tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post560133051349911775..comments2024-03-28T19:56:32.848-05:00Comments on Anecdotal Evidence: `Out of Disorder They Evolve Order'Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08436175583386298032noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-41337140929960362262010-09-18T12:37:53.381-05:002010-09-18T12:37:53.381-05:00Wow, yesterday the joyous transcendence of birth, ...Wow, yesterday the joyous transcendence of birth, today, in the dismal tones Kerouac might have used in his Buddhist stage, one is born to die. I like the idea of fall as a time in which one hurries up to expire, and it is exemplified by the industrious spider, holding onto the warmth of blood so that it can continue flowing.<br /><br />American Indian lore has the spider as symbolic writer or storyteller, the creature who taught us with her web how to create an alphabet. Writers less tormented than David Foster Wallace do seem driven to get it all down before the bell sounds, imagining how a shadow half-light will keep the web itself alive and connected to the memories in attics. <br /><br />But the eight-legged spider, with its very shape the number eight double helix of infinity, also symbolizes:<br /><br />“the web of fate for those who get caught…in the web of illusion in the physical world, and never see beyond the horizon into the other dimensions… [If a spider and its medicine comes into your life, the message is] that you are an infinite being who will continue to weave the patterns of life and living throughout time. Do not fail to see the expansiveness of the eternal plan.” (from <i>Medicine Cards</i>, Sams and Carson)<br /><br />Having grown up next to Salem, Massachusetts, where the pagans have taken over in much the same way the Indians have taken over London, this has a particular resonance for me, as I once again start to see spiders again in my life after four years of spider-free desert living and ten years in the South where spiders the size of tarantulas could actually paralyze you with their bite. <br /><br />I see that sense of the spider's expansiveness in the quote from Adam Kirsch, a humorous chiding to the acolytes of the Materialist god who would have us believe the stars themselves are on borrowed time—how “incredible” and unbelievable one should think that that’s the way things really are.<br /><br />I think this is something of what Whitman had in mind when he wrote:<br /><br />“A noiseless patient spider, <br />I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated, <br />Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, <br />It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament out of itself, <br />Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them. <br /><br />And you O my soul where you stand, <br />Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, <br />Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to <br />connect them, <br />Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold, <br />Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.”WAShttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.com