“Rabbi” Cohen’s Sabbath

This article has a long path to get to our reading it here.  It is a  selection -- from The Art of Stillness by Pico Iyer.  It is an interview with Leonard Cohen, legendary singer-songwriter, musician, poet, and novelist perhaps best known for his song "Hallelujah," who has more recently had occasion to explore a more monastic life.  Cohen’s adoption of silence and stillness “speaks volumes” about the value for us of things like Sabbaths and Sundays.

"I'd come up here in order to write about [Leonard Cohen's] near-silent, anonymous life on the mountain, but for the moment I lost all sense of where I was. I could hardly believe that this rabbinical-seeming gentleman in wire-rimmed glasses and wool cap was in truth the singer and poet who'd been renowned for thirty years as an international heartthrob, a constant traveler, and an Armani-clad man of the world.

"Leonard Cohen had come to this Old World redoubt to make a life -- an art -- out of stillness. And he was working on simplifying himself as fiercely as he might on the verses of one of his songs, which he spends more than ten years polishing to perfection. The week I was visiting, he was essentially spending seven days and nights in a bare meditation hall, sitting stock-still. His name in the monastery, Jikan, referred to the silence between two thoughts. ...

"Sitting still, he said with unexpected passion, was 'the real deep entertainment' he had found in his sixty-one years on the planet. 'Real profound and voluptuous and delicious entertainment. The real feast that is available within this activity.' ...

" 'What else would I be doing?' he asked. 'Would I be starting a new marriage with a young woman and raising another family? Finding new drugs, buying more expensive wine? I don't know. This seems to me the most luxurious and sumptuous response to the emptiness of my own existence.' 

"Typically lofty and pitiless words; living on such close terms with silence clearly hadn't diminished his gift for golden sentences. But the words carried weight when coming from one who seemed to have tasted all the pleasures that the world has to offer.

"Being in this remote place of stillness had nothing to do with piety or purity, he assured me; it was simply the most practical way he'd found of working through the confusion and terror that had long been his bedfellows. ...

"'Nothing touches it,' Cohen said, as the light came into the cabin, of sitting still. Then he remembered himself, perhaps, and gave me a crinkly, crooked smile. 'Except if you're courtin',' he added. 'If you're young, the hormonal thrust has its own excitement.' 

"Going nowhere, as Cohen described it, was the grand adventure that makes sense of everywhere else.

"Sitting still as a way of falling in love with the world and everything in it; I'd seldom thought of it like that. Going nowhere as a way of cutting through the noise and finding fresh time and energy to share with others; I'd sometimes moved toward the idea, but it had never come home to me so powerfully as in the example of this man who seemed to have everything, yet found his happiness, his freedom, in giving everything up. ...

"The idea has been around as long as humans have been, of course; the poets of East Asia, the philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, regularly made stillness the center of their lives. But has the need for being in one place ever been as vital as it is right now? After a thirty-year study of time diaries, two sociologists found that Americans were actually working fewer hours than we did in the 1960s, but we feel as if we're working more. We have the sense, too often, of running at top speed and never being able to catch up.

"With machines coming to seem part of our nervous systems, while increasing their speed every season, we've lost our Sundays, our weekends, our nights off -- our holy days, as some would have it; our bosses, junk mailers, our parents can find us wherever we are, at any time of day or night. More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently on call, required to heal ourselves but unable to find the prescription for all the clutter on our desk. ...

"Not many years ago, it was access to information and movement that seemed our greatest luxury; nowadays it's often freedom from information, the chance to sit still, that feels like the ultimate prize. Stillness is not just an indulgence for those with enough resources -- it's a necessity for anyone who wishes to gather less visible resources. Going nowhere, as Cohen had shown me, is not about austerity so much as about coming closer to one's senses." 

Thanks to Alex Newton for passing this along to me.  You can find this and other good essays and articles at delanceyplace.com. For the next 5 installments I’ll be sharing essays and insights from outside our immediate circles of Madison and the Episcopal Church.