5—
The Metaphor of the Shell

et bientôt le coquillage formel, cette coquille d'huître ou cette tiare bâtarde, ou ce «couteau», m'impressionera comme un enorme monument, en même temps colossal et précieux, quelque chose comme le temple d'Angkor, Saint-Maclou, ou les Pyramides, avec une signification beaucoup plus étrange que ces trop incontestables produits d'hommes.
—Francis Ponge, "Notes sur un Coquillage"

To discover a seashell half-buried in the sands, not of a seashore, but of a desert—this is both a scientific and a prophetic occasion. A desert becomes, through the agency of a single organic sign, an ancient sea. The shimmering mirages of retreating waters collect in a vision of the deluge, which is to say the seas which once covered the earth. The great American desert and the receding seas imagined by Louis Agassiz are poised as on the lip of a shell, the threshold of outside and inside, air and water, present and past. One can see and touch such a labial margin in the shell one is holding, there where the horny and limey exterior turns suddenly inward to become the seductive sheen of its precious interiors. It is as if a stone had become alive in one's hands.

Fables of the seashell originate in this margin between land and sea, the present and the past, because the shell is itself a contradiction where inside and outside seem to revolve on a single axis. And if one places a shell to the ear, is this because one expects that it will speak, sing, chant, breathe, or echo? Is it because a shell resemble the ear, or that one expects the pleasure of listening to the sea? Or does one expect that this resemblance can recall one's own ear and enable us to listen

to it ? As every child knows, the shell has its own song, which is the song of the sea, the rising and the crashing of waves. Only later, at about twelve, does one learn that one has been listening to the blood rushing in one's head. For some the matter ends there in the form of an explanation. The persistent child knows that the story has only begun: he will have suspected that the sea is inside of him, not as in a figure of speech or as in an epiphenomenon, but in another way.

With the exception of bivalves such as clams and oysters (whose form suggests the mouths they feed rather than the ears their gastropod relatives allow us to hear), seashells have consistently figured in human representations as both an ancestral hearing and an authoritarian sounding. In the Bhagavad-Gita , before the battle between the Pandavas and Kurus and before the instructions which Krishna gives Arjuna, it is the conch shells which sound the calls to battle and the "transcendental conch shells" (divyau shankhau ) of Krishna and Arjuna which indicate their coming victory. The conch shell is a primal trumpet in such epic narratives, as it is for the boys stranded on a desert island in Golding's Lord of the Flies : in both it is the authority of the sea, its vastness and unruliness, and the mystery of the shell's form, which combine to establish its power. And it is in this same, if inverted way, that the shell, when placed to the ear, would seem to speak of its own marine past.

Since the shell is a symbol of authority, speech, and hearing, which is to say a symbol of prophecy, one can begin to understand its spiraling form as an allegory of all origins and their ends. While such words as "origin" suppose an exemplary "arising" (origo ) from which all else flows, it is the shell which suggests another model: a spiral, a vortex, a whirlpool from which and out of which things both appear and disappear.

The prophetic and the memorable, the future and the past are in this way conserved within the inward and outward whorls of a shell, as if within the covers of a book. And yet the pages of this book are themselves blank and nacreous, streaked by blues perhaps but without trace or inscription. Its form is thus apocalyptic in the sense that it speaks of destruc-

tion and revelation, and suggests how each can be the consequence of the other. More ancient, more marvelous, more unfathomable than the wonders of the ancient world, as Ponge writes, the seashell is, like them, a recollection of life's earliest architectures and enigmas.

