FROM CURVE TO ANGLE: The Apple Peel and the Unraveling of Time
This is a blog post examining, through photographs of an apple peel taken over five days, the Lacanian term Symbolic (page 203, of the Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis).
In Lacanian theory, the Symbolic refers to the structures—language, law, social systems—that define our reality. It is the order into which we are born, shaping how we understand ourselves and the world. But what happens when the seemingly stable contours of this order begin to shift, when the organic starts resembling the constructed, when material corruption reveals a hidden geometry?
Photo by © Camilla Howalt
I set myself the task of peeling an apple in one long piece, round and round, from top to bottom. I have yet to succeed, but the apples are also very large this year.
In this email, you will find a series of snapshots where the apple peel, at first soft in contour, slowly sharpens. What begins as something organic takes on a more constructed appearance. The edges become razor-sharp, the ends fine as a needle point, and the once-rounded curves begin to break into angularity.
The beauty of material corruption has set in.
Photo by © Camilla Howalt
And why is this important? Why would I spend time sharing this with you?
At first, I wasn’t sure. But as the days passed, I began to notice the way the peel, as it dried, curled inward—spiraling back on itself, pulling taut, as if following an unseen force. What was once a simple coil took on the precision of architecture, something resembling an ancient staircase or the inward pull of a vortex.
The peel no longer belonged entirely to the natural world; it had entered a space where decay was indistinguishable from form-making, where disorder carried the logic of something preordained. This, too, is the Symbolic: the illusion of structure revealing itself in the breakdown, the spiral folding back into time itself.
Photo by © Camilla Howalt
The angularity of the aging apple peel, its curling edges, became something more than a simple drying process. It suggested movement—not just a collapse inward, but a spiraling, a gravitational pull toward some unseen center. A descent, an unraveling, a folding of matter onto itself, as though time were compacting.
I don’t know enough about these subjects—philosophy of time, the mathematics of time, or dark matter—but they fascinate me. I read about them in fragments. And so I imagine this slow, imperceptible movement: the apple peel shrinking in on itself, the invisible forces guiding it, the way something as simple as dehydration can evoke the great spirals of history, of language, of time itself.
Like waves folding into the shore. Like sand dunes shifting in a desert. No—desert, not dessert, Camilla. No whipped cream curling around strawberries and meringues now. Just the spiral, the pull, the slow turn inward. Matter folding into time.
