Take this longing from my tongue page 1, 2, 3

I was 14, living in a little town in Northern California, when I first heard Leonard Cohen. It was 1968 and the local PBS station (itself a recent phenomenon) was broadcasting a Canadian documentary that featured scenes of Cohen reading his poems and playing his songs over black-and-white montages of leaves floating down streams. I immediately ran out and bought his debut album, "Songs of Leonard Cohen," and was transfixed, not so much by the hypnotic singing or slightly cheesy soft-rock backing but by the words and images themselves. It was like looking at my big brother's Magritte book, with its paintings of faceless men and trees with breasts; here were handles on the road, drooling spirits, Cadillacs creeping through poison gas. At a time when my own sexuality was just beginning to raise its head in confusion, Cohen sang (on "Teachers") that "Several women embraced me/and I was embraced by men." Golly. This was not the Monkees. Fortunately, as a freshman in high school, I found other people who listened to Leonard Cohen. They were all girls, however, long-haired girls in the poetry and drama clubs, girls named Nancy and Mary who kept journals and wore green stockings. They loved the painting of Joan of Arc in flames that adorned the back of the album; the saint was an obsession of Cohen's. Though he grew up in a devoutly Jewish family, French Catholic Montreal was suffused with the church's icons, and he wrote several songs about St. Joan. I was beginning to understand that the fire I felt had its corollary in these young women, that if I was fire, as the song said, they must be wood.

Cohen had confessed early in his career to writing poetry pretty much to score chicks. By 1988 he was slightly more eloquent on the subject, telling a BBC reporter, "Poetry seemed to be the natural language of women; if you wanted to address women, you had to know this language." By 1971 Cohen's second album, "Songs From a Room," was out, and not only had his image changed -- he'd gone from looking like a funeral director on his first record to Clint Eastwood as The Man With No Name on the cover of the second -- but he was sharing a bit of personal history as well. On the back jacket of "Songs From a Room" was a photo of the beautiful, blond Marianne Jensen -- the Norwegian woman of "So Long, Marianne" fame, Cohen's lover and muse of many years -- sitting at a desk in a white room. Best of all, she was wearing only a towel. The life of a poet didn't look so bad.

"Songs From a Room" opened with two of Cohen's masterpieces, "Bird on the Wire" and "Story of Isaac," songs that, taken together, defined his persona as outsider and prophet, a man without a country and a citizen of the world. On "Isaac" he took the point of view of Abraham's nearly sacrificed son and was merciless in his appraisal of the father. (Cohen's own father died when he was 9, and there is a tension in much of his work between his desire to assume the role of the father and his need to refute it.) In the age of Vietnam, when young people were being sacrificed for an idea, his conclusions were unambiguous:

You who build these altars now
To sacrifice the children
You must not do it anymore
A scheme is not a vision
And you never have been tempted
By a demon or a god

Isaac's story, like that of Job, has been spliced and diced since first it was writ down, and Cohen was not the first to make a case for Abraham's evil. What was notable was the singer's sense of certitude, the imperative voice ("You must not do it anymore"). If the story of Abraham represented a cornerstone of Judeo-Christian tradition, Cohen's answer was unambiguous: Take this god and shove it.

"Bird on the Wire" is, on the surface, a simpler song; it has been covered hundreds of times in dozens of languages. Its clear language and meaning seem universal. But in the second bridge, Cohen limns his own dilemma, one that defined much of his art and his life: "I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch/He said to me, 'You must not ask for so much.'/Then a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door/She cried to me, 'Hey, why not ask for more?'" Caught between the spirit and the flesh, the specter of mortality on one side of the street and a reminder of life's pleasures on the other, is it any wonder he took the middle path?

Cohen had become acquainted with Zen Buddhism while he was a graduate student at Columbia in the '50s, but now he was practicing. "There was something very intriguing about the Zen training," Cohen told Hilburn. Though he was an artistic success, the singer's personal life was in a shambles. He had broken up with Marianne, and abuse of drugs and alcohol had led him to what he called a "breakdown." The Zen he practiced was tough compared with all the sensual free-falling. "It was very rigorous," he said. "We were like the Marines of the spiritual world, and I enjoyed that. But after a while I thought, 'This is crazy,' and went over the wall."

By the early '70s, Cohen occupied his own little place in the rock 'n' roll cosmos (though you couldn't say he ever rocked). Robert Altman's "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" employed his songs to such effect it looked like the ultimate music video, and Billboard labeled him "the new patron saint of the non-hippie hipsters." There was something very unpsychedelic about his image: the suits, the gravitas, the voice, the flamenco-style guitar. ("Now I don't want to give you the impression that I'm a great musicologist," he said in a 1995 interview, "but I'm a lot better than what I was described as for a long, long time. You know, people said I only knew three chords when I knew five.") The early-'60s poetry scene he had come out of in Montreal was as productive -- and self-important -- as any going down in San Francisco or New York. "We all thought we were immortal," he said of his clique. "We had this mythological sense of our own lives."

Indeed, his first poetry collection was called "Let Us Compare Mythologies," and his celebrated second novel, "Beautiful Losers" (1966), told the story of three (or maybe four) lovers who seemed to exist in a world of their own making. The narrator, an amateur anthropologist trying to reconstruct the myth of his life long after the others are gone, is driven and vexed by the memory of his best friend, F. -- who, true to his initial, fucks everything that moves: the narrator, the narrator's wife, the last surviving female members of a Native American tribe the narrator is studying. F. ends up "in a padded cell, his brain rotted from too much dirty sex," but before he dies he leads the narrator to a revelation, "the sweet burden of my argument":

God is alive. Magic is afoot. God is alive. Magic is afoot. God is afoot. Magic is alive. Alive is afoot. Magic never died. God never sickened. Many poor men lied. Many sick men lied. Magic never weakened. Magic never hid. Magic always ruled. God is afoot. God was ruler though his funeral lengthened. Though his mourners thickened Magic never fled ...

In this ecstatic passage (which Buffy St. Marie later recorded as a sort of incantation), Cohen has it both ways -- god and shaman, mystic and the pagan -- and he didn't need Timothy Leary to guide him. (Hydra, where he wrote "Beautiful Losers," was full of pleasure-seeking expatriates then, with visitors that included Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, and Cohen had made the acquaintance of LSD back in New York.) He had his own myths. He didn't need anyone else's.

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