ABC podcast: i/v with Sylvie Simmons

[AlanM]

I have just listened to a radio broadcast incorporating an interview with Sylvie Simmons at Sydney Writers Week.
It was similar yet different in content to what I have heard from other sources.
Being broadcast on Sunday morning it has a religious theme.

Leonard Cohen, rock star monk
Rhythms Divine
The grandson of a rabbi who grew up immersed in Judaism, Leonard Cohen spent most of the 1990s in a Buddhist monastery battling depression. On the eve of possibly his final Australian tour, biographer Sylvie Simmons explains Cohen's complex spiritual life to Geoff Wood.

It is available as a podcast (30 mins) from ABC Radio National (Australia): http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/ ... 131110.mp3
In spite of sounding like it was recorded outdoors it is actually easy to hear Sylvie!

Alan

[B4real]

Thanks Alan, I've just listened to the podcast.
Yes, of course things get repeated but that was a good interview.
And once again I missed the original broadcast. You are a good back-up man!

[jarkko]

Here is the whole interview. Thanks to Andrew Davies, online producer!

The grandson of a rabbi who grew up immersed in Jewish culture, Leonard Cohen spent five years in a Buddhist monastery during the 1990s battling depression. On the eve of what may be his final Australian and NZ tour, Cohen’s biographer Sylvie Simmons explains his complex spiritual life to Geoff Wood.

We might think we know Leonard Cohen, the 79-year old Canadian singer and poet with a gravedigger’s voice.

But, on the eve of what may be his final Australian tour, his biographer Sylvie Simmons says despite a life in front of the media, there is still much mystery surrounding the Cohen’s spiritual life, including his five year stint in a Buddhist monastery in the 1990s.

Throughout his life he’s had this obsession with being empty. He needed to be empty because then he could be filled, and this thing that he could be filled with would be love or some kind of union with the universe, or union with God.

Sylvie Simmons: A celebrated music journalist and writer since the 1970s, Simmons came to know Leonard through her writing, and he agreed to let her produce his acclaimed 2012 biography I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen.

‘One time in 2001 I did an interview that lasted three days with him and I came back like everybody else that has an interview with him, with a slight blush in my cheeks and smoking an imaginary cigarette and thinking, I’ve got a great interview, I’ve got to the heart of this man,’ said Simmons.

‘And you realise that he’s somehow given you a lot of smoke and mirrors and mystery. He’s been honest but not told all.’

Simmons wrote Cohen’s biography after similar projects with Serge Gainsbourg and Neil Young. She says the many previous attempts to capture Cohen in print had left her with a feeling of incompleteness.

‘I read lots of biographies and over the years I kept seeing the gaps and never felt that I’d got the whole man and so that’s what I decided to try and do myself.’

One of the things Simmons discovered was that Cohen’s love of music, and even his fatalistic view of life, stretch right back into his childhood.

‘Leonard, I found out, and nobody else knew this actually, was a ukulele player before he’d taken up guitar. As a little boy at the age of ten he was strumming a uke.’

‘When he was nine years old and his father died, his first piece of real writing as he’s described it – and he claims not to remember what was on it – he actually wrote folded into a tiny piece of paper... buried by stuffing inside his father’s bowtie. [He] buried it in the garden at the same time as his own father was being buried.’

Leonard was born into a Jewish family in Montreal in 1934. His mother was the daughter of a rabbi and his great grandfather Lazarus was a rabbinical teacher.

‘Basically he was born to be a rabbi, it was stamped right through him; instead he moved into the world of poetry and song. But he never turned his back on that. Bob Dylan is Jewish but reinvented himself as this little country boy who did folk music. Leonard Cohen very much kept that whole strain of Jewish music and also of following the various practices of Judaism even while he moved into various other religions.’

Cohen’s immersion in Jewish culture runs through his life’s work, most famously in the song that rebooted a fading career, ‘Hallelujah’, first recorded on his 1984 album Various Positions where he evokes the biblical King David composing music for the pleasure of the Lord of Song.

‘There’s a famous story (and it’s in the book) where Bob Dylan was having coffee with Leonard,’ Simmons says.

‘They were both in Paris, Dylan to play a concert and Leonard to see his French photographer girlfriend. And Dylan was saying, “You know your songs are becoming a lot like hymns these days, Leonard. For example that song of yours Hallelujah—I like that song. How long did it take you to write it?” And Leonard, “I was kind of a bit embarrassed it took me like six or seven years so I told him, it took two years.” And he asked how long it took Dylan to write a new song and Dylan said, 15 minutes in the back of a cab.’

After a lifetime of spiritual searching, the rabbi’s grandson is now an ordained Buddhist monk in the Zen Rinzai tradition.

‘Throughout his life he’s had this obsession with being empty,’ Simmons says.

‘He needed to be empty because then he could be filled, and this thing that he could be filled with would be love or some kind of union with the universe, or union with God. You could never tell what it was. These things all seemed to be so seamless that it could be a woman or it could be God or it could just be some state of belonging.’

Cohen’s life has been a constant search for the discipline of a spiritual path. In fact, we might say there are at least three sides to the man, each represented by a different name: Eliezer, his Hebrew name; Leonard Cohen, his birth name; and Jikan, the Buddhist name given to him by his Zen master since 1969, the 105-year old Joshu Sasaki Roshi, who was until recently head of the Mt Baldy Zen Center in the mountains just outside of Los Angeles.

Cohen decided to commit to a Buddhist monastery after his album The Future in 1993/94, Simmons says. After five years he was ordained a Buddhist monk with the name Jikan, meaning ‘Ordinary Silence’ or ‘the space between two silences’—ironic for a singer. Simmons says that Cohen took the radical step of joining the monastery ‘to observe protocol’, becoming a monk so that he could fulfil the wishes of his friend Roshi by carrying out his funeral ceremony.

‘He said to me, "Roshi never tried to get me to take on a new religion. And I didn’t want one. I already had one. I’m a Jew." But this was a spiritual practice and a discipline—both the things he was very engaged in. And they helped with his depression... [He] was getting up every morning thinking what do I have to go to get through this day. So literally everyday feeling suicidal and having to find a way of getting through it. That’s what he was having to deal with.’

Contrary to popular belief, life in a Buddhist monastery isn’t all fun and contemplation. The Rinzai Buddhist monks are known as the spiritual marines of the religious world.

‘One of the things that surprised me when I went there—I live in California now even though I’m British—but there’s a lot of Zen-lite centres,’ Simmons says.

‘They’re almost like health spas. You go there, somebody will paint your toenails and give you a shoulder massage. This isn’t like that. This was boot camp.’

Instead of being served, Cohen was learning to serve.

‘Leonard was driving his guru around, driving Roshi around... [He] loved that kind of discipline and at the same time hated it, but then that’s a Zen thing.’

‘[He] would be sitting there cross-legged for hours and hours, literally hours on end, three hours in the morning, then walking meditation, then back for teaching and sesshins with the guru and then more meditation. He said most of the time it would be obscure sexual fantasies going through his head and ideas for songs, but eventually you settle into that nothingness, that emptiness that he was looking for and it somehow managed to save him from this miserable depression and he’s a happy man these days.’

In 1999, Leonard Cohen came down from the mountain and resumed his music career.

[Sanverp]

Thanks Jarkko


Kind regards,
Sanverp

[AlanM]

This interview with Sylvie Simmons has been rehashed into a new broadcast on Australian radio, with reference to Popular Problems.
Almost Like The Blues is used at the end of the program(me).

ABC Radio National link:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/pro ... ng/5772322

Podcast:
http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/ ... 141012.mp3

Alan