Fall
I
I return to the fruit store on Lygon St where the radio is always tuned to a station playing classical music. Today, it’s opera. The music drifts through the space, turning the fruit into an audience and my visit into an occasion. Walking slowly past the displays, I imagine I’m in a museum surrounded by rarefied shapes, textures, pleasures, and unknowns. The careful arrangements remind me of S and I think of her hands. They organise parts of the world with this same attention; objects alight upon surfaces, as if to facilitate a type of breathing.
In late March, one month after I moved to Melbourne, apples began falling from branches, one by one. At the Lygon St grocer, I stopped in front of a small collection. They're dark red, almost black in places, and have a slight sheen to their surface, like polished shoes. I purchased two. Once home, I placed them on my desk. Between the piles of books, their status shifts from food to language, and they punctuate the gaps like full stops, like holes.
I'm curious to bite into one, but this now feels illicit. My interest in them as food has turned into a desire to preserve the ambiguity of their contents. By not knowing what's inside I can stay within the limits of the theoretical. Picking them up, they fit into the palms of my hands like new joints, one for each.
Late at night, and with a sudden craving for apples, I decide to eat one. It’s unlike any I have ever tried — sweet, crisp, dense, allusive in flavour, and refreshing, like cold mornings. Once I reach the core, I retrieve the seeds and place them by the window to dry. There are three.
"It is just about the darkest apple that I have ever seen. He gave me one of these apples and from the pips I grew two trees. I did so mainly because I liked the look of this apple but also because Ted Hughes was a very good friend of mine and it was a kind of link between us. I could have this apple in a Suffolk garden where it didn’t belong, and there was a kind of link between us." — Michael Hamburger
…
Last night on the phone, S told me that her mother recently attached weights to the apple tree growing in her backyard. She plans to turn it into a "weeping fruit tree." To create the weights, she sourced a pile of small rocks from a river that runs along the base of a nearby hill. Using a wheelbarrow, she transported them home and then placed the rocks inside a collection of odd socks which have lost their pair, choosing only those whose colour was black. After that, she attached the weights to the ends of the branches, one for each.
A few months later, I received an update. The net has been removed, and the apples are beginning to hang slightly lower in the sky. The tree is now replete with this season's fruit. The weights remain attached, however; there’s still some way to go before the branches touch the ground.
I pick up the dried seeds from the windowsill and wrap them in paper. They’re in an envelope, soon they will reach S.
"And consider the leaves, how blind and heavy they are, they got exasperated in thing, how blind the leaves are and how heavy they are. And feel in the hand how everything has a weight, the weight does not escape the inexpressive hand. Do not awaken the person who is entirely absent, who is absorbed in feeling the weight of things. Weight is one of the proofs of the thing: only things with weight can fly. And the only things that fall — the celestial meteorite — are those that have weight." — Clarice Lispector
II
Stepping off the plane, I'm filled with dread and excitement. I've landed in Berlin where I will spend the next three weeks before departing to Ireland. Between where I stand on the tarmac and the address written down in my diary is a network of trains, buses, and walks to navigate in order to arrive at the apartment. During the trip, strangers offer directions and I eventually find my way through the city, arriving late in the afternoon at a dark green door.
Shortly after putting down my bags, I hear a knock on the door. The woman standing there greets me in an Irish accent and introduces herself as Juliette de le Mer. "De le Mer," she tells me, is French for "of the sea." Juliette is warm and welcoming, offering me a cup of tea, which she brings to me in my room. We will both be staying in the apartment block for the next two weeks and though our doors are separated by a hallway, we are going to be sharing a kitchen.
In the week following my arrival, I encounter Juliette for brief moments throughout the day, and traces of her presence appear around me — the fruit she’s bought from the shops, her dishes drying on the rack, a bowl of oats soaking in water overnight. It’s there, in the kitchen, that I get to know a little about Juliette. We exchange stories while cutting vegetables and boiling the kettle, and the shape of her life begins to emerge. She tells me that before practicing as a painter, she spent two decades working as a librarian, during which time she raised a family. Her children have now grown up, and more recently, she’s become a Grandmother. During our conversations, I came to learn of certain losses throughout her life, of the sorrows which have, over time, accumulated. We also discuss the complex joy of solitude. Juliette now lives in a house of her own in County Clare while her partner, John, lives in England. From time to time, they cross the sea to be together. As it happens, County Clare is where my paternal ancestors came from and I’ve been planning to visit. I’m interested in seeing the terrain, a vast landscape of cracked limestone bedrock.
…
Before arriving in Berlin, I'd begun to collect apple seeds. From inside the cores of those I ate, I would retrieve the seeds and place them inside the pockets of my clothing. I continue to collect them while I'm away, and although I don’t yet have a plan for what I will do with them, the pages of Clarice Lispector’s 'The Passion According to G.H.' lay open in my mind. Throughout the book, the protagonist, G.H., contends with a desire to eat the "forbidden," though instead of an apple, it's a dead cockroach. In the book, we travel with her, offering our hands for support, while she is guided by the law of desire — of saying "yes" and stepping into the dark, guided by the apple's light towards an interior. In the kitchen one day, after eating an apple, Juliette observed me pocket the seeds. She offers to collect them from her apples too, if I would like.
…
Two years after I visited Ireland, a yellow package arrived in my letterbox, sent to me by Juliette. In one corner are two stamps that feature black and white portraits of two women, whose names are Kathleen Lynn and Elizabeth O’Farrell. They are both members of the Cumann na mBan, Gaelic for 'The Irishwomen’s Council,' a republican paramilitary organisation formed in 1914. The colour chosen to represent their organisation was green.
I examine the customs label signed by Juliette, which reads 'Barry’s Irish Tea Bags.' The package was cut open for examination and then re-sealed with tape, which I opened again. Inside, I find a dozen or more tea bags. I take one out and peer through the familiar semi-transparent paper, which conceals the tea bag's contents. I notice that a small incision has been cut into each tea bag, and then re-sealed with clear tape. Peeling it back, I pour the contents into my palm. Among the tea leaves are Juliette's apple seeds. She has been collecting them for the past two years, and every one of them has been distributed, surreptitiously, throughout the package.
…
"For a long time I've seen my job as bound up with the necessity of noncompliance with pressures, dictates, atmospheres of, variously, poetic factions, society at large, my own past practices as well. For a long time — well in fact since the beginning, since I learned how to be a poet inside the more rebellious wing of poetry; though learning itself meant a kind of disobedience, so like most words the Dis word, the Dis form, cannot be worshipped either — and that would be an obedience anyway." — Alice Notley
…
The package has been sitting in the drawer of my desk for two years now. Occasionally, I take it out and examine the contents, thinking of Juliette. Although I was intending to make an artwork using the seeds, they seem to lie outside of this paradigm. Instead, I decided to see if the seeds were viable to grow. Following a set of directions for growing apple trees from seed, I take a handful from the package and wrap them in damp tissues. To simulate the conditions of winter, I then place them in the freezer, and wait.
…
After three months passed and none of the apple seeds germinated, I concede that their time to grow may have expired. Since returning home from overseas, I have continued to collect apple seeds, and today I bought a packet of tea to send to Ireland. My collection is ready to travel.
…
When apples fall from branches, onto the earth below, some seeds will remain where they have landed. Others will travel far before they arrive at their destination. Once there, beneath the leaves and soil, they lie in wait. Most seeds will never germinate, however, either because the conditions are unsuitable, or their skins are impermeable. But for those that remain sealed, another may open.
…
Recently, while on a walk, I came across a garden on North St, not far from my studio. The garden was surrounded by three tall brick walls covered in dark green vines. Between beds of herbs and flowers, fig and citrus trees were growing throughout, and tools lay about as if they’d just been used. Bowls were placed beneath the taps to catch the drips of water, and the pathways were made from stone. Vacant chairs were scattered across the grounds. I have returned every day since, and while no one is ever there, the gate is always unlocked.
"The trees in the street showed green now, thick with budded leaves. The shadow pattern on my wall was intricate and rich. It was no longer an austere winter pattern as it had been at first. Even the movement of the branches in the wind seemed different. I used to lie looking at the shadow when I rested in the afternoon. I was always tired and so more permeable to impressions. I’d think about the buds, how pale and tender they were, but how implacable. The way an unborn child is implacable. If man’s world were in ashes the spring would still come. I watched the moving pattern and my heart stirred with it in frail, half-sweet melancholy." — Marjorie Barnard
...The day opened with an apple. When I reached the core, I discovered that the seed inside it had begun to germinate — it was growing inside the apple. I carefully extracted the seed and placed it in my palm, examining the pale green shoot. I then return to the market and fill my bag with apples from this same stall. Soon I have two dozen paper cups sitting by the window, each containing a germinated seed pressed into the soil. They grew rapidly throughout the summer heat, and I was troubled by their pace, like a promise offered too quickly. Several months passed and most of the seedlings didn't survive beyond a few weeks. Further are lost on the drive from Adelaide to Melbourne. All had fallen, but two remained, and they’re with me now, growing through their first winter, by the light of the window.
"For apple trees to produce fruit, there has to be a second tree for cross-pollination to occur. Cross-pollination is accomplished by planting two or more varieties side by side" — Botanical Encyclopedia
— Julia McInerney, August 2018