[Gulls squawk in the distance, occasionally,
throughout.]
Porcelina: I’ll say this much – the chef here can cook a
filet of salmon.
Stumbleine: Fillet.
Porcelina: You mean stuff it? With what?
Stumbleine: No, fillet. F-I-L-L-E-T.
Not “filet.”
Porcelina: What?
Stumbleine: “Filet” is usually reserved for French
cuisine. Fillet – don’t groan at
me! Fillet is the more general term,
although the Americans tend to use them pretty interchangeably.
Porcelina: [Porcelina
sighs.] You’re a pain in the ass.
Stumbleine: That’s what little sisters are for.
Porcelina: Heh.
You still have to learn to let go of the handlebars and enjoy things
here. The handlebars, y’know? “Let
the waters kiss and transmutate these leaden grudges into gold.”
Stumbleine: I was born listless – restless. Always have been, always will be.
Porcelina: With the storm cloud over your head.
[Porcelina sits back in her chair and looks
around the small restaurant, sighing again before returning her gaze to her
half-finished plate.]
Porcelina: It’s because they’re from the North
Atlantic. They get them sent here fresh
from waters that are barely above freezing.
It neutralizes that funky fish taste.
Stumbleine: You think this little bloke knew he’d end up
filleted over wild rice and three different kinds of fried tomato slices next
to grilled asparagus?
Porcelina: Makes you wonder. I’d only take points off because he was
farm-raised, not properly caught out at sea.
Stumbleine: Fuck me; how can you tell?
Porcelina: It costs the skin and muscle some color and
makes the filet fattier.
Stumbleine: Fillet.
Also, really?
Porcelina: Hey, here’s one to spur your sense of
curiosity. In Mexico in September, it
rained fish.
Stumbleine: It what?
Porcelina: You heard me.
There have actually been more than a dozen recorded incidents of animals
raining from the sky in the last 150 years alone. Mostly it’s been small fish, but there have
also been tadpoles –
Stumbleine: Eww.
Porcelina: - spiders –
Stumbleine: Fuck that.
Porcelina: - and jellyfish.
Stumbleine: Right, jellyfish I could believe.
Porcelina: Because that’s a lot more logical than the
others…?
Stumbleine: No, because jellyfish are so
lightweight. They’re like 95% water
aren’t they?
Porcelina: 97.
Spiders are light too.
Stumbleine: Alright, but if I admit it could rain spiders
I’ll never leave my flat again.
Jellyfish can sting, but they’re bigger and less gross.
Porcelina: Okay.
So why do jellies make sense?
Stumbleine: You and I know better than anyone that clouds
and tornadoes pick up droplets of water from lakes and oceans and shit to make
rain elsewhere, yeah? I just think of
jellyfish as hitching a ride up and raining down with the rest of the storm –
Porcelina: Like the baby spiders at the end of Charlotte’s Web?
Stumbleine: - Shut it! - wherever the storm makes
landfall.
Porcelina: Right in your backyard. Bath, 1894.
Stumbleine: Of course.
[Porcelina laughs.]
Porcelina: But out of all the animal rainfall occurrences,
nobody’s ever reported seeing any wildlife traveling skyward from these “lakes
and oceans and shit.” Not even the
jellies.
Stumbleine: Just because nobody sees something doesn’t
mean it’s not happened.
Porcelina: Tree falling in the woods, sister – wonders of
Mother Nature, diamonds from pressed coal.
Stumbleine: Are you working your way back round to
selling me on these immortal jellyfish again?
Porcelina: Turritopsis Dohrnii? Strewth, I’d forgotten about them. It’s true though!
Stumbleine: Porce.
Porcelina: They’re just like the caterpillar-butterfly
life cycle only instead of offspring –
Stumbleine: Porce…
Porcelina: - They just decide to return to infancy
themselves! How did they figure it out,
y’know? And why haven’t any other
species?
Stumbleine: Porcelina!
Let’s get back on track.
