SPIDER
Some people think I don’t even know what it is I’m doing or how I do it. No doubt they’re at least partially right. I take it they mean that I don’t really understand how I achieve these things. Or what for. Although I’ve never really heard these precise criticisms uttered explicitly in my hearing, one thing I do know is that people are suspicious. That’s why I like to throw out the word ‘tension’ every so often. Who can argue with that? Nonetheless I wouldn’t want to deny the vanity inherent in thinking to prevail, in thinking to witness my conceptions – and perhaps my prejudices too – advance unhindered and be fully accepted before such a format as I find here today. The gathered listeners, I mean, will not, cannot, dissent from the word of an orator on his platform after all. Or at least – and before my hackles rise at your heckles – not in any comprehensive sense. So let’s not pretend it is necessarily consensus which stares the speaker in the face, rather than convention. You are a captive audience, caught in a formal context for which no movement can be innocent.
another point of view, they say that I think that the world is me. What’s the difference, you might ask? The latter formulation is naturally only a subtle refinement of the former. But it is a telling refinement, and one that allows us to begin our examination of my operation by looking out into a whole world and its contents, rather than picking through the fickle half-truths and deceptions of personality. Basically the world that comes into play here is limited, I can spin out a thread of silk, let it drift in the air, from this twig to another across the way, from this beam in the roof to that brick supporting wall, and then I set to work. It’s small scale for sure, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that its validity as a ‘world’ is null. I strengthen the bridge I’ve made between these two anchors by crossing over and back, and thickening the line each time I go. Then from the centre point in the bridge I drop a line to the ground and secure it there. That Y-form is the basic structure, to which I add more radials from the centre to other places on the edge, and finally I weave them all together with a spiral line.
But can any movement ever be innocent, I ask you? Let’s get back to the original question at the head of my speech. People think that I am not fully aware of the motives behind my own operation. Mutterings come to me, I hear snide remarks, and occasionally I’m provoked, not so much into selfanalysis, but to come to the aid of these constipated would-be slanderers by helping them tease out some substance and coherence to their shady, fitful critique. Sometimes, indeed, it does seem that I understand more of what they are at than I do of my own business. There are at any rate, apparently two ways of looking at this main question. And I shall do my best to present the alternatives dispassionately.
The whole area one might say, is now under my control. Everything here, in this space, in this diminutive world, is mapped on a line that leads always and on circuits described above, back to my feet.
On the one hand it is said, more or less, that I think I am the world. Or to look at the same hand from
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Johnny Rodger
the drouth
Or is it, in fact, that I am now subject to every actuality and modification in this field rather than it to me? I’ve had a hard shift and I sit back on my work dozing, but the slightest breath of wind pulls the threads and shakes me into awareness. Nothing can happen in this space that does not draw my attention almost immediately. Though I’m completely exhausted, and though this concretisation of the void between a wooden beam and a brick wall has materialised gradually, and with a great and patient effort, from my very own
guts, it has often been dismissed as nought but a negligible achievement, untried over any significant dimension. Who knows, that is, if the properties of the world at large, the vast spaces traversing oceans and continents could be so mapped out – however long it took – by the method of my eyes and to this order drawn out of my body? But what does it really matter, I could reply. Even if in principle these differences in scale are insurmountable, here am I in the world of my little corner, and at this dimension, everything fits just nicely. My body and this space: me to it and it to me. On the other hand, some people say that it is a wonder anyone takes fright at the sight of my hairy black legs or when my own four pairs of eyes swivel to fix on them. For the truth is, so these people assert, that I am afraid of the world. I’m not at all ‘at home’ in ‘my corner’, at these or any other dimensions, they say. And what they mean is that the fit is not quite so neat: my machinations are no more congenial to the natural forms of a space between a wooden roof and a cold brick wall, than is a basket trap to the fish it snares. The Abstract, says this school of thought – and such is how they would categorise my work – is simply a reduction of messy reality into manageable proportions. Just so, the control freak, in their agoraand-every-other-type-of-phobia, casts out a net from their own guts and swallows their whole universe at once. Order, that is to say, is not a consequence of understanding, but a form of consumption.
carefully, every last one of them, through my jaws before I budge off in any direction – and that the weight, orientation and speed of each step is always prejudged so as not to upset the delicate network of points and lines I have built up and the complex set of relationships between them. That’s how I can say that even as I walk I’m not going anywhere: my action, indeed my very presence at any point across this area extends an immediate influence over every other conceivable point. Every other point of interest to me. So, is this my world, or is it the world, you may ask? But there is no ‘somewhere else’ to go for me, I am already always in touch, as it were, with the full range of my spatial possibilities. It’s a nonquestion. And as for you lot with your dusty feet and your weightless dreams of windswept far horizons, you soon found out you have a body too, and you’re going nowhere fast either.
In some ways, although on the face of it this seems like an attack, I find the bluntness of this critique of my operation to be more sympathetic. Where in the first critique set out above, an all-pervasive and alldetermining nature would have one’s consciousness already fixed as a merely particular mood of its fated contours, this alternative view somehow allows for a more individualistic and subjective freedom. Individualistic, I say, even if the putative individual concerned is figured for a paranoid and murderous loner dangling on a tissue of self-deception stretched across an existential nothingness! But why get so wound up? I’d have to say yes and no to all of the above. As mentioned there, the critics and the grumblers are always at least partially right. All of them. And if, on the whole, I’d have to admit that neither of the schema presented above portray an image of my operation which is entirely unrecognisable, then I’m also bound to say that the possibilities for partially-correct theorising are surely nothing short of infinite. It is this point, whatsmore, that leads us back to the question of tension. I’m walking here, I might say, but it doesn’t mean that I expect to be getting anywhere. All I can claim is that I keep my legs clean – watch me draw them
the drouth
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