Snail Shell Spirals

I'm starting the year with Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. First published in 1955, her observations are spot on for today, I am delighted to find. While the specific examples are dated - she was not tethered to a tiny screen, for example - the sentiments, yearnings, and distractions of life she writes about are directly applicable to us now. For an idea of what the book contains, there's a page of quotes from the book here, at goodreads.

Chapter 3, Moon Shell, opens with the following passage:

This is a snail shell, round, full and glossy as a horse chestnut. Comfortable and compact, it sits curled up like a cat in the hollow of my hand. Milky and opaque, it has the pinkish bloom of the sky on a summer evening, ripening to rain. On its smooth symmetrical face is penciled with precision a perfect spiral, winding inward to the pinpoint center of the shell, the tiny dark core of the apex, the pupil of the eye. It stares at me, this mysterious single eye - and I stare back.

Image URL: http://www.fontplay.com/freephotos/imagesn/fpfreefoto-1568.jpg

The chapter continues, with the moon shell as metaphor, to explore the necessity of solitude. "How one hates to think of oneself as alone. How one avoids it. It seems to imply rejection or unpopularity. An early wallflower panic still clings to the word." I find this fascinating. It's a window into another world. Personally, I adore and relish solitude. I need great big gobs of alone time in order to function properly in the world. As such, I find it hard to understand why others view solitude with suspicion or express pity for the one alone. Morrow Lindbergh continues, "We seem so frightened today of being alone that we never let it happen. Even if family, friends, and movies should fail, there is still the radio or television to fill up the void." Reading this I can't turn off the vision of a person, any person, with their head bowed, blinders on, fingers flying furiously on their phone. "Now, instead of planting our solitude with our own dream blossoms, we choke the space with continuous music, chatter, and companionship to which we do not even listen. It is simply there to fill the vacuum. When the noise stops there is no inner music to take its place. We must re-learn to be alone."

Later in the chapter, she addresses creativity. "With our garnered free time, we are more apt to drain our creative springs than to refill them." She notes the change in women's roles over generations and that, in 1955,  even housework has been stripped of its quiet, contemplative tasks. Specifically damaging is "the curtain of mechanization [that] has come down between the mind and the hand."

With Anne Morrow Lindbergh's thoughts on solitude, creativity, and hand work percolating in my brain, I spied a photograph of a ram in profile on the wall at Ikea. Not for sale, it was illustrating some marketing text on the wall about their products or philosophy or some such. (Actually, I have no idea what it was marketing, I didn't read a word.) The ram pictured had tightly curled horns, similar to the sculpture below. Seeing it, everything stopped, coalesced, and inspiration struck (yes, it can happen in the hallway to the bathrooms at Ikea!). The next yoni will feature a snail shell. Naturally.

Ram's Head Greek, Late Classical Period, probably 4th century B.C. Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
Image URL: http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/rams-head-151042

Whatever search terms I put in to find images of snail shells resulted in multiple references to the Fibonacci sequence. Rather than print a couple of choice shell images to work from, I went down the rabbit hole and discovered all sorts of cool math shit. In the Fibonacci sequence (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21...) the next number is determined by adding together the two previous numbers. Not fascinated yet? Well, Fibonacci calculated this sequence in 1202 by pondering the following puzzle about rabbits. Rather than try to expalin it myself, here's the puzzle as explained by Live Science:

Beginning with a male and female rabbit, how many pairs of rabbits could be born in a year? The problem assumes the following conditions:

• Begin with one male rabbit and female rabbit that have just been born.
• Rabbits reach sexual maturity after one month.
• The gestation period of a rabbit is one month.
• After reaching sexual maturity, female rabbits give birth every month.
• A female rabbit gives birth to one male rabbit and one female rabbit.
• Rabbits do not die.

If I haven't lost you yet, here's what's so cool about the sequence. It applies to structures in nature as well as imagined scenarios of rabbit breeding. Snail shells, hurricanes, spiral galaxies, flower petals, pine cones all conform to the Fibonacci spiral.

Image URL: http://mathforum.org/mathimages/index.php/MILS_04B_hlv3

In the process of geeking out about the Fibonacci spiral, I stumbled upon the work of artist Rafael Araujo. Take a spin through his website. His work is stunning.

Calculated Shells © Rafael Araujo
Image URL: http://www.rafael-araujo.com/calculation?lightbox=image_iyh