Leonard Cohen: A Portrait in First Person
(a transcript of a television program)
(The setting: It would seem this program was filmed in a house, maybe
in Montreal. L.C. is standing with his back to a large window. The sun is
streaming in. L.C. wears his standard uniform, dark suit and shirt. His comments
are obviously made in response to questions, but these questions have been
edited out of the program. Moses Znaimer's introduction and conclusion appear
to have been filmed in a studio.)
Moses Znaimer:
When I first became aware of Leonard Cohen, it was
the late 50s. In those days the few artists around had good reason to complain
about Canadian philistinism. In Montreal, the struggle was being loudly lead
by a lusty and charismatic poet, my teacher, Irving Layton. In his circle,
and by his side, there appeared suddenly a new wunderkind from Westmount.
But as compared to his pugnacious mentor, the thing that was most noticeable
about Leonard was a gift for compassion that made even me forget his well-to-do
antecedents, and a talent for intimacy that charmed men as well as
women.
 Leonard Cohen:
We're drawn to the truth. We're drawn to the truth when we hear it and
when we see it. We're hungry for the truth. We're always surprised because
the truth manifests itself in so many different ways and in so many different
forms. You can hear it for a moment from your friend, you can hear it from
your wife, you can hear it from your children. You can hear it for a moment
in a song on the radio. It is so precious when you hear it that you are
immediately drawn to it. So I tend to be wary of confining this expression
of truth to one kind of activity, one kind of artistic activity.
Moses Znaimer:
A little more than 20 years ago, Leonard Cohen was
living on the Greek island of Hydra contemplating his options. He was the
bright, new hope of Canadian literature with two novels to his credit that
had received glorious reviews, but he couldn't quite pay his bills. At the
same time there was a new music scene booming in America and through, as
he puts it, a combination of arrogance and inexperience, he decided to go
to Nashville and support his writing by becoming a singer. Today he has just
released his tenth album. It's called I'm Your Man. His songs have
been recorded by such diverse artists as Neil Diamond and Joe Cocker, Judy
Collins and Jennifer Warnes, while his poems and novels are studied at the
Ph.D. level and have been translated into many languages. His music and wry
observations have been embraced by millions the world over, particularly
in Europe where his clever passion and ironic lyrics are heard as part of
an honored tradition.
Leonard Cohen:
I have been told that I'm in the old troubadour, trouvere tradition. All
those things are interesting when you have the time to look at them, or if
you have a moment to lean on a tradition. I've never felt that kind of luxury.
I feel I'm on the front line of my own life and I don't really have time
to develop a description of what I'm doing or where I fit in. I think there
are people much more skillful than I am in establishing the place anybody
might have in a tradition or what tradition they find themselves in. I never
really made much sense out of anything people said about me or what tradition
I was in. I recognize I go around from place to place with a guitar and there
have been guys doing this for a long, long time. But exactly how you fit
into that, I don't know because you got to get up there and do it. It seems
these descriptions don't make it any easier. So when you are up against it,
you are only interested in things that make it easier. You are not interested
in things that complicate the activity. So I tend to resist these kinds of
descriptions. There are times when I like to read criticism because
it is one of the few things I know anything about. So I can read a critic
and often find it interesting.
I think our content is women and we are women's content. I know that my
mind, my emotions are involved with a woman. Sometimes when I'm feeling strong,
which is rare, I can get beyond that concern. But most of the time, what
I care most about is whether or not I'm being welcomed by her and I think
a lot of the time she worries about whether she is being welcomed by me.
So we are each other's content and we exist in that condition, which goes
all the way from grave discomfort to absolute peace and everything in between.
That seems to be what the activity between a man and a woman is.
One of the things about getting older is that you stop whining. One of
the reasons you stop whining is because your experience conveys to you that
your trouble is tiny compared to lots of trouble around. Once you feel that
clearly, that your trouble is tiny and that there are people at this moment
really being tortured, really being strapped to chairs, really having
electrodes pasted on their bodies, that there are situations which are truly
hellish that thousands, maybe millions of people are in at this moment, then
even though you do not wish to deny the truth of your own feelings, once
you put your own feelings in perspective, then there is an invitation never
again to whine about your own situation. So yeah, I've known a little bit
of trouble. I've experienced the break up of a family. I've experienced a
few things here and there but that's nothing, nothing to what's really going
down in this world.
I've been very lucky because I've been able to make a living doing what
I do. Although there have been periods that are leaner than others, I've
been able to make a decent living writing, making records, and publishing
books. It was never really abrasive. I never really came across mean-spirited
people for some odd reason. I've toured all over the place, practically every
country in the world. Yeah, you do meet some S.O.B.s, some mean people, but
by and large, I haven't come across that kind of real abrasive experience.
I'm not astounded at the various forms of aberrated behaviour that are
reported or seen. I'm surprised there isn't more considering what people
are up against today. As I see it, just walking the streets of the various
cities I visit, I'm surprised that people are so kind and so compassionate
and still so considerate, considering the kinds of conditions that we're
living in today. I mean they aren't that bad, I guess. When I pull up at
a stop sign in the middle of the winter or a bus stop and there are 20 people
waiting out there in the cold to get their bus at 5 or 6 in the morning,
I'm surprised that the social fabric is still holding, that they don't pull
me out of my car. I'm surprised that the thing holds together.
I think there is a tremendous amount of goodwill in the United States.
I am always surprised as I say, that the thing holds together, that people
are really as good to one another as they are. Of course, you can find cases,
many cases of ugliness in a society with that range of activity, but I think
it is in a certain way still man's best hope in terms of the organization
of society. Somehow their constitution, as clumsy as it is, and as awkward
as their electoral system seems, and they are always criticizing it themselves,
somehow it has released tremendous energy and activity in society. Their
form of government, and it is a very particular form that they have, somehow
it has produced an invitation for real activity. I don't know how that is.
Ours in Canada, our parliamentary system, which on paper seems better than
theirs and which I am not even suggesting we overthrow, but it doesn't seem
to invite the population to the same kind of expression of energy. It seems
to invite us to a somewhat more restrained response.
You have television pouring in this message of abundance into the
poorest areas in the country. They are getting this message every day about
this world that they can't get their hands on. It must be infuriating. It
must be a society that is really interested in taking chances with itself,
to pour this kind of temptation into the living rooms and bedrooms of the
poor. People must really be looking for it, this society really sticking
its neck out. It's got to be one of the most revolutionary conditions that
any society has ever gotten itself into. That's why I say, I don't know why
people stand for it.
I was thinking about this war on drugs and how my heart moves to a real
reactionary position about drugs. I think that if we have an army and a navy
and an air force, I'm talk about North America, Canada isn't threatened to
the same extent yet, but there is no reason why it won't be because
the Canadian market is just as fertile for drug sales as any other market,
but I think if I were an American, I'd go extremely right in this matter.
I think there should be real war against the countries that are supplying
dope to America. Unless there is some really sinister conspiracy in high
places in America which I doubt, that is that they want to destroy the black
youth or the poor white youth, I don't think such a conspiracy exists. But
unless there is such a conspiracy, then what is happening is a real assault
and a real attack on the future of the United States. I think it's much more
tangible than any other kind of attack that is being described in any political
circles. I think this is a real attack and I think it should be met with
real force, with the full force of the American armed community. So I would
really go in and bomb the countries that are supplying drugs to America.
We are in the mist of a vast and varied expression of music. I think there
is always good music. There is good wine in every generation, as the Talmud
says. There is no way that you can keep up with everything that is going
on even if you wanted to. I don't even particularly want to because I don't
have any sense that it's important to me to know what's happening. "What's
happening, man?" "Well, I don't know, search me." I don't care what's happening
because the demands from one moment to the next are such that I don't really
have too much time to try to develop a strategy or a large perspective about
what's happening. I know that I am embraced by the absolute. I don't have
to take care of that part of things. I don't have to develop a vision of
the Almighty. I don't have to develop an articulated position on politics,
Canadian or universal. I am already embraced by the Almighty. I am already
embraced by cultures, many cultures. My work is to stay alive and raw
to the kinds of voices that are speaking to me continually and to turn them
into a voice that I can understand, that I can cling to, and that I can stand
behind. So various visions and perspectives, strategies, they seem to escape
me. It is not a matter of this being a virtue or an obsession or an aberration.
