Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen

by Roger Green

  “Exploring without hedging”—and indeed without hedges— describes very well what I try to do. I am as honest as I know how to be. But it never occurs to me for a moment that something I put down is going to be false if I write it as I. What is Jonathan Griffin on about? And why does he stress the contemporaneity of this hypothetical problem so much—“now,” “in this day and age,” “now”? How did the mid-1970s differ from previous ages? All I can hope and believe is that if the problem did exist, and whatever it was, by now it has blown over, and it is safe for honest writers everywhere to come out of hiding and say what they like, each in his or her propria persona.

  Rang Jules, just returned from a Bohemian rhapsody in Prague and surrounding countryside. People she spoke to there loved the idea of L.’s bananas. Hydra; Aigina; Athens; Oxford; London; Alsace; Prague; Colorado; Peru; Montreal—the word is spreading. I almost wish it wasn’t. I have broken one of my own cardinal rules by telling too many people too much about work in progress. I have published it in Gath, and now I fear reprisals from the Philistines.

  In the Times, an article headlined “The Murky Secrets of Venice Canals” alleges that Venice is in peril from “toxic pollution and radioactivity.” But

  the Mayor, re-elected in November, played down the reports. “There is no danger to residents or tourists. We know about the pollution levels, we don’t need anyone to raise the alarm.”

  He has overseen the restoration of Venice’s churches and palaces, installed anti-flood defences and reversed decades of neglect by beginning to dredge canals.

  In a photograph this mayor looks like a cross between Che Guevara and D. H. Lawrence, with bushy black hair and beard, twinkling eyes, and a noble nose. He is, of course, none other than angelologist Massimo Cacciari. From the photograph, he could easily have just hijacked an airliner, but then he probably does not need wings. Indeed, this genial guerrilla, who “knows about the pollution levels,” also knows that

  the wings of the Angel pertain to contemplation. But not even the wings of angelic intelligence, the quickest of all, attain to the identification with the Point of their desire.

  And much, much more. What’s a little radioactivity sub specie aeternitatis?

  Evangelia tending to bananas wounded in the tempest. She knows when houses hurt and when bananas bleed. Felt like a character from La Jalousie as I spied on her labors. She was joined by Koulis (the only time, I think, that I have seen him in the garden) in tank top and cap. With a very sharp knife, he deftly severed three or four fronds, glowering defiantly as much as to say: I’m still boss around here. Poor bananas—paucity of panache.

  For the second time in my life heard the death-rattle as Evangelia’s mother gargled and gurgled her way through her last day on earth. The first time was when my father and I kept vigil beside my mother’s hospital bed as she too made the journey. My father kept pestering the nurses with “intelligent” questions such as: “That’s Cheyne-Stokes breathing now, isn’t it?” After it was all over, he insisted on putting on his cycle-clips and riding home by himself. I went down to the harbor; I was looking for my father. I haven’t even started to look for my mother yet. Evangelia’s mother died in the middle of the afternoon. I saw Evangelia around that time gathering flowers in L.’s garden.

  The Mistress of American Math shouted the news across to me. I went to Evangelia’s house and had a coffee beside Granny as she lay beflowered in her open coffin.

  In the afternoon, Steve, Sarah, and I went to the funeral in All Saints’ Church. As the procession left the house, somebody deliberately smashed a plate by the corner of L.’s garden wall. (To release Granny’s soul? To frighten demons?) As we passed Four Corners general store, I noticed that all the fruit and vegetables displayed outside had been covered with cloths as a mark of respect. Steve: “I’ll bet that the fact that the bananas were covered up will appear on page 326 of your book.” Yes, Steve.

  It was a day of the dead—a day for the dead. In the morning, Kyria Pagona had told me of the death of her uncle. “He was a sea-wolf, Mr. Green, who feared nothing, not even Falkonera. Yet he drowned in calm water near the Tselevinia. They think a wave made by a passing ship washed him off his own boat, which went on without him.” (The Tselevinia are two islets between which most boats pass on their way to and from Hydra. I call them the Clanging Rocks.)

  In the evening, I went down to the harbor and spoke with Koulis, standing there alone. A very pretty woman approached me, smiling, and kissed me. She turned out to be Ingeborg, onetime fiancée of Villy. The late Villy, sometime master of Dirty Corner, accomplished painter, sea-urchin gatherer, and momentary vicarious paparazzo. Villy, who had an impossible photograph taken of himself with Princess Diana of Britain, who sold it to the Greek press for a large sum, and who, a few weeks later, was found dead on board a boat at Spetses.

  That same evening, as I was passing Villy’s old house, I saw that they were chucking all his possessions out onto the street. I helped myself to a cushion, a book about Russian landscape, and two leather belts.

  Rag-and-Bone Shop

  What am I doing. Here. Probably a mistake even to pose such an uninterrogative question. What have I been living with—to what have I been allowing house room, headroom—for the past fifteen months or so? Ever since I so unsuspectingly, insouciantly, nonchalantly wrote a poem called Fun de Siècle?

  The best answer remains the one I came up with near the beginning— I have been writing a story, a parergon, a paramyth, a parable, a banana-shaped parabola. Or rather it has been writing me. But two or three items encountered by chance along the way have helped me to see the process a little more clearly.

  1. An interview with V. S. Naipaul in the Observer in which he says, among other things:

  The books I write now, these inquiries, are really constructed narratives. There is the narrative of the journey and within that there are many little narratives that are part of the larger pattern. It is a very taxing kind of writing as a lot of it occurs during the actual travel; it is not cooked up later. . . .

  I hate the word novel. I can no longer understand why it is important to write or read invented stories.

  These words excited me. I too hate the idea of the novel. (I don’t hate the word “novel,” though—why should I?) I too feel that I am writing a constructed narrative containing many “little narratives.” And, yes, it is the narrative of a journey. But if you substitute “living” for “travel”—“a lot of it—nay, all of it—occurs during the actual living” (which, of course, is true)—sadly, you begin to suspect that V. S. Naipaul is doing what the poet John Wain used to call “spitballing.” And, yes, writing is taxing—we all know that.

  And even more sadly, when I rushed to Naipaul’s nonfictional writings, hoping to find something akin to what I am trying to do, suffice it to say that I couldn’t find anything that struck the faintest kindred spark. Yes, I am writing an inquiry. Yes, I am writing a constructed narrative. But, on reflection, are not all narratives— even the most art-less—constructed? And are not all narratives in the nature of inquiries?

  So all I get from Naipaul is confirmation that I am constructing a narrative that is not a novel (though I hope it may be novel). I also obtain endorsement of my gut feeling that writers who choose to be known by their initials are somehow unreliable, unsound.

  2. I am not, as you will have noticed by now, a theoretician. I leave the theory to others, like my friend Ulf Cronquist of Göteborg, who assures me that Roland Barthes on “the text” has much that is relevant to my work.

  3. Much more directly helpful to me have been Guy Davenport’s wonderful Twelve Stories, given to me by Steve Sanfield, Master of American Haiku, whom I miss like mad every day. Not so much the stories themselves, which, brilliant though they be, are a tad too factional for me, as Guy Davenport’s “Postscript,” in which he refers to his pieces as “imaginative structures.” I like this expression. I certainly use my imagination, though more to connect than to invent. I
swear that virtually none of my bananarrative is invented. Likewise, I believe I am producing a structure, with the proviso that it is not a dead structure like a building or a vehicle but an organic structure like, let us say, a banana-plant.

  Which brings me to a fascinating parenthesis of Davenport’s in which he mentions that “a doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne calls them ‘fractal assemblages.’” My normally reliable Chambers’ (7th ed.) remains silent on “fractal,” but even before I discovered the meaning of the word, I instinctively felt that the phrase “fractal assemblage” applied to what I was doing. (While hoisting in, in passing, that Davenport, of whom I had never previously heard, was considered worthy of at least one Gallic doctoral thesis.)

