:: Friday 18 August 01
My back door leads out onto a small deck, where I have my canvas chair and my potted rosemary shrub, partly sheltered by a three-foot roof overhang, which I stand under to watch thunderstorms and smoke. In the past few days an extremely large spider has taken up residence in the roof overhang; I discovered her the other night when I was standing out there, breathing the night air and listening to crickets, and suddenly noticed something moving about two feet in front of my nose -- spider, weaving. Now when I go out every morning there's a big web right in the main traffic path that I have to be careful not to blunder into.
I used to be mortally terrified of spiders, so part of my current tolerance for them is a self-satisfied sense of triumph over girlish fears. But also, in a more purely objective fellow-artist sense, I'm deeply impressed by the achievement that that web represents. It's intricate, lovely, complex. She creates it every night, and every day it gets tattered by wind and general attrition, and the next night she weaves it all over again.
Right next to the deck are the big dining room windows, and my computer is right next to those windows, so that if I lean back and tilt to get the light at the right angle, I can see the web, from where I sit here typing. It gives me great pleasure to think of the two of us, me and the spider, carrying out our similar tasks, side by side. Every morning I open up the WIP and look at the tattered loose ends of whatever I was putting together the day before, and sigh, and start trying to re-spin the threads that'll hold the whole thing together. What I create is not much less ephemeral than her web, and far less utilitarian, but we're both compelled to make these flimsy patterns, for our very different reasons.
Spiders are traditionally the boon companions of hermits and prisoners, and I've been living the hermit's life this past week, shackled to the desk, barely leaving the house except for groceries and cigs. It's amazing and a little unnerving to me to realize how deeply reclusive I can become, without the exigencies of the job to pry me out and force me to deal with others. Fathoms deep in story, immersed in my inner world. I did stop by the office the other day, and I felt alien, as if I'd spent a few months off-planet and had lost the knack of communicating with the earth-beings.
Very soon my vacation will be over, and I'll be back on the job, on the schedule. Soon enough summer will be over, and the hard freeze will come, and the spider will die. I wish I'd gotten more done in this little span of weeks, accomplished more, made better use of time--which is no doubt how I'll feel when I'm about to die myself. But that's OK. The world will be no more affected by the words I've struggled to lash together this summer than it is by those shreds of filament on the back deck. And that's OK too. Unlike the spider, I'm not out to catch anything beyond the fluff that drifts around in my head. It's the weaving that matters.
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"I'd learned on the highway and in the circus, in the army, and at boxing gyms that even if you have a cutman in your corner to stanch the blood, it doesn't obviate the need for stamina, self-reliance, and keeping oriented to what I think of as the earth's magnetic field. You can have allies, mentors, be married, but still you're going to be alone most of your life, and if you're going to run off the rails, you had better be good company for yourself."
--Edward Hoagland