In the beginning, people knew that sugarcanes were sweet. As we started investigating the various bases for sweetness, some poets knew better than to confuse the thing with the basis for its manifestation. Some, however, reasoned that sugarcane is sweet because there is sugar in it. When the basis of sweetness was sugarcane, sweetness could only be found where the sugarcane was. When Rumi wanted to speak of it, he jumped to the heart of the matter. Whatever makes sugarcane sweet. He did not write about the sugarcane. He did not wrote about sweetness of the sugarcane. He speaks, simply, of the thing that makes sugarcane sweet. Then came sugar. With sugar, we could transport and store sweetness in our kitchens, in jars, and we learnt to bring sweetness to other things. But we didnt yet know whatever makes sugar sweet. We learnt about fructose, glucose, and sucrose. We learnt vaguely that a certain arrangement of these produces the reaction of sweetness; a biochemical process. We successfully learnt to bring sweetness in other chemicals; we had dissociated sugar and sweetness, and partly so by human agency. We can now bring sweetness anywhere we can mimic that arrangement between molecules and receptors. So we had to, naturally, find out whatever makes glucose, fructose, and sucrose sweet. We know that a flow of information, through the basis of physical substance, is interpreted as sweetness. In some future or the other, if we solve this, well be storing sweetness in computers and memory chips the same as any other data that could be experienced directly through neural interfaces between machine and the neural circuitry— after all, if we figure out how to reliably and precisely recreate the signal, we can recreate the experience of sweetness. Poetry has drastically extended itself, in all this while. A poet today, somewhere, must be plotting a verse or three around whatever makes this complex set of signals, processed through certain neural systems, sweet. And so on and on and on till we narrow it down to a precision where the most refined basis of sweetness that there could be: maybe down to ripples in spacetime which we control at some precision that we cant quite extrapolate today. And yet, even here, or even in the proven presence or absence of a classically metaphysical basis for the thing that causes other things to be sweet, or the proven or disproven nature sweetness as an emergent property, and so on, bigger questions would always remain. I can think of two. The first of which is often asked at dinner tables, and the second of which is asked popularly on Monday mornings: What? and Why?
Posted on: Sat, 29 Mar 2014 09:46:59 +0000
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