  Imagine my excitement (you would not be reading these words, I think, if you could not) when, on June 29, 1993, I read this paragraph in an article in the Times by Anjana Ahuja titled “The Nature of Numbers”:

  For example, each snowflake is not only a unique ice sculpture, but also a perfect hexagon. A cauliflower is a version of a fractal—a mathematical pattern that repeats on different scales. The vegetable is made up of florets which are made up of florets, which are—you’ve guessed it—made of florets. The same can be said of trees, because branches and twigs look like miniature trees.

  Even if bananas do not have twigs and branches as such, surely the pizzle alone, with its perpetual-motion principle, must contain innumerable fractals. Therefore, my narrative, with its narratives within narratives, is not only a fractal assemblage in its own right but is also a fractal assemblage concerned with fractal assemblages, i.e., banana-plants. Magnificent!

  The whole of Davenport’s “Postscript” offers food for thought, food for comparison, and food for melancholy, if not for tears. He speaks of “dithering around on the boundary between the demonstrable world and the inviolably private world of our minds.” (All right, but my contention would be that such a boundary does not exist. But I do not mean that the only world is the world inside an individual’s head. Far from it. Simply that everything is outside and inside, all the time, simultaneously. Something like that.)

  Davenport goes on to tell an anecdote of a contingent of the Peace Corps who made a film in an African village to demonstrate the virtues of hygiene. The film was a tremendous success with the villagers, but only because in one or two frames it inadvertently showed a chicken crossing the picture. Everybody wanted to see Ntumbe’s chicken again.

  Davenport comments: “For thirty years I have been writing stories in which Ntumbe’s chicken has riveted the attention of too many of my few readers.” Who is he to complain? If Leonard Cohen’s bananas (or anything else in my fractal assemblage) rivet the attention of anybody at all, I shall be more than delighted. Davenport is clearly a good Guy, but he takes himself just a teeny bit more seriously than I take myself.

  Of course there can be no surprise that Steve, master of haiku and adulator of Bash, gave me a book that contains a beautiful piece about Bash, that even brings in Sora, who traveled with him and, I believe, gave him the original banana-plant that prompted him to change his pen-name to Bash. Of Sora Davenport writes: “When he wrote his haiku for Mount Kurokami, he was not merely describing his visit but dedicating himself to the sacredness of perception.” Precisely. I suddenly call to mind that it was my dear friend Paul Surman who first introduced me to The Narrow Road to the Deep North. And what did I do to repay you, Old Horse? I fled South.

  4. In Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke’s house on Aigina I happened across an article that criticized a certain writer for having no metaphysical hunger. It might have been simpler to single out the few writers who do have metaphysical hunger. But it made me realize that this is the quality I look for before all others in what I read; it exists in spades in the works of the writers I admire most. It is also, I hope and believe, an attribute that nobody could accuse me of lacking either as a writer or as a person.

  5. I am ashamed to say that I did not know until I came across the information by chance the other day that Dante annotated his own poems. The Oxford Companion to English Literature (4th ed.) tells us that in the Vita Nuova,

  Dante brings together thirty-one poems, most of them relating directly or indirectly to his love for Beatrice. A linking prose narrative and commentary tells the story of his love and interprets the poems from the standpoint of one who has come to see his beloved as the instrument of his spiritual salvation. The Convivio, or “Banquet,” is an unfinished philosophical work, planned as a series of fourteen treatises, each in the form of a prose commentary on one of Dante’s own canzoni.

  I hasten to emphasize that I do not see myself as a latter-day Dante, though would that I could be, if only to elevate the Banana Princess onto the Beatricean pedestal she so richly merits. But I am gratified to learn that I have such an illustrious predecessor in the field of extended autoscholiasm.

  At this moment I cannot call any other exemplars to mind, apart from T. S. (what did I tell you?) Eliot’s scrappy and probably deliberately misleading notes on The Waste Land. Of course, of the making of many commentaries by scholars there is no end. But why should writers’ meditations on their own works, and specifically poets’ thoughts on their own poems, be so rare? (Have just thought of Seferis on “Thrush.”) If it was good enough for Dante, then it’s good enough for me.

