Border Crossings Magazine

The Book of Longing, a collection of poetry and prose Leonard Cohen published in 2006, is about wisdom. Composed by a man who has lived much in the world, and who has come to understand what all that living has been about, it also knows enough to take its wisdom with a grain of salt. While his ability to write remains undiminished, what he writes about has undergone some adjustments. As the poet himself laments, he now aches in the places where he used to play, and his candour in addressing those moments of pain is no less compelling than it was when he articulated his moments of passion. Cohen, in his 73rd year to heaven, remains our most satisfying poet on the complications of love and the loving body.

Consider the opening lines of “The Collapse of Zen,” an erotic poem that shapes itself around a series of rhetorical questions:

When I can wedge my face
into the place
and struggle with my breathing
as she brings her eager fingers down
             to separate herself,
to help me use my whole mouth
against her hungriness,
              her most private of hungers –
why should I want to be enlightened?

Why indeed, when enlightenment comes with the fleshly territory? I am reminded in reading Cohen’s poem of an earlier declaration of desire written by W.B. Yeats, which also figured out the answer to a question it set for itself. In “Politics,” written only a year before his death in 1939, Yeats wrestles with the competing tug of the personal and the social. He begins by quoting Thomas Mann’s famous declaration that, “In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms,” and goes on to ask how is it possible to “fix his attention” on politics in the presence of “that girl standing there.” Yeats is only marginally prepared to admit there may be something in the positions taken by men of the world and politicians:

And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war’s alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!

It’s clear that the real truth lies in transformative youth and physical passion. Cohen, for his part, won’t buy back into time, but he holds resolutely to the passionate body. “My heart is broken as usual,” he says near the end of “The Collapse of Zen,” “over someone’s evanescent beauty.”

While the quest for beauty has been at the centre of Cohen’s life and art for over 50 years, it has not blinded him to mankind’s dangerous tendencies. In this regard he leaves Yeats behind and bivouacs with Thomas Mann. He claims he is too old to “learn the names of the new killers” but he is aware of “their old obsolete atrocity / that has driven out / the heart’s warm appetite / and humbled evolution / and made a puke of prayer.” Earlier in “The Collapse of Zen” he observes that “the tender blooming nipple of mankind / is caught in the pincers / of power and muscle and money.” A number of these poems play the same chord as the songs in The Future, Cohen’s prophetic and brilliant album from 1992. He has seen the future; it works; and it is murder.

Cohen’s wisdom is in his ability to bring together the cultures of conscience and love. He writes in “The Mist of Pornography” that one of the functions of poetry is to overthrow vulgarity / and set America straight / with the barbed wire / and the regular beatings / of rhyme.” To recall Yeats again, a touch of mocking mockers emerges in the formulation. How effective a punishment is being beaten by lines of poetry; how likely is it that the pincers of power will be replaced by the barbs of rhyme?

Finally, though, Cohen is redeemed by love. In the light impression we make on the skin of the world, “it is in love that we are made; in love we disappear.” Making and unmaking, the loved and the lover. In Cohen’s wise construction of the world there is no way to tell the poet dancer from the poetic dance.

The following interview combines two telephone conversations recorded from Los Angeles on May 7, and May 12, 2007. The drawings by Leonard Cohen were included in an exhibition called “Drawn to Words: Visual works from 40 years” that premiered at the Drabinsky Gallery in Toronto on June 3, 2007.

LEONARD COHEN: The proofs were printed by Graham Nash who has a state-of-the-art printing facility on the beach. I think we printed 56. Quite a few, which are in colour, aren’t in the Book of Longing. A number of the images in the book were details of larger works in which the colours are very rich and the blacks very black. The medium for the drawings ranges from watercolours to oil pastels, to a number of combinations of those, which are then put in Photoshop. A lot of them were drawn on a Wacom tablet with a free-standing stylus fit right into the computer. So it really runs from doodles on napkins to watercolours, oil pastels, charcoal drawings, right up to digitally created images.

BORDER CROSSINGS: So you go from doodles to an image that you consciously sit down to orchestrate. Does that cover the way the work comes to you?

LC: Well, you know, just as play is deadly serious for children, so doodles are deadly serious for me.

BC: My question wasn’t about forming a hierarchy as much as the way the Muse comes to you. I’m interested in the relationship that exists in your mind between the drawing and your work as a poet, songwriter and novelist. Do they come from the same source?

LC: I think one is relief from the other. I always drew and when my kids were growing up a large feature of our family activity was to sit around the kitchen table with a lot of different kinds of material and draw. That’s always been what I’ve done, especially in Greece when there seemed to be a lot of time, or when the kids were growing up in Montreal. Then I got interested in computers. I don’t know if you remember, but at a certain point Macintosh gave free computers to Canadian writers, including Margaret Atwood, Irving Layton, and Jack McClelland. Not only that, they were kind enough to provide tutors who actually came to my house and helped me set up and showed me how to work it. So I got interested in the Macintosh computer quite early. (See Issue 104 to read the full interview.)