Cohen: the Poet, the Monk, the Legend

Now I bid you farewell, I don’t know when I’ll be back

They’re moving us tomorrow to that tower down the track
But you’ll be hearing from me baby, long after I’m gone
I’ll be speaking to you sweetly from a window in the Tower of Song                                                 Tower of Song – Leonard Cohen

Amen, Virtuoso of Verse: your word wizardry, lyrical tapestries, and “Golden Voice” will enrich us for many more generations.

At age 82 Leonard Cohen has passed from this life, leaving us his final studio album released just this year, You Want It Darker. Other artists of his vintage and younger produced dozens more albums in their lifetimes; but not many artists take years to chisel some of their legendary songs:

Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do you?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah . . 

The Monk

Cohen’s artistry in expressing beauty, truth, and paradox not only filled his lushly composed songs, but his life. In 1994, in a quest to mine the depths of seclusion and silence, he embarked on a five year retreat at the Mt. Baldy Zen Center outside Los Angeles. While there he was ordained as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk and given the Dharma name Jikan, meaning “silence.”

In an interview he gave there to Pico Iyer, he comments on the lure of silence and stillness: “What else would I be doing?” Would I be starting a new marriage with a young woman and raising another family? Finding new drugs, buying more expensive wine? I don’t know. This seems to me the most luxurious and sumptuous response to the emptiness of my own existence.”

Cohen, like all spiritual masters down the ages, came to the realization that when our lives are filled with the perfect job, the perfect partner, the perfect home, and a complete set of beliefs, values, and politics then there is no room for anything else – much less a sense of our divine beingness. And yet, to quote from his wonderful song, Anthem “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

The key to spiritual awakening is to be aware of the cracks, and to live in a constant spirit of detachment and self-emptying, so that divine light and wisdom can penetrate our consciousness – to heal and transform us.

The legend lives on . . 

One of Cohen’s earliest signature songs, “Bird on the Wire” from his 1969 album Songs from a Room, remains one of my favorites:

Like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free

I was born like this, I had no choice

I was born with the gift of a golden voice
And twenty-seven angels from the Great Beyond
They tied me to this table right here in the Tower of Song