On shells

On a recent trip to the beach, I picked up shells. Who doesn’t, but I’m wondering why. A friend had recently gone to the beach as well, and she wanted to show me her shells. Certainly, some shells are dramatic with spectacular spots or striping, unusual forms and sizes, they are small sculptures done by mother nature in her never-ending variety of surprising and exciting lifeforms. Yet, in spite of all that variety and beauty, most of us have been to the beach before and have see a good variety of shells. In fact, most of the shells you find look a lot like what was left over from your seafood feast the night before: clams, mussels, barnacles, razors, crabs. People do, however, pick up a lot of shells and transport them to their homes away from the sea. They clean them, put them in jars of varying shapes, and them decorate their bathrooms with the full jars. The shells become a reminder of good times, vacations, excursions that ended up at the beach. The shell becomes a synecdoche for the sea, representing all the water, salt, sand, birds, fish, and people that inhabit the beach. The shell, however, may be more than that. In Spain, at least, the shell is a symbol of Christian pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Humans seem to have a strange fascination for shells which goes beyond reason or any kind of empirical thought. The aesthetics of the shell take it beyond the realm of simple human admiration and push it into the realm of fantasy and imagination as if the shell had some sort of supernatural power to mean or be or act as a simple sign. Shells are what is left after the animal has died. In a way, the shell symbolizes both life and death, a natural Janus mask signifying light and dark, life and death, regeneration and decay. As the shells grind down in the waves, they break, eventually grinding back down into the primordial dust from which they were originally made by the humble mollusk that built the shell as his/her home. What makes shells so interesting is their durability, their art, the very conundrum of a relatively simple life form building an extremely complex structure that is the shell, whatever its shape. People use them to create pop artwork kitsch of the worst kind thinking that they can improve on what mother nature has already done. There is no accounting for taste in such matters. Anyway, at some point an archeologist from the future will find a bunch of strange salt water shells inland, about a thousand miles from the nearest salty sea, and wonder who or what brought them there, thinking many of the same things I’m thinking about tonight, and wondering, finally, why the shell is such a potent object for collectors, and why such a strange fetish.