1) A three-dimensional curve that turns around an axis at a constant or continuously varying distance as in the tortuous melancholy of Romeo Void, as the spit curls of the girl in your grandmother’s photo. The face is whited out. Perhaps the years have exerted a longitudinal pull.

2) A term derived from Berninni in the 15th century during his imprisonment under the Duke of Lombardy for crimes of heresy; Bernini used the word in the sense of endless staircases, helices, and nonplanar loxodromes, rhumb lines, whose meridians form the given class) are examples of spirals whose windings do not lie in a plane. Bernini committed suicide by jumping off imaginary loxodromes. Or clinging to. Or running towards. Or twisting himself around until his neck resembled a helix.

3. To use in the sense that a withered and frustrated wife would to describe her life built around tending to her unfaithful husband’s garden: coil, corkscrew, curl, entwine, gyre, meander, (You bastard!) snake, twine, twist, weave, whorl, wind, wreathe. See repetition, straight/bent/Scotsman’s Cane/Animal Channel/Ribbons/Foyer’s Hoax/Spirochete/Snakes Mother Mistook for Worms and the Writhing Falsetto of Her Cries. See also, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetitions that curve. See Phase Shifts of Helical amplitude.

Special Cases

• Wind me like a screw.
• Curschmann’s s’s
• organ of Corti
• penile deviation “” a defect in bulls. See corkscrew penis, See Bulls that can’t screw in a straight line. See Hemingway’s linear notes. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha.
• the arterial partition between aorta and pulmonary trunk, formed by the fusion of the truncal, bulbar and aorticopulmonary septa of the great vessels attached to the embryonic heart. ex. due to extensive damage to his arterial vessels and septum, he spiraled into a long slow death in the broken light of his bedroom whose walls were decorated with the zig-zag, or spiraling, if you will, of great birds of color in flight. Some say they were his only friends while he lived with one foot planted firmly on ground.
• s. worm “” Dispharynx nasuta. See synhimantus spiralis of the anal variety.<Note: Vernacular Usage: WIPE YOUR FEET —————————————–OUTSIDE. I DON’T WANT YOU BRINGING ANY FUCKING WORMS IN THIS HOUSE. DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD I WORK TO KEEP THIS PLACE CLEAN, YOU INSIPID AND USELESS CROOKED-NOSED BITCH. I’M NOT YOUR FALLOW LESBO PILLOW./li>
• A Spiral Notebook. As in: Mary’s self-identity became so entwined with her Spiral Notebook that soon the only thing that remained of Mary was in those sordid yellowed pages of explicit drawings of giving fellatio to snails.

Note: The term spiraling out of control was thought to have originated with Architectus of Sicily, 200 B.C.. He used the phrase to describe his lust for the notorious Crab-Woman who crept up to men along the littorals and forced them to mate with her. After they were finished, she turned them into oyster shells.

As in Symbols

Spiraling, either upward or downward, is often used figuratively to refer to the rapid rise and fall of finances. It may also symbolize flux in weather, health, and employment cycles, to name just a few. It can also simply mean that the dreamer feels things are “spiraling out of control.” As in lately I’ve been dreaming of chasing horses into the receding recesses of appaloosa-wistfulness, or how Doris stood in the rain for hours, thinking about her life spiraling out of control, how I was her bent axis, but I never considered myself a constant as the X in X and Y.

Or When the brakes suddenly failed, the car veered off the cliff and spiraled endlessly and when I woke up, if I ever did, everything in the room was either crooked or conical in spasms of blue light.

To Describe how both large and small things are connected: The Archimedes spiral is a helix. A cross between a spiral and a helix is known as a conic helix. An example of a conic helix is the spring used to hold and make contact with the negative terminals of AA or AAA batteries in remote controls. Every time you click your remote control you are making contact with a conic helix. In other words, there are powers, remote to be sure, that control your destiny.

Two Dimensional Spirals

• The Archimedean spiral: r = a + bθ
• The Euler spiral, Cornu spiral or clothoid
• Fermat’s spiral: r = θ1/2
• The hyperbolic spiral: r = a/θ
• The lituus: r = θ-1/2
• The logarithmic spiral: r = abθ; approximations of this are found in nature
• The Fibonacci spiral and golden spiral: special cases of the logarithmic spiral
  The Spiral of Theodorus: an approximation of the Archimedean spiral composed of contiguous right triangles.

Together these various formulas add up to the notion that man is more than a sum of parts yet less than an approximation of twisting eternal form.

Three Dimensional Spirals

For a helix with thickness, see spring (math).

The Ouroboros symbol could be mistaken for a torus with a continuously-increasing diameter.

Special Consideration

Ancient Greek alchemical symbol of a serpent eating his tail. The mystical work The Chrysopoeia of Kleopatra has a drawing of the Serpent Ouroboros eating his tail, with the text “One is All.” Another emblem illustrates the symbols of gold, silver, and mercury enclosed in two concentric circles with the text “One is the serpent which has its poison according to two compositions” and “One is All and through it is All and by it is All and if you have not All, All is Nothing.” This is not to be confused with Dumas’ “One for all and all for one. Or Von Tekels’ warning: “if all is one and everything is everything than why am I still being screwed out of 75 cents every time I go to the deli for a loaf of whole grain bread? Corkscrew-haired fuckers out to milk you, I’d say. Keep one hand in your pocket, boy. Watch those crumpled bills. Watch those shiny bills. Watch those curved balls.”

Four Dimensional Spirals

In your mind only.

Five Dimensional Spirals

See Bernini, Conical Interrogations, pp. 126-188.

Six Dimensional Spirals and Beyond

See discussions of Ouroboros and the similarity to Hindu beliefs in McAcnee, “The Spiral from Plant to Man to All” in The Ouroboros Journal of Ultra-Realities and Sepulchral Splendors. pp. 220-329.