That's just the way it is.
When the level of suffering in any individual reaches a certain point
and he can't deal with his own discomfort, then he is going to look for some
kind of solution. I don't think any religious quest is begun with a sense
of luxury. I don't think any serious study is undertaken unless the being
is broken with some kind of suffering, either physical or psychic. I don't
think anybody undertakes a serious religious examination unless they've been
creamed somehow by the world. And once that happens, once the heart is broken
and once you recognize that the heart is broken, then various paths open
to individuals. And there are very many different paths. That's why we should
never take a position from one path or another on the other paths, because
the broken heart illuminates a path and it is a different path for each broken
heart. I understand that when you say the words "broken heart," lots of people
just turn off. But the truth is, this is the beginning of wisdom, to understand
that you are deeply uncomfortable here. That discomfort illuminates its own
solution and it is often years before you take that solution. So you poke
around at the different solutions that are available. Maybe you come to the
ones that are most familiarly articulated, your own religion. Most of the
religions around are pretty good for that. It may be a political solution.
It may be an ascetic solution. It may be a hedonistic solution. None of us
has the right to judge other people's solutions to suffering.
I know that there are millions and millions of people in this world that
go to church in the evenings and in the mornings and receive real sustenance
from the liturgy, from the religious situation in their communities. I don't
think it serves anything to diminish human effort in any category. So I could
never take a position about where the truth is manifesting more clearly,
more beautifully. The fact is that we are all embraced by the truth continually
and sometimes we know it and sometimes we don't.
I don't really know what vice is. I guess vice is the activity that you
can't handle. We call that vice. Most of the things we call vice are just
those activities that people, according to the conventional wisdom, should
stay away from because they really do destroy you. Some people have to go
into those realms, a lot of them are artists, a lot of them are not artists.
A lot of them are just regular people that want to bring an edge into their
life, that want to attack boredom, that want to feel something a little deeper
than the feelings that seem to be available through normal activity. So a
lot of people go out on the limb. Some people send messages from there. Most
of the news is bad that we get from that place, but occasionally somebody
can use that precarious and dangerous situation to illuminate their own
predicament and the predicament of others. Those gifted individuals and those
courageous individuals and in a certain sense those doomed individuals, because
you're going to fall off somewhere down the line, they send back messages
according to their own gifts and talents and skills. These messages often
help us; they touch us for a lot of reasons, really touch us. And in a way,
we all want our artists to go that far and we want our athletes to go that
far and we want our soldiers to go that far. We want everybody that represents
us, that protects us, that defends us, that champions the best in ourselves,
we send the message to them, that we want them to go out farther and farther
and farther until they can't go any farther and we want to know what it's
like out there. That's what makes a society great. That's what makes a society
brave and courageous. People hear the will of others and they hear that
invitation to push farther and farther and they go out and they tell us what
it's like. Some of us even try to join them and that's what the whole game
seems to be about. You've got to have both kinds. You've got to have the
people projecting that will and you've got to have this tiny minority that
will hear it, that will hear the invitation and go out there and realize
the world that other people cannot realize themselves and show it to them.
Moses Znaimer:
For a man who early in his career aspired only to
be a minor poet, Leonard Cohen has a body of work in poetry and novels, his
singing and songwriting, that will, in my opinion, stand up to serious scrutiny
with the passage of time.
|
LC: It's very hard for me to locate a view of myself. It's one of the things I'm least interested in. I'm reminded of that story I read in Dalva, a novel by Jim Harrison, who is speaking of certain tribes where the white man tried to introduce the mirror, and certain native American tribes refused to accept the mirror. The reason was, they said, that your face is for others to look at.