Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen

by Roger Green

  Deep in the green lilac park

  You held on to me like I was a crucifix

  As we went kneeling through the dark.

  Silly question. The answer has to be yes. Come back, L. I’ve always thought a good refrain for a song would be: “Down on Donkey Shit Lane.”

  Chambers’, so seldom disappointing, prevaricates when it comes to defining a “vegetable.” “A plant or part of one used for food, other than those reckoned fruits,” it says. Pedant that I am, I would have thought that something that grows on a “herbaceous plant,” albeit a “gigantic” one, would have to be a vegetable. (That “gigantic” in the banana definition hadn’t really struck me before. From whose perspective? An ant’s? A Borrower’s? A Lilliputian’s?) Anyway, the other day an Athens bookshop was displaying a whole series devoted to those edible objects “reckoned fruits,” among which was the banana.

  Excitedly I seized the banana volume, but it turned out to be largely filled with colored plates illustrating a remarkable variety of banana recipes. I came away with two facts new to me. First, that there are hundreds if not thousands of varieties of banana. Second, that these include the plantain.

  Back to Chambers’, who this time did not disappoint:

  Strelitzia. A S. African genus of the banana family, with large showy flowers . . . (From Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, of the house of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.)

  Plantain. A musaceous plant: its fruit, a coarse banana: in India, a banana.

  Plantain-eater. An African bird (Musophaga) of a fam. Musophagidae, a touraco. (Origin—i.e. of “plantain”—doubtful.)

  Musa. The banana genus, giving name to a family Musaceae, order Musales, of (mostly) gigantic tree-like herbs.—adj. musaceous. (Latinised from Ar. mauz.)

  Touraco. An African bird (Turacus) of the plantain-eater family, with a horny shield on the forehead and remarkable pigments in its feathers. (Supposed to be a W. African name.)

  Turacin. The soluble red colouring matter of touraco feathers, containing copper.

  Turacoverdin. A pigment in touraco feathers, the only pure green pigment found in birds.

  Well, a god bless the Times-Listener crossword, on which I have wasted hours of my life, but which is the sole reason why my island retreat happens to be equipped with a copy of Chambers’ English Dictionary.

  Hail to the compilers! To Sidney I. Landau, W. S. Ramson, Catherine Schwarz, George Davidson, Anne Seaton, Virginia Tebbit, Pandora Kerr Frost, Rachel Sherrard, Mary Jane Kelly, and Fergus McGauran! Worthy successors, with your hints and your ironies, to the Grand Cham himself, Dr. Samuel Johnson.

  Perhaps it is just as well for my sanity that the scent went cold after Turacoverdin. My mind was already overheating. Yet doubtless there lurk within the 1792 gigantic pages further felicitous musaceous entries, if one only knew where to begin to look. (I did, by the way, glance at toucan, to be informed that it is a South American bird that does indeed eat fruit. We know, from Ina, that bananas grow in South America. Therefore, the toucan might very well eat bananas. But one could just as well modify the Wallace Stevens line to: “The pigments of touracos in the place of touracos.”) For a start, observe how the team manage to hint at

  For a start, observe how the Chambers’ team manage to hint at their own opinions and preferences—“showy flowers,” “a coarse banana,” “remarkable pigments,” “supposed to be,” “(mostly) gigantic.” Next, marvel at the breadth of their erudition—not only do they define turacin accurately but they throw in for good measure the information that it contains copper; not only do they know what turacoverdin is but they have ascertained to their satisfaction (and, surely, to ours) that no other bird in the world boasts a pure green pigment.

  An idiot like me would naturally imagine some connection between the name Strelitzia and the word immediately preceding it— strelitz, a soldier of the Muscovite guards, abolished by Peter the Great, a term derived from a Russian word meaning “bowman.” But the Chambers’ gang saves me from perpetrating such a gaffe. Strelitzia is connected with Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Alas, they stop short of telling me why. But I trust them implicitly, especially because they admit that the origin of plantain is “doubtful,” and that touraco is only “supposed” to be a West African name.

