Lobster
Entry posted by malign
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I had a dream last week that I thought I would share. I dreamed of a lobster.
What an adaptation! Covered in armor, armed with large claws, you have very few natural enemies. You're free to grow almost as big as you'd like. You eat anything you can catch, and no one bothers you.
I say "almost" as big as you want because the armor itself imposes a limit to the size of the animal. You see, the weight of the armor increases with the surface area of the animal, but muscle strength only increases linearly with the diameter. So, for instance, an "arm" that was twice as thick would be twice as strong, but the armor to cover it would be four times as heavy. As a result, you won't be seeing horror movie lobsters as big as buildings any time soon.
The other interesting thing about the adaptation of crustaceans (and insects and other things) is that their hard covering is actually an external skeleton or exo-skeleton. For some reason, the only kind of muscle that has evolved is one that contracts. That means that, in order to do work, muscle needs something to pull on. Some small animals get away with just pulling on their own tissues, but it's not very efficient. Most animals develop a skeleton. Two major paths have been followed: a skeleton on the inside, like ours, or one on the outside, that also serves as protection and waterproofing and so on.
But the obvious metaphor for emotional armor is what made me think of lobsters in my dream. And my next thought was, Take off the shell! Strangely, though, the image I got was that the shell would turn out to be completely empty. Not a helpless blob of useless muscle tissue, but emptiness, or at least, invisibility.
Am I not just helpless without armor, but actually nothing at all? That doesn't fit my world view at the conscious level, but ... It was an interesting image. Perhaps what it's telling me is that you can't convert a lobster into a person in the straightforward way of stripping off its shell. The transformation process will have to be more subtle and gradual, building a person on the inside first.
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