What Nuisance Animals Teach the Zen Apple Pruner

Upon moving in in 2006, our 200 year old house came stocked with a healthy population of Pholcus Phalangioides, an arachnid commonly called the Long-Bodied Cellar Spider (because of it’s lengthy legs and skinny thorax.) Basically, it's the giraffe of house spiders here in the Northeast and the amusing thing about this insect is that when it’s poked, it spins around in circles like a whirling dervish. It spins so fast you can’t see it anymore -- it’s just looks like a blur, like a cyclone. But otherwise, it’s a peaceful little guy that builds webs in the corners of the ceiling, we hardly ever notice them.

Anyways, we co-existed with the spiders for years but eventually their webs became too much for us. Dust would get trapped in the webs and they’d hang heavy like cotton candy. Visitors accused of us of living in a haunted house and they had a point, we had tons of these dust collectors. So last summer we decided it was time to take back our dwelling and I vacuumed the ceilings -- evicting the spiders, home and all.

 Then apple season came and went. The summer humidity made way and the stove fires sucked the remaining moisture out of the house. Then, as they do every December, red squirrels made their way in, testing our cohabitation tolerance. They squirls would wake us up at night with all their running around and occasionally they'd knock something off the counter. One morning I even discovered an entire bag of pistachio nuts emptied and presumably relocated somewhere in our walls. (I can picture him now, cracking the shells and watching Netflix on a tiny screen!)

We’ve come to expect squirrels and mice every winter but the noise only bothers us in December. Eventually, as the winter drags on their activity dies down and we can sleep again in peace.  We’re pretty tolerant of this pattern, but this January a new pest has come inside to claim this old house: Mosquitoes! This I can't tolerate.

Mosquitoes are ubiquitous in the summer and although they are annoying to humans we’ve evolved to tolerate them to an extent. But when they’re buzzing around in winter it destroys the rest period. It’s only a small population we’re talking about (I get bit only once or twice a week), but still the peculiarity has made me obsesses on finding their source. I’ve flushed the P-traps under the sinks, checked the sump pump, and drained the dishwasher and washer machine basins. I’ve even quarantined the plants and went through all the cabinets looking for pots that might have standing water. Still, the mosquitoes buzz.

Then, just as I started pruning the apple trees it hit me like a flash:  I’m noticing mosquitoes now because I removed all the spiders!  I wanted a clean house so I removed the dusty webs but that action literally bit me in the ass. And this is what that means to an orchardist...

Every branch cut from an apple tree here in America, causes a feather to fall from a bird in Australia. What happens next when that feather lands? A light bulb flickers in Scotland. And so on, and so on.

What am I talking about? Cultivation. Our actions are part of a ripple that's global, nay, universal. Think Big before you act. 

 

More on the Art of Blending

 

 

I posted this chart last year and meant to say more about it (if you click-on the image you can enlarge and see the details.) At that time I said I was going to elaborate on how the chart could help with the “art” of blending but the season got ahead of me. The main thing I'd like to say about it is this: The chart is just a tool to help with the art, it's not a recipe for making it. Mastering the formal qualities doesn’t make a person an artist, it just makes them skilled. And there is a HUGE difference.

 “What any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.”
― John Berger (towering twentieth-century English art critic)

 I chose this quote to illustrate that art involves more than just skill, the goal is ultimately about the search for certain truths (Idealism.) But I also chose this quote to speak of the importance of this quest. Notice how that whole statement changes with the addition of "And that would be our loss"! In addition to aspiring toward something, Berger felt compelled to say that our reception of art is just as much a component of "true art."

Artistic expression is about that relationship. It involves (1) an originator (in cider's case, this includes the land, the tree, the variety, as well as the artist/ farmer), and it involves (2) a receiver (in our case, the drinker or critic.) When a cider-maker aspires to artistry he or she assumes a deep relationship with the audience and they are on a quest to reach an ideal together. As with art, cider can show people what's missing in their world and it can bring them to a new place. In other words, cider has the power to change things.

This is profound shit we are talking about. But let’s face it, put in the context of the above discussion, cider isn’t usually art-worthy, now is it? Usually, it’s nothing more than an attempt to satisfy taste and not an attempt to elevate Man, or even just make us think. Not to knock wines that are made purely for aesthetic pleasure -- that can be art too -- but "true artists" (to use Berger's words) generally want more out of the relationship. They want a conscious connection between originator and receiver, a connection that sometimes has the power of change things.

How does my chart help with that? It doesn’t! My chart only helps cider-makers prepare for the woods. Being able to make green from the combination of blue and yellow isn’t art. Or, to use my chart as an example, making a bittersweet cider from bitters and sweets isn't art. In my opinion, being able to grow or dial-up certain traits (like colors) is only the beginning of art, like a hiker gathering supplies in a backpack, but it is not the art itself. If we have green on our pallet we have more arsenal should we discover a landscape that requires green in the painting, but it’s not about the pallet, it’s about the painting. What is the significance of the painting?

I think an artist who works in the medium of cider needs to know those formal properties, and they need to know the audience too, but they also need to aspire to something that isn’t already there. You can’t just pander to a market or to a predetermined expectation because that's not saying anything new -- it's already there. The quality of "true art" (again, to quote Berger) is that it has the power to change us -- to help us transcend. Without it, it would be our loss.

Let me give an example for those who prefer concrete forms: Cider, for me (and this is true for a lot of my colleagues too,) is significant when it connects humanity with the land -- that's the primary goal of most my ciders. So I want people to realize what it’s like to be in that landscape when they drink my cider. Hopefully, they ponder this and wonder what it's like to survive there, to acclimate to that location, like the trees do. I want that because that's precisely what amazing me about wild apple trees and I hope the fruit can transcend -- bring us into their world. So as an artist, I am unsatisfying if people can't make that connection. I'm aspiring to an ideal. 

But that's just my example. The chart doesn't paint the picture for me, it only gives me the ability to organize my pallet and see what I'm working with. More importantly, it shows me what I'm potentially working with. I could go on and on about my approach for days, because (no surprise) I have a million analogies about how composing a cider is like painting a picture. But if I did, I'd only be speaking about how I paint. I believe that every cider artist has their own message of originality, because everyone is working with different apples and different locations. All I intend on showing with this chart is how to organize and blend objective properties for your own use. I wish you the best of luck reflecting on your cider, or someone else’s cider, and discovering the greater significance.  

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The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.  -John Berger

My Annual New Year's Diary Post

 I feel like I spent 10 years fighting the cider industry, starting when we formed our business in 2008, up until 2018, when I completed my book. I can't count all the beefs I had with the industry, except that they fell into three categories: 1) cider agriculture, 2) the art of cider making, and 3) the way capitalist "entrepreneurs" do business (exploit the labor force, exploit the customer, and exploit the two aforementioned categories, art and farming.)

I wrote about this a lot over those 10 years and my discontentment also came-out as a major element of the book. (One might even say it was the dominant theme of the book and the reason for the sub-title.) But the second I finished the book in the summer of 2018 I suddenly became less critical of the cider industry and instead focused on my personal life. Over the past 3 years there have been some huge changes to my family, to me personally (body and mind), and to society in general, which I've reflected-on for personal consideration. Trying to influence cider just isn't my preoccupation.

I've also noticed that the cider industry got better in those 3 years and it's not as easy to get worked-up about it anymore. One can find decent cider easier in stores now, there's a greater diversity of producers, and more farmers are growing cider apples (even if they are doing it the completely wrong way still.) Yes, I still want to stick a fork in the eye of all the capitalists and sell-outs who disguise their true motives as "art" or as "doing good for the economy and planet" (they may not even know they're doing it), but every industry is dominated by those types and, in fact, cider has a smaller percentage of them. Long story short: The cider industry is a relatively good team to be on, even if I wish to distinguish myself from most my teammates. 

Now when I write, I'm writing about broad philosophical ideas that relate to a greater audience, so I haven't been publishing cider diary posts like this one recently. (In my head, I'm writing stories that are more for lay-people, though I'm pretty sure what I write will never get "polished and published.") But I'm also nostalgic for the dialog I've had with my colleagues in the foodie world, and the winter is historically when we all got together (we've been doing so for over a decade now!) Let me just say to you now: I MISS YOU BROTHERS AND SISTERS! Happy 2021.