Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen

by Roger Green

  My sense of impunity gradually flowered into art, into control of illusion, making me see myself and the island and the people on it as things which in my reports I could create.. . .

  I am a believer in signs and portents. The world of sense signals to us, but all messages are encoded.

  The island and all the people on it are my inventions. I have even invented a persona for myself. But when these fictional persons come for me they will have real knives.

  I must have lent the book to Yiota with the arrogant supposition that it would help her to understand me better. Was Unsworth’s English really too difficult for her? Pascali, c’est moi, except that I seem to have invented not one but several personae for myself. I am a master of the art of self-elusion. Pascali identifies with another of the characters; and so do I:

  Mister Bowles has lost, or perhaps he never had, essential familiarity with things, ease, custom. So of course he simulates, but badly, and this gives him a strange sort of dignity, power even; he imposes himself. Like a critical visitor. Or like a god, a minor god. A god would not, after all, move at ease among the inhabitants and artifacts of this world. He would be characterized by just this kind of hampered grace. (p. 67)

  So, as Yiota and I bandied words, and as she asked me if I loved her as a god might love her, the answer was all the time lying there on the table between us in the pages of Pascali’s Island. No doubt a literary reply would not have helped at the time, but now I understand that I could have replied: “Yes, I love you like a minor god, with hampered grace.”

  Unsworth’s characters are doomed in a classically tragic way. He probably had Aristotle’s Poetics on his desk as he wrote. That is why he describes their aspirations in the kind of elevated terms that wishful thinkers like myself want to identify with. In The Sleepwalker, on the other hand, Margarita Karapanou’s characters are also doomed, but in a sordid modern way that owes more to the tabloid press than to the dramatic unities. Karapanou cuts the crap. Her omniscient Police Inspector speaks of the expatriate writers of Hydra thus:

  Yes, they come to the island and shut themselves up in houses with their paper and their typewriters and indulge in verbal masturbation. Haven’t you noticed?

  There, but for the dubious hampered grace of a minor god, go I.

  The day after my fateful meeting with the Banana Princess, I went as usual to teach Greek to my pupil Carol. We had just started reading Kazantzakis’s Life and Times of Alexis Zorbas (Zorba the Greek) together. This was the first book I ever read in modern Greek, and it made such a profound impression on me that I thought I remembered every word. But, as I found out with a jolt on this particular morning, I had forgotten Kazantzakis’s introduction and, in particular, this passage:

  When I consider what nourishment books and teachers had offered me for so many years of trying to appease a hungry spirit, and then what a lionlike mind Zorbas offered me for nourishment over the space of a few months, only with difficulty can I contain my anger and my sorrow. Just by chance my life had been wasted—I had met up with this “spiritual father” much too late, and what remained inside me that was capable of being redeemed was insignificant. The great turn-around, the complete change of battle-front, the ignition and renewal did not take place. By then it was much too late. And so Zorbas, instead of becoming for me a lofty, commanding example for life, was debased and became instead, alas, a literary subject for me to use to smudge a few sheets of paper.

  This wretched privilege, the ability to turn life into art, has been the ruin of many a carnivorous spirit. Because in this way, vehement passion, finding an exit, leaves the breast and the spirit is lightened. It no longer suffocates, no longer feels the need for hand-to-hand combat, the need to plunge straight into life and action. Instead it rejoices as it admires the way its vehement passion makes a few smoke-rings in the air and is extinguished.

  Kazantzakis was about as old as I am now when he wrote Alexis Zorbas, but he was much younger when he met Zorbas and spent a few months with him playing at mining lignite. Was it really too late? Or did Kazantzakis, for reasons of his own, simply persuade himself that it was? Is it ever too late? Maybe it would be better, in the spirit of this narrative, to turn the proposition on its head and to aver that “this splendid privilege, the ability to turn life into art, has been the salvation, the redemption, of many a pusillanimous scribbler.” Maybe it is only too late when, like the Kazantzakis narrator at the end of Zorbas, you receive the telegram saying: “Have found finest green stone; come immediately!” and you do not go.

