Thrust: A Novel

My dearest cousin Frédéric,

I have nostalgia for apples. The story of our becoming! I have thus included in this letter reproductions on a theme: the Fall of Man.

My three favorite paintings of the Fall of Man are Jan Brueghel de Oude and Peter Paul Rubens, The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man; Hendrick Goltzius, The Fall of Man; and Michelangelo, The Fall of Man. In that order.

My choices are due to the arms and bodies of the women, although my most beloved of all has a singular feature that distinguishes it from the rest: the animals. In the shared gaze of Brueghel and Rubens, the humans are no more visually important than the animals and trees. And the snake looks like a snake, the apple like an apple, the woman like a woman.

Second place goes to Goltzius, because the woman’s back and arms are strong. As strong as a man’s. Her sexuality is not foregrounded — and the little-girl face on the snake? I must admit it makes me laugh. I know I should be outraged, but it delights me. And the tiny apple! What idiot would condemn a species for eating such a diminutive… what is it, anyway? A crab apple? Be serious. The cat does look pleased though, as cats do.

Third place goes to Michelangelo. My god. Have there ever existed more masculine women than his? She could take Adam in a wrestling match. Even his snake exhibits feminine musculature. The split image, the not-quite-a-diptych composition, fascinates me to no end. Both the snake and the avenging angel appear as branches of the knowledge tree. But my obsession with this painting rests on a missing element.

There is no apple.

In Michelangelo’s vision, the tree is a fig tree on its fruit-bearing side, and an oak on the punishment side.

In the fourth century AD, a scripture scholar named Jerome was tasked with translating the Hebrew Bible into Latin. This endeavor turned out to take fifteen years. The word for evil and apple, in Latin, was the same: malum.

However, in the Hebrew Bible, the fruit might be any fruit on the planet, because the word peri in Hebrew is a generic term. Peri is not an apple, not necessarily: It could just as easily be an apricot. A grape. A peach. A pomegranate. A fig. (Am I incorrect about the specifics? Perhaps. But you see what I am getting at.)

I don’t know if I am correct about this, but I do believe that Albrecht Dürer was the first to paint the tree as an apple tree — which, to be clear, makes nearly no sense. And that moron Milton codified the apple as the sinful fruit of women in his Paradise Lost, a book I have repeatedly thrown across the room. In many ways, the story is one of our teeming wriggling thriving city, our capitalist drive and thrust, complete with a snake-oil salesman.

What is behind desire — behind the endless waves of pleasure and ecstatic pain — is one thing: the fact of a body. A body untethered from the stories we’ve been told in an effort to contain us. My dearest, the rest of the Darwin story — yes, I finished it; I admired his drawings of animals — is that the human body has been hog-tied, stunted, kept from its own evolutions. All in the name of power and progress. We’ve been assigned roles inside a predetermined myth, roles that keep us contained. Some of us more than others, but rest assured, we are all imprisoned by the great narrative of ourselves as masters of the universe.

What a sorry lot.

We could have been anything! We could still.

Did you know that under a microscope, pig and human embryonic material share many traits?

I’m rooting for the pigs.

Listen: I know why women such as I make a more sophisticated species of pervert than their male counterparts. Women, of all creatures, remain bound to their object status in this world we’ve made, whereas male artists — you, my love — are allowed to apprehend pleasure as a sublimity.

Between inert and pervert, I choose pervert.

If Eve showed up on my street, I’d buy her a drink and bed her in an instant. In lieu of that, I created the Room of Eve as an homage, as a reclamation, where an apple has a quite different significance. You are the only person I have ever allowed to enter that room.

I am leaving, my love.

Do not look for me.

Remember us.

Aurora