Outer Reaches of the Palindrome Page: 42
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implodes and subdivides further and further and further. So, apparently, infinity is explosive and
implosive simultaneously? At this point, all that language is good for is to say, "Wow," which is,
indeed, a palindrome.
For sure, the spiral has influenced the human mind. Perhaps people of the Magdalenian
epoch at least twenty thousand years ago felt the allusion to infinity when they adorned
themselves with shells.59 And we assume that the impressive and precise architecture and
sculpture of ancient Greece was copied from nature. According to Cook, "... whether the ancient
Greeks used a shell or not in making their designs, it is very significant that the beauty of their
workmanship should exhibit so curious a harmony with the lines of an organic growth that are
nearly, but not quite, the curves of a mathematical spiral."60 I believe the spiral has instructed
humans because they are part of us ... or maybe we are a part of them. Whatever the case may
be, the deep and difficult problems of spiral growth touch on fundamental laws that regulate the
world and the tendencies that instinctively influence the art of humans.61 I don't think that notion
is too abstract- the notion of the spiral instructing humans through nature. The spiral is a
primary structural dynamic. According to Cook, "It is, in fact, almost possible to catalogue the
forms of the spiral utilized by man, in rifles, in staircases, in tunnels, in corkscrews, or a hundred
other ways, and to parallel nearly every one in natural formations."62
We humans have a long built relationship with recursive forms. They are evident in
grammar and language, art and music, in the geometry of physical living and non-living entities
from micro-organisms to stellar bodies, and psychology. Just as the universal structure found in
Campbell's "hero myth" seems to surface from deep within the mind, from generation upon
generation of collective human experience, so do other principles of recursion, such as the
timeless spiral and the ancient literary form of the palindrome. I believe that these essential42
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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/m1/45/: accessed May 22, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .