Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen

by Roger Green

  From the sanest person here to

  the craziest person there, with love,

  Roger XX

  P.S. Valerie came up to me and in all seriousness said: “Roger, you would know this—when is the best time to harvest bananas?” I have become a recognised expert, a bananologist, a musologist! Pas si mal pour un pauvre Belgian detective, non?

  I also begged her: “Please don’t reply too quickly, or I’ll have to write another letter!” Almost by return of post, I received not one but two letters, one labeled on the envelope “Therapy” and the other “Real letter.” “Therapy” proved to be just that, and best forgotten, though I liked her description of herself as a “tall, blonde Shiksa.” “Therapy” was the kind of logorrhea that computers encourage, whereas “Real letter” seemed to have been written on, and under the benign influence of, a good old-fashioned typewriter. It contained at least one passage germane to these notes:

  It has occurred to me recently that people’s souls can be like deep dark basements filled with God knows what “accumulations.” . . . Suzanne may have got that word from the Tibetan Buddhists. . . . I saw it in a chant recently when I went to their centre to meditate. It’s something to do with “merit” and enlightenment gained through a lifetime. I think that’s what she was wishing you.

  Nancy has certainly read Ira B. Nadel, so consciously or subconsciously she would be aware of L.’s reference to the “scary basement” of his Hydra house. But she appears to be confusing the soul with some part of the mind. Anyone who writes “God” with a capital G, goes to a center to meditate, and ends up reading chants (rather than chanting them) is bound to be a little confused. And, incidentally, how do you chant the word “accumulations”? Isn’t something like “om” simpler and more profound? Is the lotus full of accumulations But seriously, g-d or god or God bless Suzanne. Did I not already advert to her skill with words? I don’t think I went far enough. Her pronouncements are oracular. In this gallimaufry of myth, fairy tale, legend, and fable, she plays, among other roles, the Sphinx, the Sibyl, the Pythoness, and, maybe, Cassandra. They reckon ill who leave her out. Thank you, Nancy, for drawing my attention to the potential intensity of her wish. And thank you, Suzanne, for your valedictory benediction. I shall attempt to prove worthy.

  I certainly prefer Nancy Drew’s interpretation to that offered by Gordon Grange of Alsace, who scribbled semilegibly on his Christmas card:

  Are the Cohens adherents, perhaps, to the teachings of Wilhelm Reich? Does Leonard’s house conceal an orgone accumulator? Were you perhaps invited to ecstatic and hard wired longevity?

  Maybe orgone energy and enlightenment do not, in fact, lie so far apart.

  Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch . . .

  Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen . . .

  In the orchard of the minstrel, the bananas steal the show.

  The sadness of clowns. The pathos of bananas.

  Finished fabulous (i.e., like the best kind of fable) The Story-teller by Mario Vargas Llosa. Could understand why Nick is drawn to this magically real Latin American world. And so it is. Decided to read it in the first place because of Steve. Had never before met a professional storyteller (let alone a Master of American Haiku). Now realize that without such people, the real world could not survive. Cockerels who crow the sun up every morning. Novelists miss the point, and so miss greatness. Storytellers belong with bards, seannachies, and ollavs. Skylarks who chant the world up from the well of darkness. Won’t you lead me there?

  I suppose magical realism or realistic magic is essentially Southy; that is why books like The Lost Steps and The Storyteller (proper fables or parables thinly disguised as novels) chime so harmoniously on Hydra. These two sentences of Vargas Llosa’s perfectly sum up my situation vis-à-vis this island:

  Here I came back without having gone.

  That’s how I began to be what I am.

  After reading Death of a Lady’s Man, I almost feel as though either I wrote it or L. is writing these pages, or at least leaning over my shoulder like Plato in Derrida’s postcard. Death of a Lady’s Man contains everything my work contains, but treated from a viewpoint some twenty years and twenty yards distant. That is, it contains everything except the bananas. Kyria Evangelia is not named, but she is implicit throughout. The extraordinary thing is that L. may not even know about the banana-plants in his own garden, and the even more extraordinary thing is that it does not matter.

