The Men Who Laugh at Fruit Bowls
Vanitas with Lemons, Coins, Teeth, and Bone, by Neal Auch
I should have paid more attention to the men who laughed at my fruit bowl. I should have studied them, written a treatise on how they moved. I remember the way one man cradled my bowl in his hands, the way he bowed as he made an offering of it to his friend. “Would you like a piece of fruit?” His friend cackling. The funniest joke in the world. “I ain’t never eat no fruit before.” The obvious pride he took in that statement. The barbecue sauce staining his white t-shirt. What stupidity, I thought. What utter silliness. Fruit is delicious. Why deny yourself?
I laughed at the men who laughed at my fruit bowl.
I probably shouldn’t have.
I should have paid more attention to the boys who smoked outside the front entrance of my high school. Every day, after the last bell had sounded, they packed gravel into their snowballs and waited to hurl them at me. They didn’t know me; I don’t think they even knew my name. But they knew that I presented myself incorrectly. They knew that my clothes were far too garish, my hairstyle far too impractical. And they had taken it upon themselves to enforce the world’s unspoken dress code. I could have avoided it, of course. I could have toned down my appearance. I could have exited the school through a different doorway. But I didn’t. I passed them each day and spat at them while I did. I wanted to be understood: not one amongst their ranks had the strength it would have taken to sanction me for that hairstyle.
I should have paid more attention to the group of men who inserted themselves into our conversation that night when my teenage friends and I were drinking on the beach. Like us, the men were drunks. But they were considerably older. And one man, whose face I remember to this day, had his 7-year-old daughter in tow. We talked. We passed around bottles and joints. And we watched the fireflies darting about in their aimless way, appearing briefly and then vanishing into the darkness. The father went out and trapped one in his fist. And he let his daughter play with it for a while. But when the time came that he decided the girl had grown too attached to that insignificant creature, he snatched it back. “Please. Don’t.” She was already fighting back tears. And he said, “I caught this. I own it. I can do whatever I want with it.” Of course, I understood the story that was being told. But I didn’t follow that narrative to its logical conclusion. Why should I? It was just a firefly, after all. It was just a smear of fluid on some stranger’s hand. It was just a stain, still glowing, but dimmer with each passing second.
I should have seen it all coming. And now the world belong to men like these, men who laugh at fruit bowls, who feel threatened by strangers’ clothing, who use their hands to crush rather than to shelter. This is the time of eggshell tyrants. This is the time of men who assert their strength by consuming only those candy bars associated with masculinity; bravely, they purchase and destroy the feminine treats. This is the time of men who read nothing but memes, who save their memes in a special folder, who print their memes out on 8.5x11 sheets and wheat-paste them over the bones of the dead.
Ecclesiastes teaches that there is a time for everything. A time to cast away stones; a time to gather stones together. But the world is not a cairn. And any physics textbook will tell you that some processes are irreversible. An egg, shattered against linoleum, stays shattered forever. There may come a time when the world belongs to those who would try all the same, who would huddle over the thing with tweezers and superglue—perhaps, with focus and time, just the shell could be remade. But right now, today, the world does not belong to such people. This is the time of men who throw eggs.
I still have the bowl. I keep it overflowing with fruit, perched precariously near the edge of the counter—a tableau familiar from 17th-century Dutch paintings. In still life, it is the small things which matter. One wilting petal in the bouquet teaches that death is inevitable. The housefly resting on a blemished pear warns us that we are surrounded by evil. The passing butterfly offers a promise of rebirth—of resurrection—for those with faith in its fragile beauty. In still life, the state of the world lives in small things, in moments we encounter every day without thinking too deeply about their implications.
The men who once laughed at my fruit bowl have not changed at all in the intervening decades. But they are louder now—so loud they cannot be ignored. They scream slogans from the pulpit. Any slogan will do, so long as it is screamed. And they spray paint their symbols over the walls, the stained glass, the stations of the cross. They cover everything and then start again. And again. And again.
The men who laughed at my fruit bowl still don’t know the simple pleasure of it all, the pulpy texture of the flesh, juices pooling in the recesses of the gums. And they do not see the beauty of the process. The egg cannot be unshattered. But we plant a seed in the decomposing remains of what came before. And we wait. This is the time of stupidity and cruelty. But the tree still grows. Shit and carrion can still be repurposed into something as sweet as a peach.
I Wrote a Book!
If you enjoy this kind of philosophical analysis into the meaning of still life, you might enjoy the book I wrote on the subject.
The book is 412 pages, contains about 250 full-colour still life pictures, and about 27k words of analysis. There’s also an inexpensive e-book version available, if that’s your thing.
Vanitas with Flowers, Coins, and Lemons, by Neal Auch