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musings on a shell

Everyone ought to have a favourite shell. Foregoing the usual jokes about the Linux shell and the Royal Dutch Shell (which is, at most, proof that everyone also ought to have a least favourite shell), mine is Venerupis senescens.

This small bivalve's calciferous remains wash up on this nation's sandy shores so regularly that finding one is usually a case of "oh, hey, it's one of those" rather than the elation felt when finding, say, a mammoth bone or a piece of amber. They're relatively common, though supplies are limited: V. senescens has been extinct for about a hundred thousand years.

It's considered an index fossil for the Eemian era, meaning that if you're finding it, the stuff that surrounds it is most likely from that particular era. The Eemian era was named after the Dutch river Eem and ran from about 130.000 years ago to 115.000 years ago. It was a brief era of warmth before the most recent ice age, the Pleistocene, began. The Pleistocene, a 100.000 year age of cold, seems to be the thing that took out this little shell forever - possibly because the ocean it inhabited disappeared, to reappear only in the era we'd end up calling the Holocene.

I love this little shell. I suspect it's some combination of its rarity and the fact that it went extinct so long ago that makes it so appealing - were it still abundantly present, perhaps it wouldn't be so special to me. But still, even then, there's something more. Something about the shape of it, perhaps. While the two valves together create a symmetrical shape, the shell itself is not symmetrical, having a very small half and a very wide half. That wide half has a beautiful curve to it that appeals to me, somehow... but it's left me wondering what exactly I like so much about it.

Aesthetic beauty cannot be disentangled from an emotional connection but still, there has to be something there. I like plenty of things and I'm not necessarily enthralled by their appearance, after all. So what gives? Symmetry can be a marker of beauty, but this shell is not symmetrical. Architects and designers often use the golden ratio to construct things that are pleasing to the eye, so maybe it's that?

Hmm... I guess not.

I recently realised that I've been thinking about these shells for years and I have never been able to find some overarching quality of attractiveness, some known rule being obeyed or broken to achieve some known quantity of beauty. And yet, I love them.

It's possible to construct mathematical and geometrical models that predict and describe the physical world in a way that explains some of the things we feel - but those felt things do remain felt, they remain feelings. They defy logic. Maybe I'm illogically attracted to this little shell?

Perhaps in the aggregate of facts and feelings, somewhere, beauty appears. This shell has a soft and curved shape, its ridges are worn and catch the light, casting gentle shadows. But it also tells a tiny story, easy to miss, of a tiny creature living its tiny life in an ocean that disappeared and then came back, too late to save a little shell from extinction.

And so I talk in circles, to no avail or conclusion. The language of the physical seems to fail me on this occasion, in which case, what can we do but turn to poetry? Here are my feelings toward this little shell, set out in 3 haiku.

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small potatoes

Here's a log of three messages I sent to my partner a few days ago.

3:15 PM: a small memorial by the bridge
3:15 PM: crying students
3:15 PM: poor kid

We live in a small city and small cities tend to behave like big villages: when something of enough importance take place, the whole town's talking about it. We live in fast times so this kind of shared consciousness is a bit fleeting and doesn't necessarily last as long as once it did, but it still happens. Early last Monday, a twenty year old kid died.

He hadn't come home after a work party on Sunday night, his flatmates started to worry and by Tuesday the police were looking for him. Security footage revealed that he'd fallen into the canal shortly after leaving the venue of the party. On Wednesday, his remains were found and under the watchful eye of his friends, flatmates and passersby, the operation to retrieve his body began. The authorities set up large dividers to hide the activities from view and a stretch of canal was cordoned off - no one needed to see this.

We walked past this sad scene as it occurred and after looking over the railing of the bridge we saw a small gaggle of tall, blonde, raw-eyed students looking on with us, quickly realised what was happening, and left. The police were cordoning things off and vans and trucks were moving into place. As we walked away, figuring we'd be reading what we needed to know in the local newspaper tomorrow, we got farther away from the scene and the number of shocked people in the street decreased and by the time we reached the end of the canal, things seemed mostly normal. I went to pick up some hummus and talked to the shop owner about what was going on and she seemed less disturbed by the incident than the fact that I told her about it. Life goes on.

