by Roger Green
3Absolute Hydra, drunk on your own blue flesh,
You who devour again your sparkling tail
In the midst of noise tantamount to silence.
4“But in any event, you will be pleased to find again in the film this ‘absolute Hydra’ of Valéry’s, which constitutes the last words of the protagonist!”
5“Everything goes under the ground and enters the game again.”
6“Plea to be buried on the beach at Sète.”
7“The Erasers, followed by Keys to The Erasers, by Bruce Morrissette.”
My Journey
My journey to England—to Oxford and London—more or less revolved around L. and bananas. I must have spent hours in bookshops, museums, libraries, art galleries, music shops. And further hours trying to explain to friends what I was up to, when I hardly knew myself. Honorable mentions go to Paul Surman, Geoff Holdsworth, Douglas Duff, Antony Green, Chris Athey, and Renée Hirschon, who listened, understood, and helped. Everyone else decided, kindly, that I was obsessed, and less kindly, that I was mad. If I were, it wouldn’t matter, because not for a long time, if ever, have I had such a ball. I was going to write “intellectual ball.” But that gives quite the wrong idea. My intellect, such as it is, does come into play. But this ball that I’m having thrives on not being defined, on transcending categories. It is a ball in the sense of a dance, a merry dance, a mystical dance. But if visualizing it as the other kind of spherical ball, I would say it comes closest to a dandelion clock.
Soon after my arrival, I telephoned Steve. He told me that at the weekend, they were going to help Evangelia tidy and truss up the battered banana-plants. I said I hoped Sarah would take some photographs. Afterward it hit me that I had made an international telephone call to L.’s friend in L.’s house mainly in order to discuss L.’s bananas.
For better or for worse, I began to discover more about L. himself—always bearing in mind that even in absentia, L. remains a denizen of Hydra and, as such, is as difficult to grasp as Proteus and Nereus. (May the gods preserve us from verifiable facts!) One of my first acts was to borrow from the public library (I subsequently secured my own copy) Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen, by Ira Bruce Nadel. Nancy Drew finds it too hagiographical; Steve Sanfield declares it too inaccurate; therefore, it must be doing something right. As for me, I found it a rich source of collateral.
But first, I have to return to what I first said about the book when confronted with Nancy Drew’s review. I could easily expunge what I wrote then, but that would be to destroy the point. One of the exciting features of this banana quest is the way new material constantly gives new illuminations, grants new perspectives. I started off writing notes to a poem and have graduated to keeping a log of a journey. Maybe I’ll even end up telling a story. At all events, nothing must be lost.
So I have to say that according to my current state of perception, Various Positions (which I now know to be the title of one of L.’s albums) is a perfectly valid title for a life of L.; L. himself is somebody famous and important; the guardian of the bananas is not a Hydra-headed monster; it was only during my stay in England that L. really began to impinge on my consciousness for the first time.
One of the first things I learned from Nadel was that L. used to work on an Olivetti Lettera 22. Photographs of L. on his Hydra terrace confirm this. Sadly, recent pictures show him with a computer. I’m proud to say that I’m typing this on my Olivetti Lettera 22. It jumps a bit, but that’s excusable in a machine nearly forty years old being operated by a man who is nearly sixty.
When I first took Nadel out of the library, I became very excited. I later read the book slowly and carefully, but first I gutted it in about half an hour and rushed to photocopy some half a dozen pages that struck me as especially significant.
The opening sentence of Chapter 1 reads:
Leonard Cohen buried the first thing he ever wrote.
That had me reeling. The further revelation—that this ritual burial of an unspecified text was connected with his father’s death— had me on the ropes. What I read on the next page put me out for the count. L. is quoted as saying:
“I’ve been digging in the garden for years, looking for it. Maybe that’s all I’m doing, looking for the note.”
Had I not written (pp. 20–21):
there might be something buried there, something that needed battening down as securely as Hercules once secured the Hydra’s immortal head beneath a huge rock?
