Small Streams

Emergent Fruit

I had never thought of it before, but as I went through the checkout line one day, I overheard the cashier saying that the numbers on the fruit labels are the same no matter what market you're in — say, a Fuji apple is a 4129 at the Giant Eagle, the Whole Foods, or the Shop 'n' Save. I guess that's why they call them Universal Product Codes. I have to wonder, though, if the varieties of fruit are infinite or are always working that way as Michael Pollan, author of Botany of Desire would have it, doesn't numbering them trivialize them?

Even as the hard edges of commerce might deaden experience, John Seabrook writes that there are people like the Fruit Detective, a former millionaire stockbroker and heroin addict named David Karp, who keeps looking to stretch the boundaries of fruit.

Most people experience a truly great piece of fruit very rarely — that perfect peach you ate one summer day long ago, a taste you hope for in every subsequent peach you eat but never quite recapture. Karp's goal is to have that experience again and again.

Existence

When you think about where we come from and where we are going sometimes you come up with a solution that makes you gloomy. The whole "Descent of Man" was a pretty depressing story for a lot of people, hence the need to suppress the teaching of the theory of evolution, and has bred increasingly impressive attempts to weave new stories which don't have a foundation in much besides wishful thinking. Billions of years before us there will be nothing and billions of years after us there will be nothing. At least that's what the Dragon says in John Gardner's Grendel.

How do you go on with that idea in your head? Must you create illusions to carry on in the face of that bit of information? Of course my ideal of working through nihilistic arguments was the Woody Allen character in Radio Days who felt that if an asteroid might strike the earth at any moment, it was a good reason to not worry about your homework.

Now here's where it gets tricky and I become inarticulate — if I haven't been before. I really think that life or the will to life and then to consciousness exists apart from this particular brew we have on earth. What got me to think of this was watching Rivers and Tides a documentary about the artist Andy Goldsworthy. Goldsworthy's a sculptor who tends to natural media: twigs, leaves, rocks, even evanescent forms like icicles. One of the media that you can see him playing with in the documentary are iron stones, which he crushes and uses as pigment or merely as dust. Goldsworthy illustrates and explains iron's fundamental role in life and its manifestation in our own blood.

I think the color is an expression of life. I am in continuous pursuit of the red. That something so dramatic, so intense, could at the same time be so hidden, underneath the skin of the earth.

From thinking about iron in myself, my mind wanders to the idea of iron in every living thing. Iron-sulfur world theorists imagine iron's nature, iron's will, has taken us on a trip from there — underground cauldrons of methane, steam, and sulfur — to here. From self-replication of non-living things, to the replication of living things, to sex, to consciousness is not such a long trip. We might have started out out in a mid-ocean ridge, moved ourself to a tide pool, climbed down a tree in Africa, and now find ourselves trying to buy some coastal real estate before it's too late, but the ideas were there first. In the blackest of black holes lie the concepts of iron, life , and thought.