Uncommon Fruits

“Grafting: do we ever do anything other than that? And are we ever free from vegetal influences when we engage in its operations?
In agronomy, grafts are the shoots, or twigs, inserted into a slit of a tree. As soon as the sap of an insert mixes with that of the tree that receives it, the host is no longer the same as it was before. Either its flowers or fruits coexist with those of the grafted variety throughout the entire plant, or they change and acquire the characteristics of the graft, as in many species of apples. Grafting, therefore, foregrounds the plasticity and receptivity of vegetal life, its constitutive capacity for symbiosis and metamorphosis, its openness to the other at the expense of fixed identities (even the identity ensconced in genetics) revealed, by their very vitality, as illusory."¹
Do we ever do anything other than grafting? The process of Modernity, as described by sociologist Bruno Latour, consists of two processes: purification and hybridization. The former produces pure and self-standing identities; it clearly differentiates between Nature and Culture, between human and other-than-human. But the latter functions on a different, clandestine plane, away from the workings of purification which is unaware of the production of hybrids. We have never been modern, Latour wrote. In other words: Despite of our love for Identity and clear distinctions, we have never stopped the multiplication of hybrids. Hybridization that vegetal beings are a proponent of—through inosculation and cross-polination, for example—should be a model for cultural hybridization, too. Being of a human being is dependant on language and its fixity, on the one hand, and instability, on the other. “To write means to graft. It’s the same word,” wrote Jacques Derrida, reminding us of the shared etymology of both grafting and writing—the Ancient Greek word graphein—and adds that “[t]he graft is not something that happens to the properness of the thing. There is no more any thing than there is any original text.” There is only grafting, creating of differences; only fusions and chimeras. Let us use the production of wild tongues as a critique of fixed identities. Vida Rucli once wrote: “We read and write mostly in English, we exchange sweet words in Slovenian, we solve everyday concrete matters in Italian and, in the village, we argue and make up in our local dialect. What happens if these separations between languages ​​are not so clear and if, in fact, our everyday languages ​​are hybrid, cross-pollinated with other dialects and slangs, always mixed, fluid, contextual and built into relationships with the people who are in Topolò/Topolove at that moment? What if our writing included all these nuances of language? Beyond purity and rigidity, perhaps our consciousness would also change and be sent closer to what Gloria Anzaldúa calls la conciencia de la mestiza, the consciousness of borderlands, ambivalent, tolerant of contradictions and ambiguities, a consciousness that would embrace the wildness of languages.”

The term cultivar was coined by the American horticulturist and reformer of rural life Liberty Hyde Bailey and is supposedly a blend of two terms: cultivated + variety.

“Cultivars [...] are more than non-native species. They inscribe the ‘natureculture coevolutions’ of many peoples and cultures over time. They are varieties selectively bred and manipulated to fulfill our desires for a different world that can only be achieved with the complicity of plants. Cultivars are the result of centuries (sometimes millennia) of naturecultural processes designed to obtain bigger flowers, deeper colorations, and more intense fragrances. Simultaneously, by biologically allowing certain changes to happen, and forbidding others, plants have shaped our aesthetic taste and our economies, along with our senses. I see cultivars as the result of important, creative/cultural conversation between humans and lands, and humans and plants. Those who insist on reading cultivars as a form of subjugation of plant-life do so because they have never tried to cross-breed and select a vegetal species themselves. The process is extremely laborious, expensive, frustrating, and riddled with failure–plants don’t simply do what we want. They say ‘no’ through their biological definitions. They resist. This is why I look at cultivars as an undervalued collaborative form. [...] The history of plant cultivars spans the globe. Over millennia, from oranges to cherries, and cabbages to basil, we have selected, cross-bred, manipulated, grafted, exported, and imported. Throughout it all, plants have made us human. They have seduced us and colonized us. They have invaded our homes and have provided emotional reference points for our memories, grieving, and joy, along with food and materials.”¹

As the sun shone brightly for the first time this past week, we started thinking about the tasks we need to tend to outside our houses. The sun exercises its authority over people, inviting us under its protection, into the spaces under the empty sky. It is necessary to turn the soil in the garden and finally venture into the forest to check the condition of the surrounding wooden temple. And we must observe with great precision the metamorphosis that will begin to take place before our eyes: the growth of greenery, the sprouting of sprouts, the formation of flower buds. We always say that we need to take care of our abilities to observe the world and carefully upgrade them. When we will begin to truly admire nonhuman others, we will also begin to treat them more ethically. But the theory of the refinement of our sensory apparatus, which should consequently lead to the refinement of our mental apparatus, rests on the thesis that there is such a thing as a subject that observes and an object that is observed. Michael Pollan, the American author, the writer of the famous book The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World (2002) tackles this topic with a forceful thesis: There is no need at all to change our sensory apparatus. What interests the plant is only its genetic copying. It just wants to multiply. She has no problem with industrial agriculture, because it means more and more plants of her kind. The fact that we humans have perfected some of the species, given their fruit that right sweetness and appearance that invites more and more people to bite into her fruit, is in accordance with the plan of plant species: to reproduce. “The ancient relationship between bees and flowers is a classic example of what is known as “coevolution.” In a coevolutionary bargain like the one struck by the bee and the apple tree, the two parties act on each other to advance their individual interests but wind up trading favors: food for the bee, transportation for the apple genes. Consciousness needn’t enter into it on either side, and the traditional distinction between subject and object is meaningless.” Pollan also adds that there is no essential difference between man and this bee. So who is to blame for planting a specific type of lettuce and tomato in the garden? Pollan claims that lettuce and tomatoes are to blame: “These plants hit on a remarkably clever strategy: getting us to move and think for them.” So why should we change? Certain successful plant species are happy in monoculture oases. Even if humans have genetically modified plants, this is all just part of a secret plant plan to rule the world. The plant works through us, man is a means of its self-affirmation. In an interesting way, the idea connects two worlds that we like to separate, the world of nature and culture, into a single natureculture. The two worlds are one, says Pollan. Even the human function of reasoning, of which we are so proud, can be understood in the way that nature itself created a machine to think for it. A nature that thinks itself to spread itself.