Seashell (January)

[For Carol O’Connor] This January I re-read Francis Ponge, his ‘Notes pour un coquillage’ (1932). The argument goes that though a seashell is small, it’s a monument “colossal et précieux” compared with sand grains, more mysterious than any human monument. Impressively, a whole creature lives inside this monument. Human monuments (“Rome et Nîmes”) remind him of skeleton parts, not the same as the home of a hermit crab. Ponge imagines the impossible colossus that inhabited such ancient places. He decides that our monument is language, made from “la véritable sécrétion commune”, before describing the returning of all life into sand.