When in The Prelude Wordsworth takes account of books and their role in the growth of a poet's mind we should not then be surprised to find an elaborate dream-allegory centered on the figures of a stone and a shell. Wordsworth begins by expressing his fear that the world and human culture might survive an apocalyptic destruction but that the expressions of mind might well be lost: "all the adamantine holds of truth, / By reason built, or passion, which itself / Is highest reason in a soul sublime . . . / Where would they be?"^[1] He wonders why such human truths must "lodge in shrines so frail" as books, just after referring to the "adamantine holds" built by reason. It is as if his hyperbolic metaphors (stone holds or castle keeps and dungeons) were canceled out by his more prosaic realization that Shakespeare, Homer, and Milton exist as ink on paper or not at all: so much is obvious in an age which has put its trust in external marks. Pages awash in a stream, a book cast in the sea, a parchment curling in flames: these are the likely fates of human meditations consigned to writing. It would appear that the truth of bard and sage is only metaphorically a combination of a stone and a hold—a hollowed stone—or a shell. In reality, Wordsworth fears, metaphor is only an impotent semblance, but he hopes that it is a strict mnemonic device which can guide his faltering account of the growth of his own mind.

Wordsworth then relates how having told a "Friend" of his fears, he is told in his turn a prophetic dream: his Friend had been reading Don Quixote in a cave by the sea when the same fears had come to him. Considering the eternal truth of "poetry and geometric Truth," he falls asleep and dreams he is in an "Arabian waste / A Desart." Then an Arab of the Bedouin tribes appears atop a camel, holding a lance forward, and under each arm two portentous symbols: a stone and a shell:

           the Arab told him that the Stone,
To give it in the language of the Dream,
Was Euclid's Elements: "and this," said he,
"This other," pointing to the Shell, "this Book
Is something of more worth." And, at the word,
The Stranger, said my Friend continuing,
Stretch'd forth the Shell towards me, with command
That I should hold it to my ear; I did so,
And heard that instant in an unknown Tongue,
Which yet I understood, articulate sounds,
A loud prophetic blast of harmony,
An Ode, in passion utter'd, which foretold
Destruction to the Children of the Earth,
By deluge now at hand.

The Arab then tells his friend that he will bury the book of elements which describes in the eternal laws of geometry man's relationship to the stars, and the other divine book of poetry which contains joyful and hopeful consolation for people in their enigmatic isolation from the living world of nature. Following the Arab in hopes of guidance, the Friend sees him "riding o'er the Desart Sands, / With the fleet waters of the drowning world / In chace of him, whereat I wak's in terror, / And saw the Sea before me; and the Book, / In which I had been reading, at my side."

Sea and desert, Wordsworth and Friend, shell and stone, geometry and prophecy, Book and Dream, Arab and Quixote—all these are both set apart and then apocalyptically joined: within the scope of prophecy and dream, quotidian oppositions are easily bridged or annulled. And yet chief among these is one that Wordsworth perhaps concealed for his own private appreciation. In the first drafts the dream is attributed to a "Philosophical Friend" who one would immediately assume to be Coleridge; in the 1805 edition, it is simply a "Friend"; by 1850 the dream had become his own.

But the Philosophical Friend who told Wordsworth his dream was not Coleridge, who had tried to isolate the truth value of poetry from the withering critiques of early modern science. He was, instead, one of the inventors of modern science and philosophy, the man who had, according to Boileau,

cut poetry's throat. For, as J. W. Smyser has persuasively argued, this dream derives from Descartes's famous dreams of November 10, 1619, when the philosopher felt he had received a vocation from the "Spirit of Truth" to undertake a revision of all knowledge, using the elements of geometry and mathematics as a foundation.^[2] If there is an irony in this dream, it is a sinuous and perplexing one, rather like the turnings in the shell of the nautilus, the very type of the mysteries of the sea, poetry, and geometry.

On that night in November, 1619, Descartes, recently a soldier and a philosopher by avocation, dreamed three dreams, sketchily recorded and reconstructed by his biographer Baillet. On the basis of these dreams, Descartes was able to establish the foundations of what we know as modern science. But the idea that truth could come from dream and that Cartesian certainty could derive from universal doubt are but the last turns in this spiraling irony. In fact, the sequence of dreams has the archetypal form of religious conversion. In the first dream, Descartes finds himself in a courtyard driven by an "impetuous wind, which, carrying him away in a kind of vortex, made him spin three or four times on the left foot."^[3] Spinning like a top, the man who would later propose the theory of the vortex then seeks shelter in a college church but is distracted by various passersby, and awakens, convinced now that an "evil genius" has tried to seduce him. He interprets the dream as a reproach for his sins, falls asleep, and dreams of the "goods and evils" of his life, only to be awakened by a thunderclap. In the third of his dreams, Descartes discovers two books on his desk, a certain Dictionary and a Corpus omnium veterum poetarum Latinorum . Looking into the book of Latin poetry he falls upon the line Quod vitae sectabor iter , "What road shall I follow in life?" Suddenly a stranger appears, citing a line beginning Est et non , which Descartes then tries to find in the anthology on the table. Unable to do so, he tells the stranger of another verse by Aussonius beginning Quod vitae sectabor iter , but is again unable to find the page before the stranger disappears.

