Spider Lady

 

Weaving is often associated with spiders spinning their webs.  The Navaho, weaving their beautiful textiles, have their Spider Woman mythologies.  Spider Women spun her web and through it into the sky, where it became the night, and the dew became the stars.

 http://www.rainewalker.com/spiderwoman%20page.htmstars.

 In First Nations legends, spider women are not depicted as grotesques, or as dark ladies, or creatures of gothic fantasy.

Spider Woman was the creator of the world.  The impulse to create, especially artistically, especially through the art of weaving, was one of her gifts. And writers are like spiders, spinning their thoughts into words. :)

 


The weaver sees her fiber as the poet sees her word.
The thread feels the hand, as the word feels the tongue.
Structures of feeling in the double sense
of sensing and signifying,
the word and the thread feel our passing.

*
Is the word the conducting thread, or does thread
     conduct the word-making?
Both lead to the centre of memory, a way of uniting
     and connecting.
A word carries another word as thread searches for
    thread.
A word is pregnant with other words and a thread
     contains
other threads within its interior.
Metaphors in tension, the word and the thread
     carry us beyond
threading and speaking, to what unites us, the
     immortal fiber.

*

To speak is to thread and the thread weaves the
     world.

from 

Cecilia Vicuña: Word & Thread

Angel Walk...

Well, it has taken me a while to finish reading this book.   I started this winter, but somehow, I just couldn't get past the first few chapters, which I had to reread several times, as I put the book down for too long.  But now that spring is here, I found myself in the proper mood to read it.  I liked how real the character became, how the details of Cory's life were so amazingly authentic.  I really felt I had a glimpse into this person's world.  While Cory is 85 years old when we meet her, it is really her life in London, when she is much younger and just starting out as a photographer, that is most interesting, at least to me.

Govier takes up the theme of the painter versus the photographer, or paintings and photography as art forms.  Cory becomes one of the major photographers of World War 2, despite being a woman.  Her relationship with the painter, Albert, transcends time and circumstance as much as can be possible:

"The space was dominated by his easel; a canvas with a half-finished painting, another of his suffering, retreating women. " Are they all like that?", she said, and he laughed.  
" I feel I know you, " he said.

And of course, by the end, she is another retreating  woman herself.

Older than she, wishing to remain the one in authority, nearing the end of their physical relationship, he tries to make her remain his inferior, but by then, she has become a truly independent woman.


"You speak as if people were in fact interested in what you think!  What you feel! As if you were a great artist!  When all you are is the vulgar man on the spot with a camera."
"Maybe you don't have to be a great artist for people to be interested in how you feel," she said mildly.
He looked astonished and his throat swelled up like a bellows.
"Of course you must. Otherwise, what will we have? All sorts of minor characters running around filling every corner of the world with their beastly little impressions. No, no, no.  It's too easy." He scoffed. Anyway, why should we be interested in your thoughts about a tank?"
"'The most objective image comes from the most personal approach."'  (She quotes Goethe.)

Well, she does try to pacify him, as she still wants him to be her better half as it were, but the truth is that he has taken another lover. So although he will always be her soul mate, in that he was the person who understood her best, she leaves.  Only their conversations remain, via letter or just thought.

(I wonder how their relationship would have played out in this day of emails and FaceBook.)

Cory's son, Tyke, studies mushrooms.  He finds a death cap, or destroying angel, and marvels at its beauty, even though he recoils from it.  Toxic, like war and death, but beautiful in that it makes one value life more.

At the very end Cory explains that  Albert was an anti-mentor:
"He was dangerous.  Also, he became everything I disliked. I only had to look at him to see. It's very important you know, to have these bad examples in life.  It took me awhile before I learned to follow some of his advice and to reject other parts of it.  When I learned to see with my own eyes I had enough.
It's like the poison we take to put light in our lives.
And besides, I loved him.  Do you understand?  It's not what should be, is it?  I  should have followed someone who wanted nothing but the best for me.  But that's too easy.  We don't work that way."

Cory exiles herself for most of her life, to live  in  northern Canada, to live in the wilderness, in a world of light, where, she says,  there is no sentimentality, although once in a great while, it has "that touch of rue."

 

Roses And Rue by Oscar Wilde

(To L. L.)

Could we dig up this long-buried treasure,
Were it worth the pleasure,
We never could learn love's song,
We are parted too long.

Could the passionate past that is fled
Call back its dead,
Could we live it all over again,
Were it worth the pain!


http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/oscar_wilde/poems/11064  Read the rest here.






....there's rue for you; and here's some for me...   (Hamlet)


Cory is a strong female character, who does not give way to madness.  She transcends an archetype like Ophelia; although she is seen as eccentric, she is a survivor, belonging to the age of realism (camera), rather than that of the romantic (painting).
   
Definitely worth at least one reading!