Of Sense and Sensuality -- and the Original Sinful Fruit
I'm having much too much guilty, craftsy fun these days, as I put the finishing touches on my contribution to Brenda Novak's recently completed auction for diabetes research. It's Pam Rosenthal's Sense and Sensuality Gift Basket, a gleaning of the sweet and sexy scents and flavors evoked by certain moments in my romance novels.
Moments like...
~ when Joseph, hero of The Bookseller's Daughter, wakes up in Marie-Laure's bed under bunches of herbs hung from the eaves to dry:
~ Or when Phoebe, heroine of Almost a Gentleman, remembers what it was like the first time she kissed David, Earl of Linseley:
There are beeswax candles and herbal bath salts redolent of the bathtub scene in The Edge of Impropriety... exquisitely flavored French macaroons that call to memory the banquet in The Bookseller's Daughter...
...and more,
including an apple-scented bath and shower gel I hadn't planned to get but which I had to have when I saw it.
Because apple is probably the sharpest, most pervasive flavor of The Slightest Provocation: from the raw one that eleven-year-old Mary steals from her family's sideboard to share with twelve-year-old Kit; to the cooked ones inside the French tarte tatin over which a grown-up Mary and Kit seduce each other in Calais; to the fermented ones used to make the apple brandy in the bottle a furious Mary pitches at Kit later that night.
It's the original sinful fruit, as I once mused in a post to the (now sadly defunct) blog for erotic historical romance writers, The Spiced Tea Party. "Perhaps it's the irrevocability of that first crunchy bite that gets everybody's attention," I wrote. "Once you've pierced the bright red or green skin with your teeth, there's no hiding what you've done, no going back."
Perhaps. Though I wasn't consciously thinking of any of that when I wrote The Slightest Provocation. Fortunately for everyone, I wasn't trying to write "symbolically," which (trust me) never works; I didn't have to try, because, as I wrote in the Spiced post, "the cultural resonance has been so obvious, so everpresent," the apple evoking temptation and transgression since Eve, since the apples of immortality of Norse and Celtic mythologies, since Sappho and since the Apple of Discord that started the Trojan War. Writing about Mary and Kit's temptations and transgressions, I needed only keep my inner ear open to the braided mixed messages of the culture.
Cultural messages are always mixed, as much a matter of passionate improvisation and profound misreading as direct transmission. From Frank Browning's deliciously informative book, Apples, I learned that in the original Hebrew Book of Genesis, "the nature of the tree of all knowledge was left vague," While in the Greek texts, the word for apple is melon and the Latin is malum.
After the fall of Rome, when the only repository of classical learning (save the Muslims o
n the Iberian peninsula, as hoyden Lynna often reminds us) were the great Irish and Benedictine monasteries. And according to Browning's sources, the Irish translators of the Bible were not only taken by the similarity of the words for apple and evil, but influenced by the ubiquitous pre-Christian Celtic mythologies of apples as the source of knowledge and revelation.
"In effect," Browning concludes," the placement of the apple in the Garden of Eden is one of the most clearly pagan acts in the development of Christianity."
Not to speak of the age-old association of power, knowledge and sexuality, that continues to weave itself though everything I write.
And how about you?
Readers: are there certain thematics and aromatics that enrich your enjoyment of romance and other fiction?
Writers: do you call upon these themes and sense impressions when you write?
Anyone (but probably especially writers): what kinds of fun, time-wasting things do you find to do with your hands when you should be doing something else?
And for anyone who didn't win my gift basket (and because this Sunday's my birthday), here are a few more offerings:
~ A link to the original Spiced Tea Party post, with its discussion of Sappho's extraordinary poem about reaching for apples.
~ A link to one of the most wonderful of the cultural messages I try to keep my inner ear open to: Yeats's "The Song of Wandering Aengus" with its own eternal gorgeous reaching through the Celtic twilight toward "the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun."
~ And (if you'll permit me) a link to my own web page -- because I've decided to offer another Sense and Sensuality Basket, this time as a contest prize.
Moments like...
~ when Joseph, hero of The Bookseller's Daughter, wakes up in Marie-Laure's bed under bunches of herbs hung from the eaves to dry:
He sniffed: rosemary and lavender. And something else, spicy as cinnamon, tart as lemon. A woman. The sheets of her bed smelled like her. (Which tiny excerpt is affixed -- with curly ribbon, naturellement -- to a little packet of chocolates, infused with rosemary and lavender, lemon and cinnamon.
~ Or when Phoebe, heroine of Almost a Gentleman, remembers what it was like the first time she kissed David, Earl of Linseley:
...sweet as toffee, heady as tobacco, dark as earth... (The curly ribbon this time wrapped around the neck of a bottle of delicious unisex fragrance. It's called "Butch." And it's sold -- most appropriately, if you know about the gender play in Almost a Gentleman -- in a great little San Francisco store called Nancy Boy.)
There are beeswax candles and herbal bath salts redolent of the bathtub scene in The Edge of Impropriety... exquisitely flavored French macaroons that call to memory the banquet in The Bookseller's Daughter...
...and more,
including an apple-scented bath and shower gel I hadn't planned to get but which I had to have when I saw it.Because apple is probably the sharpest, most pervasive flavor of The Slightest Provocation: from the raw one that eleven-year-old Mary steals from her family's sideboard to share with twelve-year-old Kit; to the cooked ones inside the French tarte tatin over which a grown-up Mary and Kit seduce each other in Calais; to the fermented ones used to make the apple brandy in the bottle a furious Mary pitches at Kit later that night.
It's the original sinful fruit, as I once mused in a post to the (now sadly defunct) blog for erotic historical romance writers, The Spiced Tea Party. "Perhaps it's the irrevocability of that first crunchy bite that gets everybody's attention," I wrote. "Once you've pierced the bright red or green skin with your teeth, there's no hiding what you've done, no going back."
Perhaps. Though I wasn't consciously thinking of any of that when I wrote The Slightest Provocation. Fortunately for everyone, I wasn't trying to write "symbolically," which (trust me) never works; I didn't have to try, because, as I wrote in the Spiced post, "the cultural resonance has been so obvious, so everpresent," the apple evoking temptation and transgression since Eve, since the apples of immortality of Norse and Celtic mythologies, since Sappho and since the Apple of Discord that started the Trojan War. Writing about Mary and Kit's temptations and transgressions, I needed only keep my inner ear open to the braided mixed messages of the culture.
Cultural messages are always mixed, as much a matter of passionate improvisation and profound misreading as direct transmission. From Frank Browning's deliciously informative book, Apples, I learned that in the original Hebrew Book of Genesis, "the nature of the tree of all knowledge was left vague," While in the Greek texts, the word for apple is melon and the Latin is malum.
After the fall of Rome, when the only repository of classical learning (save the Muslims o
n the Iberian peninsula, as hoyden Lynna often reminds us) were the great Irish and Benedictine monasteries. And according to Browning's sources, the Irish translators of the Bible were not only taken by the similarity of the words for apple and evil, but influenced by the ubiquitous pre-Christian Celtic mythologies of apples as the source of knowledge and revelation."In effect," Browning concludes," the placement of the apple in the Garden of Eden is one of the most clearly pagan acts in the development of Christianity."
Not to speak of the age-old association of power, knowledge and sexuality, that continues to weave itself though everything I write.
And how about you?
Readers: are there certain thematics and aromatics that enrich your enjoyment of romance and other fiction?
Writers: do you call upon these themes and sense impressions when you write?
Anyone (but probably especially writers): what kinds of fun, time-wasting things do you find to do with your hands when you should be doing something else?
And for anyone who didn't win my gift basket (and because this Sunday's my birthday), here are a few more offerings:
~ A link to the original Spiced Tea Party post, with its discussion of Sappho's extraordinary poem about reaching for apples.
~ A link to one of the most wonderful of the cultural messages I try to keep my inner ear open to: Yeats's "The Song of Wandering Aengus" with its own eternal gorgeous reaching through the Celtic twilight toward "the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun."
~ And (if you'll permit me) a link to my own web page -- because I've decided to offer another Sense and Sensuality Basket, this time as a contest prize.
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