The Fruit of the Vine | By John Bell

THE FRUIT OF THE VINE

By John Bell

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The Montréal Review, August 2024

During the Middle Ages, the southern region of Spain, Andalusia, was a magical place. Known as Al-Andalus in Arabic, it was renowned for its religious tolerance, scientific and philosophical advances, orderly, well-lit cities, and splendid architecture, such as the Mosque of Cordoba and the Al Hambra palace. Like its more commercial cousin, California, with which it shares a beneficent Mediterranean climate, the Andalus is remembered as a land of eclectic invention and pluralism.

As Steven Nightingale recounts in his wondrous book, “Granada – A Pomegranate in the Hand of God”, it was also a place of gardens and orchards. A great variety of plants were cultivated for the physical and emotional well-being of its citizens. Jasmine, roses, apricots, acacia, lavender, mulberry and lemon are only some of the fruits and flowers that grew extensively in and around Granada, Seville, Cordoba and the other great cities of the region.

The gardens and orchards penetrated households and towns as, each spring, the fragrance of orange and lemon announced the impending bounty of the land. The knowledge and ideas behind this cornucopia came from the Middle East and spread across North Africa into the Iberian peninsula with the arrival of Islam. One of the Andalus’s most famous rulers, Abdel Rahman I, fled the Levant to establish north of Cordoba a country palace full of palm, pomegranate, figs and apples, setting a trend that was to spread throughout southern Spain. As Nightingale says, “the history of Iberia in the Middle Ages is inseparable from a history of horticulture.”

He cites the Andalusian poet Ibn Al Khatib, “country houses with gardens and light-loving water and flowering fruit trees would curl around Cordoba like arms full of stars. Villas and royal properties encompassed the city like bracelets… vines waved like billows…the winds exhaled perfumes. There is no space not taken up with gardens vineyards and orchards.”

This also required expert knowledge of irrigation, including the use of canals originally devised in Iran, to deliver water from upland aquifers without pumping. Today, the cooling and refreshing effect of water fountains continues to provide relief in the hot Andalusian summers.

Gardens also gave rise to centuries of botanical study and a rich exchange of experience and observation. Analysis of the soil and its composition and understanding of crop rotation and fallowing of the land produced successful crops of grains, fruit and spices. Experimentation led to many discoveries, for example, the scientist Ibn Al Baytar was one of many to have investigated the healing and medicinal effects of plants, cataloguing 3,000 of them. “A loved garden with the right design, brings to most of us a rare pleasure; it seems like a blessing of centuries, enveloping, protective, suggestive.” says Nightingale.

This interest in horticulture and botany can also be seen as a metaphor for human development. Understanding the nature of each plant, its seasonal needs, the amount of light and water, and the kind of soil that permits it to flourish is critical. If we would attend to the needs of human beings in the same way, we would likely have a much healthier society, and an unimagined scope for creativity and well-being.

The basic contours of such understanding exist. Like a plant, we are a life form but with both material and emotional needs. The need for shelter, food and water are quite clear, but less evident are needs for security, belonging, autonomy achievement, status, intimacy, privacy and meaning. We are innately motivated to get these met, without that, we would die physically and psychologically. We are born with them, they are in a sense a gift from nature, which is why the paradigm of “Human Givens”, developed by Ivan Tyrrell and Joe Griffin in the UK, aptly captures this reality.

As plants need sun, rain and the right soil, we also need a permissive context to flourish, otherwise we will fall ill and wither away. An overly technological, bureaucratic, authoritarian, or chaotic environment will deprive us from having our needs met. Certain ideologies are also built to hijack basic needs for ill purpose. For example, the arch-terror group ISIS was very good at ensuring that its members’ needs for achievement, meaning and belonging were well met.

Unlike the attentive gardeners and horticulturalists of the Andalus, those who work in politics today often ignore or abuse this reality resulting in a kind of chaos that only serves a few. Obsessions like A.I. or longstanding systems of control, such as excessive bureaucracy, can block the flourishing of autonomy and meaning; oppressive regimes threaten our needs for security and status. Such contexts can be understood as the equivalent of the effect of a drought on an orchard. All life forms need the right nutriment and interaction with their environment to thrive – we are no different. This is not to say that institutions, authority and technology are intrinsically a threat, but that their use and development is best judged against whether they meet these basic motivations and how.

If this is indeed a reality, then political decisions need to attune to it - not the other way around. At the very least, we can ensure that political actions do not prevent people from getting their innate emotional needs met. Creating a social climate that takes into account each person’s need for autonomy, and cultivating a culture where all can find meaning and purpose in life would seem to be a solid basis for political decisions.

Such a context would likely require better education about human nature, so we can know ourselves as the Andalusian botanists knew the objects of their care and concern. Second, as scholar and scientists Iain McGilchrist has pointed out, physical and mental health depend on a coherent social context, direct links to nature and a sense of the sacred, matters we too often ignore in favour of other temptations. The Andalus itself was a living example of such a context: its pluralism encompassed and embraced many faiths, it kept close to nature through the orchards and gardens, and its people celebrated life’s joys and tribulations through music and poetry.

It is also important to remember that when such core needs are better met or managed, there arises “spare mental capacity” that sharpens perception. We will then be able to better plumb the secrets of the universe and indeed nurture that sense of the sacred that some sincerely seek.

Like many, I have a fondness for fine wine, but my interest in Montrachet or Romanee-Conti is beyond my wallet’s capacities. So, I am thankful for those friends and family who have on occasion offered up such treasures. This interest led me to read a book about Burgundy and its wines detailing its vineyards, soil, slopes, wind and sun, and how these combined in an endless kaleidoscope with the peculiarity of each vine to generate the region’s noble grapes. The process was not over, the wine was then aged in barrels and mixed by the vintner to create yet more magical turns. The finer bottles require time to breathe once opened and evolve over hours from a solid and simple beginning to an ineffable parade of a thousand flavours. In other words, much goes into the production of such fine wine, from the seed of the vine until it arrives to please the drinker’s palate.

So it is with us. For centuries, from Central Asia to the Andalus, wine has been an analogy for the more refined states of human development. As wine is the transformation of nature’s fruit into an unexpected achievement, so we also can go beyond our basic spirits to something more human. A suitable and complex environment is needed to assist a healthy human being to achieve such purposes.

Unlike the gardens of Granada, when it comes to this cultivation of ourselves, we are in the peculiar circumstance of being both the gardener and the garden. This makes our effort more difficult yet more interesting. Our expansive imaginations can get in the way, but we are built for ‘making wine’. We are equipped for this sophisticated effort and contain the mental tools and patterns to pursue it.

However, to do so, we need a solid baseline, not a chaotic free-for-all – understanding our basic needs is essential. Like the Andalusian geniuses, if we care and tend for ourselves in a coherent and thoughtful manner, and work with others to maintain a healthy context, then the fruit of the vine will offer up endless possibilities.

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John Bell is Director of The Conciliators Guild, an organization dedicated to highlighting the critical importance of innate needs and motivations in politics.

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