  I was about to say that sooner or later, I had to read Death of a Lady’s Man. But that is patently wrong. I could only read it later. I could only read it exactly when I did in the inevitably unrolling course of this story. If, instead, I had read it sooner—if, for example, following my Pyrofani birthday party, Suzanne had handed me a copy of Death of a Lady’s Man, bound in human skin stuck full of pins with angels dancing on the head of each one, and said: “Here is a Jewish Book of the Dead for us all; if life doesn’t kill you, death will.”—If something like that had happened, it would have nipped my constructed narrative in the bud, like a banana stillborn.

  Instead I remained in ignorance until now, so that, unhampered by a little dangerous knowledge, I was able to try in my way to be free. From now on, whatever I write must be written in full awareness of the contents of Death of a Lady’s Man, even if I am able to relegate them most of the time to my subconscious. In full awareness of L.’s obsessions with, among other beings and things:

  1. Suzanne

  2. Sex

  3. The Garden

  4. Angels

  5. The Basement

  6. The Kitchen

  7. Children

  8. The Yellow Daisies

  9. Lilith

  10 Burial

  11. Weeds

  12. Scripture

  13. Writing

  Copying out passages would be to miss the point, would be beside the point. I could easily work myself up into a frenzy of excitement, jumping up and down and shouting: “Look! Look here! This is just what I said! This is just what I suggested! He even names the little church between my house and his! And here, when he says ‘Steve,’ he means Steve Sanfield! Wow!” That is not it at all.

  Any sort of critique or judgment of the book or of L. would be disastrously misguided. Liftoff or coniunctio could only take place—and even then by no means with certainty—if we had— would that we did have—a parallel text by Suzanne called Birth of a Man’s Lady. Not to mention scholia by Adam and Lorca. Suffice it to say that L. and I converge in some places and diverge in others. Some of my themes form his obsessions, and vice versa.

  Having read L.’s book, I can peer through my jalousies and know that what I am looking at is a small battleground in the war of opposites; something analogous to the marble threshing-floor of Greek folklore. Several of those thirteen headings above could be paired antithetically. My partial exegesis would be as follows:

  The House (moated grange) stands for evil, guilt, remorse, darkness. The Garden represents good, innocence. The Yellow Daisies are light, that light which “works loose the bare simplicity of things” and which, given half a chance, tears people down “to bones and instant ancient dust” (Surman). In Death of a Lady’s Man, L. mentions these daisies more than any other symbol (if symbol is the right word); they obviously disconcert him. Fortuitously or not, Ira Bruce Nadel’s book cover has a photograph of a youngish, tortured-looking L. framed by four sunflowers (my British paperback edition does, at all events).

  The yellow Hydra daisies are not sunflowers, but they usher in the sun. They are heraldically rampant now, as I write these words toward the end of March. They are virtually the last of the spring flowers to appear. They announce the climax of spring and the advent of summer. Curiously, in L.’s own garden they have been almost entirely eradicated.

  The Children are ambivalent. Sometimes they are L.’s own children. Sometimes they are other people’s. Sometimes they are his own seeming like other people’s.1 Sometimes they mock him through the bars
of his basement dungeon. Sometimes they steal his poppies. Evidently they trouble him too, like the daisies. In my exegesis they are truth. The hidden laughter of children in the foliage. A touch of Brueghel. The children and the daisies reproach but then forgive. The garden contains the possibility of absolution. Redemption through light—from photosynthesis to photolytrosis.

  * * *

  1Sometimes they are ten-year-olds making love under the windmill.

  Enclosed Garden

  From my diary:

  First the clue of an open window, then the Master of American Haiku and the Mistress of American Math—they arrived late last night. Spent about two hours with them in the workroom talking about L., Spain, Portugal, my trip, storytelling, Jews, culture, sons, etc. Bear hugs. I love that man. He gave me little Bash haiku book.

  The Ruled Notebook supplements the above:

  Coffee with S & S. Steve speaks of Evangelia’s enormous strength when holding three or four banana stems together to be trussed up. Koulis had to appear to be in charge, but really Evangelia had everything—strength, knowledge, and command. Oh, and speed.

