Postby AlexandraLaughing » Sat Apr 04, 2015 7:41 pm
Just caught up with a copy of the Book of Longing last month, so thought I'd add to this long-quiet post. Really interesting and perceptive comments from people on here.
As a Catholic who spent seven years in a convent, I would say that spending a few weeks there does not really give you an idea of what it's like for those who are there longer term. It's a little world with its own rules and its own society, with its own human weaknesses, some of which the structure helps to deal with, and some of which it makes worse. There are important differences with the type of monastery Mt Baldy is- that's mainly for the young, as far as I can see, and people are not necessarily intending to stay for life. Plus the fixation on one guru is quite different from the Catholic monastic tradition (except at the very beginning, with the fourth-century desert Fathers and Mothers). It's more about community and less about one person being the fount of all wisdom.
Partly for these reasons, I found the Book of Longing fascinating. I certainly felt, as LC describes, the joy of being able to be completely selfish once you leave, so that every cup of coffee outdoors in the sun, every minute of doing whatever the hell you want, and going wherever the hell you want, feels like a delicious liberation. All through LC's life, it seems to me, longing is matched by a feeling of being trapped and wanting liberation- running away and savouring the feeling of liberation, and then starting to feel guilty and longing once more. I've known people join a Catholic religious order because they thought it would help them be the best they could be, and I've known people join it as the nearest thing they could find to joining the Foreign Legion. My suspicion is that LC went to Mt Baldy in the spirit of joining the Foreign Legion, and that eventually he realised he had done his time, doused his existential agony enough to be going on with, and that Mt Baldy had ceased to be the solution, or even the medicine, and had itself become the problem.
None of that, of course, speaks to his relationship with Roshi. Roshi was clearly in some ways the love of his life- at least, he was the person LC spent most time with over the years- but in other ways, that relationship was clearly pretty similar to his relationship with a number of women- initially, Roshi was the miracle, the ice that would meet his fire, the balm on his raw longing, the place of escape from all the existential chains, but eventually he himself became a source of entrapment, wanting to wall him into his life and make him his heir. As far as I can tell from the Book of Longing, LC ended up seeing through Roshi and his schtick, but continued loyal to him (mostly) and protected him out of a sense of honour among professional magicians and out of kindness for a flawed fellow human being, as with Layton Irving. And as still understanding what Roshi was trying to do and what he had to offer broken young men (even if recognising the problems with what he was offering hopeful young women).
Leonard Cohen is the man of a thousand personae, the shape-changer and constant rewriter of his own reality, the professional liar, and yet everything he writes is true, not just superficially so. So even his seduction poem 'To a Young Nun' (basically the story of casually using someone in a vulnerable position and then casting her aside, having got what he wanted and left her distraught) tells the truth at many levels. It only gets annoying when he affects to be so surprised that anyone has taken his previous personae seriously, when he put so much effort into building them up. It's quite amusing to see the two interviews with the same journalist, one at Mt Baldy and one afterwards, in which he is equally sincere and equally definite in taking opposing views.
Having said all that, this is a great collection.