Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen

by Roger Green

  I replied:

  All I will say about the Banana Notes is, à la Whitman: Do I go close to the edge? Very well, then, I go close to the edge. But thank you for reading the stuff. P.S. What edge?

  What edge, indeed? In the blurb of Charles Stewart’s Demons and the Devil, I find this:

  Like the medieval cartographers’ fantasies, which were placed on the “edges” of the physical world, Greek demons cluster in marginal locations—outlying streams, wells, caves. The demons are near enough to the community, however, to attack humans—causing illness or death.

  Who is to say that the medieval cartographers were fantasizing? I am aware of a strong medieval undercurrent throughout this narrative, throughout the living of it. Here be dragons. Terra ignota. Alchemy. Angels. Wolves. Bards.

  Stewart’s “edges” is a concept I can relate to, even though, as I have said elsewhere, I do not really believe in boundaries but rather in some sort of continuum. L.’s house is not “outlying,” yet it is an astonishingly liminal place as I perceive it, particularly the garden. Maybe I am not guilty so much of going too close to any edges as of neglecting to pay due homage and propitiation to the demons. I herewith contritely apologize for neglecting them and concentrating on the equally ubiquitous angels. Like Dylan Thomas’s shepherd, I’d be a damn fool if I didn’t offer the demons some ritual observances.

  Not sure to what extent Saint Tykhon protects L.’s house and mine from demons, but the Banana Princess says that because the church was once seriously split by an earthquake (a long metal tie-beam testifies to this), the saint now protects the neighborhood from quakes. She also reports that his ikon has eyes that move. L. (Death of a Lady’s Man) says:

  Over the daisies, across the lane, fifty feet away is the chapel of Agia Tichon [sic]. The prayers of others wash over me. I will defend the chapel. I have been placed at the foot of this heap of daisies to defend whatever is in my eyesight and under my nose. (p. 98)

  Bravo. Really. Bravo. Bravo. Bravo. This means that L., when he was here (and possibly even now from his Californian mountaintop), was defending not only the long, low chapel of Saint Tykhon but also the very house where I am this minute typing these words. Just as I have been placed in my compact oionosko-peion to defend the banana-plants of L.

  In the wall of Aghios Tykhon, which I can see when sitting under my vine on my back terrace (the root of the vine is in the churchyard itself), is a niche that contains an old carved stone. I have scrutinized this stone through my elder’s binoculars. It appears to depict an ornate cross springing from what could be the curving branch of a tree (the whole thing is well weathered). Sitting on the branch is a bird, a common or garden bird like a robin or a sparrow. Flying underneath the branch is what looks like a swallow, while a vague shape in the top right-hand corner might well be another bird. Much of the left-hand side remains empty. The whole piece seems to have been executed by an artist with a penchant for asymmetry. It is tempting (for me, at any rate) to suppose that L.’s song “Like a Bird on the Wire” might have been influenced by this carving; but I have to admit it is unlikely that L. ever beheld the chapel from this side.

  From Oslo comes a packet containing a cassette from a young Norwegian singer-songwriter-guitarist called Dag who frequently visits Hydra and has become a friend. His girlfriend just happens to be the niece of L.’s old flame Marianne. This summer Dag was here with a pianist friend of his called Ronald. I gave him a copy of Fun de Siècle, and lo and behold, Dag has made a recording of it. He writes:

  Now you might not like it at all and that’s all right because I know you had another tune in mind when you wrote it. I won’t release it or anything like that, it is just to be regarded as a small token of appreciation towards a good piece of writing. Now I’ve even taken out some of the verses in order to get the dynamics right, so you’re perfectly entitled to forget all about it. . . . “Fun de Siècle” was recorded at Ronald’s house (he does the piano by the way) using his home-made equipment. . . . Give my regards to the Indian and keep doing those long walks man, they’re good for the soul.

  Well, I found it and find it mind-blowing, man. Ronald’s piano playing is out of this world—how Dag could mention it so casually in parenthesis, I don’t know—and Dag’s singing is beautiful too. Dag’s version is completely and utterly his and has absolutely nothing to do with L.’s “Suzanne,” which makes it all the more unexpected and poignant.