  The Greeks have two words for it: kanei koumando. Evangelia sometimes uses the expression of herself, and it is exactly right. It means something like “she fends for herself.” Kanei signifies “(he/she) makes or does.” Koumando may simply mean “command”—“ she takes command.” Personally, I prefer to derive it from “commando”—the Greeks acquired a lot of expressions from foreign troops during the war—“she acts like a commando,” “she does what a commando would do.” And, by Zeus, Evangelia does. When necessary she will attack with all guns blazing, but equally, like a good commando, she plans, she watches, she waits; she knows the value of silence and stealth, of camouflage and surprise.

  Diary: More Greek with Steve and Sarah, and laughs. They gave me banana photographs. Evangelia burst in bearing two teeth she’d just had out.

  There are four magnificent photographs, as requested by me on the telephone from Oxford, of Evangelia and Steve in the green toils of the banana-plants, the ravaged leaves looking like Bash’s phoenix tails and tattered green fans. They show everything— a pizzle, clusters of young fruit, Steve as a satyr-like deus loci, Evangelia becoming one with the plants, the whitewashed wall, and even a sample of the uncomfortable handiwork of the Sisters of Mercy. They also—at least to my perception—convey something of the rough, wild magic inherent in the site.

  On this day I left for a quick visit to Athens and Aigina. Steve gave me a cassette to deliver to the Jewish Museum on the edge of Plaka. He and Sarah came to see me off on the Eftykhia, the Happiness.

  Diary: Bought Angel book from window of occult shop. Delivered package for Steve to Jewish Museum, Nikis 39. Group from Israel having guided tour in English. A sense of belonging. Pitiful relics. Temporary stigmata from clutching in pocket Katerina’s star key ring from Jerusalem. Outside, pruned mulberry candlesticks.

  I stayed in the apartment of Rodney and Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke off Asklipiou (i.e., Asclepius) Street. Not far from there is a magical (accurate word for once) bookshop called Pyrinos Kosmos, or Fiery World, which specializes in alternative stuff, with much of which I cannot be doing. But I often browse here, especially in the good foreign section, which stocks, among other things, the classic Thames and Hudson series Art and Imagination. I had already decided to buy Peter Lamborn Wilson’s Angels in this series and was pleased to see it in the window. I was even more pleased when it turned out to be the last copy in the shop and they let me have it.

  From Peiraeus I made my way directly to Compendium, the English-language bookshop in Nikis Street, not far from the Jewish Museum. Here I heard two poets, a Serb woman and a Greek man, read their works. Afterward people from the audience were invited to read their own poems. I stood at the lectern and delivered (no chanting this time) Fun de Siècle rather nervously.

  Two women came up to me afterward, one to say how refreshing it was to hear rhyme, and the other one to tell me that she once pursued a personal nirvana to Hydra and lost it after a month—at least she must have been listening.

  I actually forgot to record this nonevent in these notes and have had to go back to insert it. My memory wisely suppressed it. But it has to be mentioned because this was the first—and very likely the last—truly public performance of Fun de Siècle. At the Pyrofani, I knew everyone present by name; here I knew nobody. A strange occasion, but a minor landmark, nevertheless.

  Katerina had given me a spare set of keys attached to a solid, heavy brass star of David with an inscription showing that it had been presented to participants in some international poetry festival in Jerusalem. In the semireligious atmosphere of the Jewish Museum, tears welled in my eyes as I gazed at exhibits connected with the mass murder of Greek Jews in the concentration camps. But I also enjoyed reconstructions of daily life in the old Greek Jewish communities. I once again felt this strange sense of identification.

  Only afterward did I discover that in the intensity of my emotion, I had been clutching Katerina’s key ring in my jacket pocket so hard that the metal points had impressed themselves deeply in my palm. I wish I could say they had drawn blood, but, no, the symbolism was quite sufficient. Why do I wish I could say they had drawn blood? Because it would have been more poetic? Because I have masochistic tendencies? Because I want to be a martyr? I don’t know. Anyway, when I next raised my gaze I beheld the totally poetically satisfying sight of the mulberry trees that line the streets, freshly pruned, with all the branches curving up to a level top, thus evoking the splendid menorahs I had just seen in the museum.

