leonardcohenforum.com

I'm aware this is a controversial topic, but I think it's one that's worth raising. I refrained from raising it on the thread announcing his death, which seemed disrespectful, so I raise it here instead, interested to see whether anyone will take it up or it will just be deemed too hot to touch.

Whatever we make of the allegations against Roshi, it seems clear that he was a bit of a womaniser, and LC knew he was. Now, as a Catholic, I am aware that sexual harassment of adults is not the worst thing a religious leader can be accused of; however, I'm also aware that it is extremely difficult to get people to see how damaging sexually predatory behaviour can be. On the other hand, being a sexual predator was one of the roles LC himself also flirted with back in the 1960s and 1970s, when treating women as not quite real and therefore fair game for anything was pretty common. Whatever anyone says, I do think the culture of a time has to be taken into consideration- the less impressive thing is where people refuse to admit there is or has ever been a problem once that culture has moved on.

Now, I know pretty much nothing about Zen Buddhism, so I also don't know how it views sex. In Catholicism, there's a pretty clear divide between licit sex (with your married partner, or at a push, your common-law partner) and other forms of sex, so if Roshi were a Catholic priest, he would simply be considered a fraud and a hypocrite, and that would be that. But as far as I am aware, there is no requirement that a Zen master be chaste? Am I right in thinking it's closer to the sort of Platonic ideal, where you aren't interested in THIS man or THIS woman, but in a kind of ideal of beauty? (Not that that excuses randomly groping your female disciples, obviously.)

So here comes the relevance to LC. Should we in fact be seeing Roshi, not as a father figure to him, not as the sort of serene quasi-divine figure he appears in Sylvie Simmonds' biography, but rather as a brother figure, a (metaphorical, obviously) 'partner in crime', like Irving Layton, during the 1970s when LC was struggling to find and embody authentic masculinity? Should we be seeing them as 'lads on the prowl' together, in that initial period (Roshi was present at the recording of Death of a Ladies' Man, for example, that quintessentially laddish album)? And viewing Leonard's continuing attachment to him after that period as increasingly the attachment and affection of a wryly amused spectator of the foibles and follies of humankind for a flawed- cracked- brother, overthrown by the need to touch female beauty?

Or are these questions that cannot yet be asked?

I think you've answered your own question pretty well there, Alexandra! By the way, I'm not trying to cut a potential discussion short.

A lot has been said already in this topic: viewtopic.php?f=18&t=33505&hilit=roshi
I am still struggling with the idea of enlightenment beyond good and evil.

Jarmila

Thanks- I searched for discussion on this, but all the refs I found were to the thread on his death.

Well, I've read the thread surrender linked to now, and it's basically shocked reaction from one week in February 2013 (which is also the week Pope Benedict resigned), with a few demurs. Then, on the thread for Roshi's death, people mostly say it's not appropriate to say anything bad about him when his death has just been announced, with just one exception, as far as I can see. Someone notes on the Popular Problems thread that the album is dedicated to Roshi and he respects LC's motives for doing that, and a couple of others agree.

Looks to me like analysis of the implications of the allegations against Roshi for our understanding of LC has barely begun. Maybe it is too soon.

But it seems to me that even if you go down the 'what's the big deal?' route, Sylvie Simmonds' portrait of Roshi's influence on Leonard Cohen is no longer tenable. Whatever else, Roshi was deeply flawed, and Leonard knew he was. It's his reaction to that knowledge which is interesting and revealing, and casts a new light on a number of the recent songs (and even some of the earlier ones).

I feel concerned because I posted so (too) much about that.


The death of Roshi

Once someone is dead, there is no more opportunity to walk the path. On this Earth.
(This is such an evidence, he?)
Therefore, this is a nonsense to continue to deal like if he or she can.
It's closing time.

This does not mean that some issues become non important.
I do believe it is an error to concentrate on what can not be changed while letting go what it is possible to change in this world.
Ring the bell that still can ring.



The old age of Roshi

Do just a little inquiry, and you'll find that the majority of very old men who are loosing their mind due to the old age, well, most of them are grapping the females around. This does not mean this issue is not important to deal with.

Feel free to add a line or two. I won't.



My own personal chatter box

I posted much too much because I was a chatter box.
This was my own error.



Leonard Cohen's relationship with Roshi

I know nothing about that, and I feel it is not my business. It may be some fans' affair to be curious about every inch of him. I am not a member of this sort of club.



Final word

Roshi (and anyone else ) can not be "judged" or defined on one action only.
Such an evidence also!

Thanks for that. I suppose it is nothing to Roshi what people who never even met him think of him, but, again as I know from the Catholic context, these things spread poison way beyond individuals, because the systematic denial and the institutional covering up end up being worse than the original offence in terms of the reputation of the institution.

As regards Leonard, that's the interesting thing. Inevitably, his biography illuminates his work- he himself has always written that way.

However, this won't, I think, hurt his reputation in any way, unless things are said about him of a whole order of magnitude different from what has been said to date. He's a rock star- he's not the Pope. By rock star standards, he's pretty moral, as far as one can tell.

But in this, the real question is whether, and how much, he actually does love Roshi. If he doesn't- if he's keeping quiet out of loyalty or feeling it's not his business to speak on this topic, Roshi's reputation with the wider world will remain pretty much as it is at the moment- in ruins. If LC thinks Roshi was worth more than that, if he cares one way or the other, he can write something to leave us with a better impression, even if he leaves it to be published posthumously.

So I think we'll know what LC really thinks of Roshi by whether he writes any more about him with any degree of explicitness. If he doesn't, it will confirm the view I've now formed, on further consideration of what he said to Sylvie Simmonds in 2011, and of the poems in 'blackening pages', that the 'cruel and dark regime' of Born in Chains from which the writer escaped was actually (at least partly) Roshi's.

My chatter box comment was made in reference to my, let say, conscious. I did feel a certain compulsion to write too much, which I did not like and still don't at this present time. The essential of my comments, though, feels OK to this same conscious. Not in regard of Mahomet, the Pope, Allah, Jehovah, Krishna, Buddha, Leonard Cohen or any other representation of The One. Which, in my religion, it is a sin to adore.