I. The New Year
At the moment of its birth, the snail is cursed with a shell that needs to be built. At first, the shell is soft like new jelly, and the newborn, instinctively craving calcium to make it hard and protective, eats its own egg. In this way, its old home becomes its new home, which is a comfort, and mitigates the violence of being born. But the snail has also been born into the condition of being ravenous, and from this it will never recover. Even fully grown, the snail will constantly search for calcium-rich environments to scavenge, slowly scraping its radula over ground and rock to sustain its home. To carry one’s home, one’s shell, is to be tied to unquenchable desire. This is what the full-grown snail comes to know, and this is what makes it weary as it retires in the twilight hours of the garden.
The weary snail longs, sometimes, to relinquish its home. Some do. Sometimes to mate, sometimes to scavenge, sometimes simply to walk, as scientists say, “in the nude,” a snail will leave its shell. Its silvery trails confess its wanderings, free of the purposiveness of wanting. This is why to consider the nautilus of the snail shell is to teeter on an abyss: where would you go if you were freed from desire—and would you give up your home to get there?
More often, though, the shell is not willingly abandoned but comes under siege. The shell can be cracked, broken, punctured, invaded, compromised, infected, made weak—by seagull beaks or human feet, by garden trowels or parasites or an ocean slowly dying. What the snail then learns is this: the shell is not an unwelcome burden but the material form that protects the intangible self. When the shell is under siege and the snail threatened, the soft body opens to the whole world and the whole world enters into the soft body. The self, the snail comes to know, is a delicate and breachable creation, made of desire and calcium,
