92
LEONARD COHEN
I started reading at seven or eight in the evening and I didn't
get off the bed for 30 hours straight except to urinate in the sink
which I expected to be cracked but which was brand-new. I went
through nine
books
without eating or sleeping or smoking, and I was
proud of myself for having located an area of pride in the midst of
my dedicated hack research. Several years of blurred activity have
made me expert in locating these areas, which must be occupied
from time to time just to appease a human's appetite for landmarks.
I've explored a lot of desolate beaches under that pressure. Not want–
ing to waste the hash on an alibi, I didn't smoke
it
for the reading,
and I wouldn't use it for the broadcast. I would save the crumb
for a surprise, but I was an agnostic when it came to surprises.
As
I
acquainted myself with the three minds I was to follow through the
western crisis, my work was compelled by the certainty that I wouldn't
have known where to go had I been free, that I couldn't operate in
Paris, that there was too much young Swedish sex going on without
me. It was a discomfort, not of lust, but of feeling unlucky.
Once the maid came in to make the bed and was mildly happy
to find I had not opened it. I watched her white bread-colored legs
over the horizon of the page as she performed a few ritual dusting
thrusts, recalling a pair of long, tanned, shaved wet legs which,
miraculously, had come to bore me as thoroughly as the sand. The
pleasure of the recollection derived from my acknowledgment that
the girl mounted on those wet legs was, indeed, a beauty by any
standard, that it was fine to have left her, that the sweetest aspect
of her nature was the way she let me know that I could neither hurt
or
miss
her. My concentration was so apparent that the maid left
with a tiny apology. I write with a fountain pen, and under the
shelf on the wall, I composed a very perishable aphorism in small
italic script:
Change is the only aphrodisiac.
For the sake of authority I drew a dash below the sentiment
and attributed
it
to the Kama Sutra. I leave these things everywhere,
lunatic fringe member of the Gideon Society. Maybe some salesman
wondering why he
is
alone will read it.
At one in the morning I decided to break my fast. I was half–
way through my last obligation to Romain Gary, a pocket edition of
his autobiography, "Promise at Dawn." I tore away the unread half
to take with me to a late
cafe
on BouI. Mich. I don't usually tear