  One word connects Yiannaras, Unsworth, and Kazantzakis— the Greek word tipota, nothing, nada, which can be made into a concept by the addition of an article: “the nothing.” Yiannaras speaks of “plunging into the nothing.” Unsworth’s epigraph is from Dimitrios Kapetanakis, a brilliant Greek who died young:

  Nothingness might save or destroy those who face it, but those who ignore it are condemned to unreality.

  “The nothing” and “the abyss” are constant themes throughout the work of Nikos Kazantzakis. Yet perhaps, as he himself implies in the preface I have just quoted, therein lay his problem (“I have a problem; I love you”): that he wrote the urge, the desire, the necessity to take the plunge, to make the leap, out of his system. He let “I dare not” wait upon “I would” like the cat in the adage and so never caught the fish that might have turned out to be Tobias’s fish, or even Jonah’s whale, which vouchsafes apocalypse to every worthy diver whom it swallows.

  My friend and sometime wife, Jules (the one who reproached me for not going straight for the “jugliar”), would have sorted Kazantzakis out in no time. Jules, a Scouser from Kirkby, would have said: “Hey, Kazzer la’. That’s enough of turning life into art; get out there and show ’em—all hands to the guns; pull yer knickers up and go in fighting.” No doubt she would have reprimanded L. himself in a similar vein—“What’s all this nonsense about ‘my life in art,’ then, Cozzer? Too much art and not enough life. Go for it, la’.”

  I once took Jules all the way from England to a remote village on a remote island in the far north of Greece. Instead of relaxing in this beautiful spot, all she did was pester me to take her to the other, even more remote side of the island. When I demurred, she rounded on me and shouted: “Do you know what the trouble with you is? You’re not adventurous enough.” Ah, Jules, ain’t no women, ain’t no women, been coming ’round here quite like you.

  Jules floated to the surface of my thoughts at this moment because I fondly thought that she might have approved my declaration of love to the Banana Princess. I could almost hear her saying: “Well done, Dodge; at last you’re being really adventurous.” But the delusion did not last long. When I tuned in more carefully to her wavelength, I heard: “What did I tell you, Dodger? You think you’re being adventurous, but you always reach a certain point and then stop. You were quite courageous to tell Yiota that you loved her, but then you were pathetic to retreat because she did not encourage you. She was waiting for you to go on. She was waiting for you to cross her central range to discover her other side. All women are islands, waiting to be explored.” Yes, Jules, I hear you. (I can hear Olympia too: “Explore, explore. You’re all wimps.”) If there were more people like you in the world, there would be fewer great works and more great men.

  Am I then too cerebral? Am I too bookish? I plead in self-defense that texts seek me out; they lie in wait for me. There are countless examples in this narrative. On that particular morning, as I sat in Carol’s house while she worked her way through Kazantzakis’s complicated prose, I was only half listening. Half of me—at least half—was full of Yiota and love and what my women friends had said to me the night before. When I came to and realized what exactly it was that Carol was so painstakingly translating, I shed a tear or two.

  Was that bad? Was that too literary? Just because a text had triggered my emotion? The text ambushed me. Am I to blame? I think not. Maybe Pascali is a bad role model, but I am with him all the way
when he says that “the universe is crammed with symbols and portents, for those who have eyes.” I was simply, happily, open to the message, the warning. That’s all.

  In Between

  It began with death, and it ends with death—except that there is no end and no beginning, only the serpent Ouroboros eating its tail. The neat trick to being dead is that you cannot die. “As long as life lasts, so long lasts death” (Karouzos). “As long as rain lasts, so long lasts sunshine” (Prasinos).

  Orate pro nobis: Antonia, Villy, Philemon, Nikos Hatzikyri-akos-Gkikas, Tasos Weber, Aghios Tykhon, Saint Constantine of Hydra, Nicolas Jorge, Antonios Manikis, Stavros Boufis . . . Transient as the wind. Wrinkles on the earthy ground of memory.

  The earthy ground and layers of L.’s garden, surrounded by the island of Hydra. The rocky ground of Hydra, surrounded by the sea. The strata of Hydra. First, there is what you see—the details that a Southy writer concentrates on. Second, there is what you are told—a stratum in which facts are as rare as gold nuggets.

  Third, there is the secret, not altogether commendable, life of the place—freemasonry, satanism, drug culture, child abuse, wife beating, occultism, parapsychology, crime in general, New Age, illicit affairs, witchcraft.

  Fourth, nonordinary reality or mythic time, the ontic realm. Fifth—I have not necessarily gotten them in the right order and am well aware that there are more of these strata than I wot of. Fifth, “the scary basement”—the hollow beneath the rock where Herakles consigned the one immortal head of the Lernaean Hydra. The little white chapels scattered all over the island and on outlying rocks represent stones of infinite weight keeping the canopy of rock and earth securely in place so that the horror may be oppressed, suppressed, depressed, and pressed down for ever—and never expressed. Such is the theater in which plays the drama of Fun de Siècle. “Fun” because laughter, the language of the angels, triumphs over evil, while seriousness and high moral tones prove the flimsiest of ramparts, disdainfully swept aside.

  Sixth must be everything else in the universe, and beyond, which is not Hydra, yet which could not exist without Hydra. Everything from the nearest land and the surrounding sea to the heavens, the galaxies, space. There ought to be a splendid word for this. Maybe there is. Allosympan? Antisympan? Ectosympan? Aneupan? Perhaps it is simply the small boy’s perpetually producing magic porridge saucepan.

  Seventh—surely there must be seven or a multiple thereof? Seventh is my favorite, a stratum in between the strata, a mezzanine. What Robert McGahey calls “the veritable metaxy” and Massimo Cacciari “the world of the metaxy.” It is an outopia much frequented by angels; the “crack between the worlds” (Tom Cowan)—as L. himself sings, “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”—the Orphic moment.

  Undoubtedly one of the subconscious impulses that prompted me to title my poem Fun de Siècle was this sense of in-betweenness. Mircea Eliade (The Myth of the Eternal Return) confirmed for me the significant in-betweenness of the twelve days (sometimes intercalary) that include the end of one year and the beginning of the next.

  Even though nature does not count in years, and a millennium, a thousand years, is an arbitrary cycle imposed by humans, it seems to me that there must be some significant parallel between the days around New Year’s Day and the years (maybe twelve of them, just like the twelve days) preceding and following the start of a new siècle of a thousand years.

  I am a poet, not a philosopher. I have no pat theory of in-betweenness. I cannot account for it or explain it. I just have a strong sense of its importance and its truth.

  Si on vit dans l’entretemps

  On évite tout contretemps.

  (If in in-betweenness your life’s course you steer

  Of obstacles of all kinds your path will be clear.)

  That’s my recipe for success. The problem, of course, is how to live in the in-between, the mega-maxi-maxi metaxy. Any discussion of that goes beyond the scope of these jottings.

  All I set out to do was to write a commentary, a few apostils, on my birthday poem. It soon struck me that in the verses themselves I had produced, at an in-between stage in my own life, on Hydra—an in-between place par excellence—an in-between ditty that offers an interim statement about in-betweenness. What only really strikes me now is that, in these notes, I have carried this process to the nth degree of in-betweenness.

  I’m trying to make my own summing-up, and I don’t know how to. It is a pleasantly triste, damp early-September day. I have drawn back my lace curtain so that I have a view, as I type, of the thickly leaved bananas waving softly in a gentle breeze. L.’s whitewashed house behind is untenanted. I can discern a couple of pizzles.

  I keep getting up and fetching books, searching for the clinching quotation. What terrifies me is that I see I have marked up in pencil all manner of sublime stuff that could save my soul many times over if I could only remember it. But already the bulk of it has passed into oblivion. Oh, the struggle to navigate the fragile ship of thought through the Symplegades of failing memory!

