From the Narrow Desert

In yesterday's post "The spider, the rat, and the poltergeist," I mentioned listening to the Denmark + Winter cover of Johnny Cash's "I Walk the Line" and thinking of it as being sung by a spider.

For starters, this is just very spidery music. Anyone who has spent any time interacting with spiders in an indoor environment will know that they are extremely responsive to music, being drawn to some kinds and repelled by others. (I believe there have even been a few studies by The Science on this, drawing broad-brush conclusions to the effect that spiders prefer classical to techno or something like that.) And, though Johnny Cash himself would surely leave them cold, Denmark + Winter's ethereal rendition of "I Walk the Line" is exactly the kind of music spiders like. In fact, when I played it last night, a large male cane spider came out from his hiding place under the wooden slats of my balcony floor and joined me, waving his pedipalps a bit in the tentative way they do, which is about as close as cane spiders, a nervous breed, ever get to dancing.

As I suppose is obvious, I'm fond of spiders. Tolkien apparently thought of them simply as horrible and disgusting, which is also my father's view. (Once, when my father was explaining what made spiders so repulsive -- "big fat gut, long skinny legs" -- a friend of mine overheard and responded with an indignant "Hey!") With a few exceptions, I find most kinds of spiders very likable -- particularly jumping spiders, which have an almost mantis-like air of weird spirituality. When I was living in what is now Hell Hollow Wilderness Area in Ohio, I had a persistent fantasy that there were giant jumping spiders living in the woods on the far side of Paine Creek, and that, being cursed with voicelessness themselves, they would sometimes bring humans to their nocturnal soirées to perform. A pure-voiced girl in a white gown would sing, and I would accompany her on a recorder. (This was not my instrument of choice, but spiders are fastidious about music, and they had a strict rule: Mama don't 'low no banjo pickin' round here.)

As for the lyrics, "I keep my eyes wide open all the time" is obviously applicable to spiders, but the main thing is the repeated phrase "I walk the line" itself. Walking the line is what spiders do.

Today, wondering about possible meanings of "With spider's oil the lamps of Salem burn," I put do spiders produce oil into a search engine. I was pretty sure they don't, but it can't hurt to check, right? Apparently it's a common misconception -- there are lots of sites debunking it -- that spiders do produce oil, and that this has to do with their ability to "walk the line." Here's what the Spider Myths Site has to say:

Myth: Spiders have oil on their feet that keeps them from sticking to their own webs.

Fact: Everyone who educates about spiders has heard the question "why don't spiders stick to their webs?" many times. Who first came up with the oil-on-the-feet idea is unknown, but it must have originally been a perfectly reasonable guess, or hypothesis. Since the decades-old origin of this idea, in some circles it's become a dogma. It's been repeated countless times in print and online. There are even classroom lesson plans built around this false "fact".

To quote two of the world's leading experts on spider silk use (Fritz Vollrath and Edward Tillinghast) writing in 1992: "Ecribellate spiders simply tiptoe around the glue, which they deposit in spheroidal globs. When a spider accidentally steps into one of these glue balls, as it sometimes does, it suffers no more inconvenience than a human stepping into a wad of gum. When a fly slams into the web, however, it hits about 50 of the droplets, enough to make it stick." I might add that most spiders don't even make sticky silk, and those that do (mainly orbweavers and cobweb weavers) still have many non-sticky threads in various parts of their webs.

So "spider's oil" is a myth, a substance invented by those who don't imagine a spider capable of simply watching its step. Spiders aren't immune to the traps they set for others; they're just careful. (Carefulness lies very close to the essence of spider-nature, I think.) I'm not sure how or whether that ties in with the idea of "spider's oil" as lamp fuel, but it seems worth noting.

Note added: Another "spider-friendly" cover of an originally rougher song is Storm Large's take on the Pixies in the 2013 movie Big Ass Spider (one of the best opening scenes in any movie ever). People understand that this is what spiders like:

This dream was entirely auditory; the visual field was a featureless black. I heard the sound of a small group of children singing -- I would estimate that it was a group of seven or eight small boys, and I knew that one of them was myself as a small boy. We sang:

I'm all made of hinges 'cause everything bends
From the top of my head way down to my ends
I'm hinges at bottom, I'm hinges at top
But I have to be hinges or else I would FLOP!

I knew that we were singing this under the direction of some sort of very old nonhuman entity -- probably some kind of "gray alien" type of being, though it was covered in a big hooded garment that made it impossible to be sure. (I want to emphasize that I didn't see this in my dream but was aware of it as a sort of mental image or visual memory. I find it odd that even in a dream there is a difference between a mental image and a "real" one.)

As we sang, we danced around, bending all our joints as the lyrics suggest, and when we came to "FLOP!" we instantly let all our muscles go lax and, well, flopped. Somehow we were able to do this without falling to the ground, because we had practiced it many times under this being's direction.

(I, the dreamer/observer, was not dancing or flopping. The dream was as devoid of kinaesthetic sensation as of visual. I was simply aware that my very young self had done those things. Overall, the feeling was as if I were listening to an audio recording in a dark room, and the sound triggered a memory which brought back all the rest.)

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The song we sang is one commonly sung by very young Mormon children, from a children's poem by Aileen Fisher, the difference being that the real song ends "I'm hinges in front, and I'm hinges in back / But I have to be hinges or else I would CRACK!"

Thee two versions of the lyrics suggest two contrasting ways of not being "all made of hinges." A hinge is a specific point of articulation in an otherwise rigid structure. If we were entirely rigid, with no joints, we would crack. If we were endlessly flexible, with no rigid structure, we would flop.

The imagery of the dream clearly draws heavily on Whitley Strieber's book The Secret School, where children meet secretly at night in a "children's circle" supervised by the Sister of Mercy, an alien who wears a nun's habit to conceal her true form, and one of the things they learn is to dance.

Some hours after the dream, I realized that the idea of flopping also reminded me of something in The Secret School, and I thumbed through the book until I found it. It is a scene (p. 203) in which the young Whitley feels that he has traveled into the future and is watching television:

I saw children playing on a patio. They had floppy clothes on and black helmets that reminded me of the ones we wore in the secret school. These kids had dolls that looked like the Sister of Mercy. They were moving their arms very quickly and singing in shrill voices. I found this incredibly alarming, and was glad when the scene changed.

Dancing aliens also appear in the film Communion, recently mentioned in my post "Owls, aliens, Sesame Street muppets, and the Duke of Earl." In the movie, Whitley tells his wife that when he was with the aliens, "they danced." She asks, "What kind of dance?" Whitley bursts out laughing and says, "The bossa nova! How do I know?"

In my July 23 post "Break on through to the other side," I mentioned that the Doors song of that name had been running through my head. I looked it up on YouTube and listened to it. One of the comments below the video said "Bossa Nova + psychedelic rock = perfect sound."

I only have the vaguest idea of what bossa nova sounds like. ("The bossa nova! How do I know?") When I hear bossa nova, I think the Pixies.