THE SUBLIME AND THE APPLE

The original wild ancestor of Malus domestica was Malus sieversii, found growing wild in the mountains of Central Asia in southern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Xinjiang, China.

An epigram claiming authorship by Plato states:

I throw the apple at you, and if you are willing to love me, take it and share your girlhood with me; but if your thoughts are what I pray they are not, even then take it, and consider how short-lived is beauty.

—Plato, Epigram VII

My friend Paul, who lives in a forest valley of the Idaho Panhandle, notes the passing traffic because there is not much of it in his remote area.  But last week he noticed that cars were stopping out on the road for a few minutes, then going on.  So he went to investigate.  This is what he found:  

It’s not remarkable to find apple trees or even whole orchards all across North America, partly the work of Johnny Appleseed, partly left from the earliest homesteads beginning with the first colonists on the Atlantic Coast, and partly the work of natural distribution.  So why did people stop to look and photograph?  Because the sight is “sublime.”

That term includes a lot of variations and assertions, but all definitions suggest the juxtaposition of what is exquisitely precious, maybe transient, certainly vulnerable, against forces of nature far beyond human control or understanding -- wild and drawing power from something humans must respect.  The first Europeans to reach North America, in spite of all the tree mysticism developed in the centuries before they cut down the forests of Europe (an impulse that persists in the pastor next door), were intimidated and built forts -- not so much against Indian attack as against their own hatred of vulnerability.   They wrote bitterly about the darkness, the hiddenness, the threat of primeval forests and imagined them full of wolves and Indians -- which they were.  Those Puritans oppressed and destroyed the vulnerability of their own women and children, particularly the tenderness of love, so that sex became a weapon, a property marker.  In Europe the ownership and control of the forest as a sign of power underlay a taboo on anyone lesser using its bounty.  The same applied to sexuality.  And to religion.

So the apple in its sublime bloom and then its nourishing and flourishing fruit became a symbol of defiance, independence, something to be shot off a son’s head.  Something golden to distract an inaccessible high-born female.  The preciousness of it was rooted in the vulnerability and exquisiteness of it.  The impulse of the powerful would be to somehow capture it and take it home to hoard, even if only in a photo.  But some people have an opposite impulse: to share.

Paul is a forester, which is why he lives among trees, and in an attempt to comfort me for the attack on the shared cottonwood next to my house, he sent photos of this apple tree plus photos of the indigenous and ancient cottonwoods among the conifers and the remains of the old overgrown orchards.  He says,  “I love the smell of cottonwood sap! When I come across a nice fresh bud, I'll smoosh it between my fingers and smear it under my nose.”  There’s more to do with a tree than to cut it down so you can mow the grass.

The “anthropocene” (rhymes with obscene) has a hard time with the “sublime” (slant-rhymes with mankind).  It is a geological period marked strangely by “self-snuffing” in which humans try to convert through warlike industrialization all environments and peoples other than ourselves into commodities -- to profit from their vulnerability.  The anthropocene will end with the end of the anthros, those essentially transient animals who fucked themselves into overpopulation in spite of their attempts to grind each other into bloody mush.  All in the name of righteousness.  They claim God gave them the earth, but virtue to them -- virtue like beauty -- is only a vulnerability.

One of the justifications of human existence is drawn from the idea that creatures are summoned to do what they can do best, to find their key nature and develop it.  Ironically, human beings can do two things better than any other creatures:  to destroy -- or to perceive the sublime, which means that they know what ought not to be destroyed.  So that means they value the power to destroy more than participation in creation.

This solitary tree, innocent in its simplicity and natural shape, which is like a child’s lollipop, has probably planted itself.  Paul says the apples are not very interesting to humans.  The reason it stands alone out there is two-fold.  In that valley there is not enough wind to knock it down as would be its likely fate on the prairie.  This pasture is grazed by cows all summer, who somehow missed this tree as a sprout but have not missed any others, which keeps the pasture from turning into woods but deprives them of shade and deadfalls for special treats.  Cows never plan ahead.

In 2010, an Italian-led consortium announced they had decoded the complete genome of the apple in collaboration with horticultural genomicists at  Washington State University using the Golden delicious variety. It had about 57,000 genes, the highest number of any plant genome studied to date and more genes than the human genome (about 30,000).  Apples that replicate by meiosis, the way people do, are unreliable in terms of their quality.  They are capable of producing three strands of genes which complicates re-combination, though the triple-helix plants don’t thrive.  

Humans learned early how to clone apples by mitosis, so that the apples would be predictably compliant to human tastes.  Also, apple stock is often grafted to crab apple roots so that the tree will be conveniently small.  Like roses, to which they are related, once apples go feral they revert to their old ways and in that form they persist, offering themselves up to the bees and the roulette-rules of pollen.  In fall when walking through an apple orchard, one should use care since wasps replace the bees, not pollinating but guzzling the fermenting deadfalls so that they are drunk and violent.

Paul again:  “I guess it takes others to help us appreciate our surroundings. I see that tree every day so don't give it a second thought. It's likely a hundred or so years old or more, planted by the original settler here in the valley. It's hard to appreciate all that tree has been through to survive all those years. I've tried planting fruit and nut trees here, time after time only to have the deer or cows mow them down.

“30 years ago I used to try and keep it pruned, but there was a huge excavation in one of the two main laterals that I was sure would break and ruin the tree. Still going strong all these years. I let it go wild again when I found other, better tasting apples. I do get a pie or two out of these most years, but that's about all the apples are good for. They don't store well and they're too bland for applesauce unless you mix them with other apples.

“Reminds me of Hank, a one armed old feller that lived at the other end of the valley until he died probably 15 years ago. He had a tree in his yard that he'd grafted maybe 40 varieties of apples to. His grandkid that inherited his place cut the tree down the same week Hank died, for some reason I'll never understand.