Beach-Combing Journal: Key and Shield
Infinity and the Vestigial
Joseph Campbell: “Enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path.”
Solstice Eve. I came down from my new house: an unfamiliar way. (My habits disrupted, my broken gumboots gone in the skip— it felt like months since I’d set foot on the stones.) I could hear Piri barking, but I couldn’t see her. Dog-walkers passed by on the path, and fisherfolk set to sea from the boat ramp, but once the stretching runner in the distance left, I was the only person on the beach. The day was calm and clear, the sea glassy, the sun so hot I had to take my scarf and jumper off. (Autumn is the tempestuous season of Equinoctial gales; Wellington Winter is often still.)
I couldn’t decide where to go. For no real reason I went East, on past my usual turning place at the rocks, and there I saw this card-shaped number lying in the shadow of a stone outcrop, at the top of the wave-wet.
Translating it into Tarot terms, I knew it was Strength. Strength with the lemniscate over her garlanded head, like the Magician. I knew the number 8 was something else in the Thoth,1 but couldn’t remember what. (It’s Adjustment— Justice.)
(Strength = Managing the animal-self. Justice = Grappling with what’s right, the law. Taken together: self-control vs. external control.)
The lemniscate is what happens when you lay the figure 8 down on its side. Infinity.2 But this eight I’d found, the push-button eight, was more like stacked boxes, made in straight lines like chisel strokes, like a Roman numeral or a Viking rune.
(Only now, writing this, do I understand that it’s the digital number that holds all the other numbers inside itself, by blinking its lines on or off. I’m rusty at Wizard-thinking. Inspiration is sleeping with the seeds underground. I just keep putting one foot in front of the other.)
It has a full stop after it— for making time? And black marks on it which have survived the sea’s scouring, that I think are inky fingerprints.3
The angularity of the leaning number inside the square edges of the key made it hard to photograph. The slanting lines confuse the eye. Slant is like an error, like a wonky old building, like human script made by the right-handed, or like speed— as if the number is leaning forward into the future, whichever way you flip it.
I jumped the creek in my army boots, where my old gumboots would have let me wade. Up the bank I found this, something I’d usually leave behind, but it was such a good specimen, strong, clean—
It’s the shell of Scutus breviculus, the Rori / Shield Shell / Duck’s Bill Limpet: a black slug like a naked pāua, with this chunky shell buried in its back.
(The photos on iNaturalist seem to show that the shell can be completely hidden or revealed, whether at the will of the individual gastropod or varying slug to slug is unclear.)
The vestigial nature of the shell reminded me of another animal that most people know only by the beach-cast shell, not the creature: Spirula spirula, the Ram’s-horn Squid— itself a kind of vestige, the last twig of the genus Spirula.4
This wee squid carries its shell— chambered like that of a nautilus— inside its tail.
Armour once gained is not so easily shed; but it can be internalised, minimised, or repurposed.
Quick time, in the Circadian cycles of day / night (which my friend Philippa points out in her new book, Night Owls and Early Birds, are inherent in every life form on Earth, down to single-celled algae); the Moon’s time, that which the female body knows; the Sun’s cycle, which brings us here to the ebb of the year (with its counterbalancing high time-tide in the Northern Hemisphere); and that infinity-time in which evolution’s slow change wreaks transformation over millennia. (That infinity-time which we have cut loose from its moorings with the knife of the Anthropocene.)5
Roger visited. He was too tall for my house. He told me his technique for alleviating work tedium: when brought low by boredom and despair, he’d take up his pair of dice, and promise himself that if he rolled a double four, he could immediately quit. “It only works if you’re absolutely committed to going through with it, though.”
Then he’d roll the dice, not get a double four, and keep working, feeling better. (For the brief possibility of escape? For the illusion of power? For playing a little game? I don’t know.)
“What are the odds of a double four?” I said.
”One in thirty-six.”
After a while, I said “But… Why double four?”
Roger: “Because it was my age. Forty-four.”
Me: “That’s how old I’m turning in a few months.”6
My new house is like a terrarium. Plants drink light, spread their little sails. Midwinter’s clean light throws itself right through things, illuminating the inside of them.
I wrote all this about the key and the shield, then went out.
Later, evening, as one man dragged another— fitting on the pavement— roughly into the recovery position, yanking his arms and legs, rendering How do you call it? Les premiers secours, the emergency services person spoke into my ear, “Could you tell me the exact address?”
“Um, corner of Courtenay and Cambridge. Next to the Tasting Room. Outside the Champagneria.”
My eyes fell on a number. Brass eight on the pink door. “Number EIGHT Courtenay Place.”
(The Frenchman threw the drunk guy out of the bar, they scuffled, the drunk guy swung once, twice, three times, the Frenchman tripped the drunk guy, who fell and smacked his head. The young Frenchman was smoking, shaking, telling me it was his fault.7
Strength: someone sober wrestling with someone drunk— animal-self showing its face. Justice: the cops came before the ambulance.)
Afterwards— perfect new Moon and bright Venus hanging in the sky— I walked on to Freyberg, to hear the poets and see the Solstice ring-fire lit.
Due to mystical reasons (and / or perversity) Crowley swapped the order of the Major Arcana around.
Glasses. Breasts.
When I was drawing with ink I would leave similar marks on my own white keys.
There was a time when the chambered-shell cephalopods— ammonites and belemnites— ruled the ocean: the Jurassic and Cretaceous, a period of 135 million years.
Dr. Sea posted some graphs this morning— runaway climate change science— like a red thread freeing itself from the tangled skein of data, a red vine climbing for the light.
4 + 4 = 8
The police asked the Frenchman if he wanted to press assault charges, he said he didn’t. The ambos took the drunk guy, by now walking and talking— unintelligibly— off to hospital.
P.S. Roger tells me that he did quit- twice!- by rolling double fours
This is beautiful - and thanks for the shout-out, I loved how you wrapped the bleak news into such eloquent poetry. I wish I could give you a pair of my gumboots, I’m hoarding them now I’m a “farmer”. Arohanui 😍