Objet Trouvé II:
The Nautilus, Representation, Memory
I am standing in the middle of my childhood room, looking at the refuse of my past: posters of Tony Hawk and of Harry Potter, broken or half-broken gaming consoles, a TV so covered in Zumies stickers they seem to exceed the surface area of the TV itself, and then my two eyes land on the painting of this nautilus and its shell.
This nautilus, I say, but I haven’t told you yet which nautilus. Have you ever even seen a nautilus? And has it seen you? If you have seen the nautilus, and the nautilus has seen you, then you have looked into its pinhole eyes, those eyes that hold dead light from so long ago, the light of a different sea, and maybe you have felt, as I have, that you are looking into the eyes of time itself. This nautilus that I’m looking at, however, isn’t really a nautilus at all, at least not one that could look back at me. It’s a painting—although well executed, a mere representation—of not the nautilus itself but a cross-section of its most prized possession, its miraculous shell, its so-called Spira Mirabilis. And miraculously, in this synecdoche for the nautilus, I see something staring back at me. It’s not the light of a different ocean, or the nautilus (remember, there is no nautilus in this painting), but rather unexpectedly, the eyes of my father. In this many-chambered, nacre-coated shell, I see the eyes of my father, looking back at me, as if he were in the room with me—standing in the doorway, perhaps, waking me up for school.
The nautilus shell stands in for the nautilus and also for the eyes of my father, gazing back at me, from somewhere beyond time. And why is that? Out of all the objects in my room—all of which bear some kind of connection to my father—why do I only see him in this painting of the nautilus shell? After all, it was my father who bought me my first skateboard, who bought me my first Tony Hawk video game, my first Harry Potter book, put all those gaming consoles on his credit card. It was my father who, after buying me that skateboard (and many others after that), stuffed all those free Zumies stickers in his pocket for me, who regretted doing so after he found not only my TV covered in stickers but his TV, too. In other words, why do I see my father in the nautilus and not say, the Tony Hawk poster?
For my sixth birthday my father gave me two things: the nautilus shell painting and, even more generously, one half of a real nautilus shell. I treated these objects—and the shell itself—like they were sacred, cultic objects of the sort found in a cista mystica; if I only gazed at them long enough, they would reveal their mystery, and to an extent, they have, although not in the way I expected. My father’s greatest legacy was his love of the sea, and of the strange invertebrates that called the sea home—the nautilus in particular was a favorite of his. It’s not that these other objects, such as the posters or the stickers, don’t have the same resonances for me, it’s that they have no life beyond my childhood room. The nautilus is no mere Proustian madeleine—it has a life and eyes of its own. Since my father passed away, I no longer see the nautilus shell the same way; what was once simply a synecdoche for the whole nautilus is now a metonym for a larger whole, not just my father but memory, too, and the way we read the objects of memory. Miraculously, when I look at the nautilus, there are not two but four eyes staring back at me.