JIGSAW

Oh that Leonard Cohen. He turns up when you’d least expect him. Dinner time, for example, when we’re sitting down to our meagrer meal, our Gregorian Chant meal, it being several lifetimes before payday. I was just dishing up the beans to those of us humbly assembled and turned to my left and there he was sitting next to Henny calm as you please.

I’m very fond of beans, Leonard Cohen said, looking searchingly into my eyes, lingering he was in my eyes, we were having what you might call a moment of hesitation across a sea of beans. And I said, yes, I love beans too, they being high on my list, right up there at the top of my list of poverty food, and I love a man who loves beans. And Henny, a man who’s loved without hesitation, said yes, good old beans, we all enjoy a satisfying meal of beans, but not any beans, not canned beans or boiled beans or fried or sautéed beans but raw beans, these being the most economical way to consume bean nutrition and we’re everything for nutrition at this table, yes everything, because sometimes there’s little else to think of.

Leonard Cohen smiled, I believe it was wisely, and slowly nodded his head, his dark-haired head with its sculpted Roman nose and its cheeks flushed a scandalous hint of pink. I was about to ask him his thoughts on the culture of beans, his views on this subject, but first I said, surely there’s poetry in beans. And he smiled again into my brown beanie eyes and said, yes, dear lady, there’s poetry in beans, in figs, in cashew nuts, you name it, we’re rolling in poetry, it’s just a matter of being Aldous Huxley and opening the doors, peeling the eyeballs, baring the skin and this is often everything. In fact, he continued, I’m sure there’s more skin in the world than asphalt and if all the skin was laid flat, laid end to end, we’d have a new membrane with which to cover the earth, replacing ozone, replacing our dank and fumey skies. Yes, I said, baring our skin is a necessary concept because that’s what the children are doing this very minute, razor blading their emotions with the help of Aldous Huxley and blotter acid. Can’t you hear them howling? I asked, a cluster of children at the back of the house howling their heads off that the sky is falling, the sky is falling, not liking their eyeballs flayed, not liking it at all?

Leonard waved his hand. It means nothing, he said, nothing at all. But I was impelled by the urgent something and had to leave Leonard Cohen to eat his beans alone as we, the rest of us at the table, but principally Henny and me, rushed to quell the children’s hysteria. Hysteria of the usual kind, to be sure, but raw hysteria, that being the best way to consume new emotion, new vision, which is what the children were doing. By the time I’d handed out the blankets, re-read the old stories and settled the children, I found Leonard sitting outside on a collapsible deck chair jotting in a notebook, serene Buddha that he most certainly is. (But a wee bit disinclined for all that, I thought, to get his pinkies wet, his elbows muddied.)

Henny then said, as we rested in the sun at Leonard’s feet, Henny said, well Leonard Cohen, since we’re all liberals here, can you tell me your views on nothingness? But didn’t get to expand on his theme because Leonard got mad, got huffy and said, I never defend a thing I’ve researched. And with this utterance got up and strode out of the yard.

So there’s another piece of the puzzle gone missing and if this keeps up we won’t have a puzzle at all, just a series of holes and spaces. You start out life with the puzzle intact like an enormous jigsaw and then one by one the pieces drop out or go missing; every time you ask a question, shake your head and admit you just don’t know, a piece of the puzzle goes missing. Every time you approach a Leonard or a Don or a Julio or a Grace and ask them to tell you why and how, it’s tits up for another piece. If all the holes and missing spaces were laid end to end, I said to Henny, if all the unanswered questions were gathered into a giant bouquet … And Henny sighed, gazing about the empty yard. Nobody here but us chickens, he said. And we left it at that, returning to the supper table and our meal of beans. Nodding our heads. Pecking at our plates of beans.