What the Apple Means to Me

This is what the apple means to me:

- As the traditional fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the apple is a pretty hefty symbol. It represents the fall from paradise, distance from God, temptation, disobedience, knowledge, the opening of the eyes, the aquisition of shame, progress, agency, the need for redemption, original sin, the catalyst to the human race, etc. Think of it - it's such a huge deal that it's still stuck in the throat of every modern man.
- Related to the first item and heavily addressed in a previous post that may or may not have taught the world how to draw, J.D. Salinger refers to the apple in his short story, "Teddy", as a perceptual obstacle. Says Teddy, "Do you know what was in the apple [that Adam ate]? Logic. Logic and intellectual stuff" - the stuff which, as in the previous post, keeps people seeing the world as it's supposed to be as opposed to the way it really is. Some of you might be familiar with Joseph Kosuth's installation piece, One and Three Chairs. To Teddy, the apple represented the chair on the left, where the chair in the middle would be the chair you'd see if there had been no apple.
- Related to items one and two, I have a poster in my living room of a Magritte painting (appropriately titled The Son of Man) which features a man in a suit with an apple in front of his face. This image frustrates my roommate - she wishes the apple were out of the way, she wishes she could see the whole picture. At the bottom of the poster is a quote from the painter himself: "Everything we see hides another thing. We always want to see what is hidden by what we see."
- Apples mean cider, and consequently the moods of October and the entire autumn season (both of which are my favorites in their respective categories).
- I have a vivid memory of a tree at my old house in Georgia - it was an apple tree, and one of the apples had been compromised by wasps. They pierced a solitary hole in the skin and, over a matter of weeks, hollowed out the entire inside so that the apple became a translucent globe hanging from a branch and one could put their eye to the hole and spy a diorama of apple heaven.
- The apple embodies the genre of Subjects Most Frequently Painted by I-don't-know-what-I'm-doing Art Students.
- Apples are a snack I always hated. I like the idea of the apple as a snack - they're prepackaged, they're low-maintence, they produce no environmentally unfriendly waste. They just don't taste as good as I think they should, and they're weirdly grainy.
- The apple opens your eyes or it closes them, depending on who you ask. I tend to trust God more than I trust J.D. Salinger. But with all these thoughts floating around, the apple has come to mean to me perception itself, thus I get myself in an ... "apple mindset" when I need a new idea, a fresh way of looking at things, a "moment of almost unbearable vision".

These are the reasons, for the two of you that have asked, that I painted an apple on the head of my old guitar in the midst of rays of majesty, and why apples always make me pause in the grocery store.

In other Apple-related news - I finally feel the call to get myself an Ipod. Do you kids know where I can get myself a decent used one?