DAZI - Stunning gown By Shoenique

FIG TREE

By

The Little Branch

Where did the phrase 'I don't give a fig' come from? The implied lack of any concern carries with it a scene of an endless surplus of figs underfoot in the midday sun, browsed upon by wasps and so plentiful that dispensing them by the bushel hardly counts as a gift. I wish.

I love everything about fig trees, from elephant trunk stems with their curious wrinkled bark that looks as though it has rucked and slipped a little down the wood it encases, to the huge modesty-concealing leaves and, of course, the voluptuary promise of the fruit.

Most people see them as fruit trees, in the same way that they would grow a plum or gooseberry, but their fruiting is pathetic in this country and they are best grown as lovely living objects - the fruit is a bonus. The exception to this is if you grow figs in a greenhouse, where they will perform to something like their southern potential.

Most of the 1,000 species are tropical and 70 per cent of the animal life in the rainforest depends on them. They are a “keystone” species: no figs, no jungle. Birds, bats, monkeys, gibbons, insects – all run on figs. They are sweet – which means they are high in energy – and the trees can fruit/flower several times a year. Timing is the clue to their cunning wasp-based reproductive technique: it protects them from accidental crossbreeding. Over 80 million years they have evolved a system whereby each distinct species of fig fruits at a particular time. This ensures a better chance that their seeds are eaten and dispersed (rather than all appearing at once and rotting on the branches).  

I mention all this botanical detail because there’s a lubricious poem about figs by DH Lawrence, from his collection Birds, Beasts, and Flowers, published in 1924.  

 In terms of today’s gender politics, Lawrence’s poem might raise eyebrows.  He represents the fig as a bearer of female mystery. But in the current age, as women assert themselves, he appears to say, the mystery of females is being destroyed: ‘the bursten fig’ is a ripe fig, and ‘ripe figs won’t keep’. Nonsense, of course, but this was a man who raged in verse and in prose against censorship and prurient attitudes toward sexuality, was steadfastly anti-pornographic and who wrote passionately about nature and human experience.

Figs

by D.H. Lawrence

The proper way to eat a fig, in society,

Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump,

And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled four-petalled flower.

Then you throw away the skin

Which is just like a four-sepalled calyx,

After you have taken off the blossom, with your lips.

But the vulgar way

Is just to put your mouth to the crack, and take out the flesh in one bite.

Every fruit has its secret.

The fig is a very secretive fruit.

As you see it standing growing, you feel at once it is symbolic :

And it seems male.

But when you come to know it better, you agree with the Romans, it is female.

The Italians vulgarly say, it stands for the female part ; the fig-fruit :

The fissure, the yoni,

The wonderful moist conductivity towards the centre.

Involved,

Inturned,

The flowering all inward and womb-fibrilled ;

And but one orifice.

The fig, the horse-shoe, the squash-blossom.

Symbols.

There was a flower that flowered inward, womb-ward ;

Now there is a fruit like a ripe womb.

It was always a secret.

That’s how it should be, the female should always be secret.

There never was any standing aloft and unfolded on a bough

Like other flowers, in a revelation of petals ;

Silver-pink peach, venetian green glass of medlars and sorb-apples,

Shallow wine-cups on short, bulging stems

Openly pledging heaven :

Here’s to the thorn in flower ! Here is to Utterance !

The brave, adventurous rosaceæ.

Folded upon itself, and secret unutterable,

And milky-sapped, sap that curdles milk and makes ricotta,

Sap that smells strange on your fingers, that even goats won’t taste it ;

Folded upon itself, enclosed like any Mohammedan woman,

Its nakedness all within-walls, its flowering forever unseen,

One small way of access only, and this close-curtained from the light ;

Fig, fruit of the female mystery, covert and inward,

Mediterranean fruit, with your covert nakedness,

Where everything happens invisible, flowering and fertilization, and fruiting

In the inwardness of your you, that eye will never see

Till it’s finished, and you’re over-ripe, and you burst to give up your ghost.

Till the drop of ripeness exudes,

And the year is over.

And then the fig has kept her secret long enough.

So it explodes, and you see through the fissure the scarlet.

And the fig is finished, the year is over.

That’s how the fig dies, showing her crimson through the purple slit

Like a wound, the exposure of her secret, on the open day.

Like a prostitute, the bursten fig, making a show of her secret.

That’s how women die too.

The year is fallen over-ripe,

The year of our women.

The year of our women is fallen over-ripe.

The secret is laid bare.

And rottenness soon sets in.

The year of our women is fallen over-ripe.

When Eve once knew in her mind that she was naked

She quickly sewed fig-leaves, and sewed the same for the man.

She’d been naked all her days before,

But till then, till that apple of knowledge, she hadn’t had the fact on her mind.

She got the fact on her mind, and quickly sewed fig-leaves.

And women have been sewing ever since.

But now they stitch to adorn the bursten fig, not to cover it.

They have their nakedness more than ever on their mind,

And they won’t let us forget it.

Now, the secret

Becomes an affirmation through moist, scarlet lips

That laugh at the Lord’s indignation.

What then, good Lord ! cry the women.

We have kept our secret long enough.

We are a ripe fig.

Let us burst into affirmation.

They forget, ripe figs won’t keep.

Ripe figs won’t keep.

Honey-white figs of the north, black figs with scarlet inside, of the south.

Ripe figs won’t keep, won’t keep in any clime.

What then, when women the world over have all bursten into affirmation ?

And bursten figs won’t keep ?

The trees are seasonal, but since they are typically found in warmer climates, there are just spring, summer and fall options.  With gentle animated wind movement and incredible realism,This gorgeous tree is not one to be missed. Permissions are copy/modify annd the pack contains a variety of complimentary grasses.

Now available as a new release at the Shiny Shabby event.     https://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Shiny%20Shabby/137/129/21