[MD] Leonard Cohen, via Tom Robbins

[markhsmit]

I'm not Marsha, but I loved reading that again, I had forgotten.  I love them both.
For whatever reason, Another Road Side Attraction, and Suzanne are still my 
favorites.  Robbins has a book out with essays, some of them about people.
I like one about Maharishi (sp?).

Thanks,
Mark
Marsha,

I was trolling the net looking for a quote about CHOICE from Still Life with
Woodpecker (on of MY favorites) and I came across this, which evidently was
some sort of event or tribute to L Cohen by T Robbins and I thought of you.



"He was rowed down from the north in a leather skiff manned by a crew of
trolls. His fur cape was caked with candle wax, his brow stained blue by
wine - though the latter was seldom noticed due to the fox mask he wore
at-all times. A quill in his teeth, a solitary teardrop a-squirm in his
palm, he was the young poet prince of Montreal, handsome, immaculate,
searching for sturdier doors to nail his poignant verses on.

In Manhattan, grit drifted into his ink bottle. In Vienna, his spice box
exploded. On the Greek island of Hydra, Orpheus came to him at dawn astride
a transparent donkey and restrung his cheap guitar. From that moment on, he
shamelessly and willingly exposed himself to the contagion of music. To the
secretly religious curiosity of the traveler was added the openly foolhardy
dignity of the troubadour. By the time he returned to America, songs were
working in him like bees in an attic. Connoisseurs developed cravings for
his nocturnal honey, despite the fact that hearts were occasionally stung.

Now, thirty years later, as society staggers towards the millennium -
nailing and screeching at the while, like an orangutan with a steak knife in
its side - Leonard Cohen, his vision, his gift, his perseverance, are
finally getting their due. It may be because he speaks to this wounded
zeitgeist with particular eloquence and accuracy, it may be merely cultural
time-lag, another example of the slow-to-catch-on-many opening their ears
belatedly to what the few have been hearing all along. In any case, the
sparkle curtain has shredded, the boogie-woogie gate has rocked loose from
its hinges, and here sits L. Cohen at an altar in the garden, solemnly
enjoying new-found popularity and expanded respect.

>From the beginning, his musical peers have recognized Cohen´s ability to
establish succinct analogies among life´s realities, his talent for creating
intimate relationships between the interior world of longing and language
and the exterior world of trains and violins. Even those performers who have
neither "covered" his compositions nor been overtly influenced by them have
professed to admire their artfulness: the darkly delicious melodies - aural
bouquets of gardenia and thistle - that bring to mind an electrified,
de-Germanized Kurt Weill; the playfully (and therefore dangerously) mournful
lyrics that can peel the apple of love and the peach of lust with a knife
that cuts all the way to the mystery, a layer Cole Porter just couldn`t
expose. It is their desire to honor L. Cohen, songwriter, that has prompted
a delegation of our brightest artists to climb, one by one, joss sticks
smoldering, the steep and salty staircase in the Tower of Song.

There is evidence that the honoree [Leonard Cohen] might be privy to the
secret of the universe, which, in case you're wondering, is simply this:
everything is connected. Everything. Many, if not most, of the links are
difficult to determine. The instrument, the apparatus, the focused ray that
can uncover and illuminate those connections is language. And just as a
sudden infatuation often will light up a person's biochemical atmosphere
more pyrotechnically than any deep, abiding attachment, so an unlikely,
unexpected burst of linguistic imagination will usually reveal greater
truths than the most exacting scholarship. In fact. The poetic image may be
the only device remotely capable of dissecting romantic passion, let alone
disclosing the inherent mystical qualities of the material world.

Cohen is a master of the quasi-surrealistic phrase, of the "illogical" line
that speaks so directly to the unconscious that surface ambiguity is
transformed into ultimate, if fleeting, comprehension: comprehension of the
bewitching nuances of sex and bewildering assaults of culture. Undoubtedly,
it is to his lyrical mastery that his prestigious colleagues now pay
tribute. Yet, there may be something else. As various, as distinct, as
rewarding as each of their expressions are, there can still be heard in
their individual interpretations the distant echo of Cohen's own voice, for
it is his singing voice as well as his writing pen that has spawned these
songs.

It is a voice raked by the claws of Cupid, a voice rubbed raw by the
philosopher's stone. A voice marinated in kirschwasser, sulfur, deer musk
and snow; bandaged with sackcloth from a ruined monastery; warmed by the
embers left down near the river after the gypsies have gone.

It is a penitent's voice, a rabbinical voice, a crust of unleavened vocal
toasts -- spread with smoke and subversive wit. He has a voice like a carpet
in an old hotel, like a bad itch on the hunchback of love. It is a voice
meant for pronouncing the names of women -- and cataloging their sometimes
hazardous charms. Nobody can say the word "naked" as nakedly as Cohen. He
makes us see the markings where the pantyhose have been.

Finally, the actual persona of their creator may be said to haunt these
songs, although details of his private lifestyle can be only surmised. A
decade ago, a teacher who called himself Shree Bhagwan Rajneesh came up with
the name "Zorba the Buddha" to describe the ideal modern man: A
contemplative man who maintains a strict devotional bond with cosmic
energies, yet is completely at home in the physical realm. Such a man knows
the value of the dharma and the value of the deutschmark, knows how much to
tip a waiter in a Paris nightclub and how many times to bow in a Kyoto
shrine, a man who can do business when business is necessary, allow his mind
to enter a pine cone, or dance in wild abandon if moved by the tune.
Refusing to shun beauty, this Zorba the Buddha finds in ripe pleasures not a
contradiction but an affirmation of the spiritual self. Doesn't he sound a
lot like Leonard Cohen?

We have been led to picture Cohen spending his mornings meditating in Armani
suits, his afternoons wrestling the muse, his evenings sitting in cafes were
he eats, drinks and speaks soulfully but flirtatiously with the pretty larks
of the street. Quite possibly this is a distorted portrait. The apocryphal,
however, has a special kind of truth.

It doesn't really matter. What matters here is that after thirty years, L.
Cohen is holding court in the lobby of the whirlwind, and that giants have
gathered to pay him homage. To him -- and to us -- they bring the offerings
they have hammered from his iron, his lead, his nitrogen, his gold."
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