It had been perfect, this chambered nautilus. Polished and elegant, a palm-full of three-dimensional roundness, it sat on a shelf where I could see it as I walked past it. A couple years back, I unwrapped it from its straw packing and assumed it had been shipped from a village in Micronesia, along with others of its species, by reef divers so eager to reach an international market in thrall to its beautiful shell that the animals were pushed toward extinction.
Holding one in my hand promised a sensory experience, more direct than viewing a photographer’s cutaway of its spiral. Or an artist’s drawing of its sepia-striped exoskeleton. Or a mathematician’s superimposed Fibonacci sequence — 0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 — that inexplicably perfect spiral reproduced in art and architecture, flowers and hurricanes, galaxies and embryos of all species. You’ve seen it. You’re familiar with this shape: continuous movement as it circles its center, opening out, expanding.
First, understand that the science governing the whole of this creature drew me in. I couldn’t stop researching, reading: I needed to uncover, to analyze, to know. Ah, the analytical thinking apparatus at work. I can be relentless.
I acquired bytes for the mind:
The nautilus expands from its center by a precise mathematical factor. (If you’re interested, a factor of phi, that is, 1.618, for every quarter turn it makes, inscribing a logarithmic curve that repeats itself, round and round, in what is often called God’s fingerprint. If you’re not interested, skip to the next paragraph.)
The sepia-on-cream pattern laid down on its shell illustrates an inherited message, its DNA typed out in an ordered oscillation of color. Off on, off, on. Think of zebra stripes and cheetah spots. In spite of this patterning, each chambered nautilus expresses its individuality. No two shells are alike.
It evolved a body structure so advantageous in efficiency and function, so true to the laws of conservation of energy, the species has survived for 150 million years and five mass extinctions — all before humans. In fact, before fish. It’s sometimes described as merely a “swimming snail,” but it demonstrates short- and long-term memory.
And here’s the miraculous. It spurts water, like a jet engine, to move forward, but until recently, nobody with a Ph.D. in tuethology (the study of cephalopods) understood how the animal maneuvered vertically. Like this: In and out through its permeable siphuncle -- a spinal tube connecting its chambers -- the nautilus exchanges sodium and chloride ions, equalizing both water and air pressure in its chambers. The mechanics of this swap manages vertical movement. – it ascends to eat at night, it descends to hide during the day. In short, it has mastered ballast and buoyancy; it exploits both gravity and lift. If you’re thinking of submarines, you’d be on the right track.
But we cannot approach an understanding of any being by reducing it to the laws of physics, biology, and chemistry, or by ignoring our feeling for the natural world.
Distracted, I turn too quickly, impatient in movement, and hear it hit the floor. That new and gaping rupture on its outside spiral, exposing three of its mid-life chambers, draws me into a fathomless hole -- as savage a shock as the opening of a fissure, but as promising as the discovery of an ancient artifact, mysterious and powerful and foreign.
The science of the nautilus fades; the inexplicable open-ness of its tear becomes numinous. Milan Kundura says that metaphors are dangerous; they’re not to be trifled with, but I dare:
The nautilus continuously pushes into the unknown along its growing edge, but always circles its center, the seed of its essence.
It prefers life in the slow lane, maturing patiently, adding chambers — as many as thirty in its twenty years, a long life for a cephalopod — and taking its time, avoiding the rush.
It does not slough off its past or abandon itself: it moves its soft body into a larger chamber, transcending the former but including all that came before.
Once it discovered buoyancy, it could explore the mystery of verticality, abandoning ancient life as a bottom-feeder and exploring the high road, seeking the light.
It knows the journey toward Self is not linear -- rather, a spiral held long and hard inside limits, growing by encounter, by demanding work on itself, never finished, returning again and again to the position where it began but on a higher level with a wider reach. Process as disciplined attention; its cyclic reach, real freedom.
It understands that old wineskins cannot hold the new wine.
It keeps silence, that curious and mysterious resource. It knows where home is.
The nautilus ably supports the weight of the poet’s trans-rational leap from the literal — science, fact, reason — and soars upward into metaphor, suggesting something close to being.
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