the what? (apple stories)

Here it is - the apple of discord from Greek mythology. It's big, round and red - and it shines gold in the morning light.

Over the years, we've seen it disappear, return, disappear and return again and again garbed in the cloaks of youth, love, sexuality, sin and science.

It could be a separate religion by itself - with the number of well-known characters that are associated with it, whose lives are in a way determined by the apple, who are remembered for their relationships with the apple.

We could look at the apple as something that has come into close contact with these characters - and thus has grown in terms of symbology and semiotic baggage because of this contact.

Or we could look at these characters: Adam and Eve, Hercules, Atlas, Paris, Eris, Newton, Iduna, William Tell - as characters who have grown and remained in human memory because of their close association with the apple - a kind of philosopher's stone - that turns the everyday into history and mythology.

the why?( we care)

the cosmos is where we live. i wrote that down and then i wondered whether there was any point in the sentence. it isn't like saying india is where we live - because there are other countries where we might have lived but don't - or saying the earth is where we live - because there are other planets where we might have lived (or more probably died) but don't.
but it's natural to want to know more about where you live. natural to guess, and then be delighted equally by a confirmation or a contradiction.
natural to want to know whether your home has nine rooms - or eight (and the last promised room turned out to be a broom cupboard).
natural to want to know whether the central heating system will work fine for the next, say, five billion years.
natural to want to know whether the next few houses on the street have tenants yet - or the ones beyond.
natural to want to know whether the active nucleus of the township - its central hub - is the place most new apartment blocks are gravitating towards.
natural to want to know whether any of your neighbours are massively rich enough to swallow your little home whole.
natural to want to see whether the street outside is foggy or clear, and then natural to arm yourself with a flashlight to see the dark.
the dark. that's where so many of our questions come from and go back into. there's a fear associated with it - and a strange sort of fascination.
so far, we've been looking to the light for the answers to all these questions. looking to the stars and the energy they send, through storm and space, time and aeons to us, faithful observers of interstellar beauty.
teasing answers out of them - answers to our questions about them - and consequently about us.
and now we must look to the dark, as well.
it's been telling us, throughout our communion with light, telling us quietly but firmly that it's there - that it cannot be ignored. mischievously creeping into our observations and slyly toying with our gravitational calculations.
we live in the dark.
a dark that is penetrated by pinpricks of lovely starlight, true, but is dark nevertheless.
and it's natural to want to know what's hidden in the shadows of our cosmos.

the when? (or symphony)

The baton moved in a wide arc over their heads.
As the deep brass peals resonated through a thousand ear drums - something quivered in the foundations of the music hall.
It was new, built with the latest acoustic knowledge of the realms of sound, and filled with the best musicians in the world - an experiment, and achievement, the first of its kind - a musical symphony to best all others of its time.
The resonance created now had never been heard - never been felt before in the history of existence.
And these deep vibrations seemed to reach everywhere - and everything, traverse through the very molecules of the world.
But they had been underestimated. The resonance wasn't just reaching molecules - it was reaching the very fabric of space-time that held these molecules together.
And things were shifting.
And as the orchestra moved - with one single beautiful powerful wave of magnificent sound - so did the molecules of the world - and beneath them... space-time.
And with the loud percussion peal that marked the beginning of the first movement - somewhere within the molecules, within the atoms, within the quarks, far far within where space circled in on itself - a tight circle of brilliant energy began resonating with the bang - spinning and splitting into little bits of the primal matter - and moving out - to create space.
The orchestra continued, the music moved in chords and notes and harmonies. As the frequencies changed, the resonance miraculously survived - and with each new lovely sound - new lovely things began to happen to the universe that had just been birthed somewhere within.
It would last as long as the music lasted - go through miracles with each miraculous bar - sing with it - and die with it.

the "How?" (to travel around the Universe and some other things)

Last Monday I met Mr. Mobius again. He looked quite like his old self. His mole had shifted back to the left side of his face. And his squint was back in his left eye instead of his right – which is where it had been the whole of last year.

He shook hands with me, a little disorientedly. “I’ve been using the other one for a whole year,” he said, after mistaking my left for my right.

“That’s not the only thing you’ve been doing that’s strange – ”

Mr. Mobius looked around quickly and then smiled innocently at me.

“Sharp, aren’t you? Was it the mole you noticed? Or the sudden bouts of ambidexterity?”

“Both. Well, specially the mole. You’ve – you’ve changed. Twice in the last year.”

“Not changed, child. Just laterally inverted. Like what happens to you in a mirror.”

All sorts of strange ideas floated around my head.

“You’ve been through a mirror?”

“No,” he said. “Through is difficult. Around – that’s an easier trick. I’ve been around.”

“Around a mirror?”

“Just around the Universe.”

I stared.

“How?”

“In my Expansion Capsule. It uses a plane of relativity where there’s no such thing as the distance around the Universe.”

“So this spaceship – your Expansion Capsule thingy that bends space to nullify distances – ”

“It doesn’t bend space, child. Gravity does that. It just spaces out your molecules so you can become comparable to the size of the Universe – which has a pretty spaced out molecular structure – and you can slide across the gravity curves.”

“…bends space to nullify distances, it – it inverts you?”

“No. It’s just space that does that. The Universe twists before it loops back in on itself. So every time you travel around it – you come back laterally inverted. (And upside down too – but that’s easily corrected in an upside down world.) Your mirror image comes back instead of you. It’s like traveling around a Mobius Strip.”

“Seems to me that you’re the one who twists everytime you travel out there. Not the Universe.”

“That’s it. I’m the man who likes to twist around the farthest reaches of the last collapsible dimension and come back to tell the tale.”

“Also twisting himself a little bit in the process.”

