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

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.

" Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream" The Beatles

It is not dying, it is not dying,

Lay down all thought surrender to the void,

It is shining, it is shining.

That you may see the meaning of within,

It is speaking, it is speaking,

That love is all and love is ev’ryone,

It is knowing, it is knowing.

The Beatles

I just returned from sitting Zazen all day at the Mount Baldy Zen Center. Driving through the rain and clouds, dodging the rocks tumbling from the hairpin turns on the mountain road, I truly left behind the illusion of my civilized life, to enter the mind stopping realm of Zen. The real world of what Leonard Cohen has called the marines of consciousness.

Within moments of arriving, I was silently sitting in the Zendo, legs crossed, for most of the next 4 hours, punctuated with some silent walking in circles.

3  identical bowls, dish towel and cloth napkins, and 1 cup were the instruments of our semi-formal ritualized silent lunch. When finished the filling meal of home made bread, salad, soup and tea all was cleansed with the boiling water poured from the old kettle passed up and down the table, and neatly stored for the next meal. When I stayed for a week a dozen years ago, I used the same 3 bowls for the week. And they never saw a kitchen sink. All cleaned up at the end of each meal. Minimalist, perfect, simple: Zen. Then silent sitting and walking Zazen for another 3 hours. Formal tea, casual vegan pizza (the rest of the gang enjoyed a beer) and at last a chance to talk and catch up. Then I was on my way down the mountain.

The chattering brain of mine hates the silence. My knees and inner thighs scream to move. But you can't move. You can't even scratch the powerful itch that began 2 seconds after the bell rings to begin the meditation. You sit still like a rock until the clapper sounds and you can wiggle for a minute or two until the stillness begins again.

It is not relaxing. It has no purpose. None. It will not heal me. Does not increase immune surveillance or aid in the engraftment.  

Maybe it gives me a broader perspective. I am not sure. To paraphrase Tom Robbins you don't meditate with any goal in mind. 

So why bother? 

May I please answer with an old Zen joke? You will find it published under my name (Dr. Koffman, the comic) in Joke Stew and other anthologies.

I went to a Buddhist retreat and it was a big success. I learnt nothing.