Arachnean

Human beings are made this way: the galaxy of conscious or unconscious intention in the Freudian sense of the term obscures other galaxies that would have the right to be called inate, it must be said; beings conscious of being could only be moved by this phenomenon at the expense of the predominant importance they grant to the wanting in which they place all their hopes.

Fernand Deligny, The Arachnean, Section 6

I start a project. Part of what brings me here is to be free from the way of being that is characterised by strategising to get what one wants. I seek freedom, freedom in a project which I have already been planning and justifying and shaping for a couple of years. ‘The Arachnean’ is something I will explore in depth. I envy the Arachnean. I envy their freedom from the anxiety and self-loathing which characterise my being, conscious of being. Perhaps this envy led me to plan, strategise, prepare, for this project — a project of more than envy, of love, for the Arachnean, who does not plan, strategise or prepare.

But can we say that the spider’s project is to weave its web? I don’t think so.We might as well say that the web’s project is to be woven.

The Arachnean, Section 1

We start with the metaphor, the image of a web-weaving spider, which lets us to begin to understand the Arachnean, and which gives it its name (it is an arachnid). I describe the Arachnean as a name that points towards an archetype, as Jung might have it: a pattern within humans that finds many images across cultures and times. So the spider, for Deligny, for me, is one image corresponding to the archetype. Particularly important here is the way that most spiders weave their webs, seemingly intuitively, without a human-style ‘thought out project’. Free, then, from ‘galaxies of conscious and unconscious intention’ which obscure the innate within most of us humans. We could also say The bowerbirds’ bower. The murmeration of startlings. The horse chestnut’s thick wandering trunk.

This word, ‘wander’, is important for Deligny. He was an educator, working with “autistics” in a community he established in the Cévennes, that offered non-verbal children a space that was very different to that of the institutions that existed at the time, a place of freedom for these children to be, not as “the other”, but in their way. More on this another time. One of his innovations was to invite volunteers to sit with pencil and paper and pay attention to a particular child as they moved around the buildings and the land, the tip of the pencil tracing the routes the children took. These tracings became known as the “wanderlines”.

My project is a little clearer, now: to give this word Arachnean, which I find astonishing, a meaning worthy of its harmony and scope.

THe Arachnean, Section 7

Me too! In this project I want to join Deligny in exploring this concept, the archetype that it points towards and the stories, characters, diagnoses, behaviours, locations, where the Arachnean can be found. With Deligny’s essays as a starting point, I’ll explore ideas of neurodiversity, categories of neurotypical, neurodivergent, autistic etc. It will involve reading and writing, but also dance, movement explorations, performances, workshops, interviews. The task is already too large to be exhausted in a lifetime, but so much the better for leaving the Arachnean in me room to wander through this research and its public outputs.

I am interested for a few reasons (here come the justifications which I alluded to in the first paragraph!) As an educator and play therapist who works with autistic children, I want to better understand the experience of the people I work with, and to explore the relationship diferent people have with the available structures offered to them. As a theatre practitioner, I am interested in how ancient and modern practices of masked play and dance complicate our understanding of the diversity of lived experience: how they invite us to take off the lenses of individual identity or neuropathology. And I am interested to explore my own neurodiverent (and neurotypical) traits — and all that comes along with that.

This last exploration quickly expands to include, well, everything about my experience of the world. I embrace that, if that is where this project wants to lead. Somewhere in my starry sky of motivations for this project, is the desire for permission to indulge my Arachneanness, which is when I am often most happily creating: wandering cities aimlessly, as I’ve done since I can remember, drifting off to somewhere hidden in the playground, probably among the trees.

But why so much concern for the Arachnean since it takes shape on its own?

Well, no: lift a spider onto a glass plate, and some sketchy weaving may occur, but only in a void, for the glass plate is the void, quite simply because there is no possible support struture and the spider’s gestures, obstinately reiterated, the very gestures that would allow it to weave, become so many spasms, preludes to the agony of the Arachnean

The Arachnean, Section 20

Consider this project, then, as well, as a way to escape the void. The void that can paralyse me with anxiety. But not by escaping into a restrictive institution. This project is my Cévennes! Room for wandering of many kinds, but with a plan to latch some threads onto. A plan that has given me the sense of being able to begin. It will be interesting to see whether I stick to the plan as I wander, or even if (I sob as I write this) whether I stick to the project at all. But for now, we have a frame, and thus we begin — not spinning a web on glass.

The plan is in forms: this blog; wanderings through the city; poetry; performances; workshops; interviews. This blog itself is intended to be shared with just a few people, a kind of record, selected writings (etc.), which invites others into my process and how I am resonating with my research. The work will sometimes be personal, sometimes not. Some of what takes its form on this blog may take other forms in public. But this is kind of a first step in recording and sharing my work under the title ‘The Arachnean’.