Tomato and the Tiny World

It was all kitsch.  Tomato didn’t know what that word meant, but he felt that the sound of it—more precisely, the way it made him vibrate, as sound in itself was foreign to Claymation Fruits and Vegetables—captured something very particular about life in and around the Fruit Bowl. What this particularity was could only be expressed through a type of vibration, and that vibration would then be translated into an image. This image, which tomato saw in the depths of his gelatinous seed membranes, was that of a completely rounded reflecting eye. The eye was deeply set into a larger sphere that protruded several cherry stems from the base of its body, which was made of the same smooth and dark chitin-like material, except that the apparatus was not reflective.

Tomato did not know where he had seen such an image before, but he imagined it as something that could take one’s vegetableness and transform it into something easily identified. Once identified, it could be given a name, and then it would be unchangeable forever; and this, somehow, disturbed Tomato, who knew after all, that a Tomato was always in a state of flux. If he was called by, or resonated to, the vibration of Tomato it was merely a device of convenience, like a way of marking a place or a thing, or a quality, inside one’s consciousness so as to be better able to find it later on—not to confuse it with the ribbon of Carrot skin-fiber that you had initially tied around it as a simple matter of expediency.

Of course, this is often precisely what happened, and it appeared to Tomato that such a misidentification was like confusing the specific hardness of Carrot, with some universal quality called “Carrotness.” This would be a great way of describing Carrot-like things in the world, until some other reddish hardness emerged that was not Carrotness. How then, in such a case, could Carrotness be distinguished from this almost identical to Carrotness, Not-Carrotness?  And, even if a compromise was eventually made to include Not-Carrotness next to, but separate from, Carrotness what would happen when another quality emerged—one that may always have existed but that would likely have been misidentified—that was not, Not-Carrotness, but also different from Carrotness? Tomato could see where such infinite regressions were leading and she could understand how absurd they were, like ascribing gender to a piece of fruit—once it started, there was no way of ever stopping the back and forth, and beyond to the next successive level, that the process led to. Eventually, there would be infinite categories for various gradations of Carrotness, Not-Carrotness, Not-Not-Carrotness, and ad-infinitum.

This was the basic problem in trying to describe the world; namely that once it went from a state of isness to a state of Itness, and then ThisisItness, something, delicate but very much present in that world would thenceforth be required to wear a misleading sign. And, such a sign would never be the truth, as the ‘Truth’ had always been in the thing itself, not outside of it in a sublime cuneiform screen-crawl. It was enough to make one want to spew their seeds. There was another term for this of course, and like every other phrase translated from Tomato’s essentially FVW idiom, it could never really be uttered by a tomato—or a banana, or habanero pepper, etc.,—but was certainly known to Tomato; in fact, it was known to all who inhabited the Claymation FVW Fruit Bowl, and that expression was, ‘Chinese Box.’ Tomato saw himself as a tiny fruit, forever moving from one version of this box to another, without ever escaping his own reflection, which loomed like an afterimage in the shiny hulls of each successive manifestation of The Box. And, with each step in this endless process, Tomato felt herself to be less and less real.

But that was the very conundrum, for as Tomato had surely envisioned, the Claymation Fruits and Vegetables were not ‘real’ food-items at all, but mere resemblances, carved from the stuff of an unknown medium and posed by unseen and incomprehensible digits. How then, could a subject, that willfully misunderstood its own form and origins, as deeply as a Claymation Fruit, accurately appraise the distorted relationship between a thing and that simulacrum composed of its hypostatized ‘Thingness?’ And, could such a Fruit, or Vegetable (and, it must be added that Tomato, was himself a Fruit, or a Simulacrum of a Fruit, although the argument over which category properly defines the food-item on which she was based, is just another form of ‘The Box’) be capable in whatever form, or level of resemblance to that form, of actually reflecting on its own existence in the rarified language of contemporary Culture Theorists? Perhaps it would be better to ask Tomato to explain himself, in his own words; and alas, the fact that he has no actual ‘words’—as he has no vocal chords in which to shape them, and no ears to hear them—should not be an impediment, since denizens of the Claymation FVW, are highly inventive in finding alternate modes of expression. And, tomato, like most of her fellows in the Fruit Bowl, feels vibrations and inhabits meanings, often without the benefit of intervening symbols. Yet, it is precisely those symbols that Tomato has recognized as being central to the problem. Perhaps, he experiences them as well, but on some sublime level that those who merely observe the goings on in the Claymation world can only guess at.

