Sun After Dark Read Free Page B

like his 1984 collection of psalms,
Book of Mercy,
express absolute submission. Apart from a twenty-six-year-old son, Adam, and a twenty-three-year-old daughter, Lorca, the Japanese
roshi
seems to be the one still point in Cohen’s endlessly turning life, and now the singer accompanies the man he calls his friend to Zen centers from Vienna to Puerto Rico, and goes through punishing retreats each month in which he does nothing but sit
zazen,
twenty-four hours a day for seven days on end.
    The rest of the time, he works around the Zen center, shoveling snow, scrubbing floors, and—most enthusiastically— working around the kitchen (he tells me, with mischievous pride, that he has a certificate from the County of San Bernardino that qualifies him to work as waiter, busboy, or cook). For the monk here known as Jikan (or “Silent One”), all the things he’s famous for—a command of words, beautiful suits, a hunger for ideas, and a hypnotist’s ease at charming the world—are thrown aside. “In the
zendo,
” he tells me, not unhappily, “all of this disappears.” (“This” referring, I think, to his name, his past, the life he carries around within him.) “You don’t notice if this woman’s beautiful or ugly. If that man smells or doesn’t smell. Whoever you’re sitting next to, you just see their pain. And when you’re sitting, you feel nothing but the pain. And sometimes it goes, and then it’s back again. And you can’t think of anything else. Just the pain.” He pauses (and the
chanteur/enchanteur
slips out again). “And, of course, it’s the same with other kinds of pain, like broken hearts.”
    The icon who’s been entertained and idolized by everyone from Prince Charles and Georges Pompidou to Joni Mitchell and Michelle Phillips; the regular visitor to the top of the European charts who’s inspired not one tribute album (like most legends) but a dozen; the Officer of the Order of Canada recently described, in
The United States of Poetry,
as “perhaps the continent’s most successful poet” seems to thrive on this. He’s too happy to write anymore, he tells me soon after I arrive (though, one day later, he’s showing me things he’s writing, towards a new
Book
of Longing
). And though the face is still strikingly reminiscent of Dustin Hoffman—especially if he were acting as Harold Bloom—it’s well hidden in the bobble cap that his
roshi
“commanded” him to wear. “This whole practice is mostly about terrifying you,” he says cheerfully. “But there’s a lot to be gained in those terrors. It gets you so efficiently into a certain place.”
    And the place is one that Cohen has been journeying towards all his life, in a sense. “There’s a bias against religious virtue here,” he assures me, grinning, one morning, as bells toll outside and I smell sweet incense in the air and hear clappers knocking in the distance, “and it’s very appealing. So you never have the feeling that it’s Sunday school. And you never have the feeling that you’re abandoning some cavalier life, or getting into some goody-goody enterprise. Not at all. Not at all.” When a Buddhist magazine recently asked Cohen to conduct an interview with Sasaki, he gladly agreed, provided they could talk about “wine, women, and money.” And, to be sure, we’ve hardly been introduced for the first time before the disarming sinner-songwriter is using “pussy” and
“shunyata”
in the same sentence.
    It’s not so much that Cohen has given up the world—he still has a duplex that he bought with two friends near the Jewish district on Fairfax (where his daughter currently lives), and when I visit him at two one morning, I hear the crackle of a transistor radio in his bedroom. The man with a gift for being in tune with the times is still doing things like providing the songs that are heard on the sound track of Oliver Stone’s state-of-the-art
Natural Born Killers,
appearing at Rebecca De Mornay’s side at the