Porcelina: Ok.
But they did an Octonauts episode
on the dohrnii you should watch.
Anyway. So, play along. If animals are raining down from the sky 15
kilometers and not being sucked up by rain clouds first, where else are they
coming from?
Stumbleine: You don’t think… [Stumbleine casts her eyes upwards towards the ceiling.] Exodus, chapter 8?
Porcelina: You
said it. Or, hey, when’s the last time
you saw Xolotl?
[Stumbleine scoffs.]
Stumbleine: Don’t remind me – family reunion in
Seattle. Has he still got dog’s breath?
Porcelina: That’s not nice.
Stumbleine [playing with her food]: Speaking of smog, you know I’ve always wished
I could’ve –
Porcelina: - seen
the stars on a clear night before the Age of Man?
Stumbleine: An hour we’ve been together and I’m already
repeating myself?
Porcelina: You mentioned it last time.
Stumbleine: It still stands. I can’t fathom looking up and seeing 3,000
stars and the band of the Milky Way. It
must’ve been as bright as daylight.
Porcelina: It wasn’t all that. Quit fidgeting.
Stumbleine [setting her fork down firmly]: You’re just saying that to make me feel
better.
Porcelina: I am not.
Stumbleine: Let’s talk about something else.
Porcelina: Okay…
Stumbleine: Well don’t sound so excited, P.
Porcelina: What did you want to talk about?
Stumbleine: Well, I’ll likely be thinking about animal
rain until the next time I see you, so let me think of something to blow your mind with.
Porcelina [laughing]: Sounds good.
Stumbleine: What do you know about Fibonacci?
Porcelina: Isn’t that the place on Telegraph Hill with
the amazing super-thin-crust pizza?
Stumbleine: No, you bitch! [Stumbleine laughs.] That’s
Baonecci. Fibonacci was a 13th-century
mathematician from Pisa who published the Liber
Abaci.
Porcelina [taking a sip of her water]: What did the Liber Abaci say?
Stumbleine: Fibonacci wrote this generation-by-generation
formula of rabbit breeding in optimal or conditions – y’know, “How quickly
could rabbits multiply if you work the duration of carrying a pregnancy to term
and if each baby is the right gender to have it away with another rabbit?”
Porcelina: Was the answer “As quick as a bunny?”
Stumbleine:
…Right. The sequence is that each new
number is the sum of the two numbers before it.
You start with one and one, which add up to two. Then the latest two numbers are the second
“one” and the two. One and two makes
three. Two and three is five –
Porcelina: And three plus five is eight.
Stumbleine: Yes it is.
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34…
Porcelina: I got it; I got it.
Stumbleine: Stay with me.
Divide each new number by the preceding number. 2 over 1 is 2, 3 over 2 is 1.5, right? 5 over 3 is 1 and two-thirds. The calculator on my phone says 8 divided by
5 is…
Porcelina: 1.6.
So?
Stumbleine: Okay, so let’s skip ahead. 34 over 21 is 1.619 and some change. The further you go in the sequence, the
closer you get to the following: the ratio of the final number to its predecessor
is one and six hundred eighteen
one-thousandths to one. That’s
1.618:1, okay? Remember that. Or write it down on this ridiculous paper
tablecloth with the ridiculous crayon the server used to write his name.
Porcelina [writing]: You mean it gets even more interesting?
Stumbleine: Shush.
This ratio – 1.618:1 – has become known over the last 700 years as “The
Golden Ratio.” Give me that crayon. If you lay it out with geometry, you draw a
sort of wide rectangle like a film screen, like this. This is The Golden Rectangle. Then look at the top and bottom edges running
right to left and draw a vertical line, from top to bottom, just to the right
of center like this…so it’s cut up into two bits. The left bit is a perfect square, yeah? And the right bit is a tall rectangle instead of a wide
one.
Porcelina: Maybe not the way you draw…
Stumbleine: Well ideally, for fuck’s sake. So the distance across the whole original
wide rectangle – the square on the left plus the tall rectangle on the right –
compared to the distance across the leftmost segment – the square – is The
Golden Ratio.
Porcelina: 1.618, which is the “all the way across,” to 1,
which is from the bottom left corner to the vertical drawn line just to the
right of center.
Stumbleine: Yes. Now,
the smaller, tall rectangle on the right here should be the exact same proportion as the original wide rectangle,
just smaller and rotated one-fourth around to the left. So then you start again. Draw a horizontal line near the top of this smaller
set to make a wee little sideways rectangle and rotate. Then make a vertical line on the left, and so
on …connect the corners with an arc and
you get The Golden Spiral.
Porcelina: Okay.
So you’ve got this nifty rectangle-ish spirally thing. What does it do besides winding around down
into the infinitesimal?
Stumbleine: It makes for a quaint doodle when you’re on
the telephone, but that’s the lot, really.
Porcelina: …Seriously?
Stumbleine: You should see your face! Just taking the piss, darling. If you measured your height from the top of
your head to the bottom of your foot, then divided it by your height from your
bellybutton to the bottom of your foot –
Porcelina: I don’t have a bellybutton.
Stumbleine: - If you did, do you know which proportion
they’d be in?
Porcelina: 1.618 to 1?
Stumbleine: You know your friend the nautilus? Cephalopod mollusk, white and orange-brown
spiral shell, little mandibles for a mouth, spits air bubbles out and swims
backwards? How does it grow, then?
Porcelina: Every year it makes a new chamber in its
shell, bigger than the last.
Stumbleine: How much bigger? About 1.618 times bigger?
Porcelina: Shut up!
[The check
arrives. Stumbleine looks slyly away;
Porcelina retrieves her checkbook and pays cash.]
Stumbleine: If you look at the nautilus from the side,
you could lay the Golden Spiral over it perfectly. Every nautilus in your seven seas has got a
perfectly Golden Spiral-shaped shell.
Porcelina: What else?
Stumbleine: You name it, you’ll find the Fibonacci
Sequence. Sunflowers, pine cones, the
length of most humans’ fingers and arms and legs, The Last Supper, da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man,” most music, Jaws, Stagecoach – why do you think most
films are shown on a wide screen in cinemas in an aspect ratio of 16:9? The eye just naturally responds better to
wide rectangles. The whole reason
televisions were square-shaped for 50 years was only to fit in the corner of
the bloody living room. It’s an
half-century marketing mistake is what it is.
Good thing the high-definition sets have got it right.
Porcelina: I love Jaws.
Stumbleine: No shit.
Imagine the entire length of the film runs from the bottom left corner
of our Golden Rectangle to the bottom right.
You know what happens at the mark where you draw the vertical line? [Stumbleine
pauses for effect.] You see the
fuckin’ shark for the first time.
Porcelina: So what is it – the ratio, the rectangle, the
spiral? How can it pop up in so many
independent and different systems – unless everyone’s using it on purpose in
secret without telling anybody?
Stumbleine: Only The
Battleship Potemkin and the song “Lateralus” from that album you quoted
earlier have been proven to be intentional.
As for the rest… [Stumbleine rises
from her seat.] I call it “The
Fingerprint.” Not sure of whom. Think about it and get back to me next time I
see you.
Porcelina: To be continued.
[Without another word,
Stumbleine smiles and leaves her older sister behind. Porcelina spends only a minute staring at the
hastily-sketched rectangle and the spiral within it on their paper tablecloth
before walking inconspicuously out of the seafront dining establishment and
diving back into the Atlantic. Her
physical form thins and once again becomes one with all the waters covering
nearly three-fourths of Earth’s surface, as she has for countless ages. She knows that her sister is, at the same
time, slowly dissipating throughout the air into eight billion specks, each
worming its way into the ear of a human and alighting in it a sense of
restlessness and insatiable endeavor. And
these eldritch sisters dream of two different phenomena.]
