(Screenshot from “What happens to the Heart”)
I was today years old when I found out Cohen was an ordained Zen priest. From Wikipedia:
Beginning in the late 1970s, Cohen was associated with Buddhist monk and rōshi (venerable teacher) Kyozan Joshu Sasaki, regularly visiting him at Mount Baldy Zen Center and serving him as personal assistant during Cohen’s period of reclusion at Mount Baldy monastery in the 1990s. Sasaki appears as a regular motif or addressee in Cohen’s poetry, especially in his Book of Longing, and took part in a 1997 documentary about Cohen’s monastery years, Leonard Cohen: Spring 1996. Cohen’s 2001 album Ten New Songs and his 2014 album Popular Problems are dedicated to Joshu Sasaki.
His post-humous album’s opener was a particularly moving piece for me, plenty of interesting references in the poetry, as well as a jewish boy undressing & given a kimono by an asian monk/priest in the video.
I’ve got nothing to add to his heart throbbing work:
I was always workin’ steady but I never called it art
I got my shit together meeting Christ and reading Marx
It failed my little fire but it spread a dying spark
Go tell the young Messiah what happens to the heart
There’s a mist of summer kisses where I tried to double park
The rivalry was viscious, the women were in charge
It was nothing, it was business, but it left an ugly mark
I’ve come here to revisit what happens to the heart
I was selling holy trinkets, I was dressing kind of sharp
I let pussy in the kitchen and a panther in the yard
In the prison of the gifted I was friendly with the guards
So I never had to witness what happens to the heart
I shoulda seen it coming, after all I knew the chart
Just to look at her was trouble, it was trouble from the start
Sure we played a stunning couple, but I never liked the part
It ain’t pretty, it ain’t subtle, what happens to the heart
Now the angel’s got a fiddle, the devil’s got a harp
Every soul is like a minnow, every mind is like a shark
May have broken every window, but the house
The house is dark, I care but very little
What happens to the heart
Then I studied with this beggar, he was filthy, he was scarred
By the claws of many women he had failed to disregard
No fable here, no lesson, so singing meadowlark
Just a filthy beggar guessing what happens to the heart
I was always workin’ steady, but I never called it art
It was just some old convention like the horse before the cart
I had no trouble betting on the flood against the Ark
You see, I knew about the ending, what happens to the heart
I was handy with a rifle, my father’s 303
I fought for something final, not the right to disagree
