Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Does Whatever a Spider Can.

The following post is dedicated to my academe blogging superhero(ine), Alfina the Vague, from whom I plagiarized, openly, the thematic material, and even a little bit of the style.

I was walking to UNCW last night around midnight, for the following three reasons: (1) there are not herds of shambling undergrads in the library between midnight and three, and hence I have less cause to fear inane cellular phone banter, or my laptop being thieved; (2) all the reference texts of which the school only possesses one copy, which is to say nearly all of them, are typically not in use by another MA student and are subsequently likely to be on the shelf at midnight; (3) I walk the earth by dark and crave the flesh of the living. Hey, everyone needs a hobby, right? Sure, inexpensive draft Miller High Life can slake my undead hunger and thirst for the quick, but I cannot deaden, er, liven, my need to walk under the moon and the stars. But neither can the spiders, lovely things that they are, as compelled by their nature as any vampire or zombie.

I believe that the variety of arachnid that I stumble near, and across, and sometimes into, on these nocturnal fact-finding probes is a relative of the European garden spider. It’s too far south for it to be of that exact grouping, but it matches the picture and the characteristics pretty well. I understand full well that my walking into the nets of one of these is going to cause me no greater harm than a tremendous sensation of ick, but, c’mon, don’t we all have enough ick in our lives, already? And the damned things like to build across sidewalks, half the time, as if one of them really thinks that it can take me down. No, spider, you’re going to annoy me, making me put aside my higher, self-aware, spiritual bond with all other animals and ergo cast you to the ground and squishify you. No, that isn’t a word. Luckily for the spiders, the street lamps tend to help me pick up their nasty, tenacious practical joke before I wreck their homes and then have to kill them before witnesses arrive.

But I am ambivalent, I must admit. My reaction to anything lacking a spine that crawls on eight legs and builds things by its own organic secretions, my being a vertebrate and all, is natural enough: it’s a bit like looking at your ruralite uncle’s unrestored ’73 Monte Carlo, and thinking “that’s actually your car?” Only in this instance, the antiquated item is a billion or so years older than me, the new model, and so I feel weirdly impelled to destroy webs and ant hills as a satisfying affirmation of my animal modernity. Call me vain.

But I really am rather captivated by orb-spinning arachnids, and the sheer amount of work that they get done in an evening. Were the next hurricane to level my apartment, rather than merely tear the siding off it and remove my address, (as Ophelia did, hopelessly confusing all shipping companies and taxi drivers), I’m entirely certain that I wouldn’t be able to rebuild it in a day. Given the proper materials, I’m not certain I could rebuild the spider’s home in a day. I’m not much with a loom, I fear.

Additionally this variety seems to have a certain developed level of instinct: if I toss leaves into their webs, they do not immediately react; they seem to be waiting to see if the caught object will struggle or not, differentiating between edible and inedible captures. They eventually will move to the leaves, cut them from the web, and drop them. It’s really quite remarkable.

If only they’d just stay in the bushes, and away from the sidewalk, I’d simply enjoy the show and leave well enough alone. But I walk the earth by night, you see, and so do they, and inevitably we must brush against one another. So before I mash the next arachnid I mash, I’d like to sit him down and have a talk, about how I’m acting within the precepts of nature, extraneous to the confines of invented human constructs like “ethics” and “justice.” I want my spider to understand, in his little spider logic, that this is the way this hard world works, and unfair as it is: you—ancient, stupid, small, bug; me—modern, vertebrate, intelligent, large primate. I hate to say it, but there’s just not room for both of us in this town.

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Several years ago I was bitten by a spider and had a bad reaction which led to a visit to the ER. The doctor cut open my arm and drained out the pus that had built up in there. It was nasty. Ever since then I've tried to avoid spiders even more than most people. However, I understand their role in the ecosystem, and I especially appreciate that they eat flies.
Just a few days ago I came home to find a spider had spun a web spanning from the gate in my backyard to the kitchen window. I had to walk under it to get in the yard. Ordinarily I would have just grabbed a broom and knocked down the web, fly-eating be damned. But somethings stopped me: a huge freaking spider was sitting in the middle of the web, staring at me with all eight of his eyes. I feared knocking down the web with the spider in it because he might attack! Now, when I say he was huge, I mean relatively - it wasn't a tarantula. But it's body was about the size of my small fingernail, and his legs stretched another inch or so. Plus, he was brown, and I've heard those are the poisonous kind. So for the next two days I ducked under the web and his (her?) eight staring eyes to enter and exit my back yard. Finally, he vacated the web, probably satiated by the abundance of flies swarming around the dog waste in the yard. So I destroyed his web, and he hasn't rebuilt it. Even though I didn't kill the spider b/c I was afraid of it (and why should I, weighing several thousand times his weight, have feared him anyway?), I still feel sort of good that I let him go off on his eight legs to eat more flies.

Thu Sep 29, 11:18:00 AM EDT  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Check this out: this artist had a project where she attempted to repair spider webs, then photographed it.

Also: squishify. It is punctuated nicely by a fist slamming into an open palm. Squi! Shi! Fy! I think we should make it a word, if for that reason alone.

Thu Sep 29, 03:10:00 PM EDT  
Blogger JPS said...

Agreed, 'Fina. "Squishify" is hereby nominated for word status. Present vote: two in favor, none against.

And just for fun, I'm going to be the Gas Guy for this comment.

Thu Sep 29, 09:23:00 PM EDT  
Blogger Jason said...

"making me put aside my higher, self-aware, spiritual bond with all other animals"

You sound like Timothy Treadwell. Go see "Grizzly Man" and see what happens to people who are convinced that they are "in tune" with wild nature.

While your title is a reference to Peter Parker's alterego, I think you sound more like the Spiderman from Track 1 of Cure's Disintegration.

Fri Sep 30, 03:20:00 PM EDT  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

You suck.

:P

Fri Sep 30, 04:57:00 PM EDT  

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