Jikan Leonard Cohen Memorial Service

We are home from a wonderful memorial service for Jikan Leonard Cohen at the Rinzai-ji Zen Center.

Though Leonard and I belonged to the same Zen center and the same synagogue in Los Angeles for many years, lived in the same neighborhood in eastern LA, and both of us hailed from the same Canadian city (Montreal) and the same university (McGill), we never really connected.

I saw him often, but when I did, it was because we were in the same place to medicate, study and pray. It never seemed like quite the right time to approach him.

I did tell him once that his music is always rattling around in the back of my head. And it still is.

Once I shouted out to him from the audience at one of  his many concerts that we attended about his high school in Montreal and he was kind enough to shout a joke back.

The Zen service was gentle, full of traditional Sanskrit chants, his music and personal stories of his humility, generosity, grace, and friendship.

He was at once ordinary and extraordinary.

His final gift was his graceful exit from this realm. In a letter to a friend read at the service, he shares that even with his horrible pain and his medications and his pending death, he had never been happier.

Always teaching to the last moment.

I will miss him as I remain greedy to hear more, to learn more from this wise fellow seeker. 

Rest in peace, dear Leonard. You have given me and so many so much.

Leonard Cohen: Like any dealer, he was watching for the card that is so high and wild he'll never need to deal another.

Leonard Cohen, Isle of Wight 1970

Stranger Song

More nuggets that inform my life came out of this plaintive song and from that whole first album than it is healthy to admit. I still remember the small apartment in Montreal where I first heard his music with a bunch of other angsty teenagers.

A sample of the sound bites that constantly rattle in my brain from that one song:

Reaching for the sky just to surrender.

Please understand I never had a secret chart, to get me to the heart of this or any other matter.

You hate to watch another tired man lay down his hand like he was giving up the holy game of poker. 

And of course, I am still to this day:

...watching for the card that is so high and wild (I'll) never need to deal another.

The card that is so high and wild I'll never need to deal another.

Does it really exist?  I am still watching. And waiting.

Watching and waiting in CLL has a whole other meaning.  It is a wait and see stance: how is the disease behaving, and then ignore it or respond to it depending on whether it is being nasty or nice. I am long past that pleasant interlude of plausible denial. All my chips are in the game now and I grabbed what I believe to be my best card on the table. In a trial. And even it's only advertising one more shelter I can live with that.

On the Isle of Wight, Leonard performed infront of 600,000 in the early morning of August 31, 1970 not long after the final live performance of Jimi Hendrix. Talk about a change of pace. Are you experienced?

And 43 years later, the self proclaimed grocer of despair is still delivering.

Sorry for another brief diversion but where would I be without music. Cohen's song are always humming in the back of my head, and this is one of the most persistent.

Back to work. Will be blogging again this weekend.

Another scotoma and a very busy and beautiful day

Passover, Leonard Cohen, the blessing for the return of the Sun (it only happens every 28 years), and in the middle of the day another scotoma (like a migraine aura without the migraine, I was blinded briefly in the middle of the day for about 20 minutes this time in both eyes in the left field of vision, see prior post from 4 months ago). 

Not up for much writing but I will say the concert was endearing and powerful, the blessing was transcendent and glorious, the scotoma was only briefly annoying and not serious, and the seder was fun, delicious and helpful for growth.

All in all, a very fine day, with no time to reflect or comment on all its splendors.

Leonard Cohen

Cohen set the world right. A triumphant concert. 

More later. It is 2:20 AM.

Judy Blue Eyes Sings Leonard Cohen

This is a post I put on a Leonard Cohen fan blog.He has just announced his first NA tour in 15 years.

I just saw Judy Collins at the Coachhouse in San Juan Capistrano. Her soaring voice was better than on the albums from 4 decades ago. Her final encore was a song brought to her by a published Canadian poet in NYC. He said he couldn't sing or play and wasn't sure it was a song. She said he could do both and it sure was a song. She told him that she was going to record it the next day. The song she heard that night in 1966 in the village and played last night in Orange County was, of course, Suzanne. The rest is history. Last night was a recapitulation of that history. Towering. Immediate. I cried. For those who visited my blog http://bkoffman.blogspot.com/ know that LC's songs are the music echoing in my head and that has helped me reached this time 7 months post bone marrow transplant. And now I will get to see him in concert again. I am a lucky man.

Leonard Cohen

If I can't get tickets for his concert, then I can at least see his artwork. 

If one is gifted by one of the muses, does it mean that one is blessed by the proximity of the others.  Would Terpsichore and Erato, my votes as Lenny's benefactors, have side benefits as for his work as an illustrator.

Does prowess in one endeavor mean anything in an adjoining field?  Maybe for a few true renaissance men and women, but for most of us, it is the same hard work we applied to the our first splash in the art or the sciences that lets us make similar waves in a new ocean.

At least that's my hopeful plan for my writing career.

By the way, I spent weeks at the same Zen Monastery where LC spent years.  It was life changing for me.

See below:

When Leonard Cohen famously turned his back on the music industry in 1994, he retreated to a Zen monastery more than 6,000 feet above sea level on Mt. Baldy, in the San Gabriel Mountains near Claremont McKenna College. The musician took the name Jikan — meaning “the Silent One” — and devoted himself to an ascetic lifestyle and to the study of Rinzai Zen philosophy.

His five years in seclusion left a gaping lacuna in the musician’s eclectic career. Few people know why Cohen, born to a Jewish family in Montreal, ensconced himself in the monastery’s regimen of meditation and reflection. But “Drawing From the Heart,” a new exhibition of Cohen’s art at Claremont McKenna, throws light on that chapter of his life.

With more than 50 prints of Cohen’s paintings and drawings, the show is a broad survey of his work during the last 40 years. Recurring motifs include the female nude and self-portraits of the artist’s wizened face. But there are also cryptic, slyly comic references to his time on Mt. Baldy.

In one work, “Dear Roshi,” Cohen depicts a nude goddess ...

... alongside a brief letter to his elderly monastery instructor. In the letter, Cohen calls himself “a useless monk” and asks Roshi’s forgiveness for meeting (and presumably falling in love with) a woman.

“Leonard has a wry sense of humor. There’s a clarity and tremendous cutting humor in his work, even amidst the brokenness,” said Bob Faggen, the organizer of the show and a friend of Cohen.

Concurrent with the exhibition is the Southern California premiere of Philip Glass’ song cycle “Book of Longing,” based on Cohen’s 2006 volume of poetry. Glass will perform on keyboard with eight musicians and four singers. (The Feb. 25 through March 1 concerts are at the Garrison Theater, a few blocks from the art show at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum.)

Glass said the idea for the song cycle originated in a long conversation he had at Cohen’s L.A. home. The project was put on hold when Cohen entered the monastery but was revived after the publication of his book. “People don’t read poetry books chronologically, and I wanted to replicate that experience, as if the listener was subjected to random shuffling,” said Glass. The song cycle takes 22 poems and arranges them into thematic chapters dealing with love, Dharma, ballads and Cohen’s biography.

Like his visual art, Cohen’s poems make direct references to his reclusive Zen period. In the song “I Came Down From the Mountain,” he writes about his exodus from the monastery and his moment of self-realization: “I finally understood / I had no gift / for Spiritual Matters.”

Cohen, 74, was recently in Australia on a world tour and didn’t respond to requests for an interview. Apparently, Jikan the Silent One lives on.