Fear of Eating Apples: The Semantic Collapse of the Apple

Redness — pulp — sweet — white — glory — Vanishes — organ — mush — teeth — glow — apple — lust — ego — …

It was the hyphenated notes — sentence I was pregnant with this morning when I opened my eyes; I recall, the redness on my cheek (cheek?) (when?) I tried hard to recall anyway — I close my eyes again to remember but couldn’t, instead I got senses of words on my tongue — like voluptuous orgasm, my hands got trapped in the middle of the body — sliding a little down under my belly and touched my essence — I thought for a second or there is so much to bite… but… how do I give the question bite — like dead question — of when I ate the apple, the redness?

I remember last year (Mar 29, 2025) when I had written The Art of Losing Words, I was trapped in the Coffee — inside its every single letter — I wrote:

“Suppose I am reading this sentence: ‘I am going out for coffee today’. Here, ‘I’ dances with ‘o’ and it makes dizzy the ‘ff’ and ‘ee’. Later, ‘y’ comes to the front of the sentence, and ‘ing’ collapses with ‘ut’. It is all blending together to create total nonsense — derealization of the text.” — The Art of Losing Words

This morning apple was hung in front of my eyes, as apparition, gagged like Bruno, unable to utter his last words; I was hung there like sinful but — so much to apple — that simple — bite there — between my two simple jaws I crushed it — as a poison, as a gravity, as a leantine — as a temptation — as a guillotine of the entire redness of this, what it called, ‘app’ and ‘le’ and then ‘a’ and ‘pp’ and ‘le’ and then the letters unmoor from their consortium and float, hostile, unfamiliar, like strangers who have stolen familiar faces from me. The entire edifice of ‘ap’ and ‘p’ and later ‘le’ was all screaming in the unison, saying ‘when did you eat apple first?’ it didn’t land on my lap and died. It’s redness I felt first. I peeled its every epistemological indigestive layer and stripped its whiteness over my vision. I felt sharp pain on my forehead, slowly landing, making deep wounds, was it Zeno? Yes, it was an arrow of language and letters which was move, sliced, bends inside me as no, torture but longing, desiderium, a sweet pain of desire to know everything in between those two wide-spread mountains of glory. The ‘app’ quickening inside my belly, the desire to spill over its ‘le’ unto my own visceral hunger, to know, to glorify, its redness.

Yesterday (few days ago) I was walking and thinking of language, memory and entire vocabulary of humanity inside my brain. I went to work, did my job. During my break, I made dip-tea (I no longer drink coffee) and there was a basket full of apples and the girl (colleague) told me ‘have some apples too’ and that was this all foreword I was having in front of my eyes this morning, even before opening my eyes, convincing myself, that you didn’t eat apples but you sinned, once again, not to recognize the faces who said ‘eat apples too’, was she come as an Achilles or tortoise? She had an arrow inside her eyes. I tried to understand her language and body-gesture, but it floats like, in the air in between ‘hand’ and ‘mouth’, that’s what gives me nausea all the time, because humanity never saw my ‘saliva’ but try to see my ‘failure’ to grasp the reality which unfolds inside my brain. I too, see. I too understand you. But the distance halves, if I cut this apple into two, recedes into a mathematics that keeps promising arrival and delivering only more approach, as a nauseating act and there (in the most of my cases to approach to reality) ‘app’ and ‘le’ and then ‘a’ and ‘pp’ and ‘le’ and then the letters unmoor from their consortium and float, hostile, unfamiliar, like strangers who have stolen familiar faces from me. The entire edifice of ‘ap’ and ‘p’ and later ‘le’ gets blended (for example, apple, redness, pulp, etc.) into unknown vocabulary. Even its ‘app’ separates its ‘p’ (the moor of its aesthetic) and becomes unnecessary nauseating-indulgence into my reality.

When I see (let’s say encounter with reality) such humiliation, it’s not what Nietzsche called ‘abyss’ but ‘surrender without knowing the truth which evaporates from its original sender (in this case, my colleague, the girl)’. It was exactly the same for the sentence ‘I am going out for coffee today’ and the word inside coffee is ‘coff’ and ‘fee’ and inside ‘coff’ is the memory of the ‘ff’ colliding (same as ‘pp’ in Apple), a soft-palate event (like the encounter with the Object), and inside ‘fee’ is currency, exchange, debt, the whole apparatus of transaction, the whole knowing and unknowing, and suddenly I feel lost with even benevolent subject’s encounter with ‘the basket full of apples’. Llull’s wheels were right. I am trying to remember or trying to see things as a whole (not as The Double) when she told me to ‘eat apples too’, but the failure to see her lips moving and her hands gesture towards me gives permanent seizure. I could no longer perceive ‘pp’ on ‘app’, and inside its ellipsis ‘le’, it’s so confusing. I have always this kind of damage inside my vision which prevents me from seeing the exact location of the knowledge, in the sense, the art of seeing the real world. If I fail so I instead move my head and nod like a calm sage, but this sage doesn’t know anything about this wholesome new knowledge which can give one immense pleasure to see the ‘un-doubled’ reality. If I had known derealization of the text (for example, with reality as well) I would have known the better intentions of that person (like Sartre’s Other) in the first place, which is the only source of knowing arts, literature and humanity, pleasure and definition of whole ‘crossing Zeno’s track’.

In my previous claim, I said, ‘each word’s distinctive composite meaning’ and I consciously added ‘is governed by a lost identity’, which means, in this case, when she mentioned ‘eat apples too’ I lost comprehending the apprehension of the factual reality (of which being with the world) and lost my identity then and there, no excuses, no fallacy but real ‘daunting’ abyss was unfolding its consequences into my realm. I don’t even remember what I answered and the “Letters, instead of forming coherent words or meaning, seem to collide and merge into an unintelligible blur”. Her hand reaching to grab the apples — was even her hands, or the failed projection from my consciousness? ‘eat apples too’ — this semantic collapse is not just for words — it’s for sound as well.

Giordano Bruno memorized the universe. I tried to memorize the acts of saying ‘eat apples too’. He developed a system — detailed in De Umbris Idearum, 1582, a book almost no one has read because almost no one can bear to — in which every image in the cosmos could be stored in the architecture of the mind. What have I stored? Nothing but withdrawal from the association with reality, unknowingly. “I am, might be, certainly, breaking down into this continuity of experience — where language no longer feels alive to me. Words are dead, reality is fraying at the edges”, as if I hear the sounds of gagged Bruno at the stake of his burning in Campo de’ Fiori. The basket full of apples, the face of the girl and her hands, her gestures and my unfrequented gazes of apology were “pillars of social bonding — visual and semantic — collapse into something foreign, something with unfamiliar structures.” I should have, instantly, replied something ‘wet’ and ‘uncompromised’ to that ‘eat apples too’ but I forged my ground for nothingness and slipped inside its muddled-headed insufficient convergence. So, the apple in Newton’s garden was never about gravity. It was about understanding its ‘falling’, like when I hear ‘eat apples too’. I envy Newton because he understood instantly when he saw the falling apple (without its fragmentation, ‘app’ and ‘le’ and then ‘a’ and ‘pp’ and ‘le’) but as a wholeness of that redness of full of ripeness.

This is not madness. This is a calibration error in a very precise instrument where everyday conversation falls for me. I grapple with something like this —

“If I want to perceive this ‘crisis’ as mere fate, then more situational fractures between ‘coherence’ and ‘senses’ will arise. The world becomes disjointed, fragmented, and difficult to navigate. What once made sense — what once felt alive and familiar — becomes alien, difficult, and nonsensical.” — The Art of Losing Words

What most men (humanity) desire? The answer is simple — ‘experience of lived continuity’ and picture of clear reality without traces of blur where it would be simple to track its root ‘eat apples too’.

So, what prevented me from taking the apples? When I have to reach towards the apple, I have to cross basically two points, X and Y. X being the ‘object in the world’ and Y being the ‘language’ delivered by the ‘collapsed-medium’. Why is Y called a collapsed being? Because it reaches the apple before me — it gathers its information such as its redness, app, le, or entirely, the apple; but I reach in a way so fractured that it becomes ‘app’ and ‘le’, then ‘a’ and ‘pp’ and ‘le’, then loses its face (its redness) before I snatch that bloody thing, and Y suddenly becomes unreachable as I failed to cross the medium (in this case, the girl or her gaze) in between the subjectness and objectness of reality. Newton saw its fullness before it touched the ground. Bruno did the same in his complex way. But when I tried to eat it, its fragmentation — which is caused by reality itself — keeps opening its linguistic mouth such as ‘eat apples too’, which I should unite: the hands and the act of the mouth, the munching. But before I make that distance close enough to see without The Double, it vanishes and leaves me nauseated. The girl is still there. The apple is still there. But the act of comprehension is totally lost.

For the rest, it is simple acts of everyday language and its gesture — meaning and response come in a sequence, but for me it came through gesture, fragmentation, self-consciousness, and the very important elements: delay and apology and semantic collapse with vertiginous loss of breathing. What actually happened when “eat apples too” laid on my consciousness? Why didn’t I move like everyone else did? I will add one more example here. When Van Gogh saw Starry Night, it was not a simple natural gesture someone could get, but it was a symbolic invitation — that is why few people can get his actual idea behind its awareness. The same thing happened to me when the girl said “eat apples too” — that gesture of language reached me before its invitation got through me. This is the failure of a simple mind. What I wanted from reality itself is clear: I want redness as redness, apple as apple, and gesture as pure intention — but I got left between that mystical longing, like prelapsarian language, the essence of things between lips and its signifier. When I reached the apple, there was one thing in my mind: a frightening alienation between perception and social immediacy.

There was no flaw when she said “eat apples too,” but under that norm I could imagine welcome, inclusion, kindness, the most powerful gaze, and perhaps shared rituals — “we eat, you join” or “you eat, I will join” — and recognition of me as a participant within that world of single perception. But what I failed is that I relapsed within the outer boundary of language and gesture.

What I really want is that participation with symbolic explosion, bodily awareness — what it looked like when she said “eat apples too.” Was it not harmonious? But I collided with the signifier/signified fracture, became lost in p, ap, le. Why am I delayed to this participation? Did she notice that delay? And I want to repair this with apology, but it is too late — the apple has already lost its redness.

I see over-illumination inside this redness and its skin, but I could not touch it. My consciousness lays on the “unfulfilled invitation,” which only can give the whole satisfaction of reality — so I can taste the apple, or drool over its redness. Until then, my hunger for reality would remain unsatisfied.