  Menorahs also feature in The Tree of Life by Roger Cook, another in the Art and Imagination series that I already had in my eclectic library before ever I became enmeshed with L.’s bananas. It is another of those books that make what I have been striving toward saying in these pages seem almost too obvious. For instance, when Cook speaks about Carl Jung’s studies of alchemy and the arbor philosophica, everything once more connects:

  He had found that it (a symbolic image of the Tree) most often appeared in dreams at critical periods in an individual’s life, times when there was a pressing need for a supporting image of growth and integration. At times like these, this image answered the situation of the dreamer in a way that all the well-meaning advice in the world would have been unable to do.

  Precisely. And I didn’t even have to dream. (At least I don’t think I’m dreaming.) At a critical period in my life, the tree or banana-plant simply materialized to answer my situation; although, strictly speaking, we are dealing with an entire mise-enscène of which the bananas form the central element.

  Just after this passage he continues:

  For the yogi and the mystic, who have overcome the guardians and gained mastery of the “serpent power” that guards the Tree of Knowledge and Wisdom, the traditional images of Paradise become transparent symbols for the achieved state of interior ecstasy and bliss.

  “Tread softly, for here you stand on miracle ground, boy” (Durrell). I know—and I stand on it only occasionally; the rest of the time I am a privileged spectator ab extra. I am no yogi or mystic. As Durrell himself said somewhere, I am not a bonze. And yet, and yet. Perhaps I’m deluding myself, but sometimes the symbols really do seem to “become transparent.”

  Cook quotes Meister Eckhart:

  To find nature herself, all her likenesses have to be shattered; and the further in, the nearer the actual thing.

  My friend Jules once reproached me for always skirting issues in my writing, for not going for the “jugliar.” “One day, Dodger,” she said, “if you go straight in to the center, you’ll amaze ’em all.” I’m not there yet; I may never get there; but I believe I’m further in this time than I ever was before. Further in, and counting. Nearer the actual thing. Cacciari has another marvelous and relevant quotation from Eckhart:

  All creatures are green in God, but the foliage of the great Tree of creation is the Angel.

  I
cannot resist mentioning that on the next page to the one where he talks about Jung, Cook notes that the Celestial Tree of Islam is called the Sidra. Curiously, Sidra was an old name for Hydra, which survives in the name of the Hotel Sidra. Once one has started to play this game, one notices that the Scandinavian World Tree, Yggdrasil, conceals the Greek name of Hydra, Ydra. Yggdrasil is watered by Norns (of whom Kyria Evangelia is clearly one) using the Well of Urd, which again looks similar to Hydra and to the ancient Greek hudor, “water.” While in India, as Mircea Eliade tells us, for Creation to take place, Indra had to kill a serpent called Vrtra that had “confiscated the waters.”

  Whether these connections are linguistically valid or not, there is no disputing that many people have sensed exceptional energy in Hydra. It is a Center where more lines meet than mere ley lines. Although, as Eliade explains, “every consecrated place coincides with the centre of the world,” it is implicit in his writing on the subject that some Centers are more potent, more deserving of a capital C, than others.

  The Centre, then, is pre-eminently the zone of the sacred, the zone of absolute reality. Similarly, all the other symbols of absolute reality (trees of life and immortality, Fountain of Youth, etc.) are also situated at a centre.

  It would not surprise me in the least to learn that a wooden peg passes straight through the middle of L.’s garden (the center of the Center) down into the head of the dormant Hydra. What am I talking about? It does.

  In Athens, in a record shop near Omonoia Square, bought a cassette of L.’s Various Positions. Eureka, I have found it, after all this time, after all these adventures, after such a roundabout quest, which, pace Jules, is the only way to get anywhere. In “Night Comes On,” he sings: