THE NAUTILUS
New Orleans, May 2002. A shop in France, some years later. And then: a logo.
I was in New Orleans for the Annual Congress of the American Psychiatric Association. Five thousand psychiatrists from around the world, gathered in convention halls to present papers, dispute diagnoses, debate medication protocols, and talk about the human mind with the vocabulary of science. We were also entertained. The best food, a concert, a cruise on the Mississippi river, a visit to the famous Audubon Aquarium, nothing mandatory, only for lovers of music, sea and the bored once with science. I went to all three of them.
At the aquarium, we walked from one ecosystem to another through long under water dimly lit tunnels. The spaces displaying, behind thick glass the fish were also suffused in barely visible blue or greenish light, with fish swimming noiselessly around. We could have been as well on another planet. I remember the huge sharks, some moving towards us with open mouth, showing us their sharp teeth. What stayed most on my retina were the beautiful jellyfish and the cute seahorses. The nautilus I remember vaguely, balls with light and darker stripes floating. I looked at them briefly, then went back to the seahorses and jellyfish. The nautiluses and I parted without incident.
Some years later, on a holiday in France, I found myself in one of those shops that sell semi-precious stones and fossils, the kind of shop that exudes time, mineral cold, and something ancient. On a shelf, among ammonites and trilobites and polished labradorite, there was a nautilus shell. Cream-coloured, sectioned, the inner chambers revealed in cross-section, each one a precise and proportional repetition of the last. I bought it.
At home, I read about it. I read about the depth of the ocean the nautilus inhabits, depths that would crush most living things, pressures that require the shell’s extraordinary architecture to survive. I read about how old the nautilus is as a species, half a billion years, older than the dinosaurs, older than the first trees, one of the handful of creatures that has survived every mass extinction this planet has produced, building undisturbed its chambers. I read about the mathematics of the shell, the logarithmic spiral, each chamber larger than the last but identical in proportion, the whole thing following a law so precise that it reappears at every scale of creation.
And I thought: I saw these creatures. In New Orleans. In that dark bluish light. I walked past them to look at the seahorses.
I lost the shell when I moved from the Netherlands to Portugal. But by then something had shifted, from curiosity to fascination. The nautilus had become, from an object I owned, a testimony of the ubiquitous genius of nature herself.
The logo for this website represents a nautilus, a chambered pearly seashell roaming the depths of the oceans, whose spiral growth obeys the laws of fractal geometry.
A visionary French mathematician, Benoit Mandelbrot, pulled together the scattered threads left through centuries by great predecessors, Gottfried Leibniz, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Paul Lévy, and many others, formulated the theory of a new geometry and gave it, in 1975, a name: fractal geometry.
Trees, clouds, hurricanes, lightning bolts, ocean waves, snowflakes, crystals, animal colour patterns, blood vessels and pulmonary vessels, heart rates — all have a fractal structure. The very DNA molecule and the formation of galaxies follow fractal patterns. Zoom into any of these, and the same structure reappears, over and over, at different scales.
And there is a dynamic aspect to fractals: Chaos. Fractals and Chaos are two sides of one coin. Fractals in nature are mostly not static, they move, with unpredictable, chaotic consequences. A butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing, and the weather in New York changes. All creation happens at the fringe of chaos. The forms nature takes are fractals.
We are fractals.
Being animals, we humans are fractals of nature. Being soul, being spirit, we humans are fractals of consciousness. Nature and consciousness are not separated. They are One.
In the realm of creation, consciousness follows a fractal pattern. If you look deeply within yourself, you will see the child you have been, the multiple ramifications of its development into the person you are today. You will see your mother and father, your grandparents, the language, customs, food, art, and sciences of the culture you were born into, the landscape surrounding you, the seasons influencing your moods, the historical and social and political circumstances shaping your thoughts. If you look even deeper, you will touch the ground of all creation.
You are also a fractal.
If you want to grow, you have to grow like a tree, a crystal, a galaxy. Like the nautilus, you have to build a wall to your previous state of being, in this life or a previous one, and occupy a larger space. You will not grow in a straight line, but in a spiral form. You will come often to the same point, yet on another level.
And if you want to grow, you will have to proceed toward the limit of the familiar, where chaos begins, and creativity holds court.
This is why, when the time came to choose an image for this practice, the nautilus was the immediate choice. Not because I had a mystical encounter with it in an aquarium in New Orleans, I didn’t. Not because the shell in France moved me to tears, it didn’t. But because what I read corresponded so precisely with everything I have come to believe about how a human being changes, not in straight lines, not by accumulating improvements, but in a spiral that keeps returning to the same questions, pains, joys at a larger scale, sealing off each completed chamber, moving toward the next. Our consciousness grows as nautilus grows, as crystals, trees and lightning bolts grow. We grow towards the light.
Logo designed by Tamara Albu. tamaraalbu.net