Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen

by Roger Green

  feels once again the pulse of life, the warmth,

  the healing flesh, the young man and the girl.

  (The old man and the young girl. Banana Princess. If only . . . )

  Meanwhile, Death of a Lady’s Man constitutes one long brooding over spells, with frequent temporal reversions to the burial theme: “the buried fig-tree,” “the cemetery of love,” “a funeral in the garden,” and so on. I think of Sir Thomas Browne, with his Urne Burial and The Garden of Cyrus, with its mystical quincunxes. The Garden of Leonardus.

  L.’s book speaks to me in an uncanny way. He wrote much of it on his portable Olivetti Lettera 22, sitting on his terrace, looking over the imbricated roof tiles of the chapel of Aghios Tykhon to where I now sit writing this on my portable Olivetti Lettera 22, looking over the imbricated roof tiles of the chapel of the Cypriot saint Aghios Tykhon toward L.’s garden, L.’s bananas, and L.’s terrace. Through the looking glass. Through an endless hall of mirrors.

  It is mid-September. One of the banana-plants that Suzanne transplanted in the summer looks very sick. The main clump is flourishing with panache, and has produced a new pizzle. Yesterday the woman who looks after the chapel of Aghios Tykhon (she calls him “the grandfather”) asked me to cut a heart out of paper for her son to stick on his fishing boat. I produced one out of red cardboard, and she was delighted. When I asked her why she couldn’t have done it herself, she just said: “I couldn’t.” Witchcraft? Black magic? Have I given my heart away?

  It began with death. It continued with burying and burial. With cemeteries and cimetières. With koimitiria and nekrotapheia. Here is Rilke again, from Orchards:

  The Angel’s view: perhaps the tips of trees

  are roots that drink the skies;

  and in the earth the beech’s deepest

  roots look like silent summits.

  For them, is not the earth transparent against

  a sky full as a corpse?

  In L.’s orchard, it is not so much that the tips of the bananas are roots, and the sky is “full as a corpse,” as that everything stands on its head. The sky becomes the earth, the earth the sky, and we all become the ocean. L.’s house is a reflection of the house of the woman who sold pease-pudding. His floor is her ceiling. His scary basement is her hospitable attic. The angels sing hosannas in her secret yellow daisies.

  Things slide in all directions, will not be categorized or pigeonholed any more. L. himself is the field commander above the battle, an Olympian aloof from the fray. Suzanne ought to be Hera to L.’s Zeus; instead she becomes Eve to her son’s Adam. Adam himself ought to be Cain, yet his mother, the Witch of Elrod, turns out to be the one with the instinct for suppressing life.

  Evangelia holds the answer to the riddle:

  When Adam sided with Suzanne,

  Who then was the gentleman?

  “Why,” she says, “Kyrios Leonardos was always a gentleman. Of him I can say nothing but good.” Evangelia and Koulis ought to be Baucis and Philemon, Adam and Eve. Attempts are made to cast them out of the garden, but Evangelia fights back in her capacity as guardian angel-dragon, custodian of the bananas of the diasporades. An actual Philemon, on the fringes of the story, is tempted by a virgin and dies drunk.

  Suzanne of Shalott refuses to accept that a curse has come upon her. Instead she lays curses on others. Mariana turns the moated grange into a domestic home with a child and a fireplace. All the women L.-Zeus-Orpheus has ever been involved with, including Danaë of the secret mulberries, form a shrill chorus of maenads, longing to tear him limb from limb but for ever frustrated because he has granted himself asylum in that place where they don’t let a woman kill you—the Tower of Song.

  It began with death and cannot be concluded without death. (Although it cannot really be begun or concluded at all.) Slipping the d-word into the title—as L. does with Death of a Lady’s Man—doesn’t count. L. acknowledges this:

  SHE HAS GIVEN ME THE BULLET

  There is the bullet but there is no death. There is the mist but there is no death. There is the embrace but there is no death. There is the sunset but there is no death. There is the rotting and the hatred and the ambition but there is no death. There is no death in this book and therefore it is a lie.

  My book contains death and, by the same token, is true. L. has become a Buddhist monk on a Californian mountaintop, where, I imagine, when he is not reading Fun de Siècle to the tune of “Suzanne”(as reported by Steve Sanfield), he is continuing the meditation on mortality that began on Hydra with The Book of the Dead, while I conduct my meditation on mortality and immortality, time and eternity, here in my oionoskopeion overlooking L.’s bananas. Neither of us could have done otherwise. We are both fulfilling our destinies as gregarious hermits, altruistic egoists, sedentary nomads. At least, I am. I can speak only for myself.

  Ça marche. In my head I am trudging dusty roads of happy destiny, like Lawrence Durrell’s French tramps:

  really at heart peripatetic philosophers who had opted out of ordinary society in order to make an almost religious retreat, perhaps to “redefine their deaths” while there was still time.

  (Why is that marvelous phrase “redefine their deaths” in quotation marks? Is Durrell citing an even greater sage?) Yes, and by redefining our deaths, only by redefining our deaths, we validate our lives. The longer we postpone the attempt (the attempt is all-important; success is irrelevant), the more invalid we become.

  Here on Hydra the dead are recalled by the appearance of their names at longer and longer intervals on telegraph posts and electricity poles that carry their own “Danger. Death” warnings. The printed notices that advertise funerals and memorial services are always appropriately fringed with gold. In the cemeteries, the graves are often embellished with photographs of the recently arrived. I pop in from time to time to be updated and to greet old acquaintances: “Ah, here you are! No wonder I haven’t bumped into you on the harbor lately!”

  Last summer I became aware that more and more of the names and faces were familiar to me, as I became ever more embedded in the various communities of this island. Just before the annual Miaoulia festival, I decided to do something about this. I wrote a “Hymn for Miaoulis,” thinking of the silver urn in the local museum that contains Miaoulis’s heart; thinking of Herakles slaying the Hydra; thinking of those who had died in the past year; thinking of all Hydra’s dead; thinking of my own parents; thinking of earth, air, water, and, especially, fire.

  I had had grandiose ideas of declaiming it, amplified by loudspeakers, at the harbor on the Saturday night of Miaoulia week, just before the boat-burning and the fireworks. Meester Grin would become famous and respected overnight. The mayor very kindly allowed me to read it on a Monday evening in the Melina Merkouri Hall, in English and in a Greek translation by my friend Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke (also, incidentally, a translator of Irving Layton), to a startled group of parents who had assembled to hear their children demonstrate their prowess on the piano. They took it very well. I now perceive that it was an act of homage that should have been an offering of love. Never mind. It was one more stage in the process of definition.

  I’m bad at love, but I hope I may be improving. Yiota. Banana Princess. Yiota, purveyor of three-zippered bananas. Yiota, Little Red Riding Hood, tripping through the wilderness with a basket of bananas for the fasting grandmotherly nuns. Yiota, lover of misunderstood wolves. Yiota, running with the pack. Yiota. Ach!

  Many months after I had written: “Have just reread The Song of Solomon. It is all there. It is the dénouement,” Yiota asked me to buy for her in Athens Khrestos Yiannaras’s Commentary on the Song of Songs. I duly did so, and she paid me for it. She read it and marked in pencil passages that seemed significant to her. Now she has insisted on giving the book to me, enriched with her delicate markings.

  The text stretches my Greek—and my mind—to the limit and beyond. I marvel at much of it. But what I cannot agree with is Yiannaras’s ruthless setting in opposition of Lov
e and Death. If it were either a whodunit or an alchemical work, I would expect the two to be happily united at the end. I fear that Yiannaras does not subscribe to the reconciliation of opposites—so he will have to depart, albeit with blessings on his head.

  Not for nothing does L. have representations of the conjunction of opposites on the cover of Death of a Lady’s Man. Not for nothing does the name “Death” feature in the title, even though “there is no death in this book.” Not for nothing does L. constantly suggest that this book is based on a much larger, much more amorphous text, which he refers to as “My Life in Art.” Not for nothing do his conjoining spirits have wings, because they are in a state of volatile angelic fermentation. No generation without corruption. No life without death. And, pace Yiannaras, no love without death or death without love.

