Leonard and I go back a long way—even if we met only briefly. I know something of the landscape of his younger years, his old neighbourhood in Montreal, and his muses. On top of that, he was my slum landlord. I briefly squatted in his old house by the Portuguese park on the Main, a Zen centre at the time. And for a few years, I practised Rinzai Zen in the same lineage. I even received the same degree in Literature at McGill University. And we have the same hobbies, Leonard and I: Zen, writing, songs—and a bit of hedonism.
For a while, like imitating the lives of a saint, I lived in the same mandala, read the same novels, and searched among the same garbage and flowers—not that I was so conscious of his influence at the time. I remember those desperate poetic nights in Bohemian Montreal that he writes about in his early novels—and LSD trips on Mont-Royal! I often played the guitar and sang at the same open-mic cabarets he must have and frequented the bagel shop where he used to perform.
Cohen said Montreal was more vibrant than New York in the day. Montreal winters are colder than Leningrad, but perhaps there is great warmth and wild creativity in resistance. Before the internet age, at least, Montreal was the perfect place to be free and irresponsible and make art. But as Cohen once wrote: ‘Beware of Montreal, especially in winter. It will bring everything down.’ The pull of that brightly coloured world was not without its danger of annihilation!
When we met, Leonard—always the perfect gentleman—graciously accepted my demo tape entitled ‘Soon, Soon.’ After a long pause, he looked at it carefully and replied, ‘A good title.’ He declined my invitation to my concert because of ‘previous engagements’. The next day he asked me how it was: ‘A tough gig’, I told him. ‘I’ve had my share of those’, he replied, giving me unreasonable hope. The meeting was full of warmth—the same warmth as his music.
We did a sessine or seven-day Zen meditation retreat with his old teacher Sazaki Roshi. In black robes, Cohen did not look much like a pop star but more like an old monk. While we chanted, I could hear his golden voice: ‘gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha’,—‘gone, gone gone to the other shore’. Few people know how Japanese chanting affected his vocals or the hard work of Zen in the ‘secret life’ he sang about. Perhaps Cohen knew how detrimental ‘being special’ is to the soul, so he washed dishes and shovelled snow instead of living in a Pacific palisade. In Zen practice, nobody is special. Not even Leonard Cohen. And yet, when stones are rubbed together, as the Zen parable has it, our unique diamond emerges from the friction.
After the retreat and a celebratory feast, I was given Leonard’s leftover lamb chops, which couldn’t be kept in the temple. When Cohen was in Montreal—and free from his protein-deprived Zen monk lifestyle—he went to a Jewish Deli to get his meat and liquor. Showing my roommates my hunting trophy, I told them: ‘These are Leonard Cohen’s leftover lamb chops’. We ate them silently—the holy slaughtered lamb of Leonard’s offering.
That year I wrote to Cohen at Mount Baldy, California, where he lived an austere life as a monk. The letter began: ‘I am your son’. It was true in a way, despite my youthful arrogance. Aren’t we all sons and daughters of the archetypal hero? And aren’t we all doomed to imitate that hero until we can ‘make it real’ ourselves?
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