At times I have thought my life was spiraling out of
control, things all going wrong, but now I have come to see the spiral is one
of the patterns of order in the universe.
The staircase to heaven is not Jacob’s linear ladder; it is a spiral
staircase, such as the one in a lighthouse. You keep circling over the same territory but on a higher
plane, progressing upwards, ever higher (or downward, as the case may be).
*
The outward spiral and the inward spiral: two systematic
patterns used by crime scene investigators and search parties. Begin at the scene of the crime and
search in widening circles. Or
begin on the periphery of a place and circle inward, zeroing in on the central
point, where the victim might still be found and rescued. Or the body recovered.
*
Spiral
My time advances in a spiral
The spiral limits my landscape,
leaves the past in shadows,
and makes me travel full of uncertainty.
O straight line! Pure lance without a
horseman,
how my spiral path dreams of your light!
Federico Garcia
Lorca
*
And how my spiral path here dreams of the arcing javelin. Its linear flight.
*
Spirals abound in nature: for example, the nautilus shell,
particularly if cut in half, or the garden snail’s shell, a tendril of a vine,
fronds opening on ferns, the spiral nebula, our own galaxy, moving water eddies
in spirals, and whirlpools. The
wind spirals as tornados, dust devils, and hurricanes. On the cellular level our
DNA spirals in its double helix, and spirochetes that cause yaws and syphilis
twist and turn in the bodies they destroy.
*
The brain is a nest of snakes. Full of fears. Going
around and around. Over the same ground.
*
A snake coiled, ready to strike.
*
The groove on an old vinyl record is a spiral. There are those who say if you play
certain records backwards and have an outward spiral a secret message will be
revealed. Spinning records.
*
Nine Inch Nails: The
Downward Spiral (1994)
*
Once
in a tidal marsh, I stepped into a coiled nest of snakes, more
than an ouroborus, a
circle of a snake with his tail in is mouth, or
what Tiresias saw and struck apart,
the
coupling of snakes.
I stepped into a
spiral of snakes, and escaped unscathed.
*
The Ponce Inlet Lighthouse near New Smyrna Beach, the
highest lighthouse in Florida has a spiral staircase inside of 203 step
rising clockwise to the top of the
175 foot tower. A plaque on the
wall indicates the place on the staircase a former lighthouse keeper succumbed
to heart failure. The tower
itself spirals from a base with a
32 foot diameter and walls eight feet thick and tapers to a 14 foot diameter top and the walls
thinning to just 2 feet thick.
*
Yeats’ system with its interpenetrating cones in The Vision, his gyres, the falcon
turning and turning in “The Second Coming,” are spirals, as is the staircase in
his tower in at Gort in Galway, Thoor Ballylee.
*
Soft ice cream swirling out of the machine, chocolate
swirled, braided with vanilla, into the waffle cone, a Yeatsian double gyre.
*
Orbits of manmade satellites that degrade and get closer to
the earth are spirals, as is the orbit of the moon getting further and further
away (see Dorianne Laux’s “Facts about the Moon”) though it is as ascending
spiral, the moon now further away by some six feet than when I was born under
it.
*
Ezra Pound: “We do not know the past in chronological
sequence. It may be convenient to
lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but
what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out form us and from our
own time.”
*
In the vortex of Vortecism.
*
In the Book of Job, God speaks to Job as a voice out of the
whirlwind, a spiral, posing a dizzying series of questions in Job’s ear, a much
smaller spiral.
*
When God speaks out of the whirlwind now, his voice is like
a rushing freight train.
*
Water down the drain.
It is a myth that the water swirls down the drain counterclockwise in
the southern hemisphere; clockwise in the northern. Or vice versa. It can be either one or the other in either hemisphere. The coriolis effect, if it applies, is
too weak to counteract the flow of water against the sink, the opening of the
drain. The spiral of the cyclone, the hurricane, is a different story.
*
Some labyrinths and crop circles are spirals. Could be combined into a maize maze.
*
The conch shell sings the sound of the sea in its
spirals. Hold it to the spiral of
your ear and hear.
*
Dante’s architecture in hell, purgatory’s mountain, the
circles of paradise spiral downward and then upward.
*
Goethe: “Progress has not followed a straight ascending
line, but a spiral with rhythms of progress and retrogression, of evolution and
dissolution.”
*
Coils of a rope, a lariat, a lasso, a noose knot. Tied up in knots.
*
A funnel web of the funnel web spider.
*
The arc of the discus toss, the twirling of the discuss
thrower, the tightly wound torso of Myron’s Discobolus. Compare with Frisbees. Contrast with javelins.
*
The Guggenheim.
Wright’s design a widening spiral.
*
Micea Eliade: “The spiral, the snail (a lunar emblem), a
woman, water, fish, all belong essentially to the same symbolism of fertility,
which applies to every level of nature.”
*
The Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson's great earthwork at the
edge of the Great Salt Lake, is visible again because of the droughts after
decades underwater.
*
Michael Iarocci
on Lorca: “As one circle closes another opens, which suggests that perhaps it
is not the circle, but a spiral that in the end best accounts for the
trajectories we have described, the slow moving spiral of history and desire,
the spiral of a snail’s shell.”
*
A type of Writer’s Block: Writer’s Spiral where you are just
spinning your wheels, going in circles.
*
The monumental open spiral staircase at the Chateau de
Blois, thought by some to be designed by Leonardo.
The round window in the hotel with the moon perfectly in it. The mad rush up and down the stairs,
the plaza, searching in circles for the ideal meal.
*
The volute, an ornamental spiral on a column or the scroll
on the end of the violin’s fingerboard.
*
The death spiral: a carnival ride, a crashing airplane, a worst case scenario.
*
The tornado that destroyed my house in 1994: a witness said the huge oak, big as a steam locomotive, that crushed my roof in and knocked the house off its foundations was twisted out of the ground like you'd turn and pull a baby tooth of your child.
*
Up on the ladder in the worst of Katrina in 2005 trying to spread out the blue tarp on the damaged roof,
the ladder twisting in the wind. After climbing down, I went back inside to save the china. And then the rest of the tree came down, that part of the house a twisted wreck. Wrenching. And then later the insurance company would have left us twisting slowly in the wind with that offer to settle our claim.
*
The spring binding of a spiral notebook is, technically, a
helix. In mathematics a spiral is
a curve which emanates from a central point, getting progressively further away
as it revolves around that point.
A helix is more tightly wound, a coil spring, and is thus ironically
only loosely a spiral. The braided
double helix of our DNA: our mother and father wrapped in a tight embrace
inside every cell. The story of my
life, its twists and turns, the conflicts, the irreconcilable differences
between my parents, their marriage that spiraled out of control still spinning
alive in every one of my cells.
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