Leonard Cohen Has A Thought

I've been reading from Pico Iyer's new book "Sun After Dark: Flights Into The Foreign" (which is good so far in a scattered sort of way -- I'm on page 120 and still figuring out what he's talking about) and at one point he quotes Leonard Cohen saying something that made me think:

"I feel 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."

Something about this sounds like truth to me, but I'm not sure what to do with it. I can see us hanging on to our own personal bits of flotsam, making our way through the high water all on our own, holding to descriptions of the world that mean next to nothing when it comes down to our day-to-day reality. Generally speaking, we live unaware. We don't really know our friends, much less our neighbors. So many people I know are looking for meaning (in life! in their careers! in a new car!), finding themselves at a loss to know what to pursue. I don't think it's hard to see that there is something wrong here.

So what can we do about it, seeing as we are all in this mess together? In a normal flood, you swim for the nearest high ground, climb up on the roof, look for something solid. And so we swim; we try money and sex and power and entertainment and more stuff and more money and more of everything else. We try religion (Kabbalah is hot right now, did you hear?, apparently it's knocked Scientology right off the stage) but we forget that religion really isn't about "expressing our individuality" but rather about getting the right things in the right order.

I guess what I think will get us through the high water and the missing landmarks is exactly that: getting the right things in the right order. So it's a first rate puzzle: what are the right things? And what order do they go in? I guess we'll have to figure that out together, my friends and neighbors...