The Jorō Spider

A spider native to east Asia has recently (within the last 5 years or so) spread over North Georgia, where I live. An orbweaver, the Jorō spider builds its massive golden-hued webs between trees at the edges of forest and all over my yard. 

The Jorō spider is an invasive species. It is believed that they arrived in Georgia in cargo and escaped around I-85 in Jackson County, just a 30 minute drive from Athens, where I am typing these words. 

The spider itself is beautiful. Its web, too, is beautiful. There is another spider native to Georgia called the basilica spider, named for its dome-shaped webs, which are quite messy. The Jorō spider's web is also messy, featuring several layers of strong web that when touched feels as strong as fishing line. The web shines gold in the sunlight, giving the whole scene an unearthly quality. In my opinion, the Jorō's web evokes the spiritual nature tied to a word like "basilica" more aptly than does that of the basilica spider itself. These webs, plus the large spider's striking yellow and black contrasted with the pinkish red of its spinnerette, make it no surprise that this spider has inspired folklore. If folklore or cryptozoology interest you, I recommend you click these words and read on. It's ok if you click and read now. I'll wait.

Welcome back. Recently, while the school where I teach had its field day, which was a make up for the lack of field day in the spring when we were all sent home on March 13th to quarantine at the onset of America's Covid-19 outbreak, I spotted a Jorō's web near the edge of some trees. I called my students over to teach them about the spider. Another teacher chimed in, "Those are an invasive species. We sprayed about 20 of 'em yesterday." I nodded. "We're seeing a whole lot less of our writing spiders because they're taking over." I had also noticed fewer writing spiders (or argiope aurantia), which are native to Georgia and similar in size and appearance to the Jorō. The writing spiders web is less impressive to me, though respectable nonetheless. 

In my opinion, killing the Jorō spider is a lost cause. They're well-established and will continue to spread. You can kick at the wind, but you will never stop it. Ironically, this spider-killing teacher does not often wear a mask while in the building, which has been proven to stop the spread of one thing or another, but I digress.

I don't know why I'm writing this, but if, for some reason, you are reading this and it is far into the future, I hope you are doing ok. I hope there are not currently any pandemics. I hope our collectively anxiety and fear resolve themselves peacefully. I hope the Jorō spider's ecological impact does not outweigh its inherent beauty. I hope no one judges me for highlighting previous uses of Jorō yellow, which I did accidentally while trying to paste the word. I hope formatting errors are acceptable where you are. Perhaps, it won't even show up when I publish this blog post. I hope the weather is nice. I hope we managed to halt our climate crisis or at very least our bodies learn to evolve into the chaos that we've created. I hope you imagined Kevin Costner in Water World when you read the previous sentence. If you didn't, you are now. I hope you are also imagining Kevin Costner in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, specifically the scene where he is nude, climbing across some rocks after bathing beneath a waterfall. I hope you are able to bathe under a waterfall someday. That sounds peaceful and nice. I hope on your way to the waterfall you do not walk through a Jorō spider's web and become entangled in its thick, gold grasp. I hope that if you become entangled that the Jorō spider doesn't end up biting you. I've read that their bite hurts. 

Prose

I'm trying to write more prose. I've only start one thing of prose lately, but I intend to carry through with writing more. After finishing 100+ page book of poetry over a 6 or 7 year period, I feel the need to put my thoughts into another form. I find prose challenging. I write it very slowly. I also write poetry slowly. My prose velocity means that it is highly unlikely that I ever write a novel. I wrote slowly because my hope is that I can feel the impact that each word has as I type it out. 

That sounds stupid because it is.

I kind of picture it like a piano hammer striking the strings inside the body. 

I've written short stories in the past that didn't take too much effort. It's as if I've conditioned my brain into overthinking language. Writing can feel like a trudge through a swamp. It also feels unnecessary to write every word that enters my field of thought. My language needs space, which is maybe I struggle with the visual density of prose. Maybe writing papers in college and grad school killed the joy of prose.

Here are some things I mostly avoid when writing prose:

1. Dialogue: I just don't like writing it. 

2. Character names. I always forget character names when I read and watch movies. As long as I can tell who's who, it's all good.

3. Action: When I write prose in the non-non-fictional realm, I feel this urge to have nothing happen. It's like reality is already filled with so much insanity that I want to write things in which the drama is purely in the act of continued existence. At least this applies to what I'm writing right now. Everything has already happened or will happen, but right now is just existence. Don't come to my prose looking for drastic acts or sexy shenanigans. There will be no conniving, just more thinking, but hopefully the blood of thinking.

4. Narrative resolution: I think there's only one story in which I've "resolved" the narrative, and that one was resolved by a world-ending storm overtaking the protagonist's home while playing Madden. 

5. Characters that are writers. Self-explanatory. 

After a productive period of poetry during the first month of quarantine, I found myself struggling to create until recently, which I'm forcing. I need to do that from time to time. I hope this is not something that I start and then abandon. I once wrote 30-40 pages of a novel on a Saturday before quitting the next day. I think I needed to do that to commit myself to writing poetry. I was in college at the time, still living in the dorms. All I can remember is spending an entire page describing the protagonist walking around an empty strip mall parking lot. I remember thinking that was my favorite part. It was the last thing I wrote before giving up the novel.