Still sleeping, Descartes dreams an interpretation of the

dreams he has just had: "[He judged] that the Dictionary wanted to say [nothing other than] all the sciences collected together; and that the [collection of poems] . . . showed in particular and in a more particular manner Philosophy and Wisdom [Sagesse ] conjoined." He further considers that even trifling poets often express thoughts which are more "serious" and "sensitive" than natural philosophers, who have only reason to assist them, because they have been filled with "the divinity of Enthusiasm" and the "power of the Imagination."

By the poets assembled in the Anthology he understood Revelation and the Enthusiasm that, he made bold to hope, would continue to single him out. The piece Est et Non , which is the Yes and No of Pythagoras, he understood to be the Truth and Falsity in all human knowledge and the profane sciences. . . . Seeing that all these things worked out so well with his inclinations, he was bold enough to convince himself that it was the Spirit of Truth that had wanted to open to him the treasures of all the sciences in this dream.

The origins of Cartesianism, the arising of modern science, are to be found, Descartes himself insisted, in a dream in which the powers of Enthusiasm and Imagination open "the treasures of all the sciences."

One could conclude that Wordsworth's "philosophic Friend" was Descartes himself, who appears in the retold dream both in the guise of Don Quixote, to suggest the dream-inspired, the "quixotic" quest of science, and in the guise of an Arab, to recall the people who conserved the classical heritage and brought numbers, and more importantly, zero, to Europe. And just as such oppositions are overcome, so in the course of his poetic career the dream of Descartes becomes the dream of Wordsworth. The stone of geometric truth is furrowed and hollowed by the poetic imagination to form a prophetic shell: in this way cosmic certainties of geometric truth underwrite apocalyptic intimations of the divine nature of imagination. This shell of poetic prophecy, drawing the poet and the geometrician into the same spiral of associations, thus both conserves Descartes's dream and sounds Wordsworth's poetic vocation:

Imagination! lifting up itself
Before the eye and progress of my Song
Like an unfather'd vapour; here that Power,
In all the might of its endowments, came
Athwart me; I was lost as in a cloud,
Halted, without struggle to break through.
And now recovering, to my Soul I say
I recognise they glory; in such strength
Of usurpation, in such visitings
Of awful promise, when the light of sense
Goes out in flashes that have shewn to us
The invisible world.^[4]

For Wordsworth as for Descartes, the vocations of science and poetry are literally a "calling" that follows in the archetypal pattern of conversion. Descartes's path to science begins in the whirl of an opposing wind, thus forming a via negativa upon which certitude can be achieved only through a profound doubt. Science can only be inspired by Imagination. And Wordsworth's own poetic autobiography can arrive at its ultimate annunciation by assuming the dream of Descartes and retranslating it into the language of prophecy.

How, after all, does a mind "grow" out of nature? What is its relationship to its brain? What is that brain's relationship to its skull and to other encapsulated organisms like seeds or like molluscs which live in shells? What relationship does a seashell have with a stone, and what relationship does a book have with both? Wordsworth may have worried about the fate of a frail book in a living world, but his dream suggests that one can find books in natural forms, that the memory of the natural world, both the great waters of the first and the last deluge, are conserved within the curves of a shell. The dream-work would appear to speak the nonsensical language of pure metaphor, but that is only because we cannot quite imagine how a stone or a shell could convey anything but an analogy of meaning, a "symbol"—a fragment that is completed when its lost half is joined to it—of a larger meaning it only rhetorically signifies. The merely "literary" constructions we place on metaphor and symbol and allegory convince us that such natural tropes are only resemblances, similitudes, ghostly familiars.

