Nautilus

Consider the nautilus shell:

Writes biologist D’Arcy Thompson in On Growth and Form. “Each successive stage of growth, starting from the origin, remains as an integral and unchanging portion of the growing structure.”

I thought about the nautilus when I had coffee with a smart young reporter who was describing a Veteran’s Day story spinning in his head.

“I have all these interviews with World War II vets, but I don’t want it to be a, you know, here are these World War II vets talking about their experiences. I think I want it to be a story about how we tell stories, the meaning of storytelling in passing on information from one generation to the next.”

"Very cool,” I said. “Do you think there’s anything there about memory and how the brain works? Like, some guy who can’t remember where he left his hat, but he can remember exactly what happened and who said what more than half a century ago?”

“Yeah—,” he said. “… how certain experiences are imprinted on our brain, how the stories become part of us …”

This reporter – he can’t be a minute over 28—is a nautilus.

In just two years, he has (as D’Arcy Thompson would say) “been conformed by successive and continuous increments.” Each new chamber in his artistic growth holds a proportionately larger mastery of craft than the chambers before it.

Each time he tries something new – and he does this with almost every story he encounters – he pushes beyond what he’s done before, forming a new chamber, a new level of mastery, of skill.

In the theoretical world, if a nautilus were to continue growing years and years past its natural life, its shell would cover the whole beach, then acres, then counties, then continents. That’s because of the mathematical pattern of growth of the nautilus (and many other spirals in nature).

 

“… the chambers will be similarly shaped but larger,” writes Trudi Garland in Fascinating Fibonaccis: Mystery and Magic in Numbers. “Each time this happens, the living nautilus moves into new, familiar, but roomier quarters, where it lives comfortably until the process needs to be repeated.”

Nautilus growth (and, I believe, artistic growth) follows the so-called “Fibonacci sequence,” a series of numbers that grows ever larger as each new number is the sum of the previous two.

The first 12 numbers in the Fibonacci sequence:

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144 …

(1+1=2 … 1+2=3 … 3+2=5 … 5+3=8, etc.)

Because of their cumulative nature, Fibonacci numbers become giants in fairly short order.

… 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181, 6765, 10946 …

One second you’re looking at 1+1=2, the next second you’re at 10946 + 6765 = 17711.

For hundreds of years, students of science and mathematics have noted that the sequence mirrors growth patterns in nature. As a teacher, I have often felt the sequence also reflects how we learn. That is, how we learn when we’re fully engaged in a given domain, like, say, writing and storycraft.                 

Some reporters, like my friend with the World War II vets, are nautiluses, programmed to take what they’ve done and learned into the next chamber of growth, then the next, and the next and the next.

Others are clams.

Nice clams. Competent clams. Maybe even big clams.

But they will never push beyond the limits their shells have imposed on them. Why? Personality? Nurture? Nature? Who knows, really? It’s just how it is, the way of the sea.