  The stanzas Dag omits are “And Bill’s Bar . . . ,” “And always . . . ,” “Et toujours . . . ,” and “The Millennial Olympics.” I forgive him because this way “And love is what we long for . . .” follows straight after the Indian squaw singing (with a long drawn out “ruuuuuuuunic incantation”) and the effect is magical, as if love has been summoned up by the incantation. As if post hoc were propter hoc. If only . . . I fancy myself as a sannup.

  As soon as I had listened to the song once, I rushed straight around to where I knew Katerina Andritsopoulou was working, clamped my headphones onto her elegant ears, and made her listen. Hot tears my cheeks were still stinging. I wish I could report that “the Indian” also burst into tears and fell into my arms. Alas, she was less than impressed and thought Dag’s version much too slow and melancholy. Nor was she half as excited as I was that the man was singing about her. Never mind. Subsequently both my ex-wife, Julie, and the Banana Princess, Yiota, responded far more enthusiastically and emotionally.

  (To give Squaw Katerina her due, I must say that when I told her about Beautiful Losers and her namesake, Katerin[a] Tekak-witha, and added: “Some people think I’m mad,” she retorted: “I don’t. I’m on the same wavelength as you.” As Private Eye likes to remark: Katerina is twenty-eight and Yiota is twenty-three. Ach! They are both so fair and so wise.)

  I replied to Dag in capital letters: “YOUR VERSION OF ‘FUN DE SIÈCLE’ IS MARVELLOUS!!!” and urged him to release it, saying that I should love to be Number One in Norway. Goe litle lay. Goe litle boke.

  A curious and slightly disturbing (because it demonstrates my failing mental powers) story is that of Neville and the Observer. Neville, an urbane and cultured visitor to Hydra, passed on to me a section of the Observer containing an account of a week spent with L. on Mount Baldy by one Pico Iyer. As he handed it over to me, Neville mentioned that some woman friend of L.’s had described L. as half angel, half wolf. I became very excited at this and explained to Neville that one of the sections of my “palimpsest” (Neville’s own preferred term) is entitled Of Angels and Wolves.

  When I read the interview, I found that the paragraph in question said:

  I felt disconcerted by his very niceness, his openness, his courtesy. He kept thanking me for “being kind enough to come here.” This was the seasoned seducer whom his friend Anjelica Huston called “part wolf, part angel.”

  Well, this was exciting. That these two themes that had swum up out of nowhere, as it were, into my narrative came together here in the very person of L., the phantom of the opus. Stark, staring obvious as it now seemed, it would never have occurred to me to make the connection. Perhaps for the very reason that it was too obvious.

  So far, so good. But when I started to consider the rest of the interview, I realized that the material was familiar and soon traced it back to a glossy magazine called Shambhala Sun, sent me by Steve Sanfield. Sure enough, there was a longer version of the same article. And depressingly—because I had no recollection of it at all—the “wolf, angel” reference had been heavily marked and underlined by me. Oh dear. At all events I am grateful to Neville for helping me to reestablish what I see as a very significant link. The oddest part of this little tale is the unanswered question of why Neville, having no idea of my special interest, chose to mention that one particular item from a long and interesting piece.

  Somebody told me that L. used to call his female backing chorus his “angels.” This does not excite me. It has nothing to do with the true angels inside and outside L. L.’s “angels” are a snare and a
delusion: ’ell’s angels.

  To be borne in mind: the emergency exit can sometimes provide an entrance for rescuers.

  I was sitting with P. the other evening at the Pyrofani. At the café opposite, a group of musicians, including Thanasis the garbage-truck driver, were jamming prior to playing at a wedding. Knowing that P. was familiar with Fun de Siècle, I quoted:

  And Orpheus gathers garbage. . .

  P.: “What do you mean?”

  SELF: “Well, there’s Thanasis playing his bouzouki, and he’s Orpheus in my poem.”

  P.: “Why? Does ‘Thanasis’ mean ‘Orpheus’? Is it a modern version of the name Orpheus?”

  SELF: “No. I just meant that Thanasis is a musician like Orpheus.”