In his Vues philosophiques de la gradation naturelle des formes de l'être, ou les essais de la nature qui apprend à faire homme (1786), J. B. Robinet offered an early theory of evolution which relies not on accidental mutations leading to the assimilation of advantageous form, but on a personification of nature as an artist. Gaston Bachelard writes that Robinet's book describes and illustrates

Lithocardites (heart stones), Encephalites (which are a prelude to the brain), stones that imitate a jaw-bone, the foot, the kidney, the ear, the eye, the hand, muscles—then Orchis, Diorchis, Triorchis, the Prialopites, Colites Phalloids, which imitate the male organs, and Histerpetia, which imitate the female organs. . . . It would be a mistake to see nothing in this but a reference to language habits that name new objects by comparing them with other commonplace ones. Here names think and dream, the imagination is active. Lithocardites are heart shells, rough draughts of a heart that one day will beat. . . . Shells, like fossils, are so many attempts on the part of nature to prepare forms of the different parts of the human body; they are bits of man and bits of woman. In fact Robinet gives a description of the Conch of Venus that represents a woman's vulva.^[5]

Explaining this last identification, Robinet writes, "We should not be surprised at the assiduity with which Nature has multiplied models of the generative organs, in view of the importance of these organs."

And like a shell, the complex exterior of an ear, a mouth, or a vulva infolds across lips, past an epithelial sleekness, into a fluid, sea-like realm of metabolic tides and circulations. Brain, stomach, womb: these are the chambers where sound waves, food, and semen are joined and translated into sound, energy, and life. Encountered on a stretch of sand, like any pyramid, the castaway shell and its deserted chambers seem at first only an empty tomb, but it is, more importantly, a sign of a life and an architecture we cannot explain. How could the earliest Pharaohs have begun with ancient Egypt's most accomplished architectural feats? And how is it and why is it that a spineless gastropod responding to the laws of survival should be able to develop a carapace of such perfection that it seems the out-

growth of both mathematical and aesthetic calculation? Placed to the ear, the seashell only sounds its own absence and death by returning the body's own tides to itself.

A certain Coralliophila pyriformis Kira, found in the coral reefs of Japanese waters, presents a striking three-dimensional view of vulva, labia, and womb such as one encounters in an anatomical plate. And yet these opening labia can also suggest an orchid awaiting the thorax of a bee able to bear its pollen to other orchids gesturing from other trees. Or consider the Terebra praelongas Deshayes, or indeed any other species of the genus Terebra : these slender spirals, known as auger shells because of their drill-like shape, may adorn the sands of shallow, tropical waters, but they can also be found between the eyes of the unicorns capering in the narrow corrals of medieval tapestries. And Aphrodite arises, immaculate and mature, from half of a great scallop, a divine, virgin pearl of great price. All of this is to say that the shell has the structure of a living metaphor able to move from the notional realm of imagination to the hard and durable realm of organic form.

"Like a pure sound or a melodic system of pure sounds in the midst of noises," Valéry writes, "so a crystal , a flower , a seashell stand out from the common disorder of perceptible things." And they stand out for the simple reason that their forms signify a larger order absent in perceptible "things," the form of an art practiced by what modern science has imagined to be "chance" itself. Our astonishment at such organization, far from being diminished by the laws of evolution, can only be augmented by our first intellectual reaction, which is to find chance in the face of evident design. By abandoning the image of nature as artisan, as a tireless draftsman whose sketches litter the beaches and deserts of the world, scientific culture must accept then an even uncannier artificer: chance itself, which finds in the most unpromising elements the necessary vocabulary and syntax for an order, such as one finds in the chambered nautilus, Nautilus pompilius Linne. This masterpiece may be governed by the immediate laws of molecular structure, but not by any other demands than survival, which can only be met by chance mutations. And of this shell, like

the Great Pyramid, one can ask: what is it to say that chance or design, lost arts or genius are responsible for these memorials? Valéry writes,

The problem after all is no more futile nor any more naive than speculation about who made a certain fine work in music or poetry; whether it was born of the Muse, or sent by Fortune, or whether it was the fruit of long labor. To say that someone composed it, that his name was Mozart or Virgil, is not to say much; a statement of this sort is lifeless, for the creative spirit in us bears no name.^[6]

And such names as we offer in explanation are themselves nothing but metaphors. Names like Mozart and Virgil, words like Muse and Fortune and Chance, indicate only what we do not understand.

