Tangled webs, silken threads
and a comic about a woman and a spider.
Today’s comic is loosely inspired by a true story (I did wake up one morning to find a silken spider-rope trailing from the ceiling, and it did lead me to finding and rescuing a spider from the sink). If you are arachnophobic, I don’t know if this is for you (although I promise there are no scary close-ups of spiders).
But returning to the story: I don’t worry too much about getting rid of cobwebs or spiders. They are mostly harmless, excellent at their job (trapping flies), and I find it cruel to destroy the work of a fellow artist. Spiders have blown my mind since I was a Philosophy student learning about how LSD changes the way spiders make webs.
There are countless folk stories about spiders across cultures (much more compelling than the stuff Marvel is selling). There’s Arachne, Anansi, Uttu, the Joro-gumo: spiders appear as docile women, wh*res, powerful trickster goddesses, storytellers and occasionally, deceitful men. The spider’s ability to spin thread, seemingly out of thin air, has held humans in thrall for centuries. Spiders still appear everywhere, in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex to now — when we’ve named the thing that has us all trapped after a spider’s work. The World Wide Web. The Inter Net.
Everything fell into place for me when I saw Louise Bourgeois’ Maman, a giant sculpture of a spider that was a tribute to her mother (a tapestry restorer), and also a tribute to the sticky complexity of motherhood, repair, entrapment and safety. I remember sitting in front of the sculpture in 2022, with the sweaty palms and trembling nausea of someone who has just realised that they have fallen deeply and irrevocably in love. Scroll below for the full comic or visit Now and Zen in case this email is truncated for you.
I hope this week brings you gestures of kindness.
More soon,
Nish
