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
34
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