Had Suzanne been attempting—with the unwitting collusion of the Sisters of Mercy—to make it impossible once and for all for L. to exhume his past?
Page 46 includes part of a statement made by L. on December 27, 1956:
“I want to continue experimenting with the myth, applying it to contemporary life, and isolating it in contemporary experience, thus making new myths and modifying old ones. I want to put mythic time into my poems, so they can be identified with every true fable ever sung, and still be concerned with our own time, and the poems hanging in our own skies.”
Forgive me, L., I didn’t realize where you were coming from. Your serious singing career begins almost exactly halfway through Nadel’s biography. Prior to that you were a novelist, a poet, and the white hope of Canadian literature. I had no idea. I’m sorry. There was I blahing away about mythic time and profane time and how Hydra has no history and exists in nonordinary reality, and all the time you were there before and beyond me. You were there.1 I didn’t think that what I was doing had anything to do with you. You just happened to own the garden in which grew the banana-plants that prompted my poem. How wrong could I be?
You were probably sitting in your cabin up on Mount Baldy monitoring my progress, or lack of it. But I had to proceed in my own way, at my own pace, in my own time—and I still do. But you are there! You are Orpheus. I know I said you were, but I didn’t really feel it. Now I feel it. You are the fabulist. I had to find out for myself that this story involves every myth that ever was. You knew it already. There is Orphic magic in your song. If there is any in mine, it will be because I have plugged in to your magic without realizing it. But of course we are both plugged in to a greater magic. There is power. There is mystery.
How did you understand in 1956, when you were twenty-two? Come to that, how did you know with such certainty what you were doing at the age of nine when you sewed a message into one of your late father’s bow ties and buried it? By 1965, at thirty-one, you were a wise old man when you inserted into Beautiful Losers the famous “God is alive. Magic is afoot” passacaglia that reached even Terry Rigelhof. You sensed the need for ritual incantation. You perceived the dynami in your Indian Katerina that I was to perceive so much later in mine—Tekakwitha and Andritsopoulou— names to conjure with on the conjuror’s island.
We are the laborers in the vineyard—or at least in the banana garden. We shall each receive our penny. It doesn’t matter a toss (heads or tails) that it took me fifty-seven years to get here. I’m here now. That’s all that matters—dasein. No, that isn’t all that matters. I can speak only for myself. I can’t speak for you or Orpheus or Rilke or anybody else. From here where I am now, I have to reach out as far as I possibly can. Then, like the shaman that I am not, like the sham shaman that I am, to return and report on what I touched or what I glimpsed just out of the reach of my groping fingers. Please hold me steady, L.
Paramythi is the Greek for “fable,” a paramyth, something beside myth. Nikos Kazantzakis wrote:
If only I too could avoid opening my mouth except at that moment when the abstract idea reaches its highest peak—when it becomes a fable!
He wrote that in his book about Zorba, and in that very book he realized his ambition. Strangely—I’ve just remembered—the Greek title of that novel implies that Kazantzakis is writing the life of a saint, just like you with your Saint Catherine. Nadel quotes you as saying of Beautiful Losers:
“The book is really a long confessional prayer attempting to establish itself on the th
eme of the life of a saint. . . .”
“Because I could not write or believe in a book called Cohen’s Meditations, I had to make a story out of a prayer.” (p. 134)
Precisely. Once when I delivered a lecture on Kazantzakis, a lovely Greek woman nicknamed me the paramythas, the storyteller. If only. In this banana story perhaps the only true storyteller is dear Steve, but if I am writing a story, then the reason why it is a story is that it contains characters like Steve.
I started to find references to Steve in Various Positions, but definitely not to Steve in various positions. There’s no point in my picking any of them out. I am neither a biographer nor a chronicler. But it was cheering to meet my new friend in Nadel’s pages and to hear about the way Steve, L., and others would sit around discussing various texts, such as the I Ching and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, no doubt under the influence of various substances.
On p. 210 of Nadel, I felt a frisson when I read that L. had written, apropos of Suzanne:
“I planted and watered and sang to the seeds of revenge . . . the garden is ruined and this vigil is coming to an end.”
I knew that he was referring to the garden on Hydra. I, who have always failed in the past to detect any vibrations even in the most haunted or mystical of places.
I felt a frisson of a different kind when I reached pages 245–247. Here was a story I had been prepared for by people such as Brian Sidaway and Nancy Drew, but this was my first confrontation with the details:
At a Los Angeles warehouse to watch the filming of the Warnes’ video “First We Take Manhattan,” Cohen was photographed by publicist Sharon Weisz in his dark glasses, charcoal gray pinstriped suit, and white T-shirt, eating a banana. For him, the image was precise and revealing.
Sharon showed it to me later and it seemed to sum me up perfectly. “Here’s this guy looking cool,” I thought, “in shades and a nice suit. He seems to have a grip on things, an idea of himself.”
The only thing wrong, of course, is that he was caught holding a half-eaten banana.
And it suddenly occurred to me that’s everyone’s dilemma: at the times we think we’re coolest, what everyone else sees is a guy with his mouth full of banana. . . .
He admired the photo so much that it became the signature image for his 1988 hit album I’m Your Man, and the poster image of his 1988 world tour.
(It would be churlish to add that some people might also see a guy who thinks he’s cool committing the social blunder of wearing a T-shirt with a suit.)
I still can’t get over it. There was I thinking that I must be the only person in the world who had made a connection between L. and bananas, and lo and behold, I was the one who ended up with banana all over his face. The connection had already been well and truly made in 1988, or thereabouts, on a global scale, even including fans wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the banana—or more correctly, half-banana—emblem. Nadel prints the photograph with a caption that begins: “Cohen and his banana. . . .” Not just any old banana, mark you, but his banana. Which is perfectly valid. A man cannot possess angels, but he certainly can possess a particular banana, and this one was L.’s— is L.’s for all time. Even though le fruit se fond en jouissance, it remains for ever suspended in eternity.
So there I am in Oxford, reading Nadel and getting éclaircissements every few minutes. But also rushing around as though I had won a competition entitling me to fill a shopping cart within a limited time. To my amazement, there were only two entries in Granger’s Index to Poetry under “Banana.” One I never managed to follow up. The other was by Richard Edwards and went simply:
When I was three I had a friend
Who asked me why bananas bend.
I told him why, but now I’m four,
I’m not so sure.
I can identify with that. When I was fifty-seven it seemed a simple matter to entertain my friends with a little ditty about L.’s bananas. But now I’m nearly fifty-eight, I marvel at the turns of Fate. . . .
Paul Surman has made me a copy of a remarkable poem by Wendy Cope, written to accompany a painting by Giorgio De Chirico titled The Uncertainty of the Poet. It is just another of those oddities that my mother’s old paperback of Les Gommes has on the cover Place d’Italie by De Chirico. I visited the Tate Gallery but, like a fool, was so busy thinking about Paul Klee that I forgot to buy a postcard of De Chirico’s Uncertainty of the Poet. As I remember it, it contains a very prominent bunch (or bunches) of bananas, a stone torso, a train, a desert, and maybe the odd arch or two, similar to those on Robbe-Grillet’s novel. We are definitely in a Southy world, a world of Mediterranean light where no object can hide, a world of absolute visual clarity where, paradoxically, everything is infinitely suggestive. Nothing can be more certain than a banana-plant; yet nothing can be more uncertain than a poet.
Confronted by the conundrum, Wendy Cope responds with a little enigma of her own:
THE UNCERTAINTY OF THE POET
I am a poet.
I am very fond of bananas.
I am bananas.
I am very fond of a poet.
I am a poet of bananas.
I am very fond.
A fond poet of “I am, I am”—
Very bananas.
Fond of “Am I bananas?”
Am I?—a very poet.
Bananas of a poet!
Am I fond? Am I very?
Poet bananas! I am.
I am fond of a “very.”
I am of very fond bananas.