In this last instance the piety of scientists can readily be observed: for it is under this veil of chance—the muse of modern biology—that they conceal their sense, more profound than any layman's, of the infinite artistry evident in the simplest—as in the most remarkable—of seashells. For naturalists have long realized that a nautilus's spiraling shell, and other natural architectures, display examples of the ratio 1.61803 to 1, which, since at least the Renaissance, has been called the Golden Section. The Golden Section, which is displayed serially in the so-called Fibonacci series of numbers (wherein each is the sum of the previous two numbers), not only describes the precise way in which the spiraling shell turns, but it also describes aspects of the Great Pyramid, the Parthenon, and other monumental structures from antiquity to Le Corbusier.^[7] A critic has even claimed to have found elaborations on the proportion in the structure of Virgil's Aeneid .^[8] And a Fibonacci Society was founded in California in the early sixties to trace evidence for the "thinking" which reaches from a seashell, via the Great Pyramid, to the poetry of Virgil, and beyond.

In the early years of this century the elegant and erudite scientist D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson argued in his Growth and Form that "there cannot be a physical or dynamical, though there may well be a mathematical law of growth which is common to, and which defines, the spiral form in Nautilus , in

Globigerina , in the ram's horn, and in the inflorescence of the sunflower. Nature at least exhibits in them all 'un reflet des formes rigoreuses qu'étudie la géométrie .'" Wordsworth's stone and shell are thus, perhaps, less opposite than complementary, a dream vision of the consonance of inorganic and organic form, of geometry and poetry, of the dead stone of the earth and the living mind of nature. Where, then, does "the growth of a poet's mind" described in The Prelude begin if not in natural forms? People have from the beginning established such correspondences between the human body and the living and nonliving world through myth and poetry.

If the shell is the link between the stone and the ear, the earth and the vulva, the whirpool and the mind, chance and design—if the shell, in other words, is a metaphor of a larger metaphoric process of organic development, it is within its spiral we must turn and turn and turn. For a spiral is a compromise between the progressive element of the line and the recursive, conservative disposition of a circle. A spiral, like a metaphor, is a category of trope (tropos , turn): each "new" development in a spiral is both a departure and a return to its own nature. Seen in this light all nature is governed by a certain spiral and metaphoric logic. Myth and poetry prepare the way for geometric description by establishing a world governed by correspondences, similitudes that reveal the repetition and elaboration of certain forms. Of all these recurring metaphoric and geometric forms, the spiral would appear the most promising, if not the most prophetic. D'Arcy Thompson writes,

In the growth of a shell we can conceive no simpler law than this, namely, that it shall widen and lengthen in the same unvarying proportions: and this simplest of laws is that which Nature tends to follow. The shell, like the creature within it, grows in size but does not change its shape ; and the existence of this constant relativity of growth, or constant similarity of form, is of the essence, and may be made the basis of a definition, of the equiangular spiral.

But what function can such form have in an evolutionary scheme which only rewards survival, not ingenuity and perfection? Thompson continues:

We find the same forms which (save for external ornament) are mathematically identical, repeating themselves in all periods in the world's geological history; and we see them mixed up, one with another, irrespective of climate or local conditions, in the depths and on the shores of every sea. It is hard indeed (to my mind) to see in such a case as this where Natural Selection necessarily enters in.^[9]

What clearly does enter in is an innate disposition toward forms which can be described geometrically. The Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction discovered in 1958, initiated by the combination of inorganic elements, is characterized by the formation of perfectly concentric circles and interconnected spiral "cells."^[10] Such reactions are sometimes referred to as "self-organizing," although doubtless no one using this phrase means that any "self" is involved. But what is the difference between our ordinary sense of a "self" (with consciousness, motives, and intentions) and the reflexivity implied by the phrases "self -organizing reactions" or "auto -poetic form?"

The spiral appears to be a kind of formalized nostalgia which links our geometry with the galaxies, the solar system, the pattern of our major internal organs (beginning with the heart), the figure of the univalve shell, the Belousov-Zhabotinsky spirals, not to mention whirlpools, whirlwinds, and the spiral etchings which can be found in burial vaults in neolithic Europe, from Malta to Britain.

According to Michel Serres and Ilya Prigogine, we may turn to Lucretius for an account of the momentous occurrence that begins with the first twist and turn, the first swerve (Clinamen ) in the flow of atoms. Lucretius writes:

When the atoms are travelling straight down through empty space by their own weight, at quite indeterminate times and places they swerve ever so little from their course, just so much that you can call it a change of direction. If it were not for this swerve, everything would fall downwards like rain-drops through the abyss of space. No collision would take place and no impact of atom on atom would be created. Thus nature would never have created anything.^[11]

Natural poetry, like its verbal derivatives, begins with a fecund

deviation, a chance turning aside, from which every subsequent formation develops. In the beginning—one can hear the seashell incanting—was the trope.

For Ovid, as for Lucretius, the world of discrete objects is only an illusion of ordinary vision: beneath the serene surfaces of a meadow, a bush, a stone, or a shell is a constantly flowing current of interweaving relationship. But where Lucretius saw the fundamental aspect in the face of indissoluble atoms, Ovid sees in forms the traces of the natural history of women and gods, goddesses and men, animals and plants, stars and mountains. The world, for Ovid, is an ongoing narrative of bodies passing between forms, a metamorphic world that the metaphoric language of the poet deciphers and yet perpetuates. The anatomy of the shellfish or the spider, the structure of the finger or the measure of a line of poetry are all aspects of this protoecology unveiled by the stories of metamorphoses. If the blood of Adonis can become the anemone, this is because his beauty and his death do not—cannot—simply pass into nothingness. They must leave a trace. If Arachne can become a spider, this is because all natural forms reveal, through myth and metaphor, their lines of descent and kinship. Character, both psychological and anatomical, is a kind of inscription.

The Metamorphoses of Ovid are approximations of an ecology that biologists would only begin to discover after Darwin. The logos of the oikos (house, habitat), ecology began as a metaphoric display of connections revealed by the poetic necessity of discovering or imposing semblances, and so kinship. In the time of Linnaeus, these relationships were conceived as changeless and undynamic: the grids of the natural historian's tables had fallen across living forms like a net. Beneath and within these nets, Darwin discovered, like Ovid, a differential narrative and a different imagery: he saw evidence for a sublime story of an older earth and an evolution of forms—that is to say the continuous metamorphoses of a living world. Between modern biology and ancient mythology there is an implicit link that one can discover in the anatomy of the hand and the measure of a line of poetry.

School children were once taught that the metrical foot of

a dactyl was, strangely enough, like a finger: it began with a long or stressed syllable and was followed by two unstressed syllables, like the shorter bones completing the finger. There is, then, this beautiful symmetry between the anatomy of the dáktulos^[*] and the structure of the dactyl : /--. These children were also told that the anapest meant a "reversed" dactyl (--/), that the spondee's two stresses were a "libation," and that the trochee (/-), meaning "running," galloped like a horse. They may have been taught that these mnemonic devices were also etymologies, and that these etymologies told the story of an age before writing, when even the bones of one's fingers could be relied upon to carry a line of poetry, as a line of poetry carried a story, and a story a world. The Homeric epics are articulated by these joints in language, epithets like "rosy-fingered dawn"—rododáctulos^[*] éos —which figured sunrise at sea through metaphors of rose petals, fingers, and Homer's own dactylic hexameter. Add to this story the conventional blindness of Homer and one can picture a poet counting his verses, long before they were written down, on the bones in his hand. Discounting the thumb, a line of Homer can be counted twice on one hand, or once on both. The "rosy-fingered dawn" epithet which turns up throughout the Homeric poems is thus doubly-articulated, and so can indicate the red petals of sun refracted through a moist atmosphere and a dawning in the West of a poetic meter whose perfection appears out of nowhere—unless one imagines that poetry begins with the skeleton.

