Sideways, like a fiddler crab

Fiddler crabs are masters of taking on the world sideways. When fortunate enough to spend some down time on Cape Cod, I enjoy visiting the tidal flats around Wellfleet and observing the colonies of these thumb sized creatures that come to life at low tide.

I’m intrigued by how our observations of the animal kingdom can lead to insights about our human condition.   In Moby Dick, Melville wove an amazing analogy describing the bi-polar vision of the sperm whale:

The whale, therefore, must see one distinct picture on this side, and another distinct picture on that side; while all between must be profound darkness and nothingness to him. Man may, in effect, be said to look out on the world from a sentry-box with two joined sashes for his window. But with the whale, these two sashes are separately inserted, making two distinct windows, but sadly impairing the view. This peculiarity of the whale’s eyes is a thing always to be borne in mind in the fishery; and to be remembered by the reader in some subsequent scenes.

A curious and most puzzling question might be started concerning this visual matter as touching the Leviathan. But I must be content with a hint. So long as a man’s eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing is involuntary; that is, he cannot then help mechanically seeing whatever objects are before him. Nevertheless, any one’s experience will teach him, that though he can take in an undiscriminating sweep of things at one glance, it is quite impossible for him, attentively, and completely, to examine any two things- however large or however small- at one and the same instant of time; never mind if they lie side by side and touch each other. But if you now come to separate these two objects, and surround each by a circle of profound darkness; then, in order to see one of them, in such a manner as to bring your mind to bear on it, the other will be utterly excluded from your contemporary consciousness. How is it, then, with the whale? True, both his eyes, in themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man’s, that he can at the same moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he can, then is it as marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able simultaneously to go through the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid. Nor, strictly investigated, is there any incongruity in this comparison.”  Herman Melville, Moby Dick, “The Sperm Whale’s Head”, Chapter 74.

When taken with a Melvillian spirit, it seems this side stepping of the tiny fiddler crab has more to offer our analogical capacities than we might at first sense.  The following video demonstrates the fiddler crabs mobility much better than my prose ever could.

Regardless of our situation, the human fight or flight mechanism seems to bring us directly toward or away from a given situation.  We tend to head toward the things we want to possess and to back away from that which we wish to avoid.  Or do we? Where are our own sideways deflections when facing a given challenge?  Where might the sideways approach lead to unexpected results?