Leonard Cohen: Poet of the Holy Sinners

From Forward.com:

“Book of Longing,” [Leonard] Cohen’s first new book of poems in more than 20 years, is a synthesis of the worldly and the other-worldly. In it, Cohen has crafted a poetic religion of whiskey, women and cigarettes, both a typically Zen Buddhist repudiation of all forms of religious piety and one framed by the categories of Jewish sensibility. It is antinomian and reverent, deeply sexual and deeply spiritual. ...

But there are two kinds of spiritual teachers in the world: those who claim to know the answers, and those who have only questions. The first fill the self-help shelves, and the inspirational section of the bookstore; they deal in facile answers, fantasies, simplicity and certainty. The second are the poets, the storytellers and those precious few mystics who know that the simple banalities of conventional morality, be it Eastern or Western, are not only reductive and clichéd; they are actively destructive to an authentic spiritual journey. They truck not in answers but in questions, not in fantasies but in realities — in subtlety, not simplicity, and in uncompromising, honest uncertainty....

This is neither cynicism nor the lazy secularism of those who mask their insecurity with rationale. It is experience. What the “crazy wisdom” poets like Ikkyu and Cohen recognize, and what moralizers never do, is that ultimately, the paramount task of the spiritual seeker is to give up any notion of knowing the right answer, or even the right course of action. Ideals of justice and compassion remain, of course; but the pretense of piety is only an obstruction to the openness and wisdom that are the hallmarks of the liberated mind. The poet returns to where he began: knowing that we are flawed, powerful animals, even as he also knows the ineffable, the transcendent. The mystic’s embrace of the worldly is not the same as the materialist’s rejection of the spiritual. Cohen’s verse — some rhyming, some blank, some in the form of prose-poem — often evokes the numinous.