Rev. Danny Fisher

Last week, I read Sarah Hampson’s interview with Leonard Cohen, the appropriately legendary folk singer and former Rinzai Zen monk, for the most recent issue of the Shambhala Sun. Seven days later, I’m still thinking about it.

Poetry seems to pour spontaneously out of Cohen–there isn’t a thing he says that isn’t intriguing or affecting. And hats off to Hampson for crafting an article that truly makes the reader feel like a fly on the wall. Like Lian Lunson’s wonderful film from last year, Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man, her work goes a long way in terms of giving us a sense of the real person behind the “Ladies’ Man.”

I’m something of a Leonard Cohen super-fan, so I suppose I was predisposed to appreciate this interview. But, really, it’s something special. Do take a look at the piece if you have a chance.

A number of snippets in particular have stayed with me, such as his riff on relationships, desire, and practice:

“Have you learned a lot from women?”

“Oh, yeah. You learn everything from women.”

“Everything?”

He leans in. “It is where you move into uncharted territory.” He shrugs slightly, his small, neat hands held in front of him. “The rest is just reinforcing wisdom or folly that you have inherited. But nobody can prepare anybody for an encounter with the opposite sex. Much has been written about it. You can read self-help books, but the actual confrontation as a young person with desire, this appetite for completion, well, that is the education.”

“And what a ruse that desire for completion is,” you suggest, “because ultimately, you’re still left with yourself.”

“What’s left of it,” he puts in, laughing.

Cohen sits back in his chair, his ideas as well-worn and familiar as old sweaters. “Of course, women are the content of men, and men are the content of women, and most people are dealing with this–whatever version of that longing there is. You know, of completion. It can be spiritual, romantic, erotic. Everybody is involved in that activity.”

Hampson also asks about the seemingly incongruous decision of this “sexual bad boy” to ordain as a monk. His reply:

“I always felt it was of one piece. I never felt I was going off on a tangent. Mainly because I think we develop images of ourselves quite early on, and certainly one of the images I had of myself came from reading Chinese poetry at a very young age. There was a kind of solitary figure in some of those poems by Li Po and Tu Fu. A monk sitting by a stream. There was a notion of solitude, a notion of deep appreciation for personal relationships, friendships, not just love, not just sensual or erotic or the love of a man or a woman, but a deep longing to experience and to describe friendship and loss and the consequences of distance. So those images in those poems had their effect, and thirty years later, I found myself in robes and a shaved head sitting in a meditation hall. It just seemed completely natural,” he says in a quiet manner.

On being a monk and his experience of monastic community:

“They’re not saints, and you aren’t either,” he says of his fellow monks. “A monastery is rehab for people who have been traumatized, hurt, destroyed, maimed by daily life that they simply couldn’t master…”

And, finally, on meditation:

…You run through your top ten erotic fantasies, ambition fantasies, revenge fantasies, global ratification fantasies. You run through them all until you bore yourself to death, basically, and the faculty that produces opinions and snap judgments and unrealistic scenarios for your own prominence, after you run through them for a number of years, they cease to have charge. They bore themselves into non-existence. You see them as diversions from another kind of intimacy that you become more interested in–and that is what Socrates said: Know Thyself.