The True Meaning Of Apples.
What we get wrong about the story of the crucifixion...
A story has been circulating abouth how Alan Turing inspired the Apple logo. Turing, a genius in the classical sense who invented modern computing to help defeat the Nazis, was also homosexual at a time when such love was both illegal and taboo. In 1954, two years after a state sanctioned chemical castration that led him to gradually change gender, Alan Turing died by cyanide poisoning. A half eaten apple was found by his body. Apple pips contain cyanide and he is supposed to have had a love of the story of Snow White. A final coded message from him? Or to him? Doubt is now cast upon the initial finding of suicide but any reading of these events is a national shame.
However none of this was commemorated in the design of the Apple logo. The bite was for scale, to stop it looking like a cherry. The original rainbow pattern just a boast about the colours the machine could display. The apple itself a reference to that which apocryphally fell on the head of Isaac Newton. Both founder Steve Jobs and designer Rob Janoff wished that they’d known enough to be inspired, but it’s a myth. Though myths matter.
Newton’s apple is also interesting to unpeel. The happy accident in which he was supposedly struck both by the fruit and the concept of gravity, was only ever a metaphor. It never happened. This apple was the symbol of knowledge, though ironic it should bounce off the head of a life-long virgin when the knowledge it contained in Eden was not physics but biology. Moreover the original apple wasn’t an apple but a pomegranate, the fruit that bleeds. This is a story told by a culture from the middle-east, Eden was no orchard.
The Fall of Adam comes through to western culture ripe with the horror of sexual awakening and the disobedient lust with which Eve’s body tempts Adam. But this is a story about picking fruit, not planting seeds. Eve exiled from happiness after picking fruit is not a story of penetration but parenthood. Her loss of childhood freedom comes not from fucking but mothering. After Eden the new parents are cast out into the Land of Nod, presumably a bitterly ironic name as neither Cain nor Able were sleeping more than 40 minutes straight.
The story of Cronus offers an even bleaker portrait of parenthood. To escape a prediction of murder by his own child, Cronus sets about eating his babies, something even the child killer Herod might waver over. Despite this grim culinary task, Cronus finds time to become a horse and rape Philyra, a sea nymph. Her disgust at birthing a centaur leads her to abandon the child, who is raised by Apollo. Chiron, an immortal, grows to be a great healer and a teacher. He educates many of the heroes, including Jason and Achilles. However when Heracles accidentally pierces Chiron with a poisoned arrow, the immortal is left with a wound even he cannot heal. In intolerable pain he retreats to a cave, begging Zeus to end his suffering and remove his immortality.
Jung used this story of the wounded healer as a founding myth of psychotherapy. The name Chiron also shares roots with the words “surgeon”, literally meaning “hand-worker” and “Christ”, which is often translated as “anointed one” but more literally “touched by the hand”. Christ, like Chiron is also a hunted infant and an adopted mortal-divine healer who teaches a group of guys then endures the torment of wounds even he cannot cure before dying in a cave. Ironically it’s the one without hooves who is born in a stable.
I’ve written before about pain as the core of story telling, especially in the stories we tell about ourselves. The more our identity hurts the more profoundly it defines us. Religious identities tend to be strong on the times when the faith has suffered persecution, weaker on the times when they have been persecutors. Of them all, no faith holds pain more centrally than Christianity.
Jesus was a healer, a pacifist, a rebel, a socialist but none of this is remembered as sharply as his suffering. Buddha suffered too but his icons tend towards benign rotund jollity, the approachable aspects of Godhood that Christians lease out to Santa Claus. The central image of Jesus is his suffering, the key symbol not the man but the means of his torture.
I always find it notable how, in a story that has been happy to embrace genuine magic, walking on water, feeding masses, raising the dead, this final, greatest miracle feels oddly realistic. Rather than simply being not dead and then continuing to kick ass like Jon Snow in Game Of Thrones, no vengeance or victory follows. Having risen, Jesus does what the dead always do. The portrait of life after the crucification is painfully accurate to the period of intense magical grief that follows a death. Months after dying of bowel cancer my Dad sold me bacon in a Parisian food market. So visceral is this memory it still shakes me to think of it, even though my wife, who witnessed it, assures me it was just another man with a beard. Jesus, like my Dad, is there for a bit, impossible to be dead after having been so absolutely alive. But this is not a magic that can sustain itself. It is a brilliant narrative gear change. The power of Jesus’ final miracle stems from the fact that despite defeating death he really does still die.
In Greek, “tragedy” literally means “goat song”. It’s a reference to the cries a goat made as it was led towards sacrifice. This underscores the true nature of dramatic tragedy, these are not just stories of awful things. Sacrifices are made to benefit society. Tragedy is a story where a character suffers so that the audience might gain. The suffering of Chiron leads him to sacrifice his immortality, freeing Prometheus, who like Eve, has been punished for stealing divine knowledge.
Jesus too makes a sacrifice, becomes a sacrifice but much like with Adam and Eve, the stress falls in the wrong place, distorting the meaning. Fucking in Eden should be the midpoint of the story of Eve’s journey from innocent freedom to adult responsibility, not the end of a story about the danger of lust. Suffering is the midpoint of Chiron’s transition from divinity to mortality and should be the middle of Christ’s transition the other way. But instead we fixate on his agony, it becomes not an essential part of his journey but its true destination. So focused are we on the spectacle of suffering we neglect to draw the lessons from it. Pain is unavoidable and can be transformative but it is not the everything of you.
I am glad that Alan Turing’s death is not memorialised in Apple’s iconic logo. That beautiful brilliant mind should be remembered best for the lives he saved, not the life he lost. If anyone should be remembered by a poison apple it is the men who ran the state when Turing was betrayed, including that jovial rotund figure, Sir Winston Churchill.