`There's Magick in the Web of It'

I envy my officemate the spectacle he witnessed a couple of weeks ago. He was driving in the country, shortly after sunrise, on a two-lane road paralleled by high-tension lines. The morning dew and the low angle of the sun illuminated the webs of thousands of orb-weaver spiders strung among the towers, poles and cables. For three miles, he estimated, they sparkled like diamonds, until the sun rose too high. Doni is a big, strong guy with an unlikely phobia for spiders, but even he, in the security of his pickup truck, admired the elegant engineering of the glistening webs – highly effective food-gathering devices, after all. Spiders rank with ladybugs, toads, dragonflies and praying mantises among nature’s most efficient and savage hunters. After Doni excitedly told me his spider story, I thought of this passage from the letter John Keats wrote to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds, on Feb. 19, 1818:

“Now it appears to me that almost any Man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy Citadel -- the points of leaves and twigs on which the spider begins her work are few, and she fills the air with a beautiful circuiting. Man should be content with as few points to tip with the fine Web of his Soul, and weave a tapestry empyrean full of symbols for his spiritual eye, of softness for his spiritual touch, of space for his wandering, of distinctness for his luxury.”

Keats turns a trap for prey into a lovely image of poetry, connectedness and transcendence, but a web is complicated and makes a complicated metaphor. One can, like a mosquito, become snared in a web. One can, like Doni, admire its beauty. One can also experience a sense of communion with strangers – a web is sensitive to motion -- and realize the interconnectedness of creation, natural and human. Each word, each idea, each book, connects me in a grand Borgesian conceit, with humanity. Thus, the World Wide Web -- but the idea of human relations as a web flourished long ago, and not always in so happy a sense. Consider Othello’s words to Desdemona in Act III, Scene IV:

“`Tis true: there’s magick in the web of it:
A sibyl, that had number’d in the world
The sun to course two hundred compasses,
In her prophetic fury sew’d the work;
The worms were hallow’d that did breed the silk;
And it was dyed in mummy which the skillful
Conserved of maidens’ hearts.”

If you know the play, the words are deeply disturbing, even lifted out of context, for Othello is trapped in the web of treachery spun by Iago, while spinning his own sticky web. Soon, Desdemona must die. Of all Shakespeare’s plays, Othello is the most difficult for me to read or watch. Its horror is unbearable. Whitman gave us a more reassuring spider poem, one I memorized as a kid, that resonates with a Keatsian sense of connectedness and exultation:

“A noiseless patient spider,
I marked where on a promontory it stood isolated,
Marked how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

"And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be formed, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.”