  The perfect quotation, it seems to me, would be at least Sections IV and V of “It Must Change” from Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction by Wallace Stevens—maybe the whole poem. It is full of surprises. But I shall not append it here, partly for fear of invidious comparisons and partly because, if any readers are still with me, they will have a wonderful time seeking out old Wally and gasping at the insights relating to the foregoing pages.

  The trouble with Wallace Stevens (as I think I have already more or less said) is that although he understood better than most the necessity of the angel, he thought that the angel and the angel’s sphere had no existence outside the poet’s head. I stress again that what I have been writing about is outside my head.

  Call it what you like—nonordinary reality, mythic time, the ontic realm, the area journeyed in by shamans. It exists outside, beyond myself. I can’t prove this; I just know it. I’d be a damn fool (as Dylan Thomas implied) if I took the enormous risks involved merely to reach a place inside my own skull. A man’s (yes, and a woman’s) reach has to exceed his grasp, because to stay is to be nowhere.

  We all meet in the in-between, in what Charles Segal calls “the poet’s precarious place between reality and dream, actuality and potentiality, the timeless and the transient.” One might add: between the wind and the banana. In between is where it’s at in images of elsewhere. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to scuttle back there before night falls. I have taught my tale. When you return from bathing, I shall be gone, but not before making several deep bows of gratitude to my muses, to those gigantic treelike herbaceous plants that gave me this voyage—those Bash trees, the bananas of Leonard Cohen.

  Works Cited

  NOTES TO FUN DE SIÈCLE

  Alfred Lord Tennyson. Selected Poems. Ed. Aidan Day. London: Penguin Books, 1991.

  Miller, Henry. The Colosseus of Maroussi. New York: New Directions, 1958.

  Karapanou, Margarita. O Ypnovatis (The Sleepwalker). Athina: Ermis, 1988.

  Aiken, Conrad. Morning Song of Senlin.

  Watkins, Vernon. Discoveries.

  Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land.

  Chambers’ English Dictionary. Edinburgh: Chambers, 1990.

  SINGING SOUTH

  Betjeman, John. The Costa Blanca, Two Sonnets.

  The Books Called Apocrypha: The History of Susanna.

  Karapanou, Margarita. Kassandra and the Wolf. Trans. N.C. Germanacos. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.

  Cook, Roger. The Tree of Life: Image for the Cosmos. Thames and Hudson, 1974.

  Surman, Paul. South. Unpublished poem.

  Eliade, Mircea. The Myth of the Eternal Return or Cosmos and History. Trans. from French by Willard R. Trask. London: Arkana Books, 1989.

  Nadel, Ira B. Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen. London: Bloomsbury, 1996.

  BANANA UPDATE

  Downer, Lesley. On the Narrow Road to the Deep North: Journe
y into a Lost Japan. London: Jonathan Cape, 1989.

  Bash, Matsuo. The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches. Trans. from the Japanese with an introduction by Nobuyuki Yuasa. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1966.

  INTERLEAVES

  Cohen, Leonard. Beautiful Losers. London: Jonathan Cape, 1970.

  STEVE NOTES

  Blyth, R.H. Haiku. vol. iv, Autumn-Winter. Hokuseido, Japan, 1952.

  VOYEUR

  Sanfield, Steve. American Zen: by a Guy Who Tried It. Monterey, Kentucky: Larkspur Press, 1994.

  Coupe, Laurence. Myth. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

  Polunin, Oleg. Flowers of Greece and the Balkans: A Field Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.

  The Holy Bible, Old Testament, Genesis.

  Valéry, Paul. Le cimetière marin.

  Brassens, Georges. Supplique pour être enterré è la plage de Sète.

  Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Les gommes. Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1953.

  MY JOURNEY

  Cope, Wendy. Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis. London: Faber and Faber, 1986.

  Edwards, Richard. When I Was Three I Had a Friend.

  Cacciari, Massimo. The Necessary Angel. Trans. by Miguel E. Vatter. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.

  The Oxford English Dictionary.

  Ayto, John. The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Word Origin.

  Derrida, Jacques. The Post Card, from Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. with an introduction and additional notes by Alan Bass. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987.