Outer Reaches of the Palindrome Page: 41
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What does the spiral imply? Is it implicitly and exclusively relevant to living things? To
the vital functions of living things? It is almost as if evolution upgrades living things gradually
through principles of spiral formation; however, the spiral is found in non-living things, too.
According to Cook, " ... it may be perfectly true that when a spiral formation is observable in
organic subjects, it may express in them the same results of stress or energy which are
observable in such lifeless or inorganic forms as the starry nebulae, the waterspout, or certain
forms of crystals."57 So the spiral is more than just something organic- it borders on universal as
a principle of growth and energy distribution. According to Cook:
... few facts are more significant than a similarity which may be proved to occur in things
that are apparently quite different; and they present a curious analogy with the theories of
the ultimate constitution of matter; indeed, it must always strike an unprejudiced observer
that there may be underlying all these cases the working of some still more mathematical
form, in that same spiral which seems naturally assumed both by growth in living
organisms and by energy in lifeless things, such as the nebula.58
I'm not the first person to write about spirals, but I doubt any student of the spiral can get
too much further than this point where language starts to fail. Once you start looking at things in
terms of similarities rather than differences, a feeling of connectedness arises. You observe
ubiquitous examples of spirals across the spectrum of the natural world, and you get back to
emotion, which was the "real" thing to begin with. It was the real measure. Because language is
limited. From any point on the Earth, take a pin and prick the sky with it. Magnify that point by
eighteen billion light years using the Hubble Telescope, and you get a picture of thousands of
fuzzy looking stars - but wait: they're not stars; they're tiny little spiral galaxies, going on for
what looks like "infinity." At the same time, every particle in those spiral galaxies infinitely41
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McConnell, Michael Constantine. Outer Reaches of the Palindrome, thesis, December 2003; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4407/m1/44/: accessed May 22, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .