Spiral stairwells and screw conveyors

Existential Challenge of "The Other" (Part #9)

If the DNA pattern holds, however, why the spiral? How may the spiral and twist be of psychosocial significance in development of understanding -- in contrast with other intuitions, such as those regarding a simple, linear "Jacob's Ladder"?

A previous exploration (Potential Misuse of the Conveyor Metaphor: recognition of the circular dynamic essential to its appropriate operation, 2007) reviewed insights into the significance of the conveyor as a metaphor of development and notably of spiritual development, as specifically advocated by Ken Wilber (The Conveyor Belt. Ch. 9 of Integral Spirituality: a startling new role for religion in the modern and postmodern world, Shambhala, 2006). The section in that exploration on spiral staircases and screw conveyors (omitted from an abridged version of the paper published in the Journal of Futures Studies) is reproduced in this and the following section.

The process of "return" is seemingly absent from this form of conveyor. Interestingly the spiral staircase is one favoured adaptation of the mythical "ladder" of "spiritual development" to "heaven", notably as used by Karen Armstrong (The Spiral Staircase: my climb out of darkness, 2004) -- inspired by T S Eliot's poem Ash Wednesday (1930) and by Dante Alighieri 's Divine Comedy, especially the Purgatorio.

At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitful face of hope and of despair.
(from T S Eliot, Ash Wednesday)

In both the spiral staircase and the screw conveyor it is the "material" that moves, either of its own accord (as on the staircase) or as an effect on "static" material of a rotating screw. In this sense the conveyor rotates on its axis; its ends do not meet in any "tail-biting". In effect the conveyor then acts as a form of "timeless" standing wave; it is only the material that has a temporal experience. Curiously the spiral staircase is often used as an example of an architectural design that cannot be adequately communicated with words -- making the use of images (even gestures) essential to comprehension.

However Armstrong explores the challenging experience of a spiral staircase in her development "out of darkness" over time:

I am trying to describe an experience that has nothing whatever to do with words or ideas and is not amenable to the logic of grammar and neat sentences that put things into an order that makes sense... It is as though a comforting veil of illusion has been ripped away and you see the world without form, without significance, purposeless, blind, trivial, spiteful and ugly to the core. T S Eliot describes something similar in the third poem of Ash Wednesday. He is climbing a spiral staircase, a mythical image of the 'ascent' of the mind and heart to spiritual enlightenment. But At the first turning of the second stair he sees a shape twisted into the bannister, surrounded by vaporous, foetid air, and he is forced to struggle with the devil of the stairs. He leaves these convoluted forms behind, and at the next turning finds only darkness: Damp, jagged, like an old man's mouth drivelling, beyond repair. Or the toothed gullet of an aged shark, the underbelly of consciousness that lurks in the basement of our minds. (p. 75)

The figure on any such spiral staircase (given the parallel to the screw conveyor) is of course appropriately named as Screwtape by C S Lewis (The Screwtape Letters, 1942). As Armstrong later notes with regard to Eliot's poem:

There was a complete and satisfying 'fit' between my inner and outer worlds. The poem, with its quiet, haunting accuracy, perfectly expressed my own state, and endorsed it, showing that I had... somehow stumbled upon a truth about the human consciousness and the way men and women work.... In the very first poem of the sequence... the verse constantly turns upon itself in repetition of word, image and sound. Repeatedly the poet tells us, I do not hope to turn again, and yet throughout the poem, he is doing just that, slowly ascending to one insight after another. And even though he insists that he has abandoned hope, I felt paradoxically encouraged. (p 164-5)