Flame-knee, Graysmoke, Hobo

Audax jumping spider. See page 200

Chapter 13: Mystaceus, a jumping spider

page 199 (marginal note): approximately 110 families of spiders. In Field Notes from a Hidden City, Esther Woolfson delights in the names given to various species:

Who could fail to be entranced by the Cloud-living, the Dew-drop, or the Garden-ghost spider? Who could resist the allure of the Flame-knee spider or the Fireleg, the Graysmoke, the Purple-bloom, the Red-bloom, the Filmydome, the Starburst or the Rose. Is there anyone who, on hreading the names of the Robber Baron Cave meshweaver, the Hobo, the Government Canyon Bat Cave meshweaver, the Tuscon recluse doesn't hear the score of a spaghetti western...?

Spiders are often among the first animals to colonise new habitats.

page 202: memory. Some scientists speculate that the way the brain records and remembers movement in space may be the basis of all memory.


This is fourteenth in a new series of notes and comments on chapters in The Book of Barely Imagined Beings. It appears around the time of the US publication, and adds to an earlier series that appeared around UK publication.

Speak, memory

Twenty-second in a series of notes and comments on The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Chapter 14: Mystaceus

A version of this chapter was published by Aeon as Webs of Perception

page 201: Bagheera kiplingi lives in South America, not India

page 201: build a mental map. In a comment for the Aeon article Andrew Wilson writes:

Portia doesn't actually build a mental map; there is now strong evidence that its scanning behaviour is a real time perceptual strategy that allows it to look as if it's planning; see Chapter 4 of Louise Barrett's excellent book, 'Beyond the Brain'; the chapter is called 'The Implausible Nature of Portia' and has references to all the primary literature on this.

page 203: it is also possible to remember too much. A real life Funes was 'S', a Russian man described by A. R. Luria in his celebrated work The Mind of a Mnemonist (A little book about a vast memory). Luria writes:

[S] lived in wait [sic] of something that he assumed was to come his way, and gave himself up to dreaming and “seeing” far more than to functioning in life. The sense that he had something particularly fine was about to happen remained with him throughout his life – something which would solve all his problems and make his life simple and clear.

Thus [S] continued to be disorganized, changing jobs dozens of times – all of them merely “temporary.” At his father's bidding he entered music school; later he became a vaudeville actor; then an efficiency expert; and then a mnemonist. At some point, recalling that he knew Hebrew and Aramaic, he took advantage of ancient sources in these languages and began to treat people with herbs.

He had a family – a fine wife and a son who was a success – but this, too, he perceived as through a haze. Indeed, one would be hard put to say which was more real for him; the world of imagination in which he lived, or the world of reality in which he was but a temporary guest. 

page 203: steering a course between remembering too much and too little. See this:

According to [one] theory, our memories act as a kind of ballast that holds us steady during times of stress; they can suggest ways to solve problems and offer comfort when we are feeling wounded. When people find it hard to recall specific events from their past, however, they feel overwhelmed by life's challenges, which slowly pushes them into depression. "In the right circumstances, the effect can be striking," says [Mark] Williams... If the theory is right, there may be new ways of treating depression that directly target the underlying memory problems.

In Shakespeare's Memory by Jorge Luis Borges, the narrator says:

No one may capture in a single instant the fullness of his entire past. That gift was never granted even to Shakespeare, so far as I know, much less to me, who was but his partial heir. A man's memory is not a summation; it is a chaos of vague possibilities. St Augustine speaks, if I am not mistaken, of the palaces and caverns of memory. That second metaphor is the most fitting one. It was into those caverns that I descended.

page 205: in its entirety, A Little Fable goes like this:

"Alas", said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into." "You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.

Theridion grallator

Phidippus mystaceus

The first published extract from The Book of Barely Imagined Beings appears today in Aeon Magazine today under 'An enigmatic spider and the fragile threads of human memory.'  Here is the illustration by Golbanou Moghaddas that appears in the book:

The text as it appears on Aeon is slightly cut from the version in the book, which has this epigraph from A Little Fable by Franz Kafka:

You need only change your direction.

And the Aeon version cut this:

The male Audax...has palps (frontal appendages) as splendidly hued as the feathers of a bird of paradise -- for what girl can resist a boy who has technicolor genitals in the middle of his face? [1]

Also missing from the Aeon version are five marginal notes that appear in the print and eBook versions. So for example the word highlighted in red here:

...as the young Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, ‘only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy’...

is linked to this marginal note:

Marcus Chown (2007) suggests that at the Omega Point (a condition hypothesized by the cosmologist Frank Tipler as the time when technology makes possible a state of being indistinguishable from eternal life), the greatest imaginable joy any human could experience would be to return to the ‘eternal’ summer days of childhood, when your favourite dog was alive and your parents were young and full of life. Something like this, perhaps, is evoked in the final scenes of Terrence Malick’s 2011 film The Tree of Life.

Note

[1] Turns out I have failed on a technicality here. It seems the technicoloured ‘genitals’ are in fact chelicerae, designed for transporting venom and used for courtship/wrestling in courtship but not technically sex organs. (h/t BH)