The spirals of world-building
Shells, illusion, and the intimacy of our betrayal
I once came into possession of a stunning shell. Just after their youthful marriage, and before I existed, my parents honeymooned in The Exumas, a chain of islands in The Bahamas. It is here you will find the kind of clear, pale turquoise water appropriated for screensavers and stuck in the minds of daydreamers replaying fantasies of elsewhere. On the days when my parents weren’t flat out in bed because of traveler’s diarrhea, they roamed the wintry white beaches on Great Exuma, dragging their toes and digging their heels into softness, musing on how calcium carbonate mollusk shells could be pulverized into such velvet carpet.
One day, my mom came across a fully intact, discarded queen conch shell. Its healthy, interior pink glow shone out from its twisting pirouette of a structure which felt like the lightness of a spiral galaxy and yet surprised her with the substance of its weight when she lifted it from the sparkling sand.
Queen conchs are slow-growing, late-maturing gastropods who grow these whorling shells around their snailness over the course of two to three years. Beginning their lives strewn by their mothers across the shallow water behind reefs, they recline on ocean currents in an egg trail containing hundreds of thousands of their brethren. Drifting and bobbing, swaying and giggling near or on the surface of the water, the larvae finally drop down to the bottom after about a month of infant play. During this time, they have grown lobes, like long floppy bunny ears, starting with just two, soon doubling to four, and finally ratcheting up to six in total. The tiny swimmers use these lobes to navigate the waters like little flippers, but also to breathe and feed on microalgae. Before chemical cues in the water let them know it’s time to settle down, they stretch their lobes out, reaching across currents with expansion they will lose as they begin to grow their iconic shells. After a year, the young queen conch will resemble its elders, but at only about one inch in length will be a study in echoing miniatures. These invertebrates can live as long as twenty-five to thirty years which means that, by the time my mother came upon this half of a being, its soft snail inside having shriveled up and fallen out of its hardened self, the shell was approximately the same age as she was.
How strange to meet a being as gorgeous in its death as you currently are in life, my mother’s dark blond hair swimming over penetrating, pale turquoise eyes. How strange to circle around another’s journey with your own journey, to wrap a life with as much knowledge of what it is to be you as it had of itself, to hold remnants of a remembering unknown to you with a remembering that will become your own forgetting. And somehow, as there were not bans on bringing these shells home back then, the shell of this storied life—a story untold and ever-mysterious to me—traveled back home with her, through her days in ways I don’t know about, and then ended up in the back of my Subaru Forester journeying across the citied, then grassy, then wind-whipped, then blood-red dry, then salty earth as I made my first trip westward across the United States.
And then slowly, as it sat on different shelves in different apartments in various phases of my life, and just as slowly as it grew, this shell annihilated me—not by force, but by returning me to something I was never meant to carry. Its violence came not through any phantom intentions of its own, but through my imaginings of my mother’s life—and thus my own pre-being past—into and through the queen conch. Remembering through her remnants allowed me to cement something I believed about my parent’s relationship that unraveled decades later. Plato thought of beauty—of the sort this shell contained—as a kind of remembrance of the eternal, a momentary glimpse of what we once knew. Maybe that’s what the conch undid in me, why it ached in me without ever meaning anything to me—because it reminded me of a presence, because it authored a moment that felt truer than true. This remembering which was and was not my own served, as Ocean Vuong writes in The Emperor of Gladness, “to fill the present with the past, which meant that the cost of remembering anything, anything at all, is life itself. We murder ourselves…by remembering.” Indeed I surrendered to a past I hadn’t earned and I surrendered a world I never inhabited.
What kind of world was I building? In my self-chosen isolation from others, in my little quiet apartments where books came and went as honored guests, where light fell through windows with a thrusting injury violating the lord of silence, where my glances up from reading or writing or thinking broke the spell of meaning into unrecognizable pieces of second-guessing and ache, where my wrapping of self around my family’s past, my own past, other pasts now and in the past were an infinite murdering of a life I was terrified to build, nothing I said or chose or spoke or walked towards was a movement of building, no matter how small that might have been, even if it was just the teetering tower of a single life. I was a queen without her conch, spiraling out into space, skidding to a stop every time anything prompted movement.
If you have ever seen a queen conch move, it travels kind of like that—with a stuttering, jerky locomotion. It lifts its oversized home with its oversized foot, limping painfully along. Sometimes, when overturned and exposed to the sky, it reaches out its foot and flips itself gracefully back over. But, however awkward or loping its movement is, the queen conch is always spinning around a physicality that I was desperately avoiding, except in the ways that I could tidily control it. This strange existence in a world that is not the world—the cerebral looming over the physical—parallels a similar phenomenon many of us now find ourselves in where we live, indeed exist in, dual realities—online and offline—whose lines are increasingly blurred and where, as Jia Tolentino brilliantly describes in a recent article, reality threatens to “eat time.” In this thick distortion, which unfolded more mildly in my personal life—inheritance becoming artifact and mirror becoming phantom—reality is both dulled and obscured as it seems to become “illegible, as if language were a vessel with holes in the bottom and meaning was leaking all over the floor.” Tolentino continues: “I sometimes look up words after I write them: does “illegible” still mean too messy to read?”
In this world, spiraling around the real which exists out of time and yet is desperately bound to time, the news and events—intolerably distant and yet exceedingly distant nonetheless—wash over and over you like churning waves where each comes too quickly to avoid and leaves too quickly to catch a breath before the next barrels down, and that is before the waves grow and begin to collapse inward, sucking you under in disorientation and slamming you down in continual turbulence you are sure will never end. In this world, screens eat actual events eat reports of those events eat narratives constructed around those events eat the people involved in the physical world eat your living room and your dinner and your thoughts and your rationality. And finally you. False attacks real and real battles back at false until the only thing that is clear is that all is a bloody battlefield. In retreat, perhaps, you descend under the waves into “the purgatorial cognitive landfill of things that have not been fully absorbed or processed or fought against but have been pressed into reality, where they will remain as the fading backdrop of each day’s new, grotesque parade.” The sandy bottom where the larvae becomes the queen conch is this dark unknown where we huddle, our blurry vision distorting what could be real, what might be real, and yet always returns us to what feels most real—the deep blue swim where objects grow larger and distances close in on us and everything is just slightly out of focus.
When did we ever think we could understand everything? But we did, naively perhaps. And we thought we could take those understandings and build something, maybe even build something together that would be more than a spectacular spiraling shell for one. But now some of us—those of us with the means and the seeming privilege—hole up in glittering prisons and ache for contentment. And the rest of us who cannot afford them ache for that empty ache when we have real pains—in our backs, in our children falling behind, in our wallets, in the possibility for our futures. But all of us somehow, in our shells, kings and queens of a moment we don’t bother to make matter.
It’s all so slippery…even for the snails. Especially for the snails. Land snails secrete a slimy substance as they move. Beyond leaving behind a trail of mucus, snails use this mucin—full of proteins and vitamins and skin-plumping hyaluronic acid—to keep their delicate, pliable bodies hydrated and protected. Turns out what’s good for the soft, vulnerable small being is good for the soft, vulnerable large being…us. In the 1980s, Chilean farmers raising snails for the French escargot market found that their cuts were healing faster. Also, their hands were a lot softer than their friends harvesting grapes or plums. It wasn’t long before the cosmetics market took note. Now you can purchase a wide array of mucin-infused creams, serums, or masks. The beauty of process becomes the beauty of polish. Or delicacy.
And so we eat them out of house and home. But snails don’t build their shells the way we build houses. Their shells grow with them, as part of them, secreted in a whorl from their softness outward into an earned protective hardness. A snail’s shell is both architecture and autobiography. Their shell is not a facade but an echo. The illusion of something real in that conch shell I once held in my hands was indeed something real, just not something real to me. The illusion was something I both invited and authored—my own architecture and autobiography always an invention.
We live in many unrealities and have for millenia. That is nothing new. I exist in my moody, anxious child’s happy days, sinking into them with relief that feels utterly real, realer than my own life perhaps. We play loud music into the night, drowning out the space we may otherwise have to occupy with our imperfect bodies, letting rhythms and beats intensify feelings we may have had or just long to have had. An ancient rain dance. An LSD trip. Each and every story told around a fire or written onto pages and lived into as we read and dream and fear. So let’s not kid ourselves into believing that living in illusion is our time's brilliant and demonic innovation.
But there is an airless space between those iterations of unreality and ours. Where we once stretched through the unreal, we now shrink into it. Prior unrealities expanded and even dissolved the self, whereas the distortions and confusions of current reality—especially as modified or mitigated through our screens—contract our self deeper and tighter into our fragile and unironically echoing shells—where the structure itself allows for our dissociation. As Tolentino explains:
Fake images of real people, real images of fake people; fake stories about real things, real stories about fake things. Fake words creeping like kudzu into scientific papers and dating profiles and e-mails and text messages and news outlets and social feeds and job listings and job applications. Fake entities standing guard over chat boxes when we try to dispute a medical bill, waiting sphinxlike for us to crack the code that allows us to talk to a human. The words blur and the images blur and a permission structure is erected for us to detach from reality—first for a moment, then a day, a week, an election season, maybe a lifetime.
What kind of world are we building if we don’t even know what counts as real anymore?
We worry. Are we living in a world of simulacra—of beautiful shells mistaken for being? We watch and witness digital shells—social media profiles, avatars, AI chatbots, curated selves. Outer forms—aestheticized, disembodied—and yet strangely not detached from lived experience. They are lived experience. We are living and breathing each other, making music through the shell that can be blown like a horn—ancestral, hollow, but echoing someone else’s score. We are playing an already composed symphony, the notes chosen elsewhere, our place in the orchestra quickly positioned, then repositioned, perhaps removed, but seemingly at a whim.
The disorientation comes on suddenly. Your social media account is hacked. You send emails to the help desk staff. You receive autoreplies. You are told there was unauthorized access from another email. You are then instructed to login using this email and the new password. You explain again. You explain to no one. No one is listening, unless you believe the chatbots and the LLMs and the systems are listening. You cannot get to a person. You have friends and family report the abuse to the platform. Nothing. You contact local police, you file a report with the FTC. You check your account. There are posts warning about internet scams and also posts about Larry Bird. None of it makes sense. You keep reaching out. You are rejoined with links to help desk articles. You watch videos about how other people have regained access to their accounts. You research ways of getting the ear of someone at the company. You spend far more time trying to restore your account than you ever spent actually using your account. The stress is breaking you. You cannot seem to locate your own center. You have entered the dense cluster.
The airborne toxic event in White Noise consumes and confounds the community where Jack Gladney teaches Hitler studies at a small liberal arts college. Information is sought out with desperation and simultaneously completely mistrusted. DeLillo writes:
Small crowds collected around certain men. Here were the sources of information and rumor. One person worked in a chemical plant, another had overheard a remark, a third was related to a clerk in a state agency. True, false and other kinds of news radiated through the dormitory from these dense clusters.
Some interpret the novel as suggesting the toxic event echoes the white noise that has always been the background of their existence. The way we have ordered our lives through the shell of consumerism and externalities. The novel ends with the unexplained incident of the supermarket shelves being rearranged. It creates concern, even panic for the shoppers. Nothing is where it is supposed to go. Now they are left trying to understand the logic of this new pattern. Only the obvious remains obvious—the generic food left where it used to be. But as for the rest: “There is a sense of wandering now, an aimless and haunted mood, sweet-tempered people taken to the edge. They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal.”
Earlier in the novel, as Jack walks with his colleague Murray and they discuss how to face his impending death to be caused by the nebulous mass that has been identified in his body, Murray offers up various ways of handling Jack’s fear of death. At one point, as Jack repeatedly rejects Murray’s suggestions, Murray asks him: “What have you been trying to do all these years?” “Put myself under a spell, I guess,” Jack responds. This, it seems, is the detachment from reality that Tolentino finds herself falling into, seeking even. But why are we detaching? Detaching from what? Detaching from shells? It doesn’t make sense. There is something deeper at the core, a nebulous mass, a dense cluster…the betrayal. We have been betrayed, of that we are sure, but we aren’t sure by what. And so we are suspicious…of the news, of the government, of ‘them’ who seem out to do harm, of what she or he says is real, of yesterday and its contents, of each other, of our own remembering, of words we used to know the meanings of. We are not so thick as to confuse the shell for the living being, as to mistake the illusion of reality for reality, of the simulacra for the original. It is not that we don’t know what is real. It is not that we worry about living in the multiverse. It is that the variations are being pumped out top-down and the voices yelling from bottom up are such a mass, they become the new white noise. We aren’t lost in unreality so much as trying to bubble up from a cauldron of endless other realities, mixed with unrealities—a stew of humanity, each pop of heated stock claiming authority while the iron pot sits heavy and unrelenting, containing a shared experience we refuse to drink.
