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The courtroom is quiet, but who will confess? |
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A Life in the Day of Leonard CohenInterview by Nigel Williamson
The singer Leonard Cohen, 63, released his first album in 1968 and recorded several more hit albums before his last, The Future, in 1992. He has also published poetry and novels. In 1994 he gave up his career to become a Buddhist monk. He lives in a Zen monastery 6500ft up Mount Baldy, California. He is unmarried, with two children.
The macho feeling in our group is that we are the marines of the spiritual
world. It's a severe regime by ordinary standards, but you get used to it
-- you go into ninth gear and float through it. I get up at 2:30
am. The wake-up bell is at 3 am but I like that extra half-hour. I have to
move on the coffee or else the day just doesn't begin for me. I use the time
to jot a few things down before the bell goes for us to go to the
zendo and have tea. Then we go back to the meditation hall for a couple of hours, and each monk sees Roshi, our Zen teacher, for a few minutes. Roshi is 90. I met him 28 years ago when he performed the ceremony at a friend's wedding. He gave us five precepts, the last of which was against intoxication. Then we all got bombed on sake. I'd been coming up here over the years for short periods of retreat before I came full time. Now I do all the cooking for Roshi. It's vegetarian -- lots of lentils and tofu. But the doctor said Roshi wasn't getting enough protein, so lately I've been cooking him fish. There's a lot of Japanese farmers and storekeepers in California and we beg food from them. You just stand there with your bowl. It's all part of the ritual. After seeing Roshi, there's breakfast and you do your little chores. You have 20 minutes to yourself, maybe to brush your teeth and make your bed. Then the work bell goes and there's two or three hours of maintenance work: cooking, raking, plumbing, carpentry -- whatever has to be done to keep the place going. This is an old boy scout camp, and it's 6500 ft up the mountain, so in winter there's a lot of snow shovelling. Then it's back into your robes for a formal lunch that is followed by a half-hour rest period. After an afternoon of work, it's back into your robes for dinner. Everything is done very formally, in single file. It's all ritualised. You pretty well know what you'll be doing for every moment of the day. If you think this sounds boring you should try living it. Every fourth week is a sesshin, which means a gathering of the heart- mind, and is a very intense period of sitting in the zendo for about 18 hours a day. This goes on for about three or four months: they call it a "training period." Then we have a break, when the wake-up will be at 4 am: they unscrew things a bit and life isn't quite so regulated. After that, it's back to another training period. In winter I have the stove going full blast in my cabin, which they don't really like. But we're all here voluntarily, so we don't feel deprived. There are no televisions or newspapers, But there's a radio in the car, so when you go into town for shopping trips, you can listen to the news or music. In a way it is isolated but I've never in fact felt less isolated. In civilian life you close your door, switch on the television and crack open a beer and you're really alone. There's a saying in Zen that, like pebbles in a bag, the monks polish each other. You get very close when you're sitting with a group of people day after day, meditating. There's a great feeling of love and of family among the monks, and you relax into the regime. One of the things people have difficulty with at first is the lack of sleep. But very quickly you find you don't need as much sleep as you imagined, that you just need to go into a different gear. Of course, the regime is dedicated to overthrowing you, to getting you to stop thinking about yourself. After a while you just think about your meal, work and sleep. It's refreshing, because you don't have to speculate on matters that are really quite irrelevant and which just produce anxiety and worry. It's been worked out over a couple of thousand years, so it's an effective tool for removing you from unnecessary distractions and providing a space where you live quietly. That's hard to find in the world. Back in the 1960s I lived on the Greek island of Hydra for a while. And people said exactly the same thing: "How can you isolate yourself?" But I never felt isolated there either. I was living with the villagers, seeing people every day, sitting on the porch and having a glass of ouzo with the neighbours. Of course, one is here temporarily. I don't know what's going to happen when Roshi passes on -- whether the institution will keep going or lapse, or fragment into different teachers. Traditionally, people come for two or three years and then move on. I've been here almost four years, but I was ordained as a monk a while ago, so I've committed myself for the duration -- whatever that is -- and I'm going to hang in here while I can. I want to take advantage of Roshi's time. I don't really care where it goes after that. I hardly ever get a chance to hear my old songs. Sometimes I hear one on some generous retrospective radio station when I'm in town, but I don't feel like that person any more. I stand in awe. People say the very early songs were the most important. I listen to them like I'm listening to someone else. I have a lot of respect for the young heart who produced those visions. For the past few years I haven't really had a handle on popular culture, though I'm still interested. My son, Adam, is a musician. He's just signed to Sony and sometimes he comes up to the cabin and asks for help. Maybe he'll show me two lines to a song and ask me which one works better. I'm still writing, scratching away. Yeats's father said poetry is the social act of a solitary man -- we all find ways of bridging that isolation. For writers it is words, but for the cabinet-maker it is the presentation of the finished bureau. I don't think the act of writing is especially significant. I think a man or woman lays their work at the foot of their beloved. We do everything for love. I gave a new book to my publisher. It was a very humorous look at the monastic life, but it didn't feel quite right, so I've taken it back to do some more work on it. Every week there is an afternoon with no activities. A lot of people just crash, because sleep is such a precious commodity here, but I might spend the afternoon working on this book. It looks like it might be growing into something worthwhile. Lately I've been thinking about another novel. The last one was in 1966, then the songwriting racket came along. I kind of blew it, I guess. But I liked the life of a writer: there is a lot of order in it that's very different from the life of a rock'n'roller. I need that. Order dissolves a lot of anxieties about what to do next. I was never very good at improvising my life, though that's the way I've lived much of it. We're in the meditation hall every evening until about 9:30 pm, and by then you're ready for the end of the day. There's very little time here for reflecting upon the past.
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Then we go down to the chanting hall for about
an hour. You don't really know what you're chanting became it isn't about
meaning, but about manifesting yourself as sound. It's a good feeling. And
it's good for the bowels, because you start vibrating inside.