Spider, Spider Burning Bright
I am terrified of spiders. Once on a walk in a park I saw a tarantula just off the park path. It was standing still in a pool of light. It had a kind of beauty that gets under your skin and makes it crawl. For the past few days the spider in the photo has been showing up on the ceiling of my kitchen and living room. I caught it walking across one of the M.C. Escher prints in our living room. Then Husband carried it outside on a bit of paper towel. (We have a no-violence-against-insects policy in our house. He calls me an ant-murderess because I unremorsefully kill ants that crawl too close to my sugar and flower bins. The strange thing is, I like ants very much.) In the sunlight the little tufts of hair around the spider's eyes glowed turquoise. There it was again, that uncomfortable beauty. I don't know if you can see the thin strips of white on its legs; they look painted there by a caligrapher with a very delicate brush. So she is out there now, the beautiful spider, scuttling in the grass, looking for its dinner (ants...?) and a place to sleep tonight, guarding its own little life with the same fierceness the rest of us do. What a world.
posted by Green Whale | 7:22 PM
2 Comments:
I'm not sure that saving animals from one another is necessary; they seem to me to keep a good balance in the way they kill each other to feed. But then I know so little about the natural world...
These are very hard questions you're asking, and I'm not very confident in the answers I have to them. Nevertheless -- one reason I think we owe insects, and animals in general, more grace than they owe each other is that we are capable of understanding the consequences of our actions in a way animals aren't. Our big brains allow us to see what we do in context; that's why, it seems to me, we can make moral judgments. The other reason is that animals live by instinct in balance with their environment, whereas we humans have to make a conscious effort to. Part of that conscious effort is the decision not to destroy more of the natural world than absolutely necessary for our survival.
So I don't want to kill a spider that does me absolutely no harm by living in my house. I wish I didn't kill the ants that want to get at my flour and sugar because really, in the grand scheme of things, the inconvenience that they cause me is very, very small. There are earwigs in my house too, and I hate them (and am ashamed of that), and kill them not without a certain feeling of satisfaction. It becomes a question of hygiene after a certain point, too. Or at least that's how I justify it to myself for now.
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