The Spiral Walks
A Very Thin Line

In attempting this soft-shoe dance, I’ve taken an odd sort of comfort in the figure of the spiral, which seems to represent my fear, my desire for control, and the means of escaping them both. Lately, I’ve seen spirals everywhere. There’s this jacket by STORY mfg.; these Marine Serre t-shirts; Paloma Wool knits and sandals; purses by Kiko Kostadinov and Medea; Thierry Mugler’s spiral cut denim. There are spiral charms on bras, necklaces, dresses, and skirts in Chopova Lowena’s SS21 and FW21 collections. Tie-dye is back, as if it ever left. Marco Ribeiro, the Brazilian designer known for his exaggerated round shapes, told ODDA Magazine in November that he has become “super intrigued by spirals.” Before the pandemic, he and Argentine photographer Naguel Rivero shot a series of Robeiro’s “big circle looks” on the streets of Paris. “Then in lockdown,” Ribeiro told ODDA, “I ended up drawing a spiral over the images in black paint. It gave the pictures a new meaning. I think the spiral will be my new circle.”

Spiral prints confuse the eye, obscuring the body beneath it. But somehow a spiral can reveal the body, too. Madeleine Vionnet, the revolutionary French designer who dressed Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, and Greta Garbo, approached garment construction like a ceramicist throwing clay: draping a half-scale mannequin on a rotating piano stool. Cutting her fabrics diagonally across weft and warp, Vionnet circumvented the rigid structure of the grid; her dresses followed the shape of a woman’s body, instead of attempting to shape it. The bias cut—Vionnet’s enduring gift to couture—allowed for expansion and contraction, for tightening and loosening, for movement and curvature.

A circle closes a loop; a spiral does not. It remains open, meandering on or upward. Ribeiro associates the spiral with “growth, change, movement, and progression.” Likewise, Hegelians speak of the dialectic as an ascending spiral: history turning inward and back on itself, seeing old concepts in terms of the new and—in turn—incorporating a novel picture of the old into the novel. For several ancient cultures, the spiral represented the life cycle, fertility, and rebirth. The spiral resists stasis, inviting us to traverse it, with our eyes or our bodies.

But then, of course, we might get lost. Maturation and progress are not its only currents. We also spiral out of control; downward, inward. When we hear a friend is “spiraling,” that’s almost never a good sign. The spiral sweeps you up and spits you out. It involves disorientation, hypnotic placidity, even constriction, control, and capture: a predator circling its prey.

In February, KSL-TV in Utah reported a massive spike in visitors to the Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson’s extraordinary 1970 earthwork. Located off Rozel Point in the northern arm of the Great Salt Lake, the jetty’s popularity surged in March of last year. “There was a big increase in visitors during the pandemic, but the uptick has continued,” said Kelly Kivland, one of the curators who oversees the site, “People are still heading out into the expanse of the land.”

The 1500-foot jetty is composed of 6,650 tons of displaced basalt rocks, a straight line of earth that juts out from the shore, and then curls around itself, counterclockwise, into a carefully controlled spiral. From a distance, it resembles a great black fiddlehead, a natural form in an unnatural place. Smithson chose the site for its severity and aloneness—a wasteland—and for the salt-eating bacteria that gave the water’s surface a pinkish hue. “I’m interested in that area of terror between man and land,” he said.

Smithson thought visitors ought to walk the Spiral Jetty in both centripetal and centrifugal directions: see the same thing, over and over, from slightly different angles. In an essay accompanying the work, Smithson provides a list of compass directions—sixteen quarter winds plus the four cardinal winds—and reports the physical world a person encounters at each turn. Every entry is the same: Mud, salt crystals, rock, water; Mud, salt crystals, rock, water.

The artist intended for time and entropy to change the work, threaten its coherence. Smithson constructed it during a drought, expecting the water level to rise and fall, sometimes obscuring the jetty. But those fluctuations have become less frequent; the work is almost always exposed now, an ephemeral thing made less so by climate change. Originally a monument to its own inevitable ruin, the jetty’s permanence prefigures the ruin of everything else.

Spirals are ubiquitous in nature: galaxies, fingerprints, seashells, and vine tendrils. They constitute the building blocks of human life (DNA) and the superstorms that increasingly imperil it. The most common spiral in nature, spira mirabilis—Latin for “miraculous spiral”—is logarithmic; the distance between its turns increases in geometric progression, by a constant variable. Thus, spira mirabilis is “self-similar,” retaining its shape at any scale. In nature, this quality enables efficiency (think of a mollusk expanding in its shell), the parsimonious use of space and energy. Hawks approach their prey, and insects a light source, in a roughly logarithmic swirl. The “golden spiral” is a logarithmic spiral whose growth factor is φ, the golden ratio. Artists, architects, and mathematicians have marveled at its elegance. Vionnet used the golden mean in her dress designs, Salvador Dalí in his late religious paintings. Such forms, said Le Corbusier, have “rhythms apparent to the eye.”

Smithson’s spiral is an Archimedean spiral: its curves are equidistant from each other. This form, as described by its ancient Greek namesake, is the product of a stable dual movement through time: around and away from the center. In other words—less precise but more vivid—imagine an ant walking at a steady pace along the smoothly rotating second hand of a clock; a stripe drawn on the clockface by the ant’s rotating body would form an Archimedean spiral. Smithson once said, “Time turns metaphors into things.” The spiral thingifies time.

There’s a simple enough explanation for heightened pandemic-era interest in Spiral Jetty: people had time to kill, and everything else was closed. But I suspect there’s more to it. In a wonderful 2017 essay, Heidi Julavits writes about a visit to the jetty with her family, a journey prompted by, and suffused with, anxiety about her kids—“the crows,” she calls them, with motherly derision—and their future on a dying planet. (“Will there be internet?” the crows ask.) “I’ve wondered: Are they enough into their future annihilation?” Julavits writes. “Basically, I wanted the crows to be more regularly scared.”

Indeed, the spiral can be a pathway to dread. The artist Louise Bourgeois, who made constant use of spirals, corkscrews, and helical shapes in her work, understood its diverse casts. She writes of the spiral as “an attempt at controlling the chaos.” It mattered to Bourgeois where you placed yourself: the periphery, or the vortex? Spinning outward, there is a promise of escape; spinning inward, “a retreating, a compacting to the point of disappearance.” (The new Saw movie, starring Chris Rock, is also called Spiral, but I’ve decided it is beyond my remit to find out why.)

The novelist and critic Jane Alison argues that certain stories have a spiral shape. “A spiraling narrative could be a helix winding downward—into a character’s soul, or deep into the past—or it might wind upward, around and around to a future,” Alison writes. “Near repetitions, but moving onward.” The form is common to memoir. The narrator, preoccupied—or, as Alison suggests, “haunted”—by her history, “turns around and around in her hands the most potent moments of her past, gazing at repeating patterns and shapes as she spins.” Alison cites Jamaica Kincaid’s Mr. Potter. As the narrator tells the story of her dead father, she “appears insistently, pulling in strands of story, spinning and weaving those strands to cloth, twining that cloth about herself.”

The spiral story—a delicate task of filature—is composed of many threads. It has a center, but the center isn’t fixed; its meaning and location change in relation to the materials swirling around it, tightening their grip.

For weeks now, I’ve puzzled over an anecdote published in Salvador Dalí’s autobiography in 1942. Dalí reports he was “savoring snails” in Sens when, in June 1938, Sigmund Freud arrived in Paris. Like many surrealists, Dalí idolized the founder of psychoanalysis, whose excavations of the unconscious nourished the surrealist wager: that irrationality was the moral answer to the death toll of modern reason.

Dalí was desperate to meet him, having tried and failed to do so more than once. As Dalí and his friends rejoiced Freud’s arrival, the painter “uttered a loud cry.” Dalí continues: “I had just that instant discovered the morphological secret of Freud!” His “cranium,” Dalí asserted to his companions, “is a snail! His brain is in the form of a spiral—to be extracted with a needle!”

After recovering from its absurdity, I was struck by the story's precision. Juxtaposition was Dalí’s medium, his means of breaking the seal between dream logic and objectivity. And there is something spiral-like about Freud. The narrative of ourselves imposed by the superego — that tyrannical repository of the demands made on us by fathers, priests, and police (which can be summarized thusly: “Do as I say, not as I do.”) — is a straight line: monomaniacal, simplistic, un-reflectively self-critical, repressive, and cruel. The voice in our head says: you are this. And we experience a sense of existential peril at the possibility of being that instead. Against this despotic linearity, Freud counsels a pivot, an oscillation.

But then there is something else: Dalí’s anecdote—playful and epicurean in tone— omits, entirely, the foreboding context of the long-promised union. Paris is a layover; Freud and his family are fleeing Austria for London. Freud’s diary records the events leading to their exile in a series of startlingly terse entries. On March 13: “Anschluss with Germany.” On March 14: “Hitler in Vienna.” On March 22, the day his daughter was arrested and interrogated by Nazi police: “Anna at Gestapo.”

Amid this staccato drumbeat of trauma, what Dalí recalls is his own pleasure at a satisfaction long withheld. At the same time, he betrays an unconscious appreciation for the violence undergirding the encounter: an invocation of “morphology,” as Nazi race science plagues the continent; the Jewish man dehumanized as a mollusk, his insights to be “extracted” with a sharp, straight implement. As Dalí savors his escargot, he imagines his idol’s skull as a snail shell encasing a spiral brain that is his, at last, to consume: trapped, cooked, and seasoned on his plate. (It’s necessary to note that by this time, Dalí’s passing infatuation with Hitler was over. His lasting devotion to another fascist, Spain’s Francisco Franco, was just beginning.)

Perhaps, then, it is Dalí who has been circling Freud, like a hawk, through their many failed meetings in Vienna. But Freud is wily prey. When at last Dalí’s desire is consummated — in London; not Paris — the meeting is a disappointment. Freud remarks that “in classic paintings I look for the unconscious, but in your paintings I look for the conscious,” which Dalí heard as the criticism it almost certainly was.

Besides Dalí’s autobiography, there are two other artifacts of this tête-à-tête: a letter Freud wrote to their mutual friend Stefan Zweig, thanking him for the introduction and remarking on Dalí’s “undeniable technical mastery.” The other is a portrait sketch Dalí made of Freud during the meeting, which was “strongly influenced,” says Dalí, by his “discovery” of Freud’s gastropodal cranium and spiral brain. In the drawing, Freud wears round glasses concealing his eyes; his brow is heavy, severe, and lined. Above the brow, Freud’s smooth, hairless cranium bulges. There is no spiral, but Zweig was disturbed. “I never dared show it to Freud,” Zweig said, “because Dalí had prophetically shown death in his face.” A year later, Freud was dead.

A spiral can deceive us—a self-fulfilling prophecy given shape, expiring with the inaudible thunk of a foregone conclusion. We are tempted by the promise of infinity, but having travelled a dizzying distance, we find ourselves terribly near where we started. We should’ve known. Everywhere we look, the landscape is the same.

Dalí disturbs my sense of the spiral as an opening; his attraction to it conceals a violent delight. Bourgeois makes the same leap, recalling how, as a child, she would “turn and twist and wring” tapestries by the river, and then, later, dream of “wringing” the neck of her father’s mistress with the same motion. The spiral, says Bourgeois, “is a twist.” Perhaps we are adorning ourselves in spirals for precisely this ambivalent reason; their superficial calm contains, and conveys, a storm of violence within or below.

The spiral is not itself an escape—from dread, from pain or loss; it’s only a map of an absurd alternate route from A to B. Against the univocal superego, psychoanalysis was Freud’s gesture at another sort of story, occasioned by conversation rather than command. It requires overinterpretation: turning the material over and over in your hands, looking at the same thing again and again, from different angles, at different times, through different eyes. Other voices are coaxed out; we weave and envelop ourselves in these new threads. But not too tightly. We’re on guard against coiling ourselves into something ill-fitting. The circle doesn’t close, it turns around itself again. There is give.

Sam Adler-Bell is a freelance writer in Brooklyn. He co-hosts the Dissent magazine podcast, “Know Your Enemy.”