  P.: “But what’s garbage got to do with it?”

  SELF: “Well, Thanasis drives the garbage truck, doesn’t he?”

  P: “It’s no good. I guess I’m thick or something. I just don’t understand.”

  It would be a rash person who agreed that P. is thick. She just has a completely different way of looking at things from mine. And there are plenty of people like P. They are not better or worse than me, just different. They will not derive any enjoyment from these pages. Occasionally they make me wonder whether I might be the one who is thick.

  Whose is this garden? is a very good question. To call it L.’s garden is a convenient shorthand. But it does not belong to him in reality any more than it belongs to Suzanne or Kyria Evangelia or Lorca or even Adam. I think the answer is that gardens, like women and cats, cannot be owned by anybody. If anybody can be said to own anything, then the garden possesses L. and all who come within its force field.

  I am suffering from a severe case of iotacism, defined by the dictionary as “excessive use of the Greek letter iota” but defined by me as “powerful affection for the modern Greek Yiota.” Impossible for my (y)iotacism to be excessive. It is a happy state which would be even happier if reciprocated.

  Feel that I haven’t stressed enough the paradox (or parallax) by which here, although (or because) “light works loose the bare simplicity of things” and tears everything down “to bones and instant ancient dust” (Surman), mystery remains and is even strengthened. As Henry Miller says, “a metaphysical bliss . . . makes everything clear without being known.” Was reminded of all this by one of the characters in Nanà Isaïa’s The Story Then and Now who observes that “there exists in things which have been totally exposed to the light a certain un-transparency” (opacity is not quite the right word). No matter how much I, or others, “expose” L.’s house and garden, they will always stand there enigmatically mocking, mockingly enigmatic, ultimately inscrutable and impenetrable.

  Did L. and Margarita Karapanou know one another?

  When unoccupied, L.’s house and garden are constantly swept and garnished, dug about and dunged, for we know neither the day nor the hour wherein their lord or his representatives may come.

  Brenda’s sketches of L.’s banana-plants; a strange, jagged tree-person that the astrologer Ourania drew on my birthday table; and a mystical tree that Lawrence Durrell executed on the front endpaper of a copy of Quinx—all seem more like the bananas than the bananas themselves. As much fauna as flora, like heraldic pterodactyls.

  Grist for Karen Van Dyck’s mill—the Dictatorship of L. or L. and the Censors. People on Hydra who never mention the regime of the “colonels” do refer to the time when L. lived on the island as if it was (and, indeed, it was) a specific historical period. It was historical but is rapidly passing into the mythological. We are not dealing here with timid pygmies (no doubt it is no longer politically correct to use the term “pygmy”) who try to censor themselves before the censors censor them, who play games in order to smuggle their petty ideas past the thought-customs, but with the old work of giants whose sole censor is time itself.

  What Milton actually wrote:

  Of Man’s first disobedience and the fruit

  Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste

  Brought death into the World, and all our woe,

  With loss of Eden . . .

  Sing, Heavenly Muse . . .

  Points of interest:

  1. “Paradise Lost” is probably the only epic to take as its cosubject a fruit.

  2. Some sixty years before the completion of “Paradise Lost,” we find T. Washington in his translation of Nicholay’s Voyage (1585) writing: “Apples of paradice, which they call muses.” Therefore, it is far from implausible that Milton was aware that his words could mean that he was invoking a fruit to sing about a fruit.

  3. As I have already pointed out, even a cursory perusal of Genesis shows that Adam and Eve were created mortal, that God lied to them, and that God expelled them from Eden before they could eat the fruit of a tree that would render them immortal. Therefore, Milton’s entire epic is based on a faulty premise, a rotten banana on whose peel Our Lady of Christ’s slipped up.

  Bash (at least in its English transliteration) contains great dendritic potency. Not only does the whole name signify “banana-plant” but also in it Buddha’s holy bo tree embraces Yg-gdrasil, “the ash-tree binding together heaven, earth, hell, and extending its branches over the whole world and above the heavens” (Chambers’), the tree which itself conceals Ydra).

  I hope my work proves to be a piece of esemplastic bananotechnology.

  Another letter from the Master of American Haiku:

  Just returned from a three day visit to Mt. Baldy Zen Center to see my old teacher. At 91 he looks and thinks frighteningly young. Spent some time with Leonard. . . .

  I brought a copy of “Fun de Siècle” which I had him read aloud to the tune of Suzanne. He particularly liked the verses, or was it the rhymes, “And Bill’s Bar” & “The Millennial Olympics.” Rhyming “margaritas” with “suite as” is remarkable.

  His comment on your commentary, which I only told him about, was “I hope he doesn’t spend too much time on it.”

  Just another letter, which, naturally, arrived on my birthday, i.e., on the exact anniversary of the day I first unleashed Fun de Siècle on an unsuspecting audience that included L.’s ex, Suzanne. Difficult to read aloud to a tune—I imagine L. delivering the poem in a kind of growling Sprechgesang. If only he would record it. . . . (A pity that Dag, who did record it, cut out L.’s two favorite stanzas.) I wrote and asked Steve to tell L. that I was quite prepared to share the proceeds fifty-fifty.

  Bananas need a lot of irrigation, but the time to close the sluices approaches. Who is to say how much time is too much? I hear you, L., up there on your holy mountaintop, and I appreciate your concern, but my feelings are that I have spent exactly the right amount of time on this piece of ramification. Or rather, that it has spent precisely the right amount of time on me.

  What can I say? What can I do? For a start I can stop being the bloody restrained Englishman, with the stiff upper lip and the fair play and the phlegm, and dance up and down and shout with excitement because I really am thrilled, chuffed, amazed, honored, flattered, overcome with emotion, that my poem has reached the ears and the mouth of L., and that news of the existence of my bananarrative has reached him as well.

  But don’t misunderstand me. I am not a groveling groupie. I am not a hero-worshiper. L.’s fame cuts no ice with me. My excitement is for my child, my poem. I marvel at how far it has traveled/is traveling. The thrill lies in the fact that the poem has now reached the cell of a Buddhist monk in whose garden, thousands of miles away, grow the banana-plants in whose elephant-ear leaves I first became aware of the wind blowing some fifteen months ago. Ach, that wind, perhaps the most mystical and mysterious of all the words in the poem or in this text. Air, spiritus, breath, pneuma, animus, anima, ruach, prana. That wind . . .

  Suzanne

  The day that Fate first put our heads—Suzanne’s and mine—together, she certainly had her imagination about her. My grizzled scalp full of poetry and symbols. Suzanne’s ageless countenance concealing obsessions with mos
quitoes and mosquito nets, chair covers, and cryptic expressions for us all.

  A book of Irving Layton’s poems in L.’s house has the inscription:

  For Suzanne

  for when your petite attractive nose grows cold and numb.

  Much love,

  Irving

  Hydra, Greece

  He had the right idea, to concentrate on her physical features and not to attempt to probe beyond them. L. tried to exorcise her in a book, but I don’t think he completely succeeded. As he says himself, there is not enough death in his book, and too much art and artifice.

  The man’s lady clamors for inclusion. I met her for the first time on the day I finished writing Fun de Siècle. She was foisted upon me on the evening I first performed the poem, when I still mistakenly supposed that she was the same Suzanne who takes you down and gives you tea and oranges. She has been with me ever since, either as a vengeful presence thumping down uneven stones with the aid of the Sisters of Mercy or as an enigmatic absence.

  A year after the first rendering of Fun de Siècle, as this text was nearing its conclusion, she returned, right on cue, and came into sharper focus. Sharper but never sharp focus. She carries a kind of invisible force field around her that always blurs attempts to see her or to depict her with any clarity.

  I’m not sure how that phrase sneaked past my inner censor— “as this text was nearing its conclusion.” If ever there was an inconclusive, unconcluded piece of writing, this is it. A section from an endless tape.

  Orson Welles apparently said: “If you want a happy ending, it depends on where you stop the story.” He might as well have said: “If you want an ending, you have to stop the story.” This is a story, all right, but I am powerless over where to stop it, when to stop it, how to stop it. Even death won’t do the trick. Especially not death.