"The observer stands outside the landscape, for were this not the case it would not be possible for nature to become a landscape at all." 

-Gyorgy Lukacs

“Ideology may appear clear to its proponents as long as it remains abstract, but when it is put into practice it takes the shape of a crime.”

-Mahmoud Darwish

1.

Black widow webs resemble messy tangles tucked into corners and crannies of things, under logs, sometimes littered with leaves; splashed by the surrounding spiders' white urine that attract scavengers with its strong scent. Often on the face-down side of old car wheels.

Sometimes she eats her lover. He plays her web like a lyre.

She may eat him before even copulating, or she may decide to not eat him after sex and then he dies alone.

When torn with a stick, the widow's web sounds like paper crackling in fire.

2.

The black widow spider benefits from what Ed Yong calls “embodied cognition”, so the web, itself, is part of the spider’s body:

Earlier, I described this as a postural squint. That’s close, but the analogy isn’t quite right, since squinting helps us focus on particular parts of space. Here, the spider is focusing on different parts of information space. It’s as if a human could focus on red colors by squatting, or single out high-pitched sounds by going into downward dog (or downward spider).

The ability to sense vibrations that move through solid surfaces, as distinct from sounds that travel through air, is “an often overlooked aspect of animal communication…..”

She may even eat him before copulating…..

3.

Which brings me to memoir, confession, webs, network-weaving, corporate malfeasance, the vacuity of authenticity in the never-ending hustle to keep our work separate from our personal lives. Or, at the very least, to be able to maintain control of our information space.

Eda Gunaydin’s “Tell-All” approaches the challenges of memoir in a confessional culture:

A friend who is a memoirist and I talk about the compulsion to disclose. Like her, I want to make disclosures – build intimacies to overcome the sense that this is so fucking mundane, that we, freshly emotionally regulated full-time job holding perfect subjects of neoliberalism, are now trapped in a prison of pretending like we don’t want to talk incessantly about one of three things: trauma, sex, anti-capitalism, that we are ever thinking about anything but these things. The way that any sleepover builds this heterotopic space which devolves and opens up necessarily into a conversation about fucking. The way that every game of Never Have I Ever is about fucking. The way that we all want to say to each other what the worst thing we’ve ever done is, and be forgiven.

Her observations on “communicative capitalism” will not sound strange to poets marketing their books, struggling with the blur between persona and human, and the ways in which confessions, themselves, have been a shock-market. With disgust, a part of me is forced to acknowledge that Trump knows this his market; his victim-centered memoir of his time in the White House will net millions.

For the Right is milking the teat of white male victimhood in earnest. It is doing this by constructing its own reading lists and special canons. And this confessional often involves some intense bootstraps, as Andrew Marzoni observes:

The frontier archetypes of Republican discourse – the antiestablishment maverick, the lone-wolf vigilante, the rebel, the patriot and the self-made man – draw most explicitly from the bootstraps myth of the rugged individual at the heart of American exceptionalism, which conservative authors exploit wholesale….

The pro-life thriller Gideon’s Torch (1995) by Charles Colson, formerly Special Counsel to Richard Nixon, is representative of this literature in that its depiction of ‘Christian white men in a persecuted light demanded,’ as Mason writes, ‘a deft appropriation of oppressed peoples’ actual histories and a revisionism that ranged from outright Holocaust denial to comparisons that likened antiabortionists to abolitionists.’

The current trend of far-Right literature presumes itself academic (i.e. operates to dominate the conventional elite) while lacking its own innovations. As Marzoni notes, it is characterized by “its Romantic environmentalism, neoclassical worship of the male physique, and its fixations on technological determinism and irony recall literature of the early 20th century….The narrative function, too, has remained the same: to stoke feelings of bitterness and solitude into a politics of reaction that is intellectually justified only after the fact.”

4.

Carol Mason’s “Right-Wing Literature in the United States since the 1960s” is a must-read for anyone tracking reactionary literature. To the degree that living in the South involves constant Civil War Reenactments, which I take as theatrical, nostalgia-inflected confