Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen

by Roger Green

  In most of the rest of the world (I cannot speak for places such as Montréal), Leonard Cohen has passed/is passing quietly into history. Among the expatriate community on the Greek island of Hydra, he has already become myth. Many of the denizens of this elephants’ graveyard (Margarita Karapanou’s Greek expression for us all) claim to have walked with Cohen, talked with Cohen, slept with Cohen, drunk with Cohen, inspired Cohen, understood Cohen, advised Cohen, loved Cohen, hated Cohen, KNOWN Cohen. Each will tell you (or tell me, at any rate) that only he or she really appreciated Leonard’s sense of humor; only he or she was aware of Leonard’s darkest, most unnatural vice; only he or she knew why he espoused Zen Buddhism; only he or she had had the lyrics of a particular song explained to them by the Master; only he or she knows which wire the bird sat on; only he or she knows the salacious story behind the photograph on a certain album sleeve; only he or she . . . Any Hydraean cult of Cohen would need far more than four gospels as well as an Acts of the Apostles as fat as the whole Bible, not to mention an apocalyptic apocrypha.

  “Myth is the last—not the first—stage in the development of a hero,” Eliade tells us, quoting Chadwick, and continues:

  But this only confirms the conclusion reached by many investigators: the recollection of a historical event or a real personage survives in popular memory for two or three centuries at the utmost. This is because popular memory finds difficulty in retaining individual events and real figures. The structures by means of which it functions are different: categories instead of events, archetypes instead of historical personages.

  And so on. Well, I have news for “many investigators.” Hydra has never known history, remains unpolluted by it. Just occasionally the ripples of a historical event have been brought up short by its solid rock. But it has no history of its own. History takes place on the sea, or across the strait on the Peloponnese, but never actually on this island. Hydra has no history of its own. So for “two or three centuries,” read “two or three decades.” That is all the profane time it takes for a figure like Cohen to slip into myth.

  Nobody owns or has custody of a myth any more than a man, say, owns or has custody of a woman, or a woman owns or has custody of a cat. If I were the historical Leonard Cohen, I would cease to kick against the myth and pray to become entirely mythical as quickly as possible. Historical singers and bananas are transient. Mythical ones are transcendent.

  For me, one of the functions of Fun de Siècle is to help create the landscape I inhabit. I cannot (yet) make banana-plants dance, but I can snare them with song and set them in their significant place, just as Wallace Stevens did with his jar in Tennessee. By singing I settle more comfortably into my environment—i.e., not an environment that in any way belongs to me but that which environs me. I know of few things more exciting or fulfilling than to approach a place that I have hymned on board a boat that I have sung.

  In profane time I haven’t a hope in hell of being Orpheus. But in mythic time, everyone who has ever attempted to sing partakes of the Orphic essence. Thanasis the dust-cart driver is an Orpheus. Leonard Cohen is an Orpheus, albeit apparently one who turns and rends the Maenads before they can rend him. Katerina the Squaw is an Orpheus. Paul Surman is an Orpheus. Yiota, the Banana Princess, is an Orpheus. Katerina of Aigina is an Orpheus. We are not talking about verse here, or even about poetry; we have entered a realm of magic incantation, a realm of muse-ic, a realm of the Muses of the Wise and the Foolish, a realm of angels, a realm of song.

  Wolvercote Dreaming, which I mentioned a little while ago, was a song. It was another exercise in landscape creation by Incapability Green. Each section ended with a refrain that varied slightly but basically said:

  These had I sung

  Yet I had more to sing.

  An old local man, when he heard that I was moving to Greece, said: “Don’t stop singing, Roger.” And after I had performed Fun de Siècle at the Pyrofani, Valerie wrote on my birthday table: “Keep on singinging!”

  I’m fifty-seven (as the song says), yet I’m only just beginning to learn the meaning of “song,” “sing,” “singer,” “singing.” Rilke had it all sussed by the time he died at age fifty-one. Gesang ist Dasein, he said. I have seen that translated as “song is existence,” but my O-level German tells me that that is not the whole story, and that the phrase is untranslatable anyway. Rilke wrote it in one of his Sonnets to Orpheus, which a crazy Austrian told me the other day are very easy to understand. Maybe they are for crazy Austrians.

  Marina Tsvetayeva, writing to Rilke, commented: “Song is existence (to be there; anyone not singing is not yet there, is still coming!).” I know what she meant, but I feel unhappy about it. Unhappy because singers are few and far between (so-called poets are not necessarily singers), and I wouldn’t like to think that perhaps 99 percent of the world’s population “is not yet there.” For the time being, I shall circumvent this problem by explaining away Tsvetayeva’s remark as a rather arrogant let-them-eat-cake sort of comment indicative of an I’m-all-right-Rainer attitude—as right as Rainer, indeed. As for Gesang ist Dasein, what it does not posit is that singing is the only form of existence. It does not say Dasein ist Gesang. Thus, it allows for other equally valid, equally intense forms of existing.

  Ten days before my birthday I sat down and wrote:

  Everybody comes here

  With their personal nirvanas

  Which are as transient as the wind

  In Leonard Cohen’s bananas.

  Then I sat and looked at it. A god knows (as the Greeks say) what I thought I was doing. (They have so many more gods to choose from than we do.) A “personal nirvana” is in itself something of a koan. If I thought anything, I guess I imagined I was writing verses about bananas and transitoriness. Now, it seems to me, I was writing a song about singing and singers, not forgetting the angels. A song of songs, indeed. Odd how the Bible keeps making its presence felt—could this have something to do with Leonard Cohen’s rabbinical roots?

  (Have just reread the Song of Solomon. It is all there. It is the dénouement.)

  In writing the poem, I sang metaphorically. On my birthday, I sang literally. Not in the least competently, but I sang and immediately became one with singers everywhere. Nikos’s video exists to prove it. I watched it. The actor who was playing Roger Green definitely looked as though he had found the secret of passing from becoming to being. He seemed to be on some kind of shamanic journey. He kept reminding me of somebody, not myself. Now I believe his movements and posture were those of my elder son, Nick. I was looking for my father—and I found my son.

  I sang. Imagine being Leonard Cohen, a professional who must constantly monitor his voice and his breathing, who must always keep his emotions under control, must never, while singing, show what he is really feeling. Nikos had wired me for sound, and the little microphone betrayed every uncertain tremor of my voice, every hesitant intake of breath. Nikos says there was tension. Yet I was somewhere beyond or above all this. I sang my song. And when I heard that someone called Harvey had subsequently sung my song in London with his wife, I was probably even more thrilled than Leonard Cohen when he heard people singing “Suzanne” on a ship in the Caspian Sea.

  Gesang ist Dasein certainly doesn’t mean “song is existence.” “Singing is being” comes closer. I wish I knew more German. It seems to me that the Ge in Gesang has a past force. If so, Gesang, strictly speaking, must mean “what has been sung.” In that case, the phrase implies that once something has been sung, it takes on a life of its own; it enters beingness. But what, then, happens to the singer? I need a crazy Austrian to enlighten me.

  The Greek woman glimpsed and overheard talking, through an interpreter, to Suzanne in the garden has come into sharper focus. She is none other than Kyria (i.e., Mrs.) Evangelia, who looks after the property for Leonard Cohen and whose duties include tending and watering the bananas. Moreover, it emerges (insofar as anything remotely resembling a fact ever emerges on Hydra) that she and her husban
d, Koulis, are the targets of Suzanne’s frenzied and petrous antigardening efforts. It transpires that I knew Kyria Evangelia all along because we used to meet and chat while taking our early-morning swims from the Virgin Beach (so called because Richard Branson has his beady developer’s eye on it). But she never referred to her enormous responsibilities as Guardian of the Bananas, not to mention various hesperidia that also adorn the garden.

  On the same beach at the same time, we would quite often see the novelists Margarita Liberaki and her daughter Margarita Karapanou, but I never made their acquaintance. Karapanou mostly preferred to lie on her back, fully clothed, while Liberaki plunged fearlessly into the sea. Luca the spaniel trotted to and fro. One day I overheard somebody ask the daughter why she didn’t swim. She replied: “I leave that to my mother. She goes much deeper than I do.”

  On another occasion the two Margaritas, Kyria Evangelia, and I were all at the beach together, along with some other people. The sky was dark and menacing. The billows heaved constantly without crests. On a big stone, weighted by a smaller one, lay an unclaimed towel. As I swam, my knee came into contact with something soft yet firm, heavy, slow, sinister. I thrashed away wildly and landed as quickly as possible. Two women said there had been a dead bird in the water. It didn’t feel like a bird. An albatross? At the same moment, Kyria Evangelia called out: “What’s the time, Margarita?” and I remembered the childhood game: “What’s the time, Mr. Wolf?”

  Aidan Day, in his notes on “The Lady of Shalott,” has a quotation from Northrop Frye that seems to me apropos:

  Northrop Frye, commenting on Romantic views of the imagination and on the interiority of Romantic metaphorical structures, observes: “the attempt to turn around and see the source of one’s vision may be destructive, as the Lady of Shalott found when she turned away from the mirror. Thus the world of the deep interior in Romantic poetry is morally ambivalent.”

  Which brings me back to Orpheus and Eurydice—as if I ever left them.

  Yet have I more to say, which I have thought upon; for I am filled as the moon at the full (Ecclesiasticus 39:12).

  * * *

  1I now perceive that this whole oeuvre is in the nature of a reply to Paul’s poem—a contribution to a continuing amoebaean contest. Eh, old horse?

  2As I work on my second draft, I am constantly tempted to change things in the light of all I learned or experienced later. But I steadfastly resist. This text comprises several stories, and one of them is the story of how the fool who rushed in at the outset gradually received knowledge, and even a little wisdom. Various Positions is a far from idiotic title, but I did not know it at the time.

  Banana Update

  This banana thing won’t go away. I have a huge amount of material waiting to be dealt with but meanwhile have had to grab a fresh sheet of paper to report that today I have, for the first time, been in the presence of Leonard Cohen’s bananas, touched Leonard Cohen’s bananas, scrutinized L. C.’s bananas, and come away with a gift of half the casing of one of those mysterious pizzle-like objects.

  The tiny little bananas, like baby’s fingers, grow inside the pizzle end as a bird grows inside an egg. When they reach a certain size they poke their way out, and the beautiful grayish pizzle casing, lined with a sort of blood-red lacquer, falls away. I can’t think of any other fruit or vegetable that does this. Even beans and peas have to be shelled by human hand. Most plants that I know release their seeds thus, but not their fruits.

  If the donkey is (unjustly) called the devil’s walking parody of all four-footed things, then the banana-plant could be called a god’s standing parody of all stemmed things.

  Kyria Evangelia had told me that Leonard Cohen’s “uncle” was staying in the house. I have, over the past couple of weeks, observed a genial man with curly gray hair and a beard and what I would call “a stately paunch,” accompanied by an attractive older woman. I’ve seen them in the Pyrofani. I’ve spoken to them in the Hydranet office. We’ve discovered each other’s names—they are Steve and Sarah.

  Today I spoke to Steve by Four Corners shop and learned that he had some unposted mail. I offered to take it for him (and did). He in return offered me lunch. In such undramatic wise did I for the first time enter Leonard Cohen’s property—right foot first, of course.

  Despite Kyria Evangelia’s asseverations that “he even looks like Leonard Cohen,” it emerged that Steve Sanfield is not related to Cohen in any way; they are simply old friends. Over lunch—globe artichokes with pita bread and spicy, garlicky dips and salad—I learned too much and also, probably, gave away too much.

  I learned, among other things, that the original Sisters of Mercy came from Calgary and, much more relevantly, that there were two of them. I learned that Evangelia’s husband, Koulis, had planted the bananas with the hope of having a large enough crop to sell (improbable). It was confirmed that Suzanne is not the Suzanne of the song. The S. of the s. was from Montréal, whereas Suzanne is from Miami and lives in France. It seems probable that Suzanne did indeed initiate the paving in order to frustrate Koulis and Evangelia’s gardening efforts. (No wonder she spoke of cutting down the bananas.)

  Steve writes children’s books and witty antihaiku with a world-weary tone. He has lent me a couple of his poetry books. I don’t think he mentions bananas. Sarah teaches math.

  Steve lived here for two years in the early ’60s, even pre–Bill Cunliffe. He wrote a novel called Away Is Not a Place and entrusted the only copy to a woman called Olivia, who he says was Aldous Huxley’s niece. She took it to London, and it was never seen again. Meanwhile, because of the Huxley connection, Sandoz in Switzerland sent them a big bottle of liquid LSD with the request that they try it and let Sandoz know the results. Steve also made one or more hashish runs to Turkey. He lived in Morocco too. One of those guys.

  Sarah has a habit of asking very forthright questions, such as: “What are you trying to live without?” I feebly replied: “Television.” But then said: “My wife, I suppose, and my two sons.” (On reflection I have decided that this living without my wife or any partner is like being an anthropologist. Sometimes I am desperate to have a Jules around to tell all this amazing [as it seems to me] stuff to. But if I had a Jules around, the amazing stuff would either not happen or else would take a completely different form. Like an anthropologist, I cannot help disturbing and influencing my field of study, but I have to use my professional skills to influence it and disturb it as little as possible.) Sarah also asked: “Whom do you get mail from?” When I replied that today I had received mail from Brenda and the bank, they both agreed that I seemed to have all fronts nicely covered. If only!

  Steve swears he will not touch the bananas. He likes Evangelia and does not want to do anything to upset her. Steve is very alert to what is going on. He loves to watch a blind man with a white stick moving so freely around the harbor. He differentiates between the neighborhood dogs.

  Hardly noticed anything in the house except a guitar hanging on the wall in the room Steve uses for writing (no typewriter or computer). Everything painted white.

  So I told them bits of my banana story. They accepted it all and liked it and were amused by it. Now, having read some of Steve’s haiku that he has lent me, I can see that our mind-sets are not a million miles apart, at least in some departments. For example, he seems to be into Bash and shamanism, or even bashamanism, which makes a nice change from Betjemanism. He got excited when I made a pun. Happily, I’ve forgotten what it was.

  Anyway, he understood that after all those months of seeing the bananas from afar, what I needed now was to experience them from close at hand. He showed me first how a gap in the terrace wall had been made so Evangelia could pass through to the garden without, as formerly, going through the house, which used to disconcert Suzanne.

  We went down onto the extraordinary humpy, lumpy, and bumpy stones laid down and cemented by the Sisters of Mercy with never a thought for symmetry. What I had thought looked like a wishing well turned
out to be more like a crude mounting block.

  The bananas themselves are bedraggled and forlorn at the moment. I don’t think the infants’ hands ever reach maturity. But the most exciting moment was when Professor Sanfield discovered signs of a previous civilization. In the church in the village where I grew up, on a stone in one of the internal pillars, is carved a layout for the workmen to play nine men’s morris. In exactly the same way, on the stem of one of the bananas was scratched a frame of nine squares for what Steve called ticktacktoe and I called noughts and crosses. The one game had been won very easily with a diagonal of three X’s before half the other squares had been filled in. By whom? By the Sisters of Mercy, by Albanian plasterers, or by the Lady of Banana herself whiling away the hours?

  He insisted that I take away a memento—the pizzle casing. I have it to prove that I wasn’t dreaming. In shape it really is exactly like, well, a pizzle casing, i.e., one of those plastic cups that cricketers wear to protect their genitalia. But no way am I going to bring cricket into this. Steve, who has not yet seen any of this stuff, says it sounds like the Talmud, which, apparently, consists of long, rambling notes that explore every avenue of a subject.

  In the middle of the night I had an Archimedean éclaircisse-ment. Funnily enough, my first thought, when I made the connection, was: Thank a god I got there in the end by myself and didn’t have to have it pointed out to me. Bash In his haiku-type poems, Steve alludes to Bash which led me to joke about bashamanism. But I too have been a great admirer of the Japanese poet for years, especially of his Narrow Road to the Deep North— can’t think why I haven’t got a copy with me. Bash has personal significance for me