Leonard Cohen’s Zen Sensuality
“Going Home,” the first song on Leonard Cohen’s new album, “Old Ideas,” comes from the perspective of his inner self, or, as Cohen—who lived for five years in a Zen monastery—might call it, his Buddha nature. It is this spiritual Higher Leonard who is looking forward to “going home without my burden, going home behind the curtain, going home without the costume that I wore” as he moves through the latter decades of his life. That costume is the Earthly Leonard, in his suit and fedora, “who knows he’s really nothing but the brief elaboration of a tube.” It is Higher Leonard, we learn—without surprise—who is the craftsman and seer behind Cohen’s twelve mostly brilliant studio albums: Earthly Leonard “only has permission / to do my instant bidding / which is to say what I have told him to repeat.”
– Ariel Levy writes about Higher Leonard and Earthly Leonard: http://nyr.kr/z0AS5hPhotograph by Joel Saget/AFP/Getty.