  Besides, I don’t see this particular text on which I am engaged as comprising a commentary on Fun de Siècle. I see the whole thing (for want of a better technical term), poetry and prose, as a seamless garment, as one work; I dare to hazard a guess that Dante saw his Vita Nuova and Convivio similarly.

  Why does it not seem to occur to poets in general to lucubrate upon their own works? Indeed, in Britain at any rate, it appears to be very much Not the Done Thing. If and when poets foregather, they prefer to discuss ale or sport or gossip or anything rather than their own works. Which strikes me as strange. If I had written The Waste Land (with or without the collaboration of Ezra Pound) I would have wanted to talk and write about nothing else, to spend my life trying to get to the bottom of what on earth I had perpetrated. What had I put into it? How an earth did such-and-such an element get in? My metaphysical hunger would know no bounds.

  What I would not assume for a moment would be that I was certain to be the best commentator on my own work. I would expect to be constantly surprised by my discoveries, as indeed I have been while working on this current assemblage. I would expect to be excited from time to time. But I would not expect to be objective, or even to have the best understanding of my work. That, anyway, would not be the point. Exegesis—understanding and explanation of, for example, a poem—is not the point. I am not an exegete. I am a storyteller, telling, among other stories, the story of how my poem made its way in the world after I had launched it, the story of how my postpoem life continues to be affected by the existence of the poem, and the story of how the poem has impinged on the lives of others—to name but three.

  At this point I went to visit Yiota in the Leto Hotel, full of excitement about and enthusiasm for what I had just been writing. I foolishly expected her to endorse my feelings and my findings. Not a bit of it. She let a fire-ship loose among my fleet. “A poem is a child. You will always love it. But if you give it too much attention it becomes spoiled. Too little, and it dies of neglect. But once you have made it, you cannot change it. You have said what you wanted to say. If you start entering into explanations, that implies that your poem has not been successful, cannot stand by itself. If you cannot stop talking about your poem, you are an egoist. Perhaps you are not a poet. What is all this about Dante? You haven’t seen the works in question, so you cannot talk about them. When I write a poem, I know when it is finished. I don’t want to comment on it or add to it. Perhaps I don’t understand what you are trying to do, but from what you have told me so far, I don’t think that I will like it.”

  Of course I tried feebly to fight back. But I was shaken by her onslaught. Later that same day, I wrote on a tabl
e napkin at the Pyrofani: “I forgave her because of her beauty.” But then I realized that that was (a) sexist and (b) false. So I added: “and because of her great and gracious ways,” which was more accurate. Even as she was uttering her puncturing tirade, I was marveling at the sound of her voice, the tilt of her head, the whiteness of her teeth, the movement of her lips, the light in her eyes, the sheen of her skin. . . . But even more than all these exteriors, I love the interior of her head, even when that interior turns its guns upon me. A garden enclosed is my princess; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed; her plants are an orchard of bananas with pleasant fruits.

  So what I am doing here is, among other things:

  a) inquiry (alpha) pilgrimage

  b) constructed narrative (vita) myth

  c) chasse spirituelle (gamma) cryptogram

  d) apostil (dhelta) open network

  e) narrative of a journey (epsilon) carnet intime

  f) parable (zita) premeditated notebook

  g) parabola (ita) parterre

  h) parergon (thita) litany

  i) paramyth (yiota) doxology

  j) veritable metaxy (kappa) liturgy

  k) koan (lamdha) sursum corda

  l) text (mi) lenga-lenga

  m) imaginative structure (ni) musing

  n) bananarrative (xi) kontakion

  o) chronology (omikron) hikayat

  p) fractal assemblage (pi) interlinear

  q) metaphysical hungering (rho) palimpsest

  r) Ntumbe’s chicken (sigma) flowchart

  s) metonymic montage (taf) spreadsheet