Foraging for Truth

 
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In September a thought process that had developing since February reached a certain ripeness, so to speak.  I had moved out of my house in Monterey and was organizing my things back into my parents’ house and had come across a ‘zine written by my best friend ten years earlier when she was 17.  It began

(this stems from experience)

I need to document my experience because everything I do us made up of previous experience and all my art reflects my outlook on external experiences so it seems pretty important to write them down

—I saw a plane suspended in midair once

—we stole lemons

—Johnny Cash died in my arms

A hand-drawn picture accompanied the text on this first page, of my friend crying and sitting on the ground embracing a dead Johnny Cash. 

I had one week remaining before I was to take a trip to Oakland, then St. Louis, then Berlin, then Amsterdam, then Berlin (again) then Bremen, then Andorra (via Barcelona), then Tarragona (again via Barcelona), then Granada, then Alicante, then Bristol (again via Barcelona), then Worcestershire, then London, then Berlin (again, via Worcestershire and Bristol, again), then Prague, then Berlin (again), then St. Louis (again), where I am now.  That day I had to work my penultimate shift, and I picked, as I had been doing all week, a selection of apples from the backyard apple tree, and from another tree in a neighbor's backyard that offered dozens of ignored ripe apples across its fence into the park behind my parents’ house.   I was to go into town with my father, retrieve my bicycle, visit some friends for perhaps the last time with apple offerings, and go to work at four for nearly the last time at a restaurant in Pacific Grove.

The ripened thought process began after I returned from the second bocce journey, as fruit tends to begin to develop, in February.  I went to visit my beloved in Los Angeles for the weekend, and her Saturday involved facilitating an event at her school’s art museum.  It was for students, members of her student association, and, happily, me. 

I knew little of what to expect other than a vague notion of the artist collective’s credentials—they mapped out neighborhoods in Los Angeles and pinpointed spots in parks, between fences and sidewalks, even in medians, where fruit was “public,” where one could, at the right moment in the right season, saunter up and freely grab the definition of local fruit. 

Years before, the aforementioned best friend, another friend, and I envisioned a similar project for Monterey, a town with half a dozen historic gardens and a plethora of other ignored public mini orchards.  We never completed a map, but we did complete several reconnaissance missions.  We found mostly plums.  In one space between front yard and sidewalk we were yelled at for infringing upon a resident’s space.  In another we were amiably invited onto the patio to pre-emptively rid the resident of a sticky rotten mess of plums.  We made what we called a “People’s Plum Pie”—local, sustainable, delicious. 

Years before that, as noted above, “we stole lemons,” walking up Prescott and seeing the yellow jewels yearning toward the sidewalk, capsules of citric deliciousness begging to be consumed.  I don’t know if we crossed their property to reach them, or if they crossed into the city to reach us, but I believe it was youthful sheepishness that produced the word “stole” a decade before, not actual illegality.  Certainly, however, to teenagers, theft can be positive—thrillingly transgressive, and a representation of an incommunicable sense of entitlement.  It is just a question of inches, really.  And I doubt the lemons were missed.  When I moved, years later, into that same neighborhood years later, my 27-year-old roommate would drunkenly trespass into neighbors' backyards to grab lemons in the middle of the night.  That I did not so easily condone.

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The collective was called Fallen Fruit, a group of three hip thirty-somethings.   They chatted amongst themselves preparing the presentation that would begin the workshop.   I sat with a coffee and pastry provided by the student association and sat with my beloved to hear and watch the background talk and slide show. 

The three narrated their years of foraging-centric projects, showing us the initial maps, videos of group fruit-picking expeditions through the streets of LA, public jam-making sessions, a fruit tree installation in Spain, and half a dozen related videos, events, shows, and pieces of writing. 

And then we took a break before the Fruit Meditation segment which is described on their website as

 

An array of meditations and visualizations designed for small groups in intimate settings.  Each sequence imagines fruit differently to raise consciousness about symbolic values, politics, social relations and fruit itself.  Working within individual consciousness as well as interpersonal relationships, the various parts reconfigure how we might think about fruit and use it as a personal and social tool.

We found, with or without a yoga mat, a place on the floor that spoke to us, a position in which we were comfortable, and we sat with or without our eyes closed, and were asked to visualize, with the help of an abstracted, mythologized description of the piece of fruit we were about to receive, the power of this piece of fruit we were preparing to consume—its sustenance, the place from which it came, its history—the essentially human, mythical task it was to eat the apple in front of us. 

I was incredibly open to the whole thing.  Thinking about what you eat is quite en vogue these days for a variety of great reasons—the health repercussions of people who don’t think about what they eat are readily apparent in this country, the environmental repercussions of pesticides, packaging, and 1,000-mile shipping are increasingly dire, and more philosophical—yet very real—disconnections between people and their food, and the people who produce their food are, at risk of sounding too new age-y (though in this context such a fear is absurd), fatal.   There is no respect for the tree that produces the fruit, nor for the land and people that produce the tree, in our industrialized food system.  Ask Michael Pollan.   The simplicity of an apple growing on a tree is a miracle, nothing less, and the bourgeois need to commodify and package and distance oneself from this natural fact is a tragedy.

It also so happened that I decided to stop drinking a week before.  This habit had become a crutch by which I could signal the end of a workday, celebrate the fact of a day off, drown the uncertainties of a bad mood, and distance myself from any real difficulties that may have been present in my life.  Also I had, because of drinking, starting smoking cigarettes again, which I had vowed to stop.  So I was also quitting cigarettes again.  For an untreated man in recovery the idea of meditating on a piece of fruit was vital.

The last fact of my infatuation with the whole thing was the socialness of their projects—people were brought outside together, to interact with their neighbors and to value the land they stood on, the place that a century of pavement, parking lots, television, and supermarkets had paved over and trained them to disconnect from.  And the objects in question were spheres.  An epiphany rolled through my toxin-free, antioxidant rich veins—I had found my soulmates in this trio, bocce was foraging for the mind, or, rather, foraging was bocce for the body, or parks were a free space for communities to eat, play, and connect with each other, the trees around, above, and beneath them, and the very dirt, grass, sand or decomposed granite on which they stood.

When the event drew to a close, and we all whispered an insecurity into a watermelon and participated in a Gallagher-esque destruction of said watermelon, I didn’t have the words to reach out to the trio.  What I wanted to say was not words.  It was a stone sphere I didn’t have.  It was the fruit that they had already given me.  I said thanks to the shorter of the three, and asked if I could send them a piece of writing that they had inspired in me—planted the seed, if you like—and I dumbly smiled at the other two.

Seven months later I was in the passenger seat of my father’s car explaining this ripened thought process, its beginnings with the pilfered lemons, the People’s Plum Pie, the events of the public fruit meditation, the apples from our and the neighbor’s backyard, and, of course, bocce.

“I have a story that has to do with all of that,” he said.

I have no idea what I said to that, but in my mind right now I am making myself say, “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

He told me about French colleagues of his in Nigeria.  They brought in truckloads of sand to a spot on the river to create a sort of beach.  They went there to swim—with a rope to hang on to in the swift river—and to sunbathe and relax, and to play boules (the French relative to bocce) with coconuts foraged from the area.  The Nigerians found this most peculiar, that these white foreigners would, for pleasure, subject themselves to the unyielding sun at the hottest part of the day, to the deathly river for no good reason, and that they would, in this unbearable heat, toss coconuts in the sand and walk after them for hours at a time.