Nautilus

Chapter 14: Nautilus

page 213: nothing so odd will do long. More about Nipponites here.

page 222: Motion pictures...have enhanced and altered our sense of what it is to be.  In Street by James Nares, each six-second pan of a New York scene is distended to two minutes. It may, writes J. Hoberman, "suggest an updated version of Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 Koyaanisqatsi...actually, it is quite the opposite." According to Nares himself, Street is intended "to give the dreamlike impression of floating through a city full of people frozen in time."

In 1926 Virginia Woolf wrote

[The moving pictures] become not more beautiful in the sense in which pictures are beautiful, but shall we call it (our vocabulary is miserably insufficient) more real, or real with a different reality from that which we perceive in daily life?...Watching the boat sail and the wave break, we have time to open our minds wide to beauty and register on top of it the queer sensation — this beauty will continue, and this beauty will flourish whether we behold it or not.

Roundhay Garden Scene, 1888.
This is fifteenth in a new series of notes and comments on chapters in The Book of Barely Imagined Beings. It appears around the time of the US publication, and adds to an earlier series that appeared around UK publication.

"It was unimaginable, but there it was"

Boulevard du Temple

In Chapter 14: Nautilus (page 218), I wrote:

the [photographic] image was not 'merely' memory or imagination...but to all appearances something real.

In The Information Peter Gleick writes:

The same year that Babbage published his essay, the artist and chemist Louis Daguerre in Paris perfected his means for capturing visual images on silver-coated plates. His English competitor William Fox Talbot, called this "the art of photogenic drawing, or of forming pictures and images of natural objects by means of solar light...By means of this contrivance" he wrote, "it is not the artist who makes the picture but the picture which makes itself." Now the images that fly before our eyes could be frozen, impressed upon substance, made permanent.
    By painting or drawing, an artist -- with skill, training and long labor -- reconstructs what the eye might see. By contrast, a daguerreotype is in some sense the thing itself -- the information, stored, in an instant. It was unimaginable, but there it was. The possibilities made the mind reel. Once storage began where would it stop?

Nautilus

Twenty-third in a series of notes and comments on The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Chapter 14: Nautilus

page 208: and time could exist. For a brief introduction to the nature of time as understood by a physicist see Ten things everyone should know about time by Sean Carroll. An artist's view at Refusal of Time.

page 211: deep time. My starting point is:

we need to spend a lot more time and psychic energy imagining not just life as we know in all its astonishing and disconcerting particularity, but also the stupendous beginnings of life on Earth during the Hadean, Archaean and Proterozoic eons. We will benefit from extended meditation on the forces that formed life, from the period when, for thousands of years, molten rock rained out of the sky onto an ocean of magma to the time, billions of years later, when the tides of the newly made seas – buffeted by a Moon much closer than it is today and an Earth rotating in just 18 hours – ebbed and flowed with stupendous force. We will be more alive if we envision the shallow warm pools where, perhaps, proto-life pieced itself together from the precursors of RNA, and apprehend the origins and development of photosynthesis. We will be enriched by re-imagining the Ediacarian biota, those multi-cellular enigmas of the pre-Cambrian silt which resembled quilted sacks, pizzas topped with triskelions or loofahs warped by a symmetry of gliding reflection. 

page 212: the Moon was closer. It's getting further away and both it and the Earth are slowing down:

Each day is becoming longer by about 1.7 milleseconds per century...[In the distant future, absent the explosion of the Sun], a day [would] last about 47 of our present days and the distance to the Moon [would] be 43 percent longer than today. At this point, Earth [would] spin about its axis at the same rate as the moon [orbited] the Earth — the pair [would] be tidally-locked: the moon [would] hover over the same point on Earth, rather as geostationary satellites do today.

page 213: For Nipponites, existence was one long bad hair day:

page 214: paper nautilus. Marianne Moore wrote this poem.

page 217: The images of the world created by a camera obscura flow.  See the solargraphs of Justin Quinell. 

page 220: Boulevard du Temple. A favourite aphorism of Chris Marker is this from George Steiner:

It is not the past that rules us—it is the image of the past.

page 221: David Octavius Hill. A caption for the photo from 'Time', one of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus in a version by Don Paterson:

Is the infinite life that our childhood awakened torn up by the roots and thrown into the grave?

500 million years, and a moment in time

Like the coelacanths, horseshoe crabs, tuatara lizards, sharks and crocodiles, today's nautiluses are all but indistinguishable from their distant fossilised ancestors [of 500 million years ago].

Exactly why some species survive unchanged is not clear, but it seems there is a price to pay. Living fossils have a very low "evolutionary fecundity": they may have lasted many millions of years, but at the same time they produce very few new species.

For decades, nautiluses seemed to fit this bill, but new research into their evolutionary history and behaviour has produced an unexpected turnaround. Rather than being the last holdouts of a static lineage, the nautiluses appear to be in the midst of an evolutionary adventure, diverisifying at a rate that hasn't been seen in their lineage since just after the extinction of the dinosaurs...

...[But] time is not on our side. The great survivors are facing their greatest challenge - humans. Caught for their shells, which are sold as souvenirs or turned into buttons, nautilus numbers are declining. One population in the Philippines has already been wiped out, and fleets of nautilus boats are now moving farther up the South China Sea...

-- from Nautilus: Chambers of secrets by Peter Ward of the University of Washington in Seattle.



[P.S. 2 June: see also Simple-minded nautilus reveals flash of memory]