Am I a poet?
Any of those couplets could furnish me with an epigraph, not to mention an epitaph.
Another visual hare I was chasing was Andy Warhol’s banana. Despite the fact that Warhol’s banana is better known than L.’s banana and appears reproduced in countless glossy coffee-table books, I was unable (in the short time at my disposal— about fifteen minutes) to discover its origins. It graced (or disgraced) the sleeve of a Velvet Underground album. I don’t know the title of the album, and I don’t know whether Warhol created the banana specifically for the record cover or what was his thinking (if any) behind the image. A fascinating (at least to me) connection is that according to Nadel, L. had a long-lasting and unrequited crush on Nico, the female singer with the Velvet Underground. Warhol’s banana is big, brazen, and entire. L.’s, on the other hand, is half consumed with its peel hanging down in disarray. The L. I have been discovering does not miss tricks.
The scene changes. Now we follow the possessed poet into the tall greenhouses of the Oxford University Botanic Gardens. When he has wiped the condensation from his spectacles with a red spotted handkerchief, he peers about him and beholds the Musaceae and their relatives. He sees Ensete ventricosum from East Africa, Musa velutina from southeast India. Musa X paradisiaca (edible banana), and a fine lofty specimen of cavendishii that comes all the way from China, among others. No one to answer his unasked questions. The names form a little poem in his notebook. Already he has forgotten what each one looked like. Could L.’s bananas be paradisiaca? Outside it is bitterly cold. He pees in a clump of bamboo.
In the wonderful, alternative book department of Tower Records on Piccadilly Circus, London, I bought L.’s Death of a Lady’s Man and Book of Mercy. In Blackwell’s Music Shop in Oxford, I obtained an anthology of L.’s songs and a biography of L. by two people called Dorman and Rawlins. I haven’t read the latter yet—perhaps I never will. It has no index, but the few pages I have so far managed to find referring to Hydra talk about Steve Sandown for Steve Sanfield and Anthony Kingsville for the painter Anthony Kingsmill; elsewhere a reference to the “beautification” of Saint Catherine Tekakwitha caught my eye.
But Blackwell’s main bookshop in the Broad was my happiest hunting ground. No longer the magical place of my childhood and undergraduate days (too many concessions to commerce and computers), it remains surely the best bookshop in the world. Day after day, I browsed in different sections—Cookery, Gardening, Secondhand, various languages (I bought Lorca’s
poems, hoping for clues), Anthropology, Theology, Literature, Philosophy, Travel, Art, Music, Biography, Reference.
One day I was on the second floor, somewhere around Comparative Linguistics, when I noticed a slim black spine bearing the title The Necessary Angel. I could see at a glance that it was not by Wallace Stevens, so who had pinched his title? An Italian, it transpired, called Massimo Cacciari who duly quoted and acknowledged Wallace Stevens at the beginning. Someone called Miguel E. Vatter, who deserves every award there ever was, had somehow managed to translate the book into English. It seems it was first published in Italian in about 1986.
What can I say about it? It consists of ninety-three pages plus thirty pages of notes. It is, quite simply, the most “difficult” text I have ever read, making Deleuze and Guattari look like Doctor Seuss. And yet I devoured it, I absorbed it, I basked in it. I knew it all already. I didn’t know any of it. I didn’t understand it, but it made perfect sense. (Sudden illumination: Deleuze and Guattari’s nomads are angels.) It rendered, I’m sorry to say, Wallace Stevens’s book of the same title completely unnecessary. It was more poetry than prose. It didn’t explain anything. Cacciari knew that he couldn’t explain anything—nothing needed explanation. He was taking dictation like Saint John the Divine. He was presenting. That’s it. There is this awful term in modern business, “the presentation.” Lord, what would all the yuppies praised for their snappy presentations say, should Massimo Cacciari walk their way? His is the presentation to end all presentations and to begin them all. He is not selling anything. He doesn’t have a product. He just says: Here it is; this is it. Presentation. Revelation. Apocalypse here and now.