Gregory Bateson has made the argument that we have neglected this metaphoric and narrative aspect of living forms. Thinking of such literary matters as secondary, technical kinds of representation, we ignore the fact that all organisms are, given their finite life spans, their origin and their progeny, representations, narratives, and tropes themselves. According to the central dogma of genetics, evolution itself is directed by tropes, turns, or mutations away from the actual and prosaic replication of a genetic code. But since the code is itself a creation of successful tropes—so the dogma holds—one would also have to recognize that the rule of evolution is metaphoric, and

the metaphoric aspects of organisms are unfolded within the grand narratives of evolution. But Bateson would go even further and argue that the intrinsic order of a single organism is itself structured like a narrative and that, necessarily, cultural narratives are elaborations on organistic patterns.^[12] Just as the skeleton of a human hand, forearm, and upper arm can be seen by analogy in other mammals, such as a horse, so fundamental human myths—the Osiris and Demeter cycles—can be traced to the narratives of the sun and the seasons. When Aristotle insisted that a tragedy must have a beginning, a middle, and an end, he only adapted the evident teleology of a single life, a year, or a day. And the tragic aspect depends on a transmutation of this narrative before the inevitable return of the beginning.

The literary, which is to say the unsettling aspect, of a shell or a skeleton is that it continues to exist after life has passed from it. Within the fleshy narrative of character and personality there is a plot like a stone, a pattern which links all men and women to the generic and the mortal. Thus even more uncanny is a seashell abandoned on the edge of the sea, and later found on a mountain miles above it.

It was thus that Darwin, during his voyage on the Beagle , began to imagine the dynamic and ancient nature of the earth. While climbing in the Andes, some miles above the Pacific, he discovered the fossils of seashells:

Even at the very crest of the Peuquenes, at the height of 13,210 feet, and above it, the black clay-slate contained numerous marine remains, amongst which a gryphaea is the most abundant, likewise shells, resembling turritellae, terebratulae, and an ammonite. It is an old story, but not the less wonderful, to hear of shells, which formerly were crawling about at the bottom of the sea, being now elevated nearly 14,000 feet above its level.^[13]

Later he would imagine, like Wordsworth, the connection between the animate and the inanimate. And later still another Englishman and gentleman scientist, James Lovelock, would propose that the earth itself, considering its energy and history of movement, was a kind of organism and would rename it, following the suggestion of William Golding, "Gaia."^[14]

The seashell, having become relatively speaking a permanent remainder of a life, establishes the nature and function of poetic immortality. The poems of Wordsworth or Milton, or of any prophetic or sublime work of art, assume the effect and cosmic resonance of this discovered shell. And thus one can see the ways in which organisms, myths, and texts are all elaborated from the same narrative, and narrative is always a form of recall, of recollection, of memory.

Scientists such as Ilya Prigogine and Erich Jantsch have argued that organic structures do indeed "begin" with the spiral or turbulent movement in fluid media such as water or air, which either deepen into a vortex or rise into a cone. There is thus a passageway from the world of stars and seas, stones and water to the world of living creatures. For Jantsch, evolution is auto-poeisis , a self-making of the kind described in The Prelude .^[15] It is only by constantly moving away from a center that such instances of chaos retain their forms as what Prigogine calls "dissipative structures." Whether one inspects the turbulence in a stream caused by a stone, or views a drop of water falling in a brimming bowl which raises a corona-like splash, or inspects the curvatures of shell or horn, or observes the spiraling diamonds on the face of a sunflower, one discovers this startling complicity of life and geometry, of mathematical description and poetic forms: a seashell is both evidence and metaphor for this necessary relationship.