We talked about it, on and off. I realised I had walked past the very spot where the kid was lying, under water - twice even, while walking to work. It's a terrible thing to be thinking of, but I kept thinking of it. And we talked sadly about it all, analysing it to some extent. We compared, like I think everyone does, to other tragedies. People dying in wars, children killed pointlessly and cruelly in Iran - and yet, this is the one that hits us hard. Someone we didn't know, may have never seen. Perhaps it's because we don't get fed propaganda about how his death was a necessary evil or part of a plan, none of which is meant to be believed, but at least to be absorbed and still, however hard we try, assimilated. But then there's this kid Cuinn, his life so close to ours, in the same city. He died along an innocent little stretch of canal that we must have walked past a thousand times. I guess it feels like the kind of thing that needn't have happened, the kind of thing that happens every night and doesn't end in tragedy. Students staggering along the canals, tripping over themselves and losing their balance, even falling in the water and returning home to a house of good-natured mockery, their life now one dumb story richer.

Maybe that's the thing that has people looking so despondently at the little memorial that has since popped up by the canal: the naked pointlessness. Even a car crash, even a feat of derring-do gone wrong - even a murder would carry some act of purpose, some clear wrongdoing, some message, some meaning. This was a simple error, a stumble. It needn't have happened and no one learned anything. We can all be extra careful for a little while but in the end, life returns to normal in a matter of hours rather than days and to the vast majority of people in this city, it may as well not have happened. Nothing was gained, the canals and streets and buildings look the same as they ever did. Life goes on, which doesn't feel like much of a moral to this awful story. And perhaps that's always true. Maybe it's always pointless and avoidable and maybe we gain nothing and lose everything each time. But this time in this place, we all felt it.

Though I know, because I am human, that I'll at some point almost entirely forget about Cuinn, whose life was cut short, I know his family and his friends won't. I know that my world keeps turning and that while I was afraid to walk that same stretch of canal the following morning, when I saw the Wednesday market had been built up and fish, cheese and vegetables were being sold as always, my fear abated and I just made a quick stop to acknowledge the deceased and to spare a thought for his loved ones, whose lives have been upended in tragedy. To acknowledge that the world hasn't kept turning for everyone.

For one person in particular, it will never turn again. So at least for a little while, as long as memorial and memory remain, we must experience the turning, the sun rising and setting, the festivities of Easter and all the other things big and small, in his stead - to devote a little time, to send it across the void, to one whose time has ended. The world in silence, turning without turning.

3:26 PM: getting some small potatoes

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tear down these walls

Platforms like Facebook and Twitter are sometimes referred to as 'walled gardens' - they require an account to use and don't share any data with unsanctioned third parties (including anyone without an account). Once you're in, you're stuck using it and its approved services. This happens for reasons of data scraping, getting return customers, and a misplaced sense of importance (we're so important that you'll have to get an account here, no matter how bad we treat you).

I'm happy to say I've managed without, well, any such accounts - whatever services I use include an element of commerce, so I see the need of accounts there. But it has given me another, less common perspective of these walled gardens: the view from the outside.

Yes, I've been happily abstaining. Though after some blissful years on the clear mountaintop, I've started feeling some societal pressure to participate - not in Twitter or Facebook or Pinterest, but in Instagram. Because hoo boy, everything is on Instagram. Restaurants don't have websites anymore, they have Instagram accounts. Artists, musicians, entire companies... all their shit is on Instagram. Hell, as much as I love the Internet Phonebook -a project rooted in a love for the small Web and personal websites- their barebones website had me going completely blind into one of their events until my partner found out the event details were on Instagram and only on Instagram.

I could go on at length about how relying on this one platform controlled by some American nazi billionaire is bad, but it's all been said before and more thoroughly than I'm willing to do here.

The takeaway here, I guess, is that it bums me out. I live in a city full of little event spaces and funky coffee shops and other interesting things and they all insist on using this walled garden to communicate what they're doing, and here I am, staring up against the walls, wondering what's going on inside but unwilling to put my soul at hazard by stepping in.

I hope the current wave of personal Web building translates to these walled gardeners at some point, to see that little camera icon on posters replaced with a "go to our website for more info" - hell, with everything getting announced on Instagram, I'd be happy to see posters at all.

Until that time, I'll stumble around in the dark and, at least occasionally, run into a warmly lit cottage among the tall, dark walls - and while looking around, love it all the more for holding on.

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