Necessità of Green Flows
The aromatic fume of fruity piquancy fills up the room. It makes it tickle in my body, that of my mouth particularly. I take a deep breath, inhaling the aroma through my nose. My eyes momentarily, reflexively even, shut closed, the savory fume become a sensational experience for the entire being of mine. Soon enough, I get to taste some of that readily extracted green flow of extra virgin olive oil pouring into the barrel this late October evening. As I so do, it fills up my sensational horizon, becoming known through and through.
The aromatic fume of fruity piquancy that so vividly captured my senses during my time spent in pressing facilities while making extra virgin olive oils this passed harvest season, makes itself known also this forenoon in April. However, at this time of the cyclical work inherent to that of olive oil production, it appears known to the sound of a chainsaw, the touch of an airscape filled with sawdust, and the sight of branches smoothly falling to the ground. The savory sense of freshly produced oily green drops made from olives coming straight from the orchards, harvested somewhat prematurely directly from the trees to attain the so valued extra virgin quality, occurs a stark remembrance as I stand here observing large canopies of century old olive plants carefully becoming pruned. It is quite an experience, that of practices coming together in relational encounters like this. So is the striking lushness of the plants featured in this orchard, of which the lightly pruned foliage, yearly maintained as they become, act to probe my curiosity in thinking with the regularity by which these particular practices become undertaken and corresponding effects thereof, such as on the flourished yield of canopies, fruits and oils.
I have through prior research undertakings recurrently been made aware that the saying fammi povera e ti farò ricco in many senses epitomizes the fact that if trees become pruned of their branches, they yield plentiful of fruit. The saying has also occurred noted relationally to the matter that pruning of olive plants in general, that of old ones in particular, occurs quite a costly matter of engaging olive oil production. Many practitioners therefore choose to engage the practice more heavily less frequently. In other words, and unlike the practitioner that I this morning spend time with, who himself carries out the work, a professional pruner as he is considered, they make the decision, evaluatively so, to have most of the foliage every fifth to sixth year of production cut off (as opposed to on a yearly or every other year basis). The former is a direct result of the latter; that is, one ought to cut more heavily if it occurs done less frequently. This since the inner parts of the canopies in their together-grown appearance, void of more frequent pruning, occur devoid of uniform flows of light and air, wherefore an amassed number of dried-out branches becomes gathered. These must be cut away all together in propagating green flows, such as that of photosynthesis and, consequently, also that of oily flows.
Beyond processes of photosynthesis, including all the flows and dynamics it carries with it, I have also learnt, repeatedly been notified by the people that I conduct my research with, that the former also occurs a result of the latter — still referring to the more heavily less frequently pruning mode of engagement — if yet in a less direct mode of correspondence, at least in some respects, when thought correlationally to the fact that olive plants in their so called ‘natural’ growth habit actually grow bush. That is, they sprout from the ground, spreading outwards and upwards towards the sun in their branched growing, which means that olive plants, if grown void of human cultivation, lack a trunk, a canopy, and a uniform yield of fruit. Hence, in most simple terms of illustration, cultivating olive trees for the purpose of olive oil production, one simultaneously acts to promote a uniform fruit yield throughout each tree while preventing them from growing selvatico, bush or wild if you will, by means of pruning. As such, to practice the artful care of pruning, at least such as I recurrently have scribbled it in my notebooks — read, come to know and take note of it — and especially as I have done so relationally to how the people that I work with have framed the function of pruning practice, whether undertaken for aims of soothing or maintenance or productivity, occurs a matter of necessità. In short, to engage pruning in this context occur a practical, artful and caring activity, and from the perspective of olive oil producers, a necessity for and of the production of just that, of olive oil, preferably one as prosperous as possible in kind.
That said and by way of wrapping up, me having some Easter celebration to attend to, I wish to end with a note on conducting the kind of ethnographic from-the-perspective-of-the-practitioners engagement that my research revolves around. Partaking in the cyclical work of olive growing and the making of olive oil through an everyday engagement as I do, familiarizing myself with the practices, traditions, methods, techniques, values and situated knowings by which olive oil cultivation and olive growing occur undertaken by particular practitioners here in the mid and southern part of Apulia, so to make ethnographic accounts thereof, I have come to learn much about, let alone of, the engagements that olive cultivation and olive oil production entail. I have done so, still do, in an embodied and emplaced manner, making use of my own situated being in learning about that of particular other ones. This for instance becomes apparent in myself, eight months of living my day-to-day life in this context, have gone from realizing to sensing to incorporating the rhythm by which work and daily life correspondingly here happens. It sort of comes with the ethnographic endeavor, that of my sensuous scholarship alike, to simultaneously become a somewhat skilled partaker of the particular work that I participate in and an immersed inhabitant of the setting in which it takes place. The above rather subtly tangents these aspects of conducting the scholarly work that I do, more so for given readers than others, in denoting some experiences of practicing the artful care of pruning olive plants on the one hand, that of wording representative worldings thereof on the other.
