highku (n.) a piece of thought, perception, or a general feeling that has a beautiful yet kind of delirious quality even though you are completely sober
(from high and Japanese haiku, a form of short poem)

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I’ve seen this ceiling before! I’ve seen these ripples of waves, these waves of dunes. Yes, I’ve seen this ceiling—only it was on the floor! It was the surface of a desert road leading to the Buttermilks, the legendary climbing destination at the foot of the Eastern Sierra Nevada. I sat on the sandy roadside, gazing at the stars iridescing on the snow-capped peaks. Every now and then, a stray off-road vehicle would illuminate the road, revealing its undulating texture, raising tiny mountain ranges from grains of sand. When the headlights vanished between the rocks, the night consumed the sandy pattern, and I was consumed by the vast mountains and the nocturnal sky.

I tear my gaze away from the ceiling. The sandy roadside becomes a Modernist chair. I’m sitting in a café in Casa Milà, Barcelona. I stare for a moment at the foam clinging to the inside of my espresso cup. There’s a desert hue hidden in that foam. I rise from my seat and search for the source of the light and shadows on the ceiling. I press my hand against the spotlight and look up again. I pull my phone out of my pocket. A pen falls out along with it. In defiance of dozens of notifications, messages, news, and reminders, I take a photo. In defiance of dozens of notifications, messages, news, and reminders, I pick up the pen. With it, the writing instinct reveals itself. Beneath the writing instinct lies a deeper one—the instinct to survive. A pen is a weapon of self-defense. With it, I fend off everything vying for scraps of my attention. Everything I do not, in hindsight, want to watch, read, or click. Everything designed to consume by being consumed. Notifications, messages, news, reminders…
Recently, I thought about consumption in the context of biological chirality. Some devourer of attention consumed that thought along with me. Now, I return to it, armed with a pen, paper, and a silence strange for a café.

Chirality hides in such words as chiropractor and chiromancy. Chirality hides in the scents of mint and caraway. Chiro- stems from the Greek kheir, meaning hand. The hand is concealed within the meaning of these words, but where can it be found in scents? It turns out that the geometry of hands and the geometry of fragrances are linked… by a mirror.

I press my palms together, inner side to inner side—they align so perfectly that I allow myself to indulge in the illusion of touching a mirror. Then, I place my right hand over the back of my left; the fingers overlap, but only the middle finger meets its counterpart. Hands are asymmetric structures, mirror images that do not superimpose. The same is true for many fragrant molecules: they exist in two spatial forms—mirror images that do not align. Chemists call this phenomenon chirality. The chemical structures responsible for the scents of mint and caraway are reflections of each other. Our nose and brain can distinguish these structures. It’s as if someone, looking at us and our reflection, saw two entirely different people.

Chiral molecules don’t just carry scents. Most biological molecules are chiral. When synthesized in a lab, these compounds are typically produced as a mixture of both mirror-image forms (a racemate). But when synthesized in the cellular “laboratories” of living organisms, they almost always emerge with a specific chirality. For instance, the amino acids that build proteins are “left-handed” (L), while sugars are “right-handed” (D). This preference is called homochirality.

The thought—the question—I return to in Casa Milà is one of those that fall under le hasard et la nécessité, as Jacques Monod framed it. Is the dominance of L-amino acids and D-sugars a matter of chemical necessity (nécessité) or the amplification of chance (hasard)? In other words: Could a mirror-image biosphere exist? On the other side of the mirror, would D-enzymes, proteins built from D-amino acids, break down L-lactose? Pragmatically speaking: could the Cheshire Cat drink milk? (It certainly couldn’t drink milk on our side of the mirror.) 

The deterministic scenario demands strict physicochemical proof. The contingent scenario, assuming unpredictable events with vast consequences, is unprovable. But with a bit of imagination, one could write a rather plausible chemical thriller.

The beginning might seem dull: ancient pools of organic precursors, mirror-image forms in balance, the symmetry of right and left hands. In one of these pools, a minuscule accidental excess of one form triggers the precipitation of homochiral crystals. In crystals, geometry is everything, so the precipitated molecules start consuming only their identical copies. Crystallization is a chain reaction: the larger the crystal, the faster the consumption. The plot thickens. The molecular balance is disrupted. One form is locked away, the other, free in solution, can play the evolutionary prebiotic game more effectively. On another planet, in another evolutionary pool, the opposite chiral form might have won the coin toss.

I set down the pen and see its reflection in the metallic sugar bowl. I imagine the mirrored world. If everything was reversed, then being part of that world, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference from the one where chance has presently trapped me. And even if I could, it wouldn’t matter now. Caffeine has no chiral form—it would be the same in both worlds. I take the last sip of my coffee. I place the final period on the page. Something tempts me to reach for my phone—perhaps a small imbalance, an excess of something—and that something consumes me.