Spider by Kelly Grotke

This is where I will build my web, near the light from an open window, and wait for my meal to come.   Amor fati.  A mere spider, not very widely read but I did read once that we are born to catch flies as humans are to be consumed by sorrows, even though it troubles me sometimes that I can see no horizon beyond this truth, the magnitude of it all makes me quiver when it overtakes me, I lose my step and you can imagine the result.  But then I remember that I am nowhere else but here and now, and I continue with my work, leaving the rest up to chance and luck, since whether I feast or starve depends on endless backward-bending causes far beyond my awareness, which is, as I have already admitted, very limited, and also incapable of irony.  It is said that only humans are aware of the past and capable of divining its mysteries, untangling freedom from necessity and, so they say, from themselves in the process, but I am a mere spider, and all my expressive spinning is a mechanical tendency peculiar to my kind, an interpolation in the corner of someone’s window, and if my mistakes along with labor’s endless contingencies deny my work the perfection of pure geometric abstraction after which I so evidently strive,  it is good then to remember that we cannot feed forever on ideals without going hungry.

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