Read Online The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world by Michael Pollan - Free Book Online

type or rough draft of the next that allowed him to overlook or dissolve the tensions the rest of us perceive between the realms of matter and spirit, as well as nature and civilization. For him these borders may simply not have been real. So many of the legends about Appleseed depict him as a kind of liminal figure, part man and part . . . well, some thing else. The something else, which was perhaps symbolized by the soles of his bare feet callused to a tough hide, is what permitted him to live with one of those feet planted in our world, the other in the wild. He was a kind of satyr without the sex—a Protestant satyr, you might say, moving through these woods as if they were his true home, making his bed in hollowed logs and his breakfast from a butternut tree, keeping the company of wolves.
    As I thought about the scattering of settlers along these streams who would welcome Chapman into their homes, offering a meal and a bed to this strange man in rags, I was reminded of how the gods of classical mythology would sometimes appear at people’s doors dressed as beggars. Just to be on the safe side, the Greeks would shower hospitality on even the most dubious stranger, because you never knew when the ragged fellow on your doorstep might turn out to be Athena in disguise. It’s true that Johnny Appleseed’s fame usually preceded him, but you couldn’t blame a settler family for wondering if the man who’d appeared at their door didn’t have something otherworldly about him. There was the gleam in his eyes that everyone remarked on, and the news he brought of other worlds (the wild, the Indian, the heavenly); and, of course, there was the precious gift of those apples.
    As we glided through the woods to the music of birds and the splish-swirl of our paddles stitching the black water, I tried to summon an image of Chapman. I fell back on one of the slides Bill had shown the night before at the historical society. This one was an etching that had accompanied an 1871 article about Chapman in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, and it depicted Chapman as a sinewy, barefoot figure with a goatish beard, wearing, again, something that looks very much like a toga or a dress. The effect was of a creature part man and part woman. Yet it was even more ambiguous than that, since the slight figure with the goat’s beard also seems to be melting into, or out of, the shadowy trees all around. What a strange image, I remember thinking, and now I thought I understood why: Chapman appeared in it as a faintly Christianized version of some pagan wood god. And that seemed just about right.
    By the time I entertained this little epiphany, the sun had risen high enough behind the trees to flare wildly between the cottonwood leaves, almost like a strobe, momentarily turning the riverscape into a silhouette of itself. I saw Chapman now as clearly as I could hope to. Johnny Appleseed was no Christian saint—that left out too much of who he was, what he stood for in our mythology. Who he was, I realized, was the American Dionysus.
     
     
    After the river trip my interest in Bill Jones’s John Chapman began to flicker. Which was too bad for me, because we still had a lot of ground to cover between here and Fort Wayne, where I planned to catch a flight home. I found myself tuning out a touching story about Chapman buying a new set of china for a family who’d lost all their possessions in a fire. It felt as though there were now two John Chapmans riding with us in the car, Bill’s Christian saint and my pagan god, and the front seat began to feel too small for the both of them. This made for an extremely long ride to Fort Wayne.
    When at last I got home, I went looking for Appleseed again, this time in the library. I read everything I could find about Dionysus, about whom I knew only the usual high school basics. Teaching men how to ferment the juice of the grape, Dionysus had brought civilization the gift of wine. This was more or less the same