when I was a little girl I was fond of everything that tasted sweet. Your presence was a moment of joy and satisfaction, a necessity, a reward. I loved you madly. Then something changed. I got confused, congested and stuck with my feelings for you. Large unwanted information and experiences accumulated and built a separation between us. I started to commonly assume that you, sugar, are primarily concerned with consumerism and materialism. That you work hand in hand with capitalism, that you divided continents, created political and racial conflicts, polemics about imports/exports, nurtured child labour and espoused immigration restrictions. I heard it many times: sugar = slaves, crops, theft, violence, exploitation, big business, Big Sugar, obesity, diabetes, death, blah, blah. Bewitched by language and gaslighted by the discourse of the Glycocene, I thought of you as stable object, as addictive additive to other things, as part of the dull matter that owns, manipulates and kills. I fixed you in a static space–time, seeing you as inert and calculable. I felt guilty. I had moments when I really hated you.
Boy, was I wrong! My perception of you was so shallow! You are so much more than what we ended up making of you. It’s disgusting how we vilified you. What a combination of oblivious, overweening, judgemental and numb we are! We refined you and then blamed you for so many things. We stripped you off your sacredness, raped your complexity and reduced you to a crystalline looking “pure” matter – now seen as a quick cheap fix, high on energy but devoid of any nutrients or substance. You might find these crystals they forced you into kitschy, and you’re right. Even your name, sugar, became a popular word having both treacly meanings and noxious connotations. For many you impersonate the mischievousness of matter. Some are dismayed by the ‘monstrous ways’ in which bodies like you are subverting expectations, resisting or reworking the meanings imposed upon them. Sadly, you have the reputation of being The Enemy. Yet, most people still can’t resist you. And I understand why. You’re ontologically unstable and teleologically disputable, but I adore you for being such a schizosubstance!
They often give you a bad rap, but what about you as polyethylene, the biodegradable plastic? Huh? Or that you sooth a burned tongue, keep flowers fresh, melt ice and snow (yes, it’s not only salt, you can do it even better), heal wounds, cure hiccups, prevent cheese from molding and remove odours? And if that’s not enough, what about you as breakable glass, artificial silk, medical implants, body and face scrub, hair gel, hair remover, grass stains remover, material for sculptures, yeasts, motor fuels, ethylene glycol, synthetic resins, acetone, and other acetate products? Your material promiscuity is so fertile, when I think of you I feel lost in the infinite.
I want to apologize for being so short sighted and for taking me so long to look properly at your sensual matter. No, you’re not mere matter, you are an event. Now I know you’re an expression of relational materialism at large. I accept the fact that you have multiple materialities and very specific temporalities and spatialities. You are endowed with agency. You participate lively in the articulation of all dynamic assemblages. Look at you, you’re everywhere! It’s miraculous how you appear from nowhere through the astounding process of photosynthesis. And then you’re making ‘things’, you’re a poietic agent for both life and non-life. Actually, ALL life depends on you and we just lurk at the margins of your being. Radical emergence is a feature of your reality. You, my friend, have a big role to play here. Whether it’s organs and organisms, policies and politics, spirit and spirits.
Now every time I think of you, I revere you as a gift coming from the deep space and deep time. I always had a bemusing feeling about you. And then, one day, I found it in a NASA press release: “First Detection of Sugars in Meteorites Gives Clues to Origin of Life”. You appeared in interstellar space and landed on prebiotic Earth. You have been here way before the beginning, allowing for life on Earth to start. You were one of the builders of the primordial molecule, the key component of the RNA world. Your particles travelled the entirety of space for aeons to reach my cells, and will continue to caress me till the end of my days. It’s not only love, or tenderness, or affection, it’s life itself, my life, that I found in your carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms. You’re such an harmonious assemblage of macronutrients! A revolution in evolution! It's easy to measure time using human lifespans, but peering down the billions of years of your history gives me vertigo. When I imagine you could be the key to abiogenesis, I feel like licking rocks. I have the sweet taste from your lips in my mouth. Oh, sugar, the whole Universe just gets sweeter when I think of you! You are so awesome you make me want to fly to the stars right now. You know why? You evoke such a possibility and a magic about looking to the Cosmos that I think, hell yes, it’s possible.
I know that you’re all about free play and dissolution, but I need you to be serious for a minute. My feelings for you are just so entirely intense and complicated, so laden with exaltation, sorrow, ecstasy, bliss and I need to tell you all this. You are that terrible relationship a girl goes back to again and again, no matter the ripping pain every time she does. I know you prefer to feed yeasts to the point of becoming infections and also inflammations or cancer tumours. I know you fuel plaque and bacteria causing tooth decay. I know you affect cognition, accelerate ageing, increase stress, and make me fat. But there is this fulfilment and the feeling of belonging. You stimulate me. My dopamine goes feral when I have you. I can’t resist you. I want to transcend your voluptuous matter. You have the capacity to feed me, to delude me, to modify me, to seduce me, to conquer me, to be me. It’s so difficult to see where you end and where I begin.
You want the truth? All are obsessed by you. They use both your presence and absence to talk about you every day. Regardless if you occur or not, you’re there! Mentioned and used as a slogan or topic or spell. You’re loved when you are and you’re great when you’re not. Creation through disintegration, presence through absence, fullness through emptiness—such paradoxes inspire your existence in the world. It’s so revolting how human-centered and gluttonous we are and then just pointing fingers towards you, holding you responsible for all the crap that happens to us: +kilograms, bad teeth, bad mood, bad economy and what not! To me you’re not “the white death”, “sweet poison”, “sweet killer”, “toxic”, “bad”. No, you’re alive, beautiful, you’re indispensable and I don’t want to live without you. You’re love’s digestible form. My muscles want you, my brain needs you, my nerves rely on you, my blood depends on you. I cannot always see you, but I know you’re there. My mind is the idea of your body.
The only thing I wish is we all take the trip on the side of The Unseen to discover you in your infrastructural and ultrastructural order, in your protomaterial and metamaterial existence. I hope such trip will generate a more subtle awareness of the entanglement of matter and an enhanced receptivity of the complicated web of dissonant connections between (you and all) bodies. You are productive, unpredictable, self-creative, active, you’re an excess force.
You’re giving me the sense that my appetite is primal. My heart, mind and body hold on you because you promise happiness and make me (feel) alive. I hope I don’t sound too corny for trying to see the world in a grain of sugar. But the sweet lust for life, I can only feel it with you.
I need you, and you never disappoint. And that, my friend, is why I love you.
