Eight Ways of Looking at a Spider: An Eight-Legged Essay

We write the way spiders spin webs. Thoughts on the medieval Chinese writer Liu Xie — and spiders!

Image: Zoological illustrations of spiders made by A. T. Hollick (c. 1900) for the Biologia Centrali-Americana, an encyclopedia of the natural history of Mexico and Central America. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

1. Spider

Liu Xie’s fifth century masterpiece on the art of writing, the Wenxin diaolong, or The Heart of Literature and the Carving of Dragons, makes no mention of spiders. But late one spring, I go to the park close to where I live — by the exercise machines nobody uses, within earshot of a busy road — to think about Liu Xie. And as I lie beside the long grasses the municipal authorities have left untended to encourage wildlife, I see something move: a spider tending its web.

She is a garden spider, Araneus diadematus, her brown back mottled yellow and white. The web stretches between a wide blade of grass, and the buttress of a nearby bush. The web has been torn by an insect that has broken free, and the tiny spider is meticulously drawing threads across the gaps, liquid meeting air to become silk.

I watch her go about her work, and think of the opening line of Liu’s text:

Pattern is a very great power indeed — Is it not born alongside heaven and earth?

2. Hyphology