With a few exceptions, I find most kinds of spiders very likable -- particularly jumping spiders, which have an almost mantis-like air of weird spirituality. When I was living in what is now Hell Hollow Wilderness Area in Ohio, I had a persistent fantasy that there were giant jumping spiders living in the woods on the far side of Paine Creek, and that, being cursed with voicelessness themselves, they would sometimes bring humans to their nocturnal soirées to perform. A pure-voiced girl in a white gown would sing, and I would accompany her on a recorder. (This was not my instrument of choice, but spiders are fastidious about music, and they had a strict rule: Mama don't 'low no banjo pickin' round here.)
Hell Hollow Wilderness Area just came up again, in "North Carolina Saves Mummy," but what I want to focus on here is the idea that the recorder is the sort of instrument that spiders like. In "Long green ships and the bad ol' debil" (May 17), I had to do an image search for the liner notes from the Cat Stevens album Buddha and the Chocolate Box to confirm that the official lyrics have debil rather than devil. One of the results that came up was this art from the album, which shows a spider playing a flute:
A further sync is that this is an album by a musician who goes (or rather went, before his conversion to Islam) by Cat. The Stephanie Sammann video about jumping spiders, which occasioned my post about them, says that the jumping spider's ambush method "is a lot like how cats hunt," adding later, "Jumping spiders are known to hate water. The cat analogy is still going strong here."
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