WRITING THINGS DOWN

[RonPrice]

Price had lived a life, not of wandering from town to town, although it might have appeared that way, but of attachment to a new world Faith that had been growing unobtrusively for his forty years of active involvement in it. There had been some despair, some depression, but little freedom from responsibility and obligation. He felt a sense of adventure, excitement, even romance, in this Faith, a Faith which gave him a feeling of continuity, meaning, direction, beauty. By his late forties he had acquired a great need to write things down, mostly poetry. He did not feel angry, alone, or especially filled with desire; but he did feel tired, as if he had been carrying a great weight for years and years. And he did feel his heart at peace, most of the time, at least in his retirement.-Ron Price

Leonard Cohen had lived a life of depression and despair until the early 1990s but it is also a life largely free of obligation and responsibility. He has been immersed in romance and with Zen and Judaism he has been able to deal with the spiritual and his public career. By his early sixties his biggest need was to jot things down in a diary. In a poem he wrote in 1994 he said he was ‘angry and alone and filled with fear and desire’. Then I saw him on TV a year or so ago and all that despair and depression had gone. Wonderful, Leonard. Thank God! Thank good fortune.-A summary of Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen, Ira B. Nadel, Bloomsbury Pub. Co., London, 1996.

You don’t practice meditation any more,
you say. You practice drinking; and writing
seems to be your prayer as you move to new
and empty rooms for fresh, clean, starts, like
those 3 am beginnings everyday with another
asceticism that you feel becomes you. What has
it all become Leonard? All that money, all those
women, all that song, all that striving after depth,
adventure, experience!! What has it all become?
..................

Ron Price
7 June 1997