About

A blog on aesthetics

This is a blog about aesthetics — questions on beauty, being, and ontology. It started with apple trees, orchards, and bees in the Himalayas. I was surprised at the extent to which the story of apples has also been a story of human travails along the Silk Route, of gardening aesthetics, and culinary selections. A tree as poised to conquer the world, as its many bearers. As devout to make a name for itself outside clan and parentage, as much as its human counterparts in quest for new worlds. What it means to be an apple might be historically as fraught as what it means to be human, epitomised in the colloquial comparison set forth by Henry David Thoreau in his famous essay, "Wild Apples". Yet, this blog is not about conquests, even if the victors often get cast to tell the stories - The Delicious, Gala, Honey Crisp, or Pink Lady. Or Henry David Thoreau, Jonny Appleseed, or the Stark Brothers. In the travails of history, and as much in our day, this blog tells otherworldly stories of being, of things, aspects of love, devotion, art, creation, curation, and care in ways that shape worlds anew. Little would anyone have seen the frail and shaggy character of Jonny Appleseed as a conqueror. Even the Christians of the day disparaged his esoteric devotions, not the least of which was his eccentric view of grafting (plants and trees). From his eccentric devotion to seedlings emerged the great apple rush, a wild, unprecedented flowering of difference, with about 20,000 recorded cultivars.

What gives produces a certain sense of awe, surprise, even care? What produces connection, entanglement, or sense of abandonment, even alienation? All apt metaphors for our times. Do only humans care? Why do certain things fascinate us, when most things do not? Is it only humans who care? Or do all kinds of things entangle, care, and create? What truly matters? Or what makes knowledge beautiful? When do sciences become beautiful, worth caring for those who intercede on its behalf? When does care become worth acknowledging? This blog is interested in such sensuous love affairs that pain, incite, and ignite our oft-broken places, to produce new entanglements. For it is through these cracks and gaps that we ponder upon a life worth living, love worth making, thoughts worth dwelling, toil worth labouring, send instruments prodding for a future worth cohabiting.