"What is a saint?
A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love."

L. Cohen, Beautiful Losers (1966)

From a mountain in Montreal, to an island off the coast of Greece, through an endless succession of sterile hotel rooms to a modest house in a decidedly unfashionable section of Los Angeles, Leonard Cohen has explored that "remote human possibility," with an appetite that is sometimes swollen and sometimes spartan. For the last thirty-odd years, over the course of eight volumes of poetry, two novels, and multiple albums, Cohen has shared his vision with those among us who realize the mysteries of the interior life is a project never fathomed by the characters of shallow TV shows.

Which is not to say that Leonard's audience is insubstantial. He is revered in Europe, where his albums consistently reach the top ten. There is an annual Leonard Cohen festival in Krakow, Poland, a country where he outsells Michael Jackson. In England, pop noirists like Nick Cave, Ian McCulloch and Morrissey acknowledge his influence; the Sisters Of Mercy even appropriated their name from one of his early songs.

Leonard Norman Cohen was born in Montreal in 1934. His father, an engineer who owned a clothing concern, died when Leonard was nine. He went on to attend McGill University, where at 17 he formed a country-western trio called the Buckskin Boys.

He also began writing poetry and became part of the local boho-literary scene, a scene so "underground" that it was bereft of "subversive intentions because even that would be beneath it." His first collection of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies, was published in 1956, while he was still an undergrad. The Spice Box Of Earth (1961), his second collection, catapulted Leonard Cohen to international recognition.

After a brief stint at Columbia University in New York, Leonard Cohen obtained a grant and was able to escape the confines of North America. He travelled throughout Europe and eventually settled on the Greek island of Hydra, where he shared his life with Marianne Jenson, and her son Axel.

Cohen stayed in Greece on and off for seven years. He wrote another collection of poetry, the controversial Flowers For Hitler (1964); and two highly acclaimed novels, The Favorite Game (1963), his portrait of the artist as a young Jew in Montreal, and Beautiful Losers (1966), described on its dust jacket as "a disagreeable religious epic of incomparable beauty." Upon its publication, the Boston Globe trumpeted, "James Joyce is not dead. He is living in Montreal under the name of Cohen." To date, each book has sold more than 800,000 copies worldwide.

But Cohen's restless spirit couldn't be contained, even by the warmth of Hydra. "For the writing of books, you have to be in one place," he told Musician magazine in 1988. "You tend to gather things around you when you write a novel. You need a woman in your life. It's nice to have some kids around, 'cause there's always food. It's nice to have a place that's clean and orderly. I had those things and then I decided to be a songwriter."

Leaving behind his domestic scene, Cohen returned to America, intent on settling near Nashville and pursuing a musical career. Championed by Judy Collins, who recorded both "Suzanne" and "Dress Rehearsal Rag" on her In My Life album, Cohen appeared at the Newport Folk Festival in 1967, where he came to the attention of legendary Columbia A&R man John Hammond (who also recruited Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen to the label). By Christmas, Columbia had released his first album, The Songs of Leonard Cohen.

It was a remarkable debut, as songs like "Suzanne," "Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye," "So Long, Marianne," and "Sisters of Mercy" propelled Cohen to the top of the pop-confessional pantheon. The songs had such power that Robert Altman's 1971 film, "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" became, in effect, the first long-form video for Cohen's soundtrack.

Songs From a Room (1969), his second album, and Songs of Love and Hate (1971) further reinforced Cohen's standing as the master ofSongs From mortification and the sentry of solitude. With "Bird On a Wire," "The Song of Isaac," "Joan of Arc," and "Famous Blue Raincoat," he continued to stretch the borders of the pop song landscape.

1972 brought with it the release of Live Songs, Cohen's only live album, which featured an amazing 14-minute improvisation, "Please Don't Pass Me By," along with live versions of songs from his first three albums. New Skin For the Old Ceremony (1973), was a bit of a stylistic departure. Featuring a more orchestrated sound (thanks to producer John Lissauer), Cohen continued his investigations into the hottest crucible of the human spirit -- the muffled battles in the boudoirs.

Cohen took a sabbatical from the musical wars for the next few years, releasing only a greatest hits album, Best of Leonard Cohen (1975). In 1977, he was back with what was certainly his most curious album, Death of a Ladies' Man. It started as a collaboration with famed producer Phil Spector, but ended with Cohen being excluded from the final stages of recording. "It was a catastrophe," Cohen remembers. "Those are all scratch vocals, and Phil mixed it in secret under armed guard. I had to decide whether I was going to hire my own private army and fight it out on Sunset Boulevard, or let it go. I let it go." Recent Songs (1979), the next album, was another stylistic departure from its predecessor. Gone was the Spectorian wall-of-sound, replaced with a more delicate musical patina partly due to the influence of co-producer Henry Lewy (who had previously worked with Joni Mitchell). The songs continued Cohen's dissections of the vicissitudes of the male-female union, but also began to reflect his long-standing explorations into the religious arena.

Various Positions (1984) was the full flowering of these religious concerns. Songs like "Hallelujah," "The Law," Heart With No Companion," and "If It Be Your Will" are contemporary psalms, born of an undoubtedly long and difficult spiritual odyssey, so difficult that its conclusion left Cohen literally "wiped out."

"I had a lot of versions of myself that I had used religion to support," Cohen told L.A. Style in 1988. "If you deal with this material you can't put God on. I thought I could spread light and I could enlighten my world and those around me and I thought I could, but I was unable to. This is a landscape in which men far stronger than you, far braver, nobler, kinder, more generous, men of extremely high achievements have burnt to a crisp on this road. Once you start dealing with sacred material you're gonna get creamed."

I'm Your Man (1988) was the culmination of Cohen's professional and personal reintegration, an amazingly crafted work that speaks eloquently to the experience of one of our musical elders. Buoyed by now-classic songs like "First We Take Manhattan," "Tower of Song," and "Ain't No Cure For Love," it was no surprise that the album went to #1 in several European countries.

While Cohen's painstaking meticulousness has led to many long passages of time between albums, artists as diverse as Neil Diamond, Nick Cave, Diana Ross, Joan Baez, Rita Coolidge, and Joe Cocker have kept Cohen's music on the airwaves with their own interpretations of his songs. Long-time musical colleague Jennifer Warnes released the critically acclaimed "Famous Blue Raincoat" in 1986, an entire album of Cohen's work.

Cohen's output does not exist solely on paper or on disc. He conceptualizes his own videos and, in 1984, scripted, directed and scored "I Am A Hotel, a half-hour short feature that won first prize at the Festival International de Television de Montreux (Switzerland) and was submitted for Academy Award consideration. He collaborated with singer/songwriter Lewis Furey on Night Magic, a rock opera movie for which he won the Canadian Juno award for "Best Movie Score" of 1985. His work in front of the camera even included a memorable cameo as the head of Interpol on NBC's "Miami Vice."

From a man who only "aspired to be a minor poet" early in his career, Leonard Cohen has produced a body of work that has withstood the passage of time. With the release of The Future, his eleventh album, he continues to bring to us, through the musical idiom, a documentation of maturity and survival. He has become an elder.

"If there is anything in my own work it's because how I cop to my own experience," Cohen told L.A. Style. "That's what I became. I became a writer and as my friend Irving Layton always said, a poet is deeply conflicted and it's in his work that he reconciles those deep conflicts.

"That place is the harbour. It doesn't set the world in order, you know, it doesn't really change anything. It just is a kind of harbour, it's the place of reconciliation, it's the consolumentum, the kiss of peace."

Leonard Cohen has taken us down to that place by the harbour and our world has become that much richer for the journey.