Recently, a researcher working at Anthropic suggested that perhaps 15% of chatbots might already be conscious. Anil Seth, a highly regarded thinker in the AI space, concludes that this notion is likely untrue. Why might we mistakenly conclude AI is conscious? He offers us three explanations: first, that we incorrectly equate intelligence with consciousness; second, we are stuck on the brain as computer analogy which wildly underestimates the embodiment of conscious experience; and, third, we are unaware of the many possible ways that consciousness might arise. Ultimately, though, whatever the state of chatbots or LLMs, we find ourselves in an ethical quandary where our subjective experiences themselves betray us. “Conscious-seeming AI can exploit our psychological vulnerabilities, distort our moral priorities, and—if we treat things that seem to have feelings as if they don’t (perhaps ignoring their pleas for help)—we risk brutalizing our minds.”
The illusion of aliveness is alluring, even when we know better. Technology, I would argue, just reveals the escape we have been engaging in for the whole of humanity—all of the time we have spent building vast civilizations, the time each parent spends in adoration of the blissful ignorance of a child, the ambitious desire to stand out and be remembered. We employ all of these techniques to avoid facing the fear situated at the heart of life.
David Brooks recently wrote about what he is calling “the most rejected generation.” The generation of young people now face tripling of applicants to the most selective colleges, summer internships competition where over 300,000 will be rejected for the most desirable positions, and a job market overlain by a vast and opaque system where you can apply for hundreds of jobs and never hear back from a single one. But it is not just the hypercompetitive or the privileged who face this endless sense of exclusion and negation. There is no need for me to explain to you the dating app experience where most reach-outs fizzle out while still online or receive no response in the first place, where ghosting has become so woven into our social interactions we are willing to forgive ourselves this ungracious loutish behavior, where even learning that needs to be in person like art classes can take place online. Ghosting, as the USA Today article notes, is “the ultimate ambiguity” and it is this ambiguity that seems to be the nebulous mass at the heart of the rejection and exclusion and betrayal we endlessly experience.
What kind of world can we build when we are part of the story’s structure and not its author? In a letter in response to Stephanie Burt’s article about the multiverse in literature and popular culture, Hugh Siegel writes about the phenomenon in the 60s of
Star Trek” devotees writing fan fiction, becoming “the storytellers themselves, publishing their own imagined adventures of the Enterprise crew in mimeographed zines that were shared through the mail and at fan conventions. These stories, built around a TV series that embraced the idea of parallel universes, represent a vibrant embodiment of the multiverse. Beyond creating new fictional worlds, they explored the one-way street of media production and consumption into an endless web of storytelling. Though the regular variations on classic franchises pumped out by studios like Marvel may be profitable, the full potential of the multiverse device lies not just in the unlimited dimensions available to its characters but in the sheer number of authors who can tell their stories.
My mom’s queen conch is, fittingly, back at her house. Somewhere. When I asked her about it the other day, she wasn’t sure where it was. Do I even have it? she asked me. While questioning himself about a deception he carried out upon his own mother, Hai, the main character in The Emperor of Gladness, exists in an unanswerable ambiguity about his own motives: “
Inside those wide white hours, he often asked himself why he had deceived his mother in the first place. In the end, there was no good answer—only the image of her face brightening when he told her he was going to heal the sick, the cancer-riddled, the broken, the maimed, by becoming a doctor. After Bà ngoai died, his mother’s light dimmed, and seeing her shriveled in the corner of the couch, her head down and lit blue by her Game Boy, playing endless Tetris day after day, her hair thinning, he figured he had to do something. You lose the dead as the earth takes them, but the living you still have a say in. And so he said it. And so he lied.
What if the say we thought we had in life is a phantom? All of us trying to author our lives, but for whom. Is anyone really listening? Is anyone here now reading this? When the structures where we used to author something together turned into ghosts, turned into the noxious cloud above our heads, reminiscent of something, but most likely something threatening, we became more deeply mired in pattern searching. And yet, this returned us to “the ancient problem” of believing there will be an answer in some remote place, in some corridor, under some staircare, or perhaps in a shell that you can fill with stories which will forever be lies, self-deceptions. No, not everything has been written, but yes, we are stuck in the disorder. If you zoom far enough out, it may look like order…but it also might remain as endless entropy. The shell merely holds emptiness, but I hold it nonetheless. In this gesture, I find a reality—present and absent, lived and relinquished—that spirals around my truths and stories while inhabiting the honest being that once was, echoing hope that I may also be.