Re-weaving lives and love ~ Malinda Words

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 249th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

The late poet Indika Gunawardena wrote two poems about spiderwebs. In one he claimed that he was a spider, but one who would weave a different kind of web. The title was ‘Against the system.’ Following the claim, Indika states the objective and demonstrates full cognition of the fate that awaits him -- he is not just a spider weaving a different kind of web, he thinks not of prey but just the beauty and for this reason perishes before his time. Unperturbed by sweet death, he is, to the end, just a spider, yes, weaving a web differently.

I am tempted to say that we, his friends and readers that is, were the unintended victims of that singular weave. We still struggle in those delicate strands, but then again the weave is of such tenderness that this entrapment pleases. We are prisoners who do not seek freedom.

The other spider poem is brief, elegant, amusing and philosophical. I do not have the original at hand, so this is a rough translation from what I remember:

Weave
weave
weave
commands the spider’s wife

Break
break
break
mine commands.

It is another spider poem or rather a poem about spiderwebs that took me to the poetry of my dear friend who unburdened himself from weaves and traps, domestic and otherwise, almost six years ago.

Fady Joudah calls it ‘Mimesis,’ which means the representation of the real word in art and literature. The Palestinian American physician, poet, and translator has a spider story and one which is not too different from the second of Indika’s poems above.

My daughter
Wouldn’t hurt a spider
That had nested
Between her bicycle handles
For two weeks
She waited
Until it left of its own accord

If you tear down the web I said
It will simply know
This isn’t a place to call home
And you’d get to go biking

She said that’s how others
Become refugees isn’t it?

Indika may or may not have cleared the cobwebs as ordered to, but he certainly wasn’t too happy about perpetrating what amounted to the destruction of habitat. He didn’t have to talk about turning creatures into refugees.

We could argue that the bicycle handles belonged to the girl and therefore the spider was in fact trespassing, just like notions of ownership may very well have prompted the self-righteous intent and therefore the command, ‘break, break, break.’

The spider was not consulted in either case.

What is a clean house? What is a bicycle that’s squeaky clean and not blemished by a skein of silk intricately arranged? Fady’s daughter chose to wait. She needn’t have. Keeping a house neat and tidy is pleasing but what of that to the spider?

Choices. Histories. Territories. Refugees. So much power. So much politics. So many backstories. All of it, yes, all of it, can be swept aside with a broom or brush or a piece of cloth if the aim is right and the magnitude of strength deployed is sufficient. No one has to negotiate with a spider. No one has to say ‘move or else..’ or ‘sorry, must be done…’ No one has to utter a word or spare a thought.

Fady’s daughter did.

And my thoughts went all the way to something my wife told a neighbor who was upset that there were birds, squirrels, monkeys and other creatures eating fruits in our garden. ‘They won’t spare anything; how wasteful!’ That was the neighbour’s lament. Maybe it was said by way of commiseration. Perhaps she thought that we too were distraught about these losses.

‘These are their homelands on which we have encroached,’ my wife said gently and with a smile.

Who came first? Who was invited to whose home? Who confers the right to take umbrage? Who gives the authority to evict?

In the Republic of Poetry in which the heart is resident and where there’s room for empathy, such questions are meaningless. It’s nice to ride a bike. It’s nice to walk. It is nice to step back from life and death issues such as getting from here to there.

Fady knows the weaver’s trade. Fady’s little girl has the eyes to see that the weave is layered and does not forbid further layering. Indika’s weave was so magical that the layering has not stopped so many years after he departed, ‘leaving love’s residue behind’ as promised.

Some little girl, somewhere, upon seeing a spider web between the handlebars of a bicycle, decided to postpone a bike ride. She turned her father into a spider. Just like that. And we, happily trapped in the silken weave that was then woven, move our eyes across broken landscapes, determined to re-flower them with tenderness.

Maybe we are spiders too. We too can weave to trap. We could also weave simply because we like creating something that pleases one and all, even if it means our life expectancy diminishes. It means one thing: we are all spiders, endowed with silk glans. We can weave if we want to. Perhaps we should.

21 October 2023

Re-weaving lives and love

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