Weekend Read: Geraldine Brooks On Spiders
Geraldine Brooks doesn’t stop. The former foreign correspondent wrote her first book, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women in 1994. Then she switched to fiction, with best-selling novels such as People of the Book, Caleb’s Crossing and the Pulitzer Prize-winning March, inspired by Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Her acute powers of observation and her elegant prose are on display in this piece on spiders.
Don’t worry, spiders, I keep house casually
— Kobayashi Issa, b.1763
I’m looking at him. He’s looking back.
He’s looking down, in fact, from the ceiling of my bedroom. His eight-eyed stare is the last thing I see each night before I reach over and turn off the light.
But in the dark, he’s still looking. I can’t see him now, but I know he sees me. He has better night vision than I have.
I always imagined that his superfluity of eyes would enable him to see the world in vivid, sparkling beauty – more colours, more details. But scientists say that’s not so. His eyes are arrayed in two rows of four simply so that he can sense movement, trap prey. The internal structures of his eyes are of the type that give only blurry, wide-angled images.
All those eyes – the row of four on top of his head and the row of four facing forward – are the most alien, perhaps the most alienating, thing about him. Eight legs? No big deal. We live with animals who have more legs than we do. We’re used to that. But when we gaze into a dog’s eyes, or a cat’s, they gaze back at us with a familiar stare, eyeball to eyeball. It’s easy to befriend them. It’s one of the attributes that makes them easy to love.
Loving a huntsman spider, of the family Sparassidae (from the Greek, to rip or tear), is, perhaps, a bigger ask. But when you live in the inner city, wildlife is scarce, elusive. So you need to appreciate what you have. The huntsman spider on my bedroom ceiling is not my pet, but he is my housemate. His ancestors were on this bit of rocky Sydney harbourside long before mine were. Why should I not welcome him?
I do welcome him, in fact. I assume he is male, because I have seen no egg sacs, and huntsman egg sacs can be conspicuously large – some, I’ve read, the size of ping-pong balls.
He is a graceful creature, an athlete. He’s built for speed. He’s faster than the best of human runners. Usain Bolt, for example, can travel five body lengths per second. A huntsman spider has been clocked at forty-two. Because of this swiftness, he is relieved of the necessity to spin a web. If a mosquito lands, he feels the vibration and runs down his prey with lethal speed.
Is he cute? I think so. He is pleasantly furred. He is polite and moves away when he senses that is required. But he can also be clingy. Once you have him on your hand, it can be hard to convince him to let go. When I have had occasion to touch him – once, for instance, to move him out of sight of a hyperventilating arachnophobic guest – he was light in my hand, and soft as a feather. He isn’t an itsy-bitsy spider. He’s as big as my palm. He has venom, I know this, but it’s not very toxic to humans. I also know that his jaws are too small, his fangs insufficient, to easily puncture human skin. Even so, I move slowly, so as not to startle him. Generally, we give each other our space.
There are 1207 species of huntsman spider in the world. You can find 155 of them in Australia, and most of these can’t be found anywhere else. Some species have grand and violent names, Goliath, Hercules, that refer to their size and not their shy nature. David Bowie has a species named after him, a Malaysian huntsman with a shock of yellow hair.
My resident huntsman is no rock star, no mythical hero. His furry head and legs are subtly toned with the soft greys and beiges of his native habitat, the dry sclerophyll forests of the Sydney foreshore. My terrace house also has a muted colour palette, which is maybe why he feels at home here. I think, but am not sure, that he is a Delena cancerides, a ‘social huntsman’. Cancerides comes from his supposed crab-like movement, but I don’t think he moves like a crab at all. I think he moves like a dancer, swift and lithe, graceful and powerful.
And because of him, there are no mosquitos in my bedroom. It’s been years since I’ve seen a cockroach. But more than that: he brings the wilderness inside my house.
Thank you, friend.
This is an edited extract from Animals Make Us Human, ed. Leah Kaminsky and Meg Keneally {RRP $29.99, Penguin Life}, available now.
Words_ Geraldine Brooks
Photos_ Supplied, AussieNotNamedBruce, Shanrad