I want to offer the deepest gratitude to
, the first paid subscriber to Out for Stars. The encouragement that kind of support gives is hard to put into words. It stokes me to keep writing, keep thinking, keep making connections and sharing them for the good of anyone who crosses this threshold in need of beauty, inspiration, writerly imagination, or a taste of our shared humanity. Thank you."...the spider is the color of the foam on an espresso and it walked across the window and I don’t know where she went."
-Callie Feyen, “Insect”
I've been seeing spiders every day this week. They started small and spindly, and it was easy to feel charitable as they skittered toward the corner behind the cupboard or the toilet. "Thank you for taking care of the other bugs for me!" I left them be, like Annie Dillard when she finds spiders in her bathroom:
“I figure that any predator that hopes to make a living on whatever smaller creatures might blunder into a four-inch square bit of space in the corner of the bathroom where the tub meets the floor, needs every bit of my support.”1
Then I was greeted on my porch seat by a thick, furry fellow, and in an effort of goodwill for which I generously pat myself on the back, I held back from saying hateful things to the creature or from perpetrating harm, but I did tell him, "No, thank you," as I tucked my feet out of his way. Principles can only go so far,2 and people say if you find a spider in your house, you can be confident there are twice as many more that you cannot and will never see. Even Annie Dillard doesn’t want the spiders crawling on her: “Not on me, they won’t,” she says.
So I sit in my chair on the porch under the overhanging roof beneath the early blue sky. Beneath the chair, a spider spins webs. Between the pages of my book, Green Dolphin Street by Elizabeth Goudge, one of the characters says home is the place that is most like where you go on the inside when you feel liberated, and also when you’re outside your experience, self-forgetting. In the book, the character Marguerite’s home is tidy and spare, like a nun’s cell inside a convent. The smart spider’s home is fragile and complex, private, away from open places.
I have spiders on the brain. I pull out my Emily Dickinson, but her spider that holds a silver ball3 isn’t what I’m looking for. The last place I expect to find the arachnid I want is in Jonathan Edwards, and, technically, it isn’t. It’s in the lyrical prose of Thomas Gardner’s Poverty Creek Journal.4 Gardner explains that a young Jonathan Edwards apparently "studied the flight of spiders off the coast,” and those spiders went not down and under, but up and out, flying on their fine-spun threads, flying out across water. Gardner imagines "the way they'd fling themselves on a westerly wind, strand after drying strand, lifted by the wind, sailing far out and faltering."
The spiders Edwards and Gardner have in mind are like the mangrove trees in Annie Dillard’s essay “Sojourner,” in which Dillard “alternate[s] between thinking of the planet as home—dear and familiar stone hearth and garden—and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.”
“The mangrove island wanders on, afloat and adrift. It walks teetering and wanton before the wind. Its fate and direction are random. It may bob across an ocean and catch on another mainland’s shores.”5
Dillard is talking about the way we humans make our home on a planet that is spinning out to who knows where, and we can choose to hide for fright, or we can fling ourselves into the grand dance of it all, spider strands floating on the wind, destination unknown.
The spider "will make herself at home in the silk she casts from herself," Callie Feyen writes. Feyen’s spider is the "color of foam on an espresso," which is really a shocking comparison. Who wants to imagine the taste of the spider, the feel of its skittery feet on the tongue? Who isn't unsettled by the fact we don't know where the spider went? I think this is the crux of the arachnid anxiety: it leapt at me out of nowhere and urban legends about how many spiders one eats in one's sleeping life.
I think this is the crux of human anxiety: we can’t know what is going to happen next. I once sat in my backyard and saw a single, vertical strand of spider web, ten feet tall, walk horizontally across my line of vision, glinting in the light. A piece of hair. The opposite of a veil. A click of the shutter lens from one moment of being to another. The woods behind the same but not, something inside me blown wide.
The spiders "giv[e] themselves to the grand unraveling of being," Gardner says, "the torn web of it." Making a home in the low, hidden spaces or spinning out across the universe like a mangrove tree planet, the unsafety of the venture, the givenness to what our options really are, which are small, which are to breath however many breaths are ours in this short time, to climb toward some vague cultural notion of success or to scurry away from the madness of it all or, madder still, to catch the gust of a solar wind and see where the elements take us.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Even Peter Wimsey says principles are dangerous.
Emily's spider is a metaphorical beast standing in for the artist who "plies from Nought to Nought— / In unsubstantial Trade—."
I cannot recommend this lyric essay collection highly enough. Poverty Creek Journal: Lyric Essays by Thomas Gardner - Tupelo Press
Teaching a Stone to Talk
<3 spiders
Two things:
1. Favorite spider poem is probably Robert Frost's "Design" -- I'm sure you've read it. The playfulness of the octave undercut by the despair in the sestet. Definitely worth the (re)read!
2. I read a poetry collection last summer that completely knocked me out. It was about spiders and outer space and maybe the poet's mother's sickness? It's written by a professor at some school somewhere. I forgot the title and the author and apparently literally everything else about the book; I've been kicking myself ever since because it was SO GOOD. Like, eye-openingly, jaw-drappingly good. But I can't ever find her book again because I don't know anything about it!
(This is a desperate plea for help.)