  Apart from the embarras de richesses of incidental nuggets, consider how, in the space of a few brief definitions, they have enlarged my store of banana information. I now know:

  1. That Strelitzia and plantains are members of the banana family.

  2. That representatives of this family can be found in, among other places, South Africa, West Africa, and India.

  3. That some bananas are coarser than others.

  4. That there is a bird that eats bananas.

  5. That the sadly underused adjective meaning, presumably, “banana-like,” “banana-ish,” “banana-y,” “pertaining to bananas,” “of bananas,” and so on, is “musaceous.” (E.g., “Pele scored directly from the free kick with a shot of musaceous trajectory”; “I fear we shall have to send my uncle to an institution if he becomes much more musaceous”; “This split is a bit too musaceous for me”; “The musaceous humor of the music-hall.”)

  That’s enough to be going on with.

  Steve Notes

  It is now December—five months after I wrote Fun de Siècle— and I see quite a lot of Steve and Sarah Sanfield. In fact, I frequently visit them in L.’s house.

  I try hard not to pump Steve for information (a) because it would not be polite, and (b) because I really do not want information. But when he started talking about “Mariana,” I must admit I did prick up my ears. It emerges that the real name of the Marianne of the song was pronounced Mariana. She was a very beautiful Norwegian girl, originally married to a man called Axel, who eventually became L.’s woman and lived in L.’s house for several years, together with her child by Axel. She antedates Suzanne and evidently lived in the house for much longer, continuously, than Suzanne ever did. In other words, the moated grange did have its Mariana.

  Steve confirms that the album I’m Your Man does have on the cover a photograph of L. eating a banana, despite Steve’s advising L. that the picture was unsuitable. L. insisted on wearing his banana on his sleeve.

  Incidentally, Steve has a son who sells Harley-Davidsons. A neat division of labor—the father takes care of the Zen, while the son attends to the motorcycle maintenance.

  My offering to Steve:

  No PLAY

  No frog

  No pond

  No water

  Bananas

  Ina, a German woman who lives on Hydra, insisted on viewing the bananas. She had a particular interest: she wished to compare them with the bananas she used to eat fried while on location in the Amazon jungle. I looked across from my house as Ina, Steve, and Sarah made a stately progress through the fruit trees. “I can see Adam and Eve,” I shouted, “but who is the third one?” Without a moment’s hesitation, Steve replied: “The Lord God herself.”

  Steve and I hope that Ina is the first of many to show more interest in the bananas than in L. and that we can make a killing with guided tours, poetry readings, and all manner of spin-offs, e.g., a museum or an amusement park. Have forgotten to mention to Steve that my friend Yiota (the very same one who takes bananas to nuns) already sells banana souvenirs in her shop on the harbor. These take the form of large, soft, yellow bananas made out of some sort of fluffy synthetic material. They have three zippers that you can open to reveal a white banana made out of the same stuff. Believe me, they have no innuendoes. Each one has two eyes and a mouth, but they are as innocent as the day. What you see is what you get—imitation banana. A unique instance of a souvenir anticipating demand instead of following it. We hope. Yiota—banana princess. (And as long as it has princesses like Yiota, Hydra cannot be a banana republic.)

  I have a much clearer idea now, after closer, prolonged inspection (thanks to Steve, who leads me gently to the bananas as though he were my guar
dian in some kind of Care-in-the-Community scheme), of how the “pizzle” operates. The whole procedure is miraculous. No wonder engravings of various magical and mystical trees seem to be modeled upon it. The pizzle head resembles a pointed, ripe-fig-colored cabbage with layer upon layer of tightly packed leaves or sheaths. The growing bananas push a pair of leaves open like wings until the leaves finally fall to the ground.

  What I did not appreciate at first is that this process is repeated almost ad infinitum. Bananas work on the principle of perpetual motion. As soon as one bunch of babies’ fingers is happily growing in the open air, immediately below them on the pizzle stem another set is bursting free, and below them another is waiting, and so on. No wonder the insides of the casings are lacquered like Chinese boxes or babushka dolls.

