Describing a spiral

Friday Fragment #31

Two and a half years have passed since I proposed a topic with the above title for a short programme of talks by local creatives being curated by

Andrew Eberlin

. I rediscovered some correspondence about the subject earlier this week. Sadly, the event didn’t come to pass, and so preparing a talk never got past a few scribbled notes plus the more formal shaping of the following blurb: ‘Sharing what we see and what happens, expressing what we feel, and explaining what we mean are the ways in which we direct our freethinking position in this world. We come together in various places to do this – to virtual worlds such as Instagram or Twitter, or to physical spaces such as the pub or dining room table. In each of them we tell our story. We aim to describe and define our experience of the world in engaging ways. We so often rely on words or images – or words and images – but sometimes we fail to tell our stories with the passion and clarity they deserve. Stories are built around description. Though we might look for definition in our lives, it’s description that gives our lives their meaning and takes them from cold black and white into rich and beautiful colour. And it’s this skill of description that can limit or heighten our interest in the lives and stories of others.’ Description, in all its forms, but especially the literary form, has always fascinated me. My hope for the talk was to separate defining things from describing things and to contrast the simplicity and complexity inherent in both, and champion the enhanced beauty that can be found in the latter. It was the closest I’d come to studying what I have spent a good part of my working life obsessing over, sometimes through the medium of photography, sometimes through writing. Laurence Sterne once wrote that ‘to define is to distrust’ (we define because we don’t trust others to know what we mean). Definition can see us trapped in a loop of synonymity, as I once explained here, whereby we try to explain a concept such as kindness via a string of words – compassion, tenderness, niceness – and find ourselves no further forward in conveying meaning. For that we need description. The ‘spiral’ of the title pays homage to one of the most affecting passages of prose that I have ever read, from the most remarkable book. I quote that passage in full in the footnote below.¹

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1. Most people are afflicted by an inability to say what they see or think. They say there’s nothing more difficult than to define a spiral in words; they claim it’s necessary to use the unliterary hand, twirling it in a steadily upward direction, so that human eyes will perceive the abstract figure immanent in a wire spring and a certain type of staircase. But if we remember that to say is to renew, we will have no trouble defining a spiral: it’s a circle that rises without ever closing. I realise that most people would never dare define it in this way, for they suppose that defining is to say what others want us to say rather than what’s required for the definition. I’ll say it more accurately: a spiral is a potential circle that winds round as it rises, without ever completing itself. But no, the definition is still abstract. I’ll resort to the concrete, and all will become clear: a spiral is a snake without a snake, vertically wound around nothing.

[…]

Once I heard a child, who wished to say that he was on the verge of tears, say not ‘I feel like crying’, which is what an adult, i.e. an idiot, would say, but rather ‘I feel like tears.’ And this phrase – so literary it would seem affected in a well-known poet, if he could ever invent it – decisively refers to the warm presence of tears about to burst from eyelids that feel the liquid bitterness. ‘I feel like tears’! That small child aptly defined his spiral.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet