I was carrying a book written by Ted Hughes (once Plath’s chosen mate) on the Bard and the Goddess of Complete Being to my room in preparation to write a note (i.e: ‘status update’) relating to the difference between using language (as oneself) in ways that depersonate (self, others), impersonate (self, others), or personate (actual selves, unities and others).

While I was walking a spider appeared on my book’s open pages. Thus a crisis ensued. Effectively, however, ‘I’ mostly disappeared. Not in shock, fear or anxiety; but rather, into careful, gentle, expert action. I had only a short time in which to insure that many threats against this small creature would not succeed, the most dangerous of which was its complete ‘unpredictability’.

‘Darin’ disappeared into a ‘small-spider-on-this-large-book-in-my-hand’ rescuing ‘predictor’/’protector’. The spider was in a deadly and fictional context, nested within several others.

Slight changes in the physical situation could wipe it out. If it got between pages, I would be unable to manage their weight. I moved quickly, and was able to both preserve the spider without apparent injury, and release it from a variety of fictional frameworks at once.

I did not know how ‘ahead of time’, and the spider was small, and moved rapidly and somewhat unpredictably. The event was immediate. It happened as me, rather than to me. Once the spider appeared safe, I ‘returned to myself’ and began to marvel that I had ‘been something else’ for a moment. Something not entirely ‘me’, and somehow unlimited. I had become care and learning in service.

Was the spider deadly? What if it had been poisonous?

The spider is not as deadly as most of what we think and do without the slightest concern a thousand times a day. And it is far, far less poisonous. My primary concern was an opportunity to resolve an encounter while learning to see, rather than think, classify or react.

Analysis was employed only for mutual care and rescue. The spider was not the threat. The frameworks were. When I released the spider, something of myself and all of us, all throughout history and the future, was ‘right there, then’. It wasn’t precisely you or I, and yet without being thus it was more.

And it went beyond the frameworks, entirely.

‘I’ would say that I got it wrong. My self didn’t disappear. The ‘half-self-conflicted constructs I pretend about and for, around and into’ suddenly dissolved into something more like true relation. That isn’t me disappearing, but the opposite.

That was me, there, for a moment. Appearing and violating endless false frameworks, fears, lies, religions, and superstitions. Not for reasons. As being. With being. For beings, together.

Later, it became clear that the spider must have been on the book, somewhere, while I was holding it, for some time prior to my encounter. One can take this as one pleases, yet for me, there was a living soul that makes webs… hiding in and on this book, this moment, in my hand. Within the dead frameworks, the origins of life were near, alive; as if an octopus of very tiny size… emerged then, from an ocean of letters and insight…