fruit and seed
Image from “The Armchair Book of Gardens” by Jane Billinghurst.
Fruit and its seed
Following on from musings about vegetables I’ve been thinking about fruit, and seeds, and also Macbeth. For some reason fruit seems to command a more powerful archetypal position in the imagination than the humble vegetable – how many statues of saints are there holding a leek or a carrot? I did find one, with a garden spade at least – the French seventh-century Saint Fiacre, patron saint of gardeners, pictured here with his well-hoed beds in Meaux. Famous for his vegetables, he also made and dispensed many herbal remedies, but he - along with St. Werenfrid, patron of vegetable gardens, St. Isidore, patron of farmers and large gardens, and St. Patrick, not only patron saint of Ireland, but also of organic gardening (a relatively new addition to this tribe?) - remains a fairly singular example. Compare this with all the apples and pomegranates which abound in Christian iconography, in paintings and sculptures, as well as in the vast array of mythological references from so many different cultures.
For all the importance of vegetables – and there are many fine poems and stories about them too - it is fruit that commands the literary and mythological imagination. There are the golden apples of the Hesperides, the pomegranate seeds of Persephone, the apple/fig/pomegranate (so many speculations) of the garden of Eden – the myths abound, tapping into a deeply-felt sense of both fruit and seed, blossom and ripeness, and, through these, a sense of seasonality, of Time itself.
One misjudged (or deliberate) bite is also the seed action of all that will follow - the other, metaphorical, fruit that will be borne, even into eternity. There is John Milton’s Eve, flushed as she swallows the erstwhile fruit, the fate of humankind suddenly hanging in the balance. Only the diminutive strawberry was said in legend to have escaped the curse of the Fall, because being so close to the ground, it remained unseen by God in his wrath. But what would we make of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the Durbevilles without its basket of strawberries, symbol of all that is forbidden, and therefore obviously to be enjoyed, the pivot on which the story turns? In Eden a new story begins when Adam and Eve are banished to till the ground themselves, to plant and reap, now farmers, not Sunday gardeners, subject to the cycles of time and the seasons - the solar power in its ascent bringing seedtime and harvest, the longer lunar nights the periods of rest and renewal.
There are so many ways of thinking about this symbolic power of fruit, and poems that invite us to do so. There are poems with lemons (Pablo Neruda) and watermelon Ode to the Watermelon, pomegranates (D. H. Lawrence, Eavan Boland), figs and grapes (D H Lawrence again), bananas (Wendy Cope). But sooner or later, fruit also expresses itself as seed, the one contained within the other, intrinsic and barely separable, and, as grain, identical with its own seed. What you sow is what you will reap, not so much because karma is ruthless and unforgiving, but because it is almost entirely mechanical, with little invitation for intervention. Even our proverbs and idioms catch this sense of cause and effect – the rotten apple never falls far from the tree, or like father, like son, epithets that remind us that you can’t avoid the inevitable. It is woven in like DNA to our lives and our language, destined, whatever our efforts, to shape things on the pattern of their, or our, forebears. Like the threads woven by the fates, or by Chronos, Old Father Time, whose scythe is both blade and crescent moon, it allows for the whittling away of that which has had its time, and the emergence from the dark of the new - where it has been gestating all along. It enables a moralising drawn from the simple observation of the natural processes at the heart of life. It isn’t exactly rocket science. And yet.
On to Macbeth, and the question of fate. I have been teaching ‘the Scottish play’ for many years now, but I never tire of it. It is often selected by exam boards and schools as one of the easier, more accessible, of Shakespeare’s plays, but many of its ideas are complex and intricately expressed. The story of seed and fruit, fruit and seed, is the whole drama of Macbeth, which is not just about tantalising daggers, or tales told by an idiot, or even plain old hubris and its appropriate punishment. The deep beauty of the play lies in the language of its more searching enquiry about actions and their consequences, and the question of intervention, of agency and choice. It is there at the beginning of the play in Banquo’s lines, which are themselves the seed of the whole play:
If you can look into the seeds of time
And say which grain will grow and which will not,
Speak then to me… Act 1, sc.iii
Most of us want to peer into the future, at least a little, and there are many traditions for divining fate. Not many of us would choose three old crones on a heath, but in this hauntingly beautiful line addressed to them, is everything that will be cast away for the wrong fruit, as well as the necessary resolution. It gives a delineation of the actions that will bear terrible fruits with terrifying acceleration, and, ironically, in the achievement of Fleance’s eventual succession, the salve. Even in the brutal and relentless bloodiness of the play, blood itself is also a synonym for generation and lineage, seed bearing fruit in an endless succession.
And succession is on everyone’s mind. Duncan announces early in the play that Malcolm will be his heir, while it is Lady Macbeth’s great sorrow that she has ‘known how tender ’tis to suck the tender babe’, yet not one of her children has survived. This fuels the great irony of Macbeth’s suggestion that Lady Macbeth should ‘bring forth men-children only’, that they might have her ‘mettle’, though perhaps the grace of the story (as well as its driving force, evident in Lady Macbeth’s radical denouncement of any nurturing instinct) is that there are no offspring for the Macbeths. Instead, order will be restored through another kind of renewal, the regeneration of the old virtue, embodied first as Malcolm, Duncan’s son, and in an imagined future, Fleance.
It is this taunt of Banquo as progenitor of the future line of kings that comes to haunt and torment Macbeth most, and for which, in moments, he hardly it counts it worth the ‘jewel’ of his conscience to have killed either king or Banquo. He recognises again and again his crime against this jewel. He describes himself in contrast to the worthiness of Duncan, and the true fruit, the telos that will accrue to each of them. In the subterfuge and terror evoked by the Macbeths’ ambitions, it is easy to forget that this is also a play of intense self-examination, vividly aware of the fruits of action. Hands cannot be washed clean, neither by all the perfumes of Arabia, nor in the multitudinous seas. Moments of choice are dramatized, hanging like the wilful dagger in the air, externalised for the audience in vivid, concrete terms. Even Lady Macbeth, reduced to that most feminine of shadows, wandering the stage in nightgown with candle, fulfils the law of nature, speaking in her distraction the truths that cannot but surface sooner or later.
So how far does Macbeth choose his fate? The witches themselves have masters, so is it really crones that drive the plot? Is it Lady Macbeth’s emasculating jibes, or the invisible but evil ministers she conjures? Or is it Macbeth’s repeated rejection of his own virtue that ultimately produces his apathy? – ‘I am’ he says, ‘in blood stepped in so far/ T’would be as tedious to go back as to go o’er’. This, combined with the kind of magical thinking that convinces him of his invincibility, also makes him ultimately so ruthless. By contrast, it is the slaughter of wife and children which energises MacDuff’s revenge, though, in the youthful embodiment of the future, it is not yet Fleance, but Malcom who returns. It has always seemed curious to me that Malcolm is so underdeveloped as a character, given the part he must play in the restoration of the new-old order. In imagination, it is Fleance who is the true fruit, and seed of the future, who is imbued by virtue of his birth, and the prophecy which affirms it, with the mystical powers of renewal.
And what of the fruit of the play itself, in all its blood-letting and sacrifice? Virginia Woolf famously, in the only recording we have of her voice, speaks of the extraordinary power of language to be found there, its power to reverberate across time:
The splendid word “incarnadine,” for example – who can use it without remembering also “multitudinous seas”? […] Words belong to each other, although, of course, only a great writer knows that the word “incarnadine” belongs to “multitudinous seas”…
Even within the play the image embodies for Macbeth the impact and infinite consequence of his action, a whole sea made red by just his bloodied hand.
This endless multiplication touches into the other curious fact that mostly nature provides more seeds than fruit will ever grow, demonstrating a kind of built-in proliferation, particularly evident in plants at the end of their life. Nature also reanimates in her own season. There are plants whose seeds are only activated by intense fire, or certain kinds of rain. So too in the world of language and memory. Sometimes it is only years later that something surfaces that was planted years before, as the poet Edwin Muir describes here, of the prayer learnt and practised through childhood, but long forgotten until adulthood:
Last night going to bed alone I suddenly found myself (I was taking off my waistcoat) reciting the Lord’s Prayer in a loud emphatic voice, a thing I had not done for so many years, with deep urgency and profound disturbed emotion. While I went on I grew more composed. As if it had been empty and craving and were being replenished my soul grew still. Every word had a strange fullness and meaning which astonished and delighted me. It was late; I had sat up reading and I was sleepy but as I stood in the middle of the floor half undressed saying the prayer over and over, meaning after meaning sprang from it, overcoming me again with joyful surprise…
Things appear in ways we could not have anticipated, but not from nowhere. Words, like seeds, have their own shadowy realm. As Virginia Woolf says later, in the same lecture, of words,
Undoubtedly they like us to think, and they like us to feel, before we use them; but they also like us to pause; to become unconscious. Our unconsciousness is their privacy; our darkness is their light…