Mr. Mobius smiled his strange lopsided smile and said:

“You look older today, child. You’ve had a long year, too, haven’t you?”

The Which?

Quark A stood on the quivering brink of time and looked around at quark B, whose eyes – well, no, call it consciousness – hovered over the distant horizon of squiggly shapes and colours.
“Is it time?” it asked, the question traveling on invisible matterless waves of the primal ether over to the other quark.
“For what?” Quark B whispered.
Quark A wiggled its eyebrows – very figuratively. The equivalent in the quark world was a series of short continuous waves that would look like an earthworm if someone chalked the waveform on a blackboard before physics class. Or a kitten playing with wool, of course.
“What?” Quark B said.

Good morning reader. This is a hypothesis. It is not real. It is as unreal as the supposition that it is morning – whereas, more likely than not, it is after sunset.

At the dawn of time…there was a light. It wasn’t a light really, more of a Light. And there was an inability to pronounce capital letters. And then there was a need to pronounce capital letters – well, a need to pronounce anything, so that the light could become a light, you know. The need became a Need and manifested itself in matter. And then the fun started. The Light and the matter sent giant waves of improbable instigation towards time and the fun began before the fun began – before there was anyone to say that it had begun – or notice that it had begun.
And chance after chance after chance after chance later, quark A stood on the quivering brink of time and asked quark B a question.
Quark B misread it, as I’m sure did all of us.

The question floated all over the primal ether and burnt into the quantum foam of the brink of time – to be etched there for all eternity – or even a moment, which is the same thing.

Or was it there from before – a question – not The question – the answer to which, as we all know by now, is 42 – but the Question. A hovering uncertainty that doesn’t come from anywhere and doesn’t really go any where but lies dormant and restless in the heart of matter across the multiverse.

An intransitive. Quark A sighed and shook it’s head. It looked at the brink of time – at the edge and beginning and end of history and prehistory and chronicles and timescales – and asked the funny little shapes and loops of colours it could see whether they were time. Time. And they didn’t answer. At least in Quark language.
And Quark B just took the question as another question and paid no further attention. And the question – as with all questions asked at the beginning of cosmic history and cataclysmic follow-ups – stayed there forever, to subconsciously plague all consciousness for all eternity, at least, all eternity before the end of all things. After that, we’re told, things… change.

But which question was it? What is the question buried in the hearts of all consciousness? Is it the eternal Question that asks Time whether it is, in fact, Time? Or is it the more mundane unromantic (even if Quark B didn’t call it that) question that asks the next consciousness whether it is time for the next thing lined up in everyday history to happen?

Which is more important? The transitive or the intransitive? The Light or just the light? The Question or just the question?

Put it this way – an earthworm…or just a kitten playing with wool?

I don’t think anyone except that environmentalist with grubby gloved hands and soil-smeared goggles will differ.

Primal ether did a few more cosmic rifts and catherine wheels and smiled. Quark B edged a little closer to quark A. It was a beautiful brink of time.

A questionable introduction

Questions are easy enough to classify. Much easier than answers, though people put them into correct and incorrect and hopelessly in between, as if everything wasn't supposed to be black and white anyway.

First, there are the WHY questions.
Absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to answer and most of which, dare I say ALL, don't make any sense at all. For example, WHY are there two rhyming 'all's in the previous sentence? Or WHY are we here? Or WHY is the fish blue. The fish is blue. It is simply blue. Pointless.
Now I shall stop putting some of my words in caps because i hate doing that and i dont know WHY im doing it either. There i go again.

The how.
Easy but ambiguous. The answer requires the following-up of a path of events. Guide books are the best use of these questions. How do i get to such and such and so and so? As if the guide book did not know.
How did the universe begin? By a miracle, so let us all sing. Again, the pointless and the answerless and the frequent and the bored.

The what.
My favourite kind. Pointless again, and impossible again, less so than the why but still there.
What is a marshmallow?
If sentences didn't have to have a subject, maybe what questions would have made some sense. But they do. And therefore what questions almost always, make that always, answer themselves.
A marshmallow is, of course, a marshmallow. I mean, whatever else could it possibly be?

The who.
Ah. The private eye's pet. Literature's laced handkerchief. Bloggers' mysterious unviewable profile that keeps cropping up in your comment box. Who is reading this now?
Obviously, no one, because i wrote this a long time ago. But, nevertheless, poignant.

The when.
The human race's answer to the relativity of time. Shut it up in a box and throw it into the Brahmaputra. Why the Brahmaputra? Pointless again. When? Now. Which could mean that impossible uncertain elusive illusion (elusive illusion??) "when" the past just becomes the future... or a forever. A year, two, 1000657490, or more. But am I talking about the answer? In this case, both go hand in hand.

The where.
Again, we have no idea. Is there a where? Is there a 'any of this'? Is there a 'does it matter anyway'? And yet we have the answers ready. Here, there, between, under, over, in, out, withal. No, sorry, the last preposition doesn't count.

Did I leave out the whence? Well, I meant to. So there.

The can you and the will you and the won't you and the may i. Intricacies of l'ettiquette. And pure laziness, of course.

And then there are those beautiful works of art - sorry? pardon me? huh? Or just ??? In a white speech bubble or fluffy thought bubble that's a permanent resident of the human brain. And maybe the reaction to the last sentence also, but that's just me.

I suppose that's it. Except that question you can't put into any of these categories... Romeo? Is that really you?
Which is not really a question at all.
I suppose i hate rhetorical questions. But i love them, too, in a weird sadistic sort of way.

So here's to curiosity...the inability to spell...long sentences...and untainted stupidity.
Here's to the question of all questions... and what's in a question? A question by any other name would smell etc, etc.
May the question live forever, and judging by the mental capacity of the human mind, take it in whatever way you please, it shall.

And it will. Which?