in his apartment in South Mumbai. Among them, just days after having left Roshi's monastery, and “in a state of acute depression and deep distress,” was Leonard.
35

Leonard had first encountered Ramesh's teachings while living on Mount Baldy. A few years earlier, someone at the monastery had given him a book called
Consciousness Speaks,
a question-and-answer session with Balsekar, published in 1992. At the foundation of Ramesh's teaching is that there is one supreme Source, Brahman, which created everything and is also everything it created. Since there is only this one single consciousness, then there is no “I” or “me,” no individual doer of any action, no individual thinker of any thoughts, no experiencer of any experiences. Once the sense of self drops away, once a person deeply understands that he has no free will, no control over what he does nor over what is done to him, when he takes no personal pride in his achievements or personal affront at what might befall him, then that person becomes one with that single consciousness or Source. When Leonard read the book that first time, he liked it but could not say that he understood it. He put it aside, and during “those last dark days”
36
at the monastery he found himself drawn back to it. This time when he read it, it seemed to make more sense. He even found that by applying Ramesh's teachings to Roshi's
teisho
, he could once again understand Roshi. But it was a purely intellectual understanding that did nothing to ease the intensity of his mental torment. Leonard drove to the Bodhi bookstore to look for more books by Balsekar and decided to go to India to hear him in person. He booked a flight to Mumbai.