  Curiously—or perhaps not so curiously—my writing of these notes (or, better, my transcription of these notes from some mysterious dictation) seems to me to emulate or parallel the banana process. Every time I think I have finished, the next casing silently eases itself open, like the doors of a secret weapon silo, to reveal yet another thought-missile ready for firing—to fall to earth I know not where, or maybe never. Perhaps this inexhaustible fruitfulness was Bash’s true and hidden reason for liking the banana so much.

  Steve has written out some quotations for me. One, which I assume is from Bash, says:

  My poetry is like a stove in summer

  or a fan in winter.

  It runs against the popular taste

  and has no practical use.

  Although it sounds rather too explicit for Bash, he certainly admired uselessness in the banana, or bash, tree, which perhaps, like Leonard Cohen’s bananas (apparently), never bore completely ripe fruit. But it would be a bold person who asserted that neither poems nor banana-plants have any use at all.

  I do after all have with me the Penguin Classics edition of Bash’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa. It too translates the passage used by Lesley Downer, quoted in Chapter 4, in slightly different words, and, after “I love the tree, however, for its very uselessness,” adds: “I sit underneath it, and enjoy the wind and rain that blow against it.” I like that. Dear Bash.

  Yet how can I write “dear Bash” when I have only the vaguest idea of the man and his writing? When I read in Downer’s book:

  Banana tree in autumn gale—

  All night hearing

  Rain in a basin . . .

  I thought I had got the picture. But the Penguin Classics has:

  Tonight, the wind blowing

  Through the Bash tree,

  I hear the leaking rain

  Drop against a basin.

  So now I have two pictures, each probably an approximation of the original. It doesn’t matter. I know that, as I lie in bed and hear the wind blowing through L.’s bananas, I have an affinity with a seventeenth-century Japanese poet, through whom I am linked to L. himself (for I have heard that L. admires Bash) and to Steve listening to the same wind in the same leaves and dreaming in haiku as the rain sneaks into both our houses.

  Steve is reading my commuting book Notes from Overground, which is published under the name Tiresias. “Hey, Roger,” he says, “what does this mean? ‘Mermaid in high banana shock’?” I am startled, if not shocked, in my turn. I explain that I simply put together to form a joke headline the names of four railway trucks that I used to notice out the train window—Shock, High, Mermaid, and Banana. Thanks, Steve; I had completely forgotten the existence of rolling stock called Bananas and the fact that they had insinuated themselves into my work.

  It seems almost incidental that one day, sitting in one of L.’s first-floor rooms, I calmly gave Sarah and Steve a rendition of Fun de Siècle. I will show them these notes one day but at the moment am reluctant to divulge work in progress.

  Somebody has just told me that there is somebody on the island who has the entire Encyclopedia Britannica on compact disc. I DON’T WANT TO KNOW! For me half the pleasure of writing these notes and collecting the material is my totally haphazard and aleatory way of procedure. The Encyclopedia Britannica would be soul-destroying enough. Imagine accessing the Internet. ’Tis too horrible.

  According to the blurb on one of his books, Steve has been “hailed as ‘the master of American haiku.’” Really? Do people actually shout at him as he passes: “Master of American haiku!”? Be that as it may, I hail him from my house if I have a question, and he and Sarah hail me from L.’s terrace if they need a Greek interpreter. Now, that’s what I call hailing. (I.e., I shout: “M.O.A.H!”)

  If Steve is—and he probably is—the master of American haiku, then, on his own testimony, he owes his extraordinary status to one book—Haiku, by R. H. Blyth, in four volumes: Vol. IV, Autumn–Winter, Japan, Hokuseido, 1952. Why Vol. IV? Because that was the sole volume to be found in L.’s house when Steve first stayed there some thirty-five years ago. And that very same volume was still in L.’s house when Steve returned this autumn of 1997. But it is not in L.’s house now. It is sitting on my table as I write, and I feel inestimably honored that Steve has allowed me to borrow it.

  I cannot speak of volumes I, II, and III, but Haiku, Vol. IV, Autumn–Winter, or at least the copy thereof beside me now, is clearly a device primed to explode inside the mind of anyone who so much as sees it and handles it, let alone opens it and reads it. It is a chunky little object, eminently heftable, lightly bound in what I would describe as sack-colored sackcloth, which even smells like a sack in a granary. Stamped into the cover, as well as the English title, are two graceful Japanese ideograms. Inside, paper, Roman type, Japanese type, delicate illustrations with transparent explanations—the whole design attracts irresistibly. Again, smell predominates. I cannot describe the odor that emanates from the pages. It must be the product of the operation of some forty alternations of Greek heat and Greek damp upon the original Japanese glue. It is a hauntingly subtle fragrance. How could the young Steve, LSD bottle at his elbow, not have been influenced by such an explosive package?

  The key word is love. Compositors, binders, editors, publishers, plate-makers have lovingly produced this volume. As for R. H. Blyth himself, his love for every aspect of his subject radiates from every page. According to yet another book that Steve has lent me, The Roaring Stream: A New Zen Reader, Blyth’s book contains “flaws and mistakes.” How dare the editors suggest such a thing? What un-Zen-like impudence. The Roaring Stream stinks—so there! It is so shoddily put together—a mishmash of other people’s translations—that it doesn’t even have an index. (In American, I suppose I should say The Roaring Stream sucks.) Anyway, Blyth is the man, and his section (yes, a whole section) on “the banana-plant” is sublime.

  Blyth’s selection begins, naturally, with Old Banana-plant himself:

  Having planted a bash,

  I feel spiteful now

  Towards the sprouting bush-clover.

  Here is Kyria Evangelia. “Will you give this to Mr. Steve, please?” It is a fat envelope from Senegal, plastered with exotic stamps and addressed to

  Leonard Cohen

  Hydra

  Greece

  And here am I trying to be clever:

  One hand

  Clapping

  A banana leaf.

  The first time I visited L.’s house, Steve lent me two of his books of haiku, and Sarah put them in a brown paper bag from Maria and Dimitris Kondopitharis’s Four Corners shop. When I got home I observed that the bag bore the English words “Greek Fruits,” plus a drawing of several kinds of fruit, including four bananas.

  Steve keeps pressing on me grapefruit from the garden. Leonard Cohen’s grapefruit? Now, there’s an idea.

  Voyeur

  Steve and I inspect banana storm damage together. Cracked stems. Ripped leaves—but the leaves are designed to rip—has anyone ever thought of designing a yacht’s sails to tear along dotted lines in gales? Imagine the huge threshings and moanings if banana leaves (not
to mention birds’ feathers, not to mention angels’ wings-vans) resisted the wind instead of submitting to it! I got excited about seeing at close quarters the kind of assembly-line system that produces the fruit.

  “Hey, Steve, you can see the flowers turning into bananas!”

  “Calm down, Roger. Bananas aren’t unique. All fruit comes from flowers.” Yes, but the difference here is that while apples, pears, oranges, etc. blossom, then the blossom falls and the fruit begins, on a banana stem everything is happening at once and continuously—a factory, a fructory. Above the first ring of flowers you have a ring that is half flower, half banana; above that a ring of tiny fruit; above that a ring of larger bananas. And so on—all emanating from the pizzle at the tip of the stem. A conveyor belt. A force constantly driving through a green fuse.

  After more storm the bananas have taken a tremendous bashing (no pun, for once, intended). Steve offers me remnants, but what would I do with them?

  Steve says he’s too much in awe of Bash, respects him too much, to presume to attempt a banana (Bash) haiku. Says he can’t understand why Bash’s frog-pond haiku is considered the greatest of all time. I reply: “If you can’t, who can?” All this in the very shadow of L.’s or Koulis’s bananas.

  Steve has given me a copy of his American Zen, mainly haiku, as a New Year’s present. He wrote in it: “For Roger G. in the long smile of it, with admiration and affection, Steve S. at the turning, In One Year & Out The Other.” (The last seven words were my suggestion for a title for a new collection of his.)

  Am constantly amazed at where this Fun de Siècle banana jeu d’esprit keeps taking me. Even the order of events seems somehow preordained. And now I am a frequent visitor in L.’s house and garden. Steve, Sarah, and I, in a relaxed, informal way, exchange visits, food, books, ideas, poems, gossip, newspaper clippings, bananas. Although I must admit that most of the food traffic is one-way. “What a bloody pity it is that you don’t drink, Roger.”