  In the context of this story, at least, the most important thing about Yiannaras is that one exemplar of his book became a token of exchange between me and the Banana Princess. But his Commentary is not the dénouement. On the contrary, it is stubbornly nodose. The Song of Songs or The Song of Solomon remains the only true dénouement.

  Yiota would not allow me to begin to discuss Yiannaras’s Commentary with her until I had finished reading it. I was tempted to penelopize, to go back to the beginning and start again in order to postpone the moment of discussion. Why? Because Yiannaras’s main theme is love for the Other, and I knew that I was going to have to tell Yiota that for me, she is the Other, and face the consequences. I was nervous.

  In its ultimate manifestation, the Other is some sort of divinity. Our ideal aim, according to Yiannaras, is to love what he calls “God” as the Other. But we approach this aim by making another human being the Other first. Even this secondary level is almost impossible to attain because a lot of what we suppose to be love is actually egotistical desire. If I want the Banana Princess to be mine because she is young and pretty and intelligent and Greek, I am living in what Yiannaras calls “the way of death,” and no good will come of it. I swear I do not desire Yiota in that way. For me she is nearer to becoming a divinity.

  Here is a specimen of Yiannaras on song:

  Reality can only be articulated in the language of love. You divest yourself of the panoply of meaning and plunge, annihilated into the void, the nothing. Then the freedom of ignorance proves “beyond all knowledge.” “Beyond” is not the void, it is the leap. For every worthy diver there always waits the revelatory swallowing by the whale. There, “in the depths of the heart of the seas,” in the abyss that is the belly of the whale, God is eponymous bridegroom. His truth is “the whole of love.”

  It has taken all this time, and all this scribbling, for me to realize that I too am a diver of Hydra. May I prove a worthy one. When I wrote the lines:

  Sleepwalkers who’ve forgotten

  Their bends-defying plunges

  I thought I was talking about other people. I didn’t realize I was talking also about myself. In order to catch oneself off one’s guard, one must remain constantly alert. We have to dare to make an exodus, says Yiannaras; we have to risk a relationship with reality. If we do not, we remain in the “way of nature,” the “way of death.”

  Despite my reservations about Yiannaras because he doesn’t appear to attempt a reconciliation between death and love, a hieros gamos, or sacred marriage between opposites, it has to be said that his extraordinary book contains some mighty fine thoughts and phrases. Yiota and I could probably have passed the whole winter debating his philosophy and theology. But it didn’t happen like that. Nor should it have happened like that.

  As I approach the grand climacteric, I am aware that my physical death cannot be that far away. I believe that I am not afraid of it and that I am preparing for it and redefining it constantly. But Yiannaras made me conscious of and, yes, afraid of, another kind of death, “the way of death” that is inhabited by those who live alone without love.

  Yiannaras makes it plain that a fearful man is to be despised, but I was still afraid. I thought (past tense) that if I told the Banana Princess that she was my Other and that I loved her, and she then sent me packing (I hardly dared hope that she would do otherwise), I would be inexorably consigned to “the way of death.” Oh, how I tied myself in rational knots!

  Like a timorous adolescent, clutching the Commentary on the Song of Songs, I sought out Yiota in the hotel where she works. She opened the proceedings by handing back to me Barry Unsworth’s Pascali’s Island, saying she had found the English too difficult. She brought me coffee. She moved and spoke and existed with her customary grace. We started to discuss Yiannaras. Finally, I blurted out: “Yiota, my problem is that I love you. For me, you are the Other.”

  Of course she behaved beautifully while making it clear that she did not love me in that kind of way. She doubted whether she loved anyone in that kind of way. She thought she probably loved only God. How objective was I being? Was I perhaps really being egotistical and seeing her as an object of desire? I couldn’t concentrate on her fusillade of questions. I felt detached and tingled all over as if from mild, not unpleasant, electric shock.

  Did I love her as a god might love her? (I babbled that I could not do that; I was not a deity.) Why had I said that my problem was that I loved her? The fact that I saw it as a problem proved to her that I did not love her properly. (Can you imagine Beatrice haranguing Dante like this? Yes! What a pain he must have been.) I spluttered that for me, there were problems within problems. “Yes,” she retorted. “Just like your beloved bananas!”

  Mister Bowles and Mister Green

  Life continued. In the evening, I ate at the Pyrofani with two woman friends of my own age to whom I confided all. They said that I had been courageous to declare myself and opined, from their own experience, that Yiota was probably pleased to receive such a declaration, even without wishing to reciprocate. Possibly. Possibly.

  But the two ladies then suggested that my problem might be that I am too cerebral and am only really happy with books, whether reading them or writing them. Oh dear; I fear they have me sussed. The subject of my discussions with Yiota is often books. We play Scrabble together, which is tantamount to selling doves in the Temple. It was the mutual—almost ritual—exchange of a book that led to my avowal of love. Now here I am putting the unclassifiable Banana Princess into my text like a botanist drying and pressing a specimen of what a guidebook calls “Hydra’s Florae.”

  For all that, I am in love, and I do have real unbookish feelings, feelings that have undergone pleasantly surprising changes since my rejection as a lover but my retention, thank the gods, as a friend. I feel myself to be in what I can only describe as a state of grace. Instead of feeling wretched (as I expected), I feel blessed. I wander around with a warm feeling of elation inside me. By uttering my love I have raised it to a new level of intensity and made—at least for this aging, twice-married man—an extraordinary discovery, viz.: that one can be happily in love without having that love reciprocated.

  I confirmed all this on my first visit to Yiota after the showdown. Over coffee we just talked and talked. She (I confess to being gratified to notice) gabbled a little nervously—maybe I did the same. But she made me as welcome as ever, met my gaze, smiled her fetching smile and laughed her lovely laugh.

  I gazed back into her eyes, basking in the knowledge that she knew now that I loved her, even if she was not certain how I loved her. Discovery number two: I had all unwittingly strengthened the power of my love by voluntarily forbidding myself to speak about it. I suppose also the fact that Yiota appeared to be happy (naturally, I could not ask her if she was) added to my happiness.

  So I rejoice in the discovery of all these new and different feelings. (I rejoice in the discovery that I have feelings at all.) All this is much more exciting for me than just popping into bed with somebody. If you do that, the Other goes out the window. But I do have to admit that my old habits are still flourishing and that I have been discovering and rediscovering literary parallels an
d texts to support and reinforce my experience—to redefine it, indeed—and to give me admonishments. First there is Yiannaras himself warning that “we come to know God by cultivating a relationship, not by comprehending a meaning.” For “God” read “the Other,” or just “Life.”

  My dull brain has a nasty habit of perplexing and retarding its owner just when he ought to be leaping boldly into the abyss. Instead of the viewless wings of poesy, I opt for the visible scaffolding of prose so that the Banana Princesses (a plural to conjure with) of this world (if indeed she is of this world) may not accuse me either of not being a poet or of ruining my poem with explanations.

  I still hope to have the last laugh. Once this text is completed, it will be seen for what it is: a seamless garment where prose and poetry merge, which really will require no further commentary— from me. Yiota will be right because the finished work will require no scholia. I will be right because the poem (Fun de Siècle) and its scholia together comprise the finished work. All shall be well because the Banana Princess and Mister Green will be reconciled.

  (But yet again I have to remind myself that “once this text is completed” is merely a façon de parler. There can be no completion, only an arbitrary pause. Only a lifting from the loom. Only a casting off of stitches. But the weaving, the knitting, continue for ever. Isn’t that right, my contrary friend? Isn’t that how your garden grows?)

  After Yiannaras comes Barry Unsworth. Having returned home in a daze after my confrontation with Yiota, I began to leaf through Pascali’s Island again. I had forgotten just how much my book it is. It is specially directed at cerebral pen-pushers who live alone on small Greek islands, observing more than participating, thinking too much and feeling too little. Quotation is unavoidable. In each of these extracts Pascali is speaking of himself: