It’s less a spiral, and more of a collapsing ratchet sort of motion. Each iteration is a line, straight forward, and the descent can be perceived as gradual. When the end of a circuit is reached, there is a juddering halt, and you are hurtling in some new direction, perceptibly lower. In ordinary Euclidean space, this might be conceived of as a right rotation. One might even assume each circuit occurs in scalar multiples of a common plane. But in the manifold of the inexpertly lived life each trajectory is more profoundly perpendicular, and lower ceases to have it’s familiar, ordinal meaning. The locus of the whole motion spills and sloughs through space like some nightmarish, angular worm; its segments divided by the envelopes of widely varying orbits and its longitudinal boundary everywhere discontinuous. Each length of motion is orthogonal in a deep and frightening sense. The momentum of your previous existence contributes nothing to the new trajectory, linear in a way somehow dizzying and convoluted; lower becomes not a coordinate but a profound state of being, a mathematically precise definition of the inexpressive engine, powering your forward motions with great heaving oscillations, condensing towards its center like a pendulum. With each destructive overtone the perturbations introduce, the light above the surface of the water grows dimmer and a kind of Judecca grows larger in your view, until the shells of youth unravel, revealing an ancient animal nucleus and a hateful, dusky splendor. Death never comes.