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Valyermo 6
Posted on September 30, 2003 in Book of Days Myths & Mysticism Photos Sexuality Travels - So Cal
Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.
Today’s topic: Write about a rendezvous.
Whatever possessed people to link apple trees to the human act of carnal sex? I know that this is nonbiblical, that the idea came out of northern Europe where blonde people gnashed through the thin red skins and chewed hunks of the blonde flesh as they salivated over each other’s blushing, soft curves in the green shade.
A Dictionary of Symbols claims that the apple rates because of the pentagonal shape of the core. Five black seeds radiate out from the center forming a pentagram. If you doubt the power of the apple seed, save a few in a jar and eat them. One man who did so died of cynanide poisoning.
But this still doesn’t explain what it has to do with sex. Perhaps, I thought, it was the way that apple trees healed themselves when they lost a limb. The bumps that formed vaguely resembled vaginas or, when more fully congealed, breasts.
What probably happened was that in the distant Celtic/Germanic past a storyteller needed a means for magically transmitting a virtue to a hero and he chose the apple because it was a fruit that everyone knew about and savored. Others picked up on the rhetorical device and repeated it. The apple tree went from magic to magic until a medieval painter planted it in the Garden of Eden.
A grove of apple trees points from the heart of St. Andrew’s Abbey towards the mouth of the canyon. Lynn and I took a walk there in the middle of the afternoon. Volunteers camped out at the festival, spreading their tents and parking their RVs beneath the stubby trees. “These look like good trees to climb,” said Lynn, eyeing a ruby fruit beyond even my reach. I took out my camera and photographed the trunks and the bark, contemplated the mortality of a few ruddy fruits disintegrating in the alluvial dirt, and forgot that we were only twenty steps from the noisy festival.
The peace of the garden could have been Eden. Lynn, the volunteers, and myself loitered beneath the trees. Beyond our ears and our eyes, the monks rested before the late afternoon’s sacred dance. All beasts and all fowl fled except when penned for the petting zoo or tethered for the pony ride. All in the name of Man’s Dominion over the animals, I suppose. A cop snoozing in a black and white was the only sign of anything like an angel with a flaming sword.
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Want to participate? First either get yourself a copy of A Writer’s Book of Days by Judy Reeves or read these guidelines. Then either check in to see what the prompt for the day is or read along in the book.
Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: On the night train to .
