"In Which a Spider Weaves a Web on My Computer Screen"

A Note on "In Which a Spider Weaves a Web on My Computer Screen" from Tom Sleigh:

This is the second to last post in “Age of Wonder: Poems from 'The King’s Touch'". Next Tuesday, Feb. 1, is publication day: so many thanks to all of you who have followed along week by week.

Today’s poem chronicles what at first seems to be two separate events: one in the private sphere, the other in the public. But both events mirror each other in that both chronicle catastrophes. In the 1930s, at the moment when Hitler was consolidating power, the Baltic German naturalist and biologist, Jakob von Uexküll—whom some have called the father of bio-semiotics—developed a theory that every creature, from single-celled ones to humans, were all interpreters of signs. If a tick on a leaf smells butyric acid wafting from the sweat glands of a mammal, it first has to perceive the odor before it drops onto the mammal and starts crawling to where the tick’s sense of touch sends it the sign that HERE, RIGHT HERE is a good place to start sucking blood. This world of signs Uexküll called the tick’s "Umwelt", literally its “surround”—its own particular bubble of perception, and hence of signs. To von Uexküll, the fact that all creatures live in a world of signs was proof that every creature is sentient and inhabits their own all-encompassing, subjective world. So when the speaker in the first part of the poem callously sweeps away the web, the devastation for the spider would be recorded by the spider as a “spider-catastrophe.” But the result is that the spider begins to spin a new web.

Similarly, in the second half of the poem the old Palestinian man, who has had to rebuild his life after being expelled from Palestine by the Israelis, describes his life as a refugee as “living like a spider in the bottom of a well.” But what he actually said to me was translated from Arabic into French, and then from French into English, and then into my own way of understanding English: three acts of translation taking place in three idiosyncratic and very personal Umvelts.

But acts of interpretation aside, when the speaker sweeps away the spider’s web, when he listens to the old man talk about the murder of his mother by Israeli soldiers, how do you begin to calibrate the relative scale of brutality—and of equal, if not more importance, its redress? Which is when the poem’s first half comes back to haunt its second.