Tomato, of course, doesn’t care—she knows not whether there are any cosmic witnesses to her drama, and has little patience for speculation beyond the level of the most sublime vibrations. Hence, he sets out to find a connection, or yardstick, through which to explain the Chinese box; one that, hopefully, will not also become another larger and more inclusive Chinese Box. This, of course, may prove to be difficult. Nonetheless, Tomato is determined, in a way that only a Tomato can be, and sets out to seek a mystical connection that might help explain the infinitely regressing puzzle of ‘The Box.’ To do that Tomato would have to find the ‘reflecting eye,’ from his gelatinous-seed vision, and to find it, she would need to seek out Banana, who was the only Fruit she knew to have successfully made the journey to the edge of Kitchen.

Banana was propped on the counter next to the Fruit Bowl. He was grimacing, and forming strange shapes with his lips that the proxies found humorous. They would giggle in unison, while their Claymation mouths contorted into tiny vibrating o’s, which would then begin expanding and contracting, causing them to giggle even harder. The giggle vibration went, ‘Tee-hee-hee-hee,’ and then repeated several times. It was like an impassioned prayer, and Tomato could feel the juices bubbling inside his seed-filled belly, as he became entranced by this strange new music. But, in this instance, Tomato’s purpose had to precede all other considerations; so he made his presence known to Banana, who indicated by fluttering his lips that they should find a more suitable place to communicate.

Banana pays careful attention as Tomato contorts his Claymation lips into various shapes and vibrates his gelatinous bodice for emphasis. Banana responds, sharing with Tomato his insight into the nature of Kitchen. A subliminal, cuneiform screen crawl undergirds the entire exchange, and features an impressive assortment of symbols that neither Banana nor Tomato fully comprehends, although the meaning is clear enough—they can feel it. Banana informs Tomato that if they want to understand the conundrum of “The Box,” that they need to investigate the tiniest parts of ‘The Tiny World.’ This advice seems paradoxical to Tomato, since the Box infuses everything, and the tiniest things can only be absorbed into its larger structure. Banana, however, is adamant on this point; because, as he goes on to explain (in the inimitable way that FVW denizens explain things to one another) only by observing the tiniest of the tiny,  which, after all, are part of everything, can they understand the biggest of the big—and nothing is bigger than the concept of The Box.

Banana opens his Claymation mouth into a perfect ‘o’ and blows out a small sphere that looks like a smoke ring. It shimmers brightly as it spins, turning orange and falling onto Table-Top with a soft flutter, like a citrus fruit landing in a pillow-lined basket. Tomato can feel the warmth emanating from this diminutive sphere. It has very tiny Claymation mouth lips, and Tomato has to peer very closely to see them contort into a half-circle grin. This is a sign of friendliness—and the little sphere vibrates happily like an unripened cranberry rotating in a wind-vortex. There was a sublime cuneiform screen crawl, and Tomato began resonating to a specific word—the word was Pixel.  It was only natural that Tomato should attach this free-floating idiomatic vibration to Sphere, who was still untethered and nameless. Once the two began to merge, Tomato could envision Sphere more clearly; but as Pixel, the tiny ball of orange energy, took on weight and mass, and lost his friendly grinning countenance. Pixel had now become a fact in the Claymation world.  

The diminutive ball of weighted mass had many surprises within, however. To prove the point, he suddenly grimaced in a tiny parody of Banana’s inimitable large mouth-‘O,’ and served up a much smaller sphere, which wiggled in a gelatinous dance of transformation, becoming in turn, a multi-pronged form, a sphere of rapidly changing shapes—whose motions reminded Tomato of a balloon full of wind-rustling strawberries—and, finally, millions of tiny flickering lights. The flickering lights would give way to other flickering lights, in an intimate ritual of energy transference. When Tomato tried to focus on the illuminated orb in front of him, all she could see was a single strand of wriggling fiber, and then nothing at all. This was obviously some sort of trick—why else would the sphere reduce itself to an absence, a void? Or, was this transformation into nothingness, sort of like a mouth-grimace, ‘O,’ a way of communicating something, perhaps something with meaning?  

Banana indicated that this was, in fact, Pixel’s intention. Tomato was shocked—he had never actually realized that an object so small could have intentions; then again, who would have ever accused a Claymation fruit of possessing thought vibrations and ideas? The world of Kitchen was simply suffused with odd surprises. And here was the oddest: Pixel was opening his energy-mouth so wide that it became clear that he wanted Tomato to jump inside. Tomato understood immediately, that if he did, he would be temporarily absorbed into the world of Pixel; that is, the world of the ever-shrinking sphere, and by extension the universe of the very small, and the tiniest of the tiny. If Tomato were to go into this minute dimension, he wanted to be confident that he would return from its unknown depths as the same Tomato that he was before he made the decision. Banana vibrated reassuringly that, the quavering shimmy of time would stop until that moment when he returned.

Pixel’s mouth-lips were opened so wide, that Tomato thought she could see an entire universe inside of them. As he readied himself to take the plunge, he tried to envision his malleable rubicund bodice contorting into the shape of a carrot. Tomato wasn’t entirely sure if this was working, but she suddenly felt herself being pulled towards the open mouth grimace, which now loomed as large as the terrifying event-horizon of Blender. No Fruit or Vegetable had ever returned from that horrible creature’s open-caw to tell the tale, but Tomato resonated with the fear it produced, and sensed the word, ‘Soupification.’ That fear resonance was soon dispelled, however, as a bubbly-band of ecstatic energy went through Tomato and settled in his seed membranes.  She could feel her Fruit-body being stretched like Pickled Okra, and getting all gooey and elastic, as she entered into the barrier separating the Claymation world of Kitchen from the Pixel-World of the very tiny.

When Tomato was fully absorbed, he felt for his seed membranes, and was reassured that they were there, and that he was fully intact. She could sense that she was now in a space without boundaries or points of clear reference, where light and dark pin-dots of energy exchanged characteristics in untraceable sequences. Pixel soon appeared, but as a holographic projection, who paradoxically took a form, which had no discernible mass, amidst a landscape devoid entirely of actual space. Tomato was confused by this strange state of being, as it wasn’t ‘being’ in any sense that might trigger a familiar vibration, but ‘being’ as a timeless jelly through which the smallest forms were amplified.

What Tomato saw next was a confirmation of his Kitsch vision from earlier that day—it was a large rendering of the chitin armature which held that same rounded-reflecting eye; seen in holographic relief; however, it revealed itself instead to be a lens through which images were imbibed and retained. This eye vibrated into a screen crawl that Tomato could discern as ‘Camera.’ More surprising was the realization that Camera was not an outgrowth of Pixel, but that pixel was an intangible quality retained by the Eye: a small point that articulated a miniscule part of a larger field, now transformed into something familiar to Tomato but beyond his conceptual reach. This ‘thing,’ or quality, made up every discernible moment in the pixelated frames of the FVW narrative of which Tomato was but a tiny part. Yet, the entire apparitional world to which this seemed to refer, had no center, no mass, and could be manipulated from any point on the very scale which Tomato now conceived as a measuring rod for these qualities.

Still, this particular unit of measurement would only retain its meaning for as long as Tomato remained in the world of the very small. Once Tomato reemerged back into Kitchen World, he would lose the uncooked-vegetable-strand of comprehension that was allowing him to at least partially grasp the strange universe that he had willingly fallen into. As he vibrated uneasily to the resonating meanings that seemed to collide with one another, like badly juggled fruits, inside his seed membranes, Tomato sensed the existence of a single point, or building block. This point took up no space, but paradoxically pulsated from every part of the pixel-field at once. Tomato could not understand how something could be nothing, and yet quiver from every conceivable direction, and do this without a central locus of emanation. Moreover, there could be no point of expansion to the vibration, as the field itself was already an expansion of the void—which meant pure nothingness. Yet, the point retained its quality of pointiness while shimmying everywhere at once, like a ripple in dishwater caused by the impact of a stray blueberry, that remained long after the blueberry sank beneath the suds, or floated off. One could extrapolate the center of the wave, its origin point, but could not conjure it visually. All of this led to an epiphany, a rare burst of insight for any creature from the Claymation world, although one familiar to the likes of Banana, who tended in his cogitative-vibrations towards the metaphysical.

Suddenly Tomato comprehended an expanded and more nuanced universe than he had previously imagined possible. He could now see clearly now, that Pixel was just one unit, repeated into near abstraction, representing things-of-the-world. Some of these things, in fact, were so strange and complex—being covered with soft outer-membranes, puffed up by strange nodules and hard lattice-like scaffoldings—that Tomato simply couldn’t understand exactly what he was now seeing. Many of the creatures of this world, in their full flowering, were filled with the same soft oozes as Tomato, and when you squeezed them tightly, magical goos would emerge that appeared to be the stuff from which everything else might be formed. But this impression didn’t resonate correctly, for the laws of this world reflected more than the sum of their parts, and Tomato could sense an element of consciousness that was clearly missing from Kitchen and the Claymation FVW. What this quality actually was, seemed too abstract to fit into any pixelated thought-idiom that he could conjure; but, it was a world of all inclusive size, in which being ran together in a confused jumble of intermingled sensations and ideas, like the watery ectoplasm which emanated from overcooked Okra.

Camera existed as one discrete element in this world of cross-pollinating bundled entities, and its existence was specialized, as it functioned as a kind of measuring device—a conveyer of symbolic meaning. Into this digitized frame of meaning were thrust Tomato and all of the other denizens of the Fruit and Vegetable World, who grimaced, gesticulated and vibrated indifferently, not knowing or caring about such larger concepts; which, after all seemed distant and abstract when compared with the specter of Hand swooping down for a Fruit-grab. But Tomato also felt that he could never be the same after such a realization—after all, what self-respecting Claymation Fruit could tolerate the notion that he/she was merely a symbol rendered concretely by an artificial process conceived in the imagination of a creature too complex to be named or even vaguely characterized. There was, he knew, another word for this, but he couldn’t discern its vibrations well enough to feel it clearly.

As he was pulled back out of Pixel’s mouth, reactivating the innumerably insurmountable gears of time, he knew that he would never get closer to that realization than he had been only seconds before. Soon, it would all be a half-recalled jumble of inexplicable images—lost to memory and requiring a conceptual apparatus that did not exist within the boundaries of Kitchen. Banana was unusually sympathetic to Tomato’s sense of having lost something that was never entirely understood in the first place. This was an anomalous state—after all, how could one recuperate a world that one had never actually experienced in the first place; yet, this was the source of the paradox. Other than Tomato, only Banana seemed capable of fully comprehending it.

As they climbed back into the Fruit Bowl exhausted and well exercised by the day’s adventure’s they could not help but view their surroundings in an entirely new way. Tomato knew that he had to communicate this new reality to the seemingly indifferent perishables assembled in the Bowl, but how he would go about this was anybody’s guess. What if they misconstrued his intent, and began to worship him as if he were the source of the information, instead of merely being an instrument through which it could be disseminated. Nothing could remain abstract for long in the Fruit and Vegetable World—everything had to be given a form, even if it resonated falsely. He knew that he would need Banana’s help, and that in the end it was just as likely that he would be ostracized for his generosity. He brought up the possibility of remaining silent about the whole episode instead, but quickly rejected it. He had a mission now, and he was going to fulfill it as his true purpose, even if he had to invent it first.

 

JZRothstein Final-Edit 12/10/2013