My Substack posts have become experiments with words and meanings. I’m trying not to edit them too severely, though this risks straining the text and failing to show how ideas connect.
A spider once spun her web suspended against my office window, as I was working late at night. Mesmerised, I took photos and then, work suspended in mid-sentence, wrote a poem. I share it here with some reluctance and anxiety, after several rewritings.
I often write poetry as the best way to set words chasing after feelings and experiences too elusive for explanation, knowing that the poem will remember, long after I have forgotten. It’s a diary of sorts, but it leaves open possibilities for future interpretations that resist being too clearly recorded as things that happened. “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” Poetic language cracks open the world and lets in that which resists explanation.
But I’m not a poet. If a few words cluster together in poetic resonances, then that is serendipity—the result of some desire that comes from deep down or far out, seeking to sculpt the human voice to the primordial rhythms of life.
So here is my wordweave about the spider:
Falling
with passing allusions to Walt Whitman, “A Noiseless Patient Spider”
A spider looms
against the absent light
tumbling down
through empty space
like Sisyphus
she climbs
the silken trail
again, again, again
she falls,
trapezing out
across the night
and back
again, again, again,weaving a gossamer shroud
on the loom of the window pane.By day she climbs again
and eats it all away.Tonight, must she begin
again, again, again?Reversal of the mythical Penelope
consuming in light
what she weaves by night.Most web-building happens under the cover of darkness.
Dreamweavers, mythmakers.
We spin our silken stories
in the night
and consume them in the morning light,
destroying their fragile symmetries,
their patterned grace
and standing fearful
on the edge of space
we fallagain, again, again
into the night.
Maria Popova’s wonderful web-weaving online magazine, The Marginalian, gifts me the words to explain this quest to allow poetic meaning to appear through the cracks and gaps of language:
We spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. We snatch our freeze-frame of life from the simultaneity of existence by holding on to illusions of permanence, congruence, and linearity; of static selves and lives that unfold in sensical narratives. All the while, we mistake chance for choice, our labels and models of things for the things themselves, our records for our history. History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.
She is writing about reading a dead poet’s letters and glimpsing “a fragment of that atomic mutuality … a miraculous sight: … a small, shimmering red leaf twirling in midair.” And then, “I step closer and notice a fine spider’s web glistening in the air above the leaf, conspiring with gravity in this spinning miracle”:
Neither the spider has planned for the leaf nor the leaf for the spider—and yet there they are, an accidental pendulum propelled by the same forces that cradle the moons of Jupiter in orbit, animated into this ephemeral early-morning splendor by eternal cosmic laws impervious to beauty and indifferent to meaning, yet replete with both to the bewildered human consciousness beholding it.
I want to quote that whole post, because she says so much better than I can what I’m trying to say: “Some truths, like beauty, are best illuminated by the sidewise gleam of figuring, of meaning-making.” But she is an abundantly generous writer who gives of herself freely, so you can read this piece and everything else she writes online.
Gifted writers gift us with their insights and their ability to hold words up to the world, like cracked mirrors where the tain has rubbed off in places to reveal mysterious possibilities that glisten beyond what words can reflect as they bounce off the surfaces of things.
Popova too discovered inspiration in a spider’s web, and also in a “small, shimmering red leaf”. Some connection sparks across the darkness with a silken thread that links her words to a poem I discovered a few weeks ago on The New Yorker poetry podcast: David Baker reading Stanley Plumley’s poem, “In Passing”. This image has stayed with me:
… the gradations of a large
and yellow leaf drifting its good-bye down one side of the gorge.There is almost nothing that does not signal loneliness,
then loveliness, then something connecting all we will become.All around us the luminous passage of the air,
the flat, wet gold of the leaves. …
Only connect, they say, and when we connect, we discover that there is no end to the connections, the webs we weave to hold us swaying, climbing and falling in the loom of time. Yes, we are lonely, but loveliness connects us.
I return again and again to the last pages of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. Like Popova, she is a writer whose language shivers in the in-between, where prose and poetry tremble along the margins of meaning and invite us into the beauty of bewilderment.
I listened to all thirty hours of the audiobook of The Goldfinch on a long train journey through Europe last year, reaching the last chapter on a sleepless night in a cramped hotel room in the Swiss town of Brig. A jagged mountain loomed over the town like a rotten tooth. Lying awake in the shadow of the mountain, listening in darkness through my earphones, I felt the presence of the uncanny creeping into the room and wrapping cold hands around me. Then the last chapter swallowed me and carried me away. I had to buy the book on Kindle and read those lines, to consume the words that had consumed me. (These are the virtual worlds we now inhabit, where one can download a novel in the middle of the night):
And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between “reality” on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.
And—I would argue as well—all love. … And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky—so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime. (The Goldfinch, pp. 863-866)
Let me make another connection, this time with a beautiful short reflection by Jesuit priest and journalist Antonio Spadaro, which he shared on Twitter (X):
As a child I used to take off my glasses to see the world blurred. It was fascinating. When a windowpane mists up, the world wears a veil. If steam fogs it up, then it dresses it in a gradual fog that melts shapes and softens colours. Detail is lost, harmony blurs differences. What is lit is not extinguished no, but accepts to attenuate its presence. We see it is there, it has not disappeared, but it does not attract attention. Calmness takes over, as in the humid, warm, cosy atmosphere of a kitchen where a pot is boiling and spreading steam. The world, if turned on, wakes us as if to the sound of a trumpet. If, on the other hand, it is dulled by a fogged glass, then it reminds us of reality but without evidence. Then we can meditate, remember and daydream. Through a fogged window we can imagine again: what we have always seen distinctly or what we do not know. A little prince even said that the essential is invisible to the eyes.
My dear friend, theologian Gerard Loughlin, wrote a book titled Telling God’s Story: Bible, Church and Narrative Theology (2010). The book is in some sense an extended metaphor about consuming and being consumed by texts:
Loughlin reflects on the eucharistic meal as an enactment of Scripture, a transubstantiation of the world in the life of a community that is incorporated/incarnated into the story of Christ through consuming the Word of God. I wrote a disparaging and thankfully unpublished review of Loughlin’s book in the early days of my theological studies. Under the influence of Luce Irigaray, metaphors of consumption narrowed in my imagination so that they seemed destructive and annihilating. Now I yearn to read the book again, when I can find it among the cardboard boxes yet to be unpacked from my office move three years ago. It is a more confident and assertive theology than I am capable of writing, having moved far to the margins of theological language, but there is something about the nurturing capacity of language to birth us into different worlds that invites a more positive reading about what it means to consume and be consumed by texts.
Ann W. Astell’s dense and difficult book, Eating Beauty, reflects on the Eucharist in the context of medieval spiritualities and aesthetics. She writes of finding “an understanding of the beautiful that is inseparable from the good and the true, but which is (for that very reason) dynamic and inclusive of a whole life-process of suffering, digestion, dying, and transformation.” (p. 259)
Much of what Astell and Loughlin writes compels and repels me today. No longer immersed in or attracted by the Derridean gurus of postmodernity, I fear the consuming darkness of postmodern theories that shut out the body and block out the light. But that is what concerns Astell and Loughlin too, which is why their writing beckons me to return, to read them differently. Loughlin criticizes what he calls “the textualist theologian”:
In the past we thought that God wrote the story, but now we know that we ourselves have written God. .. God is wholly inside language, make-believe like everything else; God is language. God is the play of signs upon the Void. … The textualist’s vision is a dark one. As Taylor’s image of language as a maze suggests, we are forever enclosed, wandering in the labyrinth. No matter how long our piece of thread, there is no way out and nowhere to go." (pp. 15-16)
With Loughlin and Astell, I want to affirm that beyond the text, beyond language, beyond thought, there is ….
My thoughts wander back to the metaphorical abundance of the web. It risks becoming the most banal of clichés, and yet as we reach for images, it offers itself in so many ways:
The divine Persons are subsistent relations, and the world, created according to the divine model, is a web of relationships. Creatures tend towards God, and in turn it is proper to every living being to tend towards other things, so that throughout the universe we can find any number of constant and secretly interwoven relationships. (Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, para 240)
The cosmos is interaction; life organizes relative information. We are a delicate and complex embroidery in the web of relations of which, as far as we currently understand it, reality is constituted. (Carlo Rovelli, Helgoland, p. 155)
Each of us is now connected through the worldwide web, no matter how strenuously we try to resist it. We tremble on the brink of the unknown, as revolutions in Artificial Intelligence usher in an era for which we are unprepared, for which we can never be prepared, when language spirals out of human control and lays claim to every lie as a fact of life. The web of life risks being consumed by this new and deadly web.
Yet can AI replicate poetry and literature? We can’t ask such questions without asking what it means to speak of the soul, not just as an attribute of the human but as the transcendent sustaining source of all life, all meaning, all futurity.
The worldwide web is a dark gift, but every gift has darkness within it. The gift of the Christmas child is followed by the Slaughter of the Innocents and overshadowed by the cross. That which tastes like honey in the mouth can become bitter in the stomach. We must seek the promise, the gift, the hope, within the shadows, in the light that appears in the cracks of language and of life.
We can be like the fly caught in the sticky embrace of the web as the spider weaves a shroud around us, “forever enclosed, wandering in the labyrinth”. But we can also be like the spider, spinning silken connections, risking the leap into the void, reaching for the far side. For this, perhaps we must learn to eat our words, so that we might nourish new ways of speaking and being to weave us into the web of life.
Might we learn how to trust those primordial instincts that enabled us to see beauty in the garden of creation, to live at peace with the spiders and commune with the snakes, to walk naked and without shame, to hear the voice of God in the twilight language of birdsong and poetry, nature and art? Can we discern the creativity of love that suspends all that is within the void of nothingness, creating silken threads of meaning to sustain us?
Yes, the metaphor of eating texts is appropriate. We eat our words as nourishment for future worlds, rising from our vertiginous falls and climbing again and again the silken strands of life and love, like Sysiphus. Weaving the stories that we pray our children might live to tell, of hope reborn and love renewed.
Professor: Might I suggest (clumsily) that Wordweaves is not a singular post/musing/delivery; but a multi-faceted, living, expanding landscape.
Now, to peer into, over, under and around this Wordweaves ecosystem. 👀
Louise
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