Sea Shells

 

     Who as a child did not prize among treasured possessions a collection of sea shells?  Many were souvenirs, gathered along the shore during vacations, others may have been gifts or curio shop purchases.  Many of us were undiscriminating; while fancying the novel and colorful, we prized ordinary specimens hardly less.  We may have in fact been developing a subtler taste.  A receptive eye will find magic in every broken sand dollar!  Somehow a good many conch shells had been carried far from the Caribbean; those that had escaped the indignity of being made into lamps could be used for the meditative purpose of “hearing the ocean.”  Wordsworth, receptive always to commonplace profundities, describes a “curious child” listening to a shell and experiencing thereby a “Mysterious union with his native sea.” As if this were not enough, he explicates: “Even in such a shell the Universe itself/ Is to the ear of Faith.” [1]

     But that calming mantra proceeding from the pink and pearly threshold of the conch’s extraordinary home is hardly the only appeal of shells.   A handful of commonplace shells, in a box in the back of a drawer, sitting amid a few grains of sand, can renew the wonder of an encounter with the immensities of the sea.  Though hard and calcareous, there is something in the unique opalescent cream-tones so common in malacological collections reminiscent of milk and semen and the bright heart of things. 

     Even to a child, shells might be in many ways instructive apart from their beauty.  I once collected a pailful of living Pacific mollusks and left them outside my motel door, expecting to play with them again as I had on the beach, but found the heap a sad and stinking mess of death the next day, a disturbing elemental revelation of mortality.  

     The wonder such objects inspire is evident not only in memories of childhood, but also in the earlier days of our species.  Large architectural shells have been fashioned into trumpets since palaeolithic times, though the details of their original uses must remain obscure.  We know, however, about Poseidon’s son Triton, usually represented as a merman, his lower half a fish, who, in his role as herald or messenger for Poseidon blew a large shell, perhaps a conch (though today the Charonia, a large sea snail, is commonly called Triton's trumpet).  After the flood that left only Deucalion and Pyrrha surviving, Triton manifests at Neptune’s behest to sound his shell-trumpet, and the waters only then take heed and begin to retreat.  According to Ovid Triton was draped “in purple shells,” and the fact is that the Murex snail’s shells were used to produce the very prestigious Tyrian purple dye, called also royal purple and Phoenician red. 

     Shell trumpets were in fact used in battle just as bugles are today. [2]  To the Greeks of Classical times, they already seemed a sign of a primitive people.  Thus in Euripedes [3] it is used by the backward Taurians, while Theocritus describes its use a Bebrycian in  Bithynia. [4]  In Vergil Misenus played his concha like a virtuoso and dared the gods to outdo him whereupon Triton threw him to the rocks to drown. [5]  Even in antiquity’s sunset, Nonnos tells us that Dionysos can be heard, blowing a shell trumpet amid troops of bacchantes and satyrs as he speeds into battle against the Indians. [6]The Indians would have recognized the consch as an emblem of Vishnu.  The Japanese similarly used shell trumpets, called jinkai, in war, as did the Aztecs who called theirs quiquiztli and many South Pacific peoples, including Fijians (davui), and Maoris (pūtātara). 

     War is not the only theater in which the dramatic sound of the shell trumpet plays a role.  Shell trumpets are used in in the Japanese Buddhist goma ritual of the Shingon and Shugendo sects.  In Polynesia, South America and the Caribbean, they have been used for calls to prayer, funerals, and in apotropaic rituals.  In Malta such instruments are called bronja or tronga and are used for less portentous occasions, blown to notify farmers that the windmills are operating and capable of grinding grain.  Today conch-blowing performers greet cruise passengers in the Marquesas and entertain the patrons of the Hyatt Regency in Honolulu.

      Sea shells may signify love as well as war.  The beauty of cowries is suggested by the fact that the word porcelain derives from the old Italian term for the animal (porcellana).  The lovely complementarity of the one side swelling outward in a smooth mound and the other side with its rippled vent, opening into an unseeable mystery, may have contributed to the shell’s acquisition of symbolic value through association with the female genitals, as attested by both the common name in ancient Rome concha veneris and the scientific subfamily today – Cypraeidae.   Native people in California’s Great Basin called the shells in their own language, “cunts” and prepared their dinner with a phallic mortar and a pestle bowl rimmed in cowries, considering their subsistence and thus their kitchenware hallowed as a gift of coyote. [7]  Today many New Age and African-oriented websites market cowries as a “fertility charm.” 

     Cowrie-shaped amulets are found in ancient Egypt, often in the form of belts or girdles worn about women’s waists, often along with other symbols of generation such as tattoos of Bes.  Cowries of pure gold that accompanied Princess Sithathoryunet to her tomb almost four thousand years ago contained metal balls that would tinkle as she moved, likely providing an apotropaic effect similar to that of the Roman phallic tintinnabulae.

     Perhaps the value acquired through these connotations played a role in the widespread use of cowries for money in Africa and Asia as well as ancient Egypt.  They have found myriad other uses as well, among them as aids in contacting the Orixás in New World settings reflecting Yoruba tradition, called búzios in the practice of Candomblé and Umbanda and in Santería called diloggún.  They are used in divination by the Kaniyar Panicker in Kerala, a group today designated a “backward tribe” by the government though their advanced academies of astrology, ayurvedic medicine, and philosophy gave them once the reputation of scholars.  Less magical uses include the control of livestock according to Plutarch [8]. 

     The story of the miraculous appearance of dew in Gideon’s fleece, taken as a type of the conception of Christ, led to the association of shells with the Virgin Mary.  This connection, prominent in the treatment of the Physiologus [9] associated shells with Mary and a pearl, like the dew Gideon saw, as a representation of the Incarnation.  The round and perfect pearl, according to the second century writer, “removes the uncleanness of the sea” as Christ forgives sin.  In addition the author says that the two shells of a bivalve signify the two Testaments.  Supported by other church fathers [10] and by the continuing popularity of various versions of the Physiologus, shells found their way into religious iconography in paintings by Piero della Francesca and others.  In the dome of Pisa’s cathedral an annunciation scene includes a shell and pearl and the legend rore coelesti foecundor (“heaven’s dew will make me fruitful”). 

     Because of their habitats not far from Santiago de Campostela, scallop shells were one of the first popular souvenirs.  Symbolic of pilgrimage, they are today visible as icons on signs along the route today.   Such shells were also used in baptism and included in the design of baptismal fonts long after they were no longer used. 

     Those if us of a certain age encountered in school a more generally spiritual metaphor in Holmes’ “The Chambered Nautilus,” while Tennyson found a shell a “miracle” of beauty though he felt he had to ornament the natural object with fanciful images.

 

Did he stand at the diamond door           

Of his house in a rainbow frill?   

Did he push, when he was uncurl’d,        

A golden foot or a fairy horn       

Thro’ his dim water-world?  [11]

  

     Material facts determine in part the fascination of sea shells.  These mollusks and other creatures occupy our world, but in a dimension most people never enter.  A cliché of scuba divers likens their experiences to those of astronauts in space (including virtual weightlessness), but the land beneath the sea is busy with a myriad strange animals.  Vertebrates share a common body structure; the bones of mice and men very nearly match, and even insects and fish have predictable body parts, but submarine life seems freed from all prescriptions, capable of taking practically any shape: sea stars, octopus, sea horse, jellyfish, coral.   Animals like bivalves have, perhaps fortunately for the diner who likes them on the half-shell, no identifiable organs.  Apart from its viscous softness and vulnerability, little sign of its life reaches us.  Once seized from their home, shellfish become mute and stubbornly unwilling to reveal their secrets with the fortunate exception of their subtle and ravishing flavor.   

     During the hyperaesthetic Heian period in Japan when aristocrats enjoyed poetry improvisation competitions called uto-amare, a game developed called e-awase in which the players painted small pictures in clam shells on assigned topics.  In its later Kamakura form kai-awase the shells were prepainted and the object of the game was to find matching pairs (called male and female) in a set of three hundred and sixty painted shells.  Today many such shells available in tourist shops are decorated with decals rather than painted and the actual game is seldom played.

       A shell is by definition a concealment, hiding a mystery within.  If its contents remain incognito, what one may see provides a marvelous distraction.  Some shells have intricate sculptural reliefs like angel-wings or painted patterns like even the humble cockle.  The channeled duck clam is often pure white and features the most delicate and tasteful minimalist lines, while the sundial snail (scientific name is the grand Architectonica perspectiva) seen from above resembles not so much a garden timekeeper as a cosmic whorl, an image of the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang. 

     The creatures of the sea approach us as well through smell and taste as they are perhaps the most delectable of human foods for those willing to eat flesh.  The saline taste of the ocean enhances the full and rounded sweetness of clams and of oysters, at once so rich and so austere.  Mussels are a more frugal delight, their orange-pink bodies savory and fine, their broth little short of elixir.  Once, in a Seattle restaurant, I ordered scallops on the half-shell and discovered that rare thing, a new pleasure, with little in common with the abductor muscles labeled scallops in the supermarket 

      Looking at shells is like looking through a telescope at stars or through a microscope at a cell or exploring the interior of the body or the cryptic chambers of the mind.  If these creatures can inspire people to war, to bed, to the table and to church, they thereby associate themselves with the most significant realms of human desire.  Still, if they inspire some to poetry, they send others off for an afternoon nap.  A graceful note in a Renaissance painting or a kitschy ashtray.  They provide a glimpse into a new world, utterly foreign to everyday experience yet drawing the eye with irresistible beauty.  The student of sea shells, like the diner facing a plate of clams and oysters, will in the end find an intimate relevance to human life in these elegant and exotic animals. 

 

    

 

1.  “The Sea Shell.”

2.  The battle trumpet of the ancient Hebrew-speaking people was, of course, no shell at all, but a horn, the shofar.  See, for instance, Judges 6:34 or Joshua 6:4-20.

 

3.  Iphigenia in Tauris. 303.  Ares wields a shell trumpet according to Lycophron.

 

4.  Idyll 22, l. 75.  Bithyina is also a genus of snails.

 

5.  Aeneid 6.171ff

 

6.  Dionysiaca 17.93-94.

 

7.  Henry Koerper, “Cowry Shells: Fertility/Fecundity Symbols In Southern California Iconography,” Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology Vol. 23, No. 1.

 

8.  Table-Talk, 7.8, 713B.

 

9.  XXIV.

 

10.  Isidore, for instance, says that pearls are conceived by means of celestial (caelestis) dew

(Etymologies 12.6).  See also Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Efrem the Syrian.

 

11.  “The Shell” in Maud I.

Misunderstandings of Travel [Waugh, Byron, Chatwin]

 

 

     Incidents of my own experience which are illustrative of the general principle here may be found inter alia in the following posts: “Hitchhiking in Algeria” (September 2010), “A Reading in Kathmandu” (November 2009), “Vignettes of Sunny Nigeria” (March 2011), “Festival in Ogwa” [Nigeria](January 2011), “Sacred Space as Sideshow” [Prague] (February 2010).

 

 

     The fine savor of travel often involves the pleasant acquisition of new knowledge.  Away from home one cannot avoid learning about other people’s history, art, cuisine, politics, and taste, in short, the wide variety of ways to be human.  All travel encourages receptive senses, even a stroll around the town next door, but the further afield one wanders, the wider one’s eyes are likely to open, and the more new data the traveler will process. 

     There is no smooth transition from naivete to cosmopolitan sophistication.  The traveler is in the position of a small child and feels a similar exhilaration and frustration born of occupying a world largely mysterious, learning daily, but with codes only sketchily known, A necessary concomitant of spending time in such realms of half-knowledge, of speculation and outright mystery, is that a good share of one’s conclusions prove more or less wrong, while others can never be satisfactorily tested and must remain hypothetical, and a good share of the world remains cryptic.  

     With or without guides and translators, the strangeness of being in strange places is enhanced by confusion over customs and values and most of all by imperfect mastery of other languages on the part of both foreigner and native.  This lack of understanding magnifies the irreducible distance between one consciousness and another.  The tolerance and acceptance a drifter must adopt when stranded in a tropical village where the road ends are perhaps the basis for the only workable attitude toward life, considering that everyone is always dealing with insufficient information.  Submission is sometimes all that one has. 

     Whereas earlier travel writers had emphasized the picturesque or the sublime in landscape or dramatic history or exotic in folkways, the great twentieth century English travel writers – Evelyn Waugh, Robert Byron, and Bruce Chatwin – excelled at capturing the absurd, the accidental, the inexplicable in the center of the everyday.  Each presents the persona of a well-meaning innocent, cast about by circumstances, observing unstable chains of cause and effect which seem puzzling, inscrutable, and generally faintly hostile.   One ordinarily thinks of traveler’s enlightenment arising due to new information, the acquisition of which allows new insights about both others and one’s own habitual attitudes.  It not uncommonly happens that a complementary view will not supplant one’s preconception, but rather will come to seem equally true or will simply cast an experience as inexplicable. 

     A few examples may clarify this distinctly modern vision which focuses specifically on what is not seen, what is unknown.  Evelyn Waugh’s Labels (1930) describes a show he attended in Port Said, Egypt. 

 

Attendants were going about selling nuts, mineral waters, coffee, and hubble-bubbles . . . the doctor warned me that if I smoked one of these I would be bound to catch some frightful disease; I did so, however, without ill effects . . . we found ourselves in the middle of a hugely popular comic turn: two Egyptians in European costume were doing cross-talk . . . It was, of course, wholly unintelligible to us; now and then they smacked each other, so I have no doubt it was very much the same as an English music hall turn . . . their place was taken by a very pretty little white girl in a ballet dress: she cannot have been more than ten or twelve years old; she danced a Charleston . . . Then there were some Japanese jugglers, and then an interminable comic turn done by the whole company . . . After this a Negro of magnificent physique appeared.  First he thrust a dozen or so knitting-needles through his cheeks . . . It was while he was doing this that a fight began . . . The man on my right, a grave Egyptian with a knowledge of English, with whom I had had some conversation, suddenly stood up, and leaning across all three of us, struck down with his umbrella a resounding blow on top of one of the fighting heads . . . “What is the fight about –” I asked him.  “Fight?” he said, “Who has been fighting?”

 

The opening act of Egyptians mimicking Europeans suggests an unbridged cultural divide, yet the rest of the vaudeville seems ambitiously transnational, the sort of broad entertainment that might amuse anyone anywhere.  But just as the spectacle seems intelligible, the fight and then its resolution both occur without the slightest cause.  Then the “grave Egyptian” denies that it occurred at all.  Waugh (and his reader) can only look on in bemusement, murmuring perhaps with Puck “What fools these mortals be!” 

     There are multifarious trail-heads through the semantic field of unknowing in this incident.  Waugh, for instance, mentions his use of a public water-pipe in spite of being warned by a doctor.  He does not apparently even consider if the advice may be sound, or what the threatened disease may be, except that it is likely to be “frightful.”  Here the foreign setting allows Waugh to express the feeling many have, even in a semi-scientific society, that health is a matter of fate.  One hazards on forward until felled.  And by surviving unharmed to tell his story, the author becomes a sort of comic hero, turning the tragic emotions of pity and fear on their heads as all is well for the moment at any rate.  The reader feels blessed like the impetuous traveler and can reflect with some composure on that strange scene, the ever-varied procession  of humanity. 

     In The Road to Oxiana Robert Byron describes a Turkoman encampment in northern Afghanistan.  As the men are working somewhere else, the women all flee, while their dogs attack.  Once the dogs are subdued, the following scene occurs.

 

 I approached a mother and two children.  They fled into a kibitka, and I turned to a younger woman of magnificent carriage who was clasping a baby.  Placing it behind a wattle screen, she grabbed a pole, traced a circle in the dust in front of it, and came at me like a mediaeval knight.  Her face was screwed up with anger, and there was something in the tone of her denunciations that made me uncomfortable, as if I had been meanly taking advantage of her man’s absence.  The two old witches chuckled at the scene.  But our guard, a new one who had joined us at Andkhoi, was ashamed, and said that Afghanistan was like that.  He had on a sophisticated Western mackintosh, and was always taking snuff from a silver-mounted gourd with a ruby on its lip.

 

     The reader relishes Byron’s image of the lady of stately mien delicately setting her infant “behind a wattle screen” that she might free her limbs to express herself, undeterred by the fact that she is not understood.  He reacts with the lovely understatement of the faux innocent observer, saying he senses a subtle “something” in her “tone’ that made him “uncomfortable” when she is charging like a knight, apparently raging and hopping in hostility.

     The guide introduces another twist.  In contrast to the woman’s wary defensiveness before an outsider he is a slavish adherent of his partial and distorted notion of European ways.  One would, I think, have to look a long time in London before spotting another such rubied snuff-box even among the dandies.  He is like the cartoon savage in a loincloth and a top hat.  If this individual is not as world-wise as he may fancy himself, the reader may naturally turn to questioning the admittedly shaky authority of the writer, perhaps even of his own vision.

     In Byron’s anecdote the narrator, his guide, and most of the women in the camp are uneasy, cautious and defensive, unsure what their encounter may.  One might well understand Byron’s uncertainty about how to behave in an unfamiliar situation, the general anxiety about the sudden appearance of a mysterious stranger, and Andkhoi’s distress at seeing his employers treated disrespectfully.  The most unaccountable actions are performed by the “woman with magnificent carriage” who is as well the only decisive individual on the scene.  Here is figured the unbridgeable gap that separates each consciousness from all others, regardless of culture.  Just why does Byron feel the discomfort he attributes to his in some sense “meanly taking advantage of her man’s absence”?  Is it in any way related to his appreciation of her figure?

     Bruce Chatwin‘s experience during a coup in Benin was nothing short of Kafkaesque.  After being swept off the street “for your own proper protection,” he is denounced as a mercenary by a corporal with bad breath.

 

     He held up my fountain pen.  “What?”

     “A pen,” I said.

     What for?”

     “To write with.”

     “A gun?”

     “Not a gun.”

     “Yes, a gun!”

    

His bad cop interrogator is then replaced by a comparatively urbane functionary who seeks to reassure his prisoner, saying “Calm yourself, monsieur.  You do not understand.  In his country one understands nothing,” before marching him back to his cell.  Eventually a sort of hearing on his case is held.

 

A young zealot started mouthing anti-capitalist formulae until he was silenced by the colonel in charge.  The colonel then asked a few perfunctory questions, wearily apologized for the inconvenience, signed my pass, and hoped I would continue to enjoy my holiday in the People’s Republic.

      Chatwin’s story may be read as a cautionary warning against the blindness induced by ideology.  The willful unknowing produced by the desire to toe the government line allows a man to see a fountain pen yet call it a gun.  Yet the man who releases hum seems to subscribe to the exact same way of thinking and yet casually releases him.  The reader is willing to believe that the writer might have been arbitrarily killed.  Why did things turn out as they did?  No one knows.  Would there be any difference at all between the putative Marxism of this ruling party and a Western-allied dictator, or a third who cultivates a simple cult of personality? 

     In each of these incidents the observer is European and the scene before him is distinctly Other (though the pattern occurs as well, of course, in the observations of cultivated non-European writers) [2].  This sets in motion a peculiar dialectic in which on the one hand the writer implies the ethnocentric notion that other cultures are inscrutable, ridiculous, or childish.  At the same time the attitude confesses parochial ignorance since every custom must have a reason.  The implications spread from that point indefinitely: one side is more rich and powerful, yet the other may possess some greater wisdom, the one is on home ground and thus secure, the visitor at a loss, and so on into the speculative night.   All this from some unexceptional not-knowing.

     But in the most general terms, the author in each of these scenes does not know what to make of the spectacle before his eyes, so what is the reader to think?  Chatwin’s persecutor perhaps could see a weapon in a fountain pen, but why did Waughs’s interlocutor say he saw no fight?  In order to more placidly enjoy his evening out?  In Byron’s story the same events cause the “old witches” to laugh, the young woman to rage in fury, and the writer to scratch his head.  Does a “real” meaning exist?

     The Pyrrhonic skeptics of late antiquity felt that they could make use of such uncertainty and achieve peace of mind through acknowledging their ignorance, leading first to silence, but then to serenity and perhaps even to pleasure. [1]  Followers of the meditative via negativa such as the pseudo-Dionysius and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing have conjured deity out of purest no-thought.   And Bloom would make mis-reading a source of creative change. 

     The twentieth century offered new renditions of this paradoxical enlightening darkness.  In Sartre’s Nausea (1938) Roquentin reflects on the roots of a chestnut tree.  His experience is confined to the present moment, and he concludes “faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence . . . That root with its color, shape, its congealed movement, was beneath all explanation.”  A few years later in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus provided another memorable illumination sparked by ignorance.

 

At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in the face of man' s own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this "nausea," as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd. Likewise the stranger who at certain seconds comes to meet us in a mirror, the familiar and yet alarming brother we encounter in our own photographs is also the absurd.

 

     This metaphysical occlusion of meaning is only the broadest initial reading of such misunderstandings of travel.  Whether such reflections are recorded in a journal or a book or whether they simply vanish like sparkles of sunlight on a stream, the trip will eventually end.  The traveler may then return with a livelier sense of the extent to which we all are finding our way about the darkness whether in our own home or in Timbuktu.  With the right spirit we can enjoy our bumbling as a kind of sport or gallant act in defiance of the unknown and make as much of our not-knowing as our knowing.  What more is there to travel?  What more to reading?  To life?

 

 

 

1.      1.  See Eusebius Praeparatio Evangelica, Book 14.

2.      2.  Recognizing the utility of the outside perspective, in the eighteenth century a series of books by Europeans in the pose of non-Europeans were published including Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721), Poullain de Saint-Foix’s Lettres d’une Turque à Paris (1730), d'Argens’ Lettres chinoises (1741), Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne (1747), Beckford’s Vathek, and Johnson’s Rasselas (1759).