Stairways to Heaven

I was listening to a choir ensemble sing American composer Randall Thompson's "Allelujia" on NPR's Performance Today. It's a haunting piece inspired by the destruction of WWII. This particular rendition was performed at Santa Fe's Loretto Chapel, which is perhaps most famous for its peculiar spiral staircase. The staircase is quite gorgeous, having two full turns. What's most remarkable is its lack of a center support and the fact that it was constructed by a "mysterious wayward carpenter" between 1877 and 1881 without nails or glue. A lovely story, though there are, or course, skeptics.

The spiral is perhaps a near universal mystic symbol and can be found in ruins and paleographs around the world - from Celtic stone carvings to swastika to paisley to kundalini to yin-yang to the cosmic egg and cadeucus. Many of them are astronomically associated, though to gaze into the heavens without the help of the Hubble, one would not find many spirals. In 1979, the spiral was revived by Starhawk and her version of goddess worship with the book The Spiral Dance. The ritual of the spiral dance involves a line of folks whose center turns on itself, resulting in a swirling double-spiral formation. I've never tried it, but it sounds great. The spiral is also a recurring motif in mathematical fractals, the Greek golden ratio or the Fibonacci sequence, a standard of mathematical/architechtural beauty. The conch shell is built on a golden ratio. The poet H.D. writes in "The Walls Do Not Fall" that "there is a spell, for instance, in every sea shell." A whole host of flowers and plants are governed by this principle, including the lotus. You may have gazed at the face of a sunflower or daisy and been mesmerized by its fibonacci-ness. This was a symbol of the Art Nouveau movement. The spiral nature of trees becomes readily apparent when they are struck by lightning. In the same way, bones sometimes fracture spirally. Of course, on the microscopic end of the spiral staircase, we have the DNA double helix, the 3 meter strand to be found in every cell.

The spiral is much maligned in language and culture. Geometic language tells us that we are orderly when we have our "ducks in a row" and things "squared away." Christianity is linear (the migration of the soul to heaven). Circles represent and often foster a communal, protective, and egalitarian atmosphere. Buddhism is in many ways circular. On the other hand, things may "spiral out of control" or we may undergo a spiral of self loathing or exaltation. The spiral appears as a will-less process of letting go, which is why, I suppose, it is associated with natural processes and the goddess. It is too large (or too small) for our feeble egos. We may think we are rendering our daily lives when we are really caught up in sweeping spirals of political, technological, and social consolidation and dissolution. Jose Luis Borges has said that history does not repeat itself circularly; rather, it spirals through time.