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Hard Fruit
November 15, 2006    File under:

Mary stands, in stained glass or in colorless marble, with one foot on a serpent. The serpent has an apple in its mouth. Sometimes red, sometimes not.

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The apple is, as long as I’ve been told the original story, the fruit of temptation, though, as I’m reminded many times, the Bible nowhere says apple. Some scholars prefer pomegranate, perhaps drawing a parallel between the Edenic Fall and Persephone’s, also involving a snake.

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The botanical genus of apple is Malus. I wonder if the Mal in Malus is the same mal in malformed, malfeasance, malice. And if so, is that rooted in the Edenic story, or is that story rooted in the apple’s root?

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Several years ago, I met an orchard keeper, whose family’s orchard preserved more than 100 varieties of apples, for sale. He told me that at the turn of the 20th Century more than 600 varieties of apples were grown in the United States. Now, in the local groceries, I can find maybe eight varieties, if I’m lucky. Most are, as Michael Pollan notes in The Botany of Desire, exceedingly sweet.

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Does our Eden’s story, then, say it was sweetness that made the tempting apple so tempting? Not knowledge, but sweetness?

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According to Lewis Hyde, the word “gift” in German is related to the word for poison. Maybe because a poison transforms and a gift transforms. I think of Napoleon—or was it the Counte of Monte Christo—consuming an amount of arsenic each day to change his body so it would be immune to poison.

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In American lore, students offered apples to their teachers. I have never received, however, an apple from a student. The closest I’ve ever gotten, I suppose, was either in a bottle of Maker’s Mark, wax apple-red, left outside my office door just after graduation, or the computer I work on, surely funded in part by tuition dollars. The whiskey was an invitation to delinquency, a respite from work; the computer is a temptation toward work, so easy to open the clamshell and find the glow of labor within. I wonder sometimes which is the paradise, which the punishment, though it all seems so obvious, though that, the obviousness, is what makes me think again.

***

The orchard keeper, visiting a university, offered two dozen kinds of apples. I tried them all. He later saw me eating one apple whole at the back of the room while someone else occupied the podium. He looked the apple over, took it from me, smelt it, then said, I can’t believe you’re eating that. That’s a spitter.

***

Many years ago, I fell in love with a close friend. Though my heart was drawn to hers, our hearts could not speak to one another without mutual pain. She blamed me, calling me stubborn, then continued to even sharper accusations. Her words hurt me dearly, and I could have turned that back toward her, but what would have been the point? I imagined all the difficulty gathering in me, a bitter fruit hung from some hidden bough of my heart, a bough I raised high so no one could reach that fruit, so it could never fall. I changed in that moment and before long she wrote me to say that she could never be my friend.

***

A colleague vouches a harsh word for another colleague. The accusation is strong, though probably only an expression of the frustration of one, one’s jealousy of the other. I wonder what other ears have been abused this way and wonder if I should say anything to the accused. I tuck those words away in me as if to let them go would leave them lying in the open for the accused to find. But as I breathe the accusations make a wound in me. This is why sometimes I tell. Or cry to tell.

***

When I hear what a colleague has said about me, I imagine the mouth, moving, as it disgorges the words. In a dream, the mouth breaks and apples pour as if from a harvest basket.

Are they for the cider heap? I wonder how strongly they'll intoxicate. Bitter.

***

This morning, I have a Granny Smith, polished and ready to crack. I can already taste the sour.

When I was an undergraduate, I would drive, on my way home, past an orchard, that sold small bags of apples for $3. Some times the table was unattended, but the apples were there and you left your money in a box. The drive home, or back, was tart and sweet, and the taste so strong that when I passed the vacant trees, off season, I could smell the apples anyway.

The mastering odor.

***

I have a taste for the sour.

My mother says you either have a sweet tooth or a salty tongue. I must confess my mouth seems to invite every conceivable flavor and to delight in even in the bitter that swadles a pecan, the cut of white vinegar, the pungent eruption of Chinese mustard, and even the spitter, which I do not spit.

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Three species of snake can spit or eject the venom in a fine spray, which is aimed at the eyes of an enemy and projected for distances up to 2.4 m (8 ft). If the venom gets into the eyes, it may cause blindness. The spitting is used only in defense and never to obtain food.

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What does the serpent taste beneath Mary's heel?

Is it injecting the apple with some poison there? Some gift? Or mastered by a sweetness? Or receiving a justified bitterness? Or, turned bellows, drawing out what it's laid there?

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Maybe by eating the bitter apple I become immune—or is it inured?—to the displeasure, transformed somehow by the experience.

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I have turned away, just as often, from the bitter fruit, toward the sweet. I wonder what that says about me. I wonder if I should return. And how long I must hold this in me.

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Who will step and draw the bitter out or show me that the taste is what I've deserved?

Posted by Jake Adam York at November 15, 2006 10:10 AM