“That’s Leonard’s Jeep,” Robert said as we walked his dog past the monastery. My wife and I had driven north about ten miles, most of it curving two-thirds of the way up Mt. Baldy, to watch my professor’s cabin while he was away on a business trip. The most important part of the job was to make sure his old dog, Toby, was looked after, and walked twice a day. As he showed us the normal route that Toby liked to go, he pointed over to the Buddhist monastery right across the street, halfway between his cabin and the public campgrounds. There were a few vehicles outside the building, all of them likely part-time visitors who would come up for a few days at a time to gain peace and wisdom at the feet of the monks. Among the vehicles there was a silver Jeep, which was likely bought by the unofficial Poet Laureate of Canada to make his nearly-weekly trips from Los Angeles to Baldy, trying to shake a depression, a “cloud” that had settled over him sometime in the early 1990s, and had literally kept him unable to create anything new, either on the page or in the studio, for nearly a decade.

“We’ve had breakfast a couple of times,” Robert added, as he let Toby off the leash and let him wander the ravine separating the monastery from the road. And that was that. No juicy gossip would be forthcoming. But, then again, I wouldn’t have expected any. Not about Leonard Cohen, who even before his period at Mt. Baldy seemed to already carry an almost Buddhist sense of mysticism, both in his work and his very presence. The man was a study in Taoist contradictions: a poet who became a songwriter, while most popular artists went about it the other way around. A man with a voice once called “the worst to ever be signed to a major label,” yet one that perfectly suited both the man and his songs: full of passion, mystery, and the texture of a well-aged port. An Anglo-Quebec native with much more in common, it seemed, with the artists of continental Europe than the Quebecois or English who surrounded him. A Jew whose most well known songs were populated with associations to Christian imagery. A man who looked and sounded like a philosophy professor, and yet always came off as the coolest motherfucker on earth. (more…)