Leonard Cohen -part wolf, part angel

"Everyone here is fucked up and desperate,
That’s why they’re here. 
You don’t come to a place like this unless you’re desperate."

"living in England is like living in a cabbage," Cohen gets to talking of Cuba, and the time, just after the revolution, when he was walking along the beach in his Canadian Army khaki shorts with his camping knife, imagining himself the only North American on the island, and got arrested as the first member of an invading force.

"So anyway, there I was, on the beach in Varadero, speculating on my destiny, when suddenly I found myself surrounded by sixteen soldiers with guns. They arrested me, and the only words I knew at the time were ‘Amistad de pueblo.’ So I kept saying, ‘Amigo! Amistad de pueblo!’ and finally they started greeting me. And they gave me a necklace of shells and a necklace of bullets and everything was great." 

An angry soul making a heroic attempt to reduce itself to calm

Cruelty has always been as disconcerting a part of his package as perversity.

 "I can’t stand who I am."

Leonard Cohen has always seemed, or tried, to inhabit a higher zone of sorts, and his parable-like songs, his alchemical symbols, and his constant harking back to Abraham and David and Isaac only compound the stakes. In trying to marry Babylon with Bethlehem, in reading women’s bodies with the obsessiveness of a biblical scholar, in giving North America a raffish tilt so that he’s always been closer to Jacques Brel or Georges Mousstaki than to Bob Dylan, he’s been trying, over and over, to find ceremony without sanctimony and discipline without dogma. Where else should he be, where else could he be, than a military-style ritualized training that allows him to put Old Testament words to a country-and-western beat and write songs that sound like first-person laments written by God?

"I feel," says Cohen, "we’re in a very shabby moment, and neither the literary nor the musical experience really has its finger on the pulse of our crisis. From my point of view, we’re in the midst of a Flood, a Flood of biblical proportions. It’s both exterior and interior—at this point it’s more devastating on the interior level, but it’s leaking into the real world. And this Flood is of such enormous and biblical proportions that I see everybody holding on in their individual way to an orange crate, to a piece of wood, and we’re passing each other in this swollen river that has pretty well taken down all the landmarks, and pretty well overturned everything we’ve got. And people insist, under the circumstances, on describing themselves as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative.’ It seems to me completely mad." Of course, he can’t explain what he’s doing here. "I don’t think anybody really knows why they’re doing anything. If you stop someone on the subway and say, ‘Where are you going—in the deepest sense of the word?’ you can’t really expect an answer. I really don’t know why I’m here. It’s a matter of ‘What else would I be doing?’ Do I want to be Frank Sinatra, who’s really great, and do I want to have great retrospectives of my work? I’m not really interested in being the oldest folksinger around. "Would I be starting a new marriage with a young woman and raising another family? Well, I hated it when it was going on"—signs of the snarl beneath the chuckle—"so maybe I would feel better about it now. But I don’t think so.