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 a collection of rarified 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.
It’s late in March, one month has passed since I moved to Melbourne and apples have begun falling from branches, one by one. At the Lygon St grocer I stop 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 purchase two. Once home, I place them on my desk. Between the piles of books, their status shifts from food to language, and they punctuate the gaps like fullstops, like holes.
I'm curious to bite into one but this somehow seems illicit. My interest in them as food has been succeeded by 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. I collect the pips from inside the core 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
…
On the phone last night, S tells me that her mother recently attached weights to the apple tree growing in her backyard. Her plan is to turn it into a "weeping fruit tree". To make the weights, she sourced a pile of small rocks from a river that runs along the base of a nearby hill. Using a wheelbarrow to transport them home, she then placed the rocks inside a collection of odd socks which have lost their pair, and then attached these to the ends of the branches, one for each. She used only black socks to weigh the branches down.
A few months later, I receive an update: the net has been taken off and the apples are beginning to hang slightly lower in the sky. It’s 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 window sill 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.
Soon after arriving, I hear a knock on the door. The woman standing there greets me with 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 tea, which she brings to me in my room. We're both staying in the apartment block for the next two weeks. Our doors are separated by a hallway but we are going to be sharing a kitchen.
Over the course of the next few days 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 a 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. I also come to learn of certain losses throughout her life, of the sorrows which have, over time, accumulated. We 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. They cross the sea from time to time to be together. 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 though I don’t yet have a plan for 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.
…
A yellow package arrives in my letterbox from Ireland, two years have passed since I visited. One side has my name and address written on it and the other has Juliette’s. Two stamps in the corner feature black and white portraits of two women. Their names are Kathleen Lynn and Elizabeth O’Farrell, 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 look to the customs label signed by Juliette, which reads 'Barry’s Irish Tea Bags'. The package has been cut and sealed with tape, which I re-open. Inside are a dozen or more tea bags. I take one out and examine the familiar semi-transparent paper. A small incision has been cut into each tea bag and re-sealed with clear tape. Peeling it back, I pour the tea leaves into my palm. Amongst the tea leaves are apple seeds. Juliette has been collecting them for two years now her entire collection is distributed 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 lies in my drawer for two years. I take it out occasionally and examine the contents, thinking of Juliette. I’ve been intending to make a work using the seeds, but they seem to lie outside of this paradigm. Deciding instead to see if the seeds are still viable to grow, I collect a handful and follow a set of directions for growing apple trees from seed. To simulate the conditions of winter, the instructions suggest wrapping the seeds in damp tissues and placing them in the freezer.
…
Three months have now passed and the seeds haven't germinated, their time to grow may have expired. I've continued to collect apple seeds and today bought a packet of tea to send to Ireland; my collection is ready to travel.
…
Years can pass and apple seeds won’t make an entrance into the world. Some seeds will stay where they fall while others will travel far. Beneath the leaves and soil, they lie in wait. Most will remain impermeable, but while they remain shut, another opens. Recently, while looking through a hardware catalogue, I came across an item called a 'coffin lock'. It's a joint sometimes used in theatre sets or scenery, designed to draw together two decks and fix them in place by way of a 'blind panel connector'. Curiously, the mechanism resembles a camera in size and layout, but where a camera has a lens, the lock fits a 'key', but unlike other locks, there isn’t a single key to open it, to fit the lock’s interior.
…
While out for a walk recently I came across a garden on North St. It 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, and I’ve 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 is opened with an apple. When I reach the core, I discover that the seed inside it has begun to germinate — it’s growing inside the apple. I carefully extract the seed and place it in my palm, examining the pale green shoot. I then return to the market, 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 grow rapidly throughout the summer heat and I’m troubled by their pace, like a promise offered too quickly. Several months pass and most of the seedlings don’t survive beyond a few weeks. Further are lost on the drive from Adelaide to Melbourne. All have fallen but two, but they’re with me now, growing through their first winter, by the light of the window.
"In order 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