'Sea-shell and Leaf Alike'

As the human world seems to grow more chaotic, as though entropy were finally triumphant, I look for evidence of pattern and design in nature and among writers I admire.

In his short story “The Bicycle Rider,” Guy Davenport arranges a still life evoking order, including two shells: “A glass jar of acorns. A nautilus shell. Shale slab with a fossil gingko leaf. A Greek coin from Metaponton in Sicily. A snail shell.” In the same story, Davenport writes: “Luck has nothing to do with happiness, which comes from rhythms, order, clarity.” In his poem “For Basil Bunting,” Davenport celebrates the spiral, which you will find everywhere if you take the time to look: 

“to be Greek as a curl

on a flat cheek

 

“the coil of white

the Ismene lily

 

“spirals, hound’s tail

when his nose is down

 

“snail shell, paper nautilus

wavetop scroll

 

“ear, weather, world

this shape of turning”

 

In his essay “Marianne Moore,” Davenport says the poet loved things “cunningly made.” See her poem “The Paper Nautilus.” Here is the opening sentence of his short story “The Dawn in Erewhon”:

 

“The Dutch philosopher Adriaan Floris van Hovendaal was arranging the objects on his table, a pinecone to remind him of Fibonacci, a snail’s shell to remind him of Ruskin, a drachma to remind him of Crete.”

 

Leonardo Bonacci of Pisa, better known as Fibonacci (c. 1170-c. 1250), lent his name to the sequence known as the Fibonacci numbers. Starting with 0 and 1, each number in the sequence is the sum of the previous two numbers. Thus: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, and so on. The ratio between each term and its predecessor approaches 1.618 . . ., the golden ratio, which appears commonly in nature and art.

 

The Fibonacci numbers suggest, at least to this non-mathematician, the presence of design principles in the universe, perhaps one of nature’s structural default modes. The notion, I know, appealed to Davenport, from whom I first learned of Fibonacci decades ago in “The Dawn of Erewhon”:

 

“The Fibonacci number following thirty-four is fifty-five. A set of thirty-four helix curves radiating from a common center clockwise crossing a set of fifty-five helix curves rotating counterclockwise from the same center gives the finely meshed honeybrown redgold spiral net panier of the Grote Zonnebloem, Helianthus annuus.

 

“Adriaan had one on his desk, others in a wicker basket at his feet. If one spiral is a rotation of thirteen helices, then the counterspiral is twenty-one. Fibonacci, both. And he [Fibonacci] had brought the ancient Indic naught, the Arabian number unoccupied by quantity, to be our zero.

 

“Fibonacci harmonies ran through the pinecone which he kept on his table, through the snail shell.”

 

Helianthus annuus is the sunflower, in which each floret is positioned toward the next at an angle of about 137.5 degrees, the golden angle. This produces the pattern of interconnecting spirals described by Davenport. Botanists speculate that the arrangement results in the most efficient packing of seeds.

Clearly, this pattern fascinated Davenport – and Marianne Moore, though she doesn’t name it. In her poem “The Pangolin,” she notices the creature’s skin with “scale / lapping scale with spruce-cone regularity.” In fact, the scales on cones are arranged in alternating spirals, like the sunflower, with the number of spirals always representing two adjoining numbers in the Fibonacci sequence – say, three and five, or eight and thirteen. Because Fibonacci numbers approximate irrational numbers, the scales do not line up precisely, and weaken the arrangement. There’s structural integrity in regular irregularity. Science overlaps with aesthetics. As Paul Valéry puts it in Sea Shells (1936, trans. Ralph Mannheim):

 

“Run off by the billions, each different from the rest (though the difference is sometimes imperceptible), they offer an infinite number of solutions to the most delicate problems of art, and of absolutely perfect answers to the questions they suggest to us.”

 

Another poet, Howard Nemerov, in “Figures of Thought” (Sentences, 1980), celebrates the patterns hiding in plain sight:

 

“To lay the logarithmic spiral on

Sea-shell and leaf alike, and see it fit,

To watch the same idea work itself out

In the fighter pilot’s steepening, tightening turn

Onto his target, setting up the kill,

And in the flight of certain wall-eyed bugs

Who cannot see to fly straight into death

But have to cast their sidelong glance at it

And come but cranking to the candle’s flame —

 

How secret that is, and how privileged

One feels to find the same necessity

Ciphered in forms diverse and otherwise

Without kinship — that is the beautiful

In Nature as in art, not obvious,

Not inaccessible, but just between.

 

It may diminish some our dry delight

To wonder if everything we are and do

Lies subject to some little law like that;

Hidden in nature, but not deeply so.”

 

[Davenport’s poem appears in Thasos and Ohio (North Point Press, 1986). His story “The Bicycle Rider” is collected The Jules Verne Steam Balloon (North Point Press, 1987). The Moore essay is in The Geography of the Imagination (North Point Press, 1981). “The Dawn in Erewhon” is collected in Davenport’s first story collection, Tatlin! (Charles Scribner’s Son, 1974).]