Crop Circles and Unbelievable Melons (no, not that kind)

I've always been something of a cosmic child. Even as a kid i could be found holed up in my room, lying on the floor, reading opuscules on the paranormal, Egyptology, yettis - cradling copies of UFO Today and at intervals, springing up to skulk about like Christopher Walkin. On clear nights, my parents would have to carry me inside and whack me in a neck-brace from excessive star-gazing. Point is: I was a real 'wonder'-kind.

So it was with serious relish that i attended my first Crop Circle Conference in Devizes, Wiltshire, UK in August 2009, thus fulfilling a lifelong (admittedly fringe) dream. I fully intend to do a separate post about that to share some amazing photos, some of my ideas about the greater meaning of the phenomenon, and to deal with frequent comments like "Isn't it just a bunch of kids/farmers/maths geeks fucking around?". Aside from the theories proposed (many of which were extremely enlightening), I was dumbfounded by the pure, elegant Mystery of it all; the ineffable quality of the circle formations. It was a cumulative and integral sense I had, one which I felt rather than thought, after walking inside some circles (a misnomer, since the perimeters of many are not circular, but nevertheless an historically convenient label), after seeing designs so vast and so geometrically complex that my mind could no longer apply rational processes to comprehend them. Reason dissolves in the face of overwhelming beauty. Occum's razor becomes but a crude tool of neolithic mentality.

It seems to me that what we have lost in a world advanced and dominated by scientific materialism is a sense of wonder at the mysteries of the Universe. It need not be 800 meter-wide fractal formations in wheat. Or orbs of light in the sky. The mystery and the wonder resides as much in the microcosmic as it does in the heavens. It is present in the miniature, the organic, the synchronous, even when we doubt its presence in the firmament - when we diminish miracles as nothing but CGI FX.

My partner Rani had already drawn my attention to a strange little melon-related coincidence in Cambodia. You can see it here (or click the link to check the original post on our friend Ali's blog):

http://alijones.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-to-be-domestic-goddess-khmer.html

When Ali cut into her melon, she found this naturally-occurring smiley face comprised of seeds. Ha. We smiled. Doesn't Nature do funny things.

And then I returned from the crop circle conference, awash with mystical information, spouting factoids about the spontaneous appearance of spirals, orbs of light etc. The usual hippie clap. (I may look like I escaped from United Colours of Benetton; I may dress like a Revenge of the Nerds fratboy; but inside, I'm fuckin Yoko Ono man. All of which makes my particular brand of metaphysics so damn sneaky.) And then, late one night, at one of those terribly pedestrian domestic junctures (in between putting on boxers and brushing my teeth), Rani yells from the bedroom: "Do you want some watermelon?". "Sure" I said tentatively. It was a little late, but i guess when melon calls....So i grabbed an uncut Italian-grown soccer-ball sized melon from the fridge and cut it open.

This is what I found inside (unfortunately, the photos aren't as clear when compressed, but if you look closely you should see six swirls):

'It's got to be an illusion. A freak. A prank.' So I cut a cross-section of it, and this here is what i saw:



I cut a number of cross-sections, and the pattern/design runs all the way through. Notice how the texture or fibres of the melon actually flow into the straight lines and spirals. The geometry is pretty incredible too. Stick a ruler to it and see.




I don't know how to explain the straight lines or the spirals. I'm aware of geometries in nature and the mathematical universe: the golden ratio in plant stem distribution, the Nautilus shell, the fibonacci sequence etc (sure, we've all read The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons)...but I've eaten a lot of melons in my life, and I have never seen anything like this one. Nothing to suggest a pattern born of primordial bouillabaisse. I showed various people with fairly sound non-hallucinatory psychological backgrounds. None could explain it either. One woman is now a devout melonist.

Naturally, we ate the melon. I've had some pretty trippy dreams since. Coincidence? Psychoactive fruit? I'm not really prepared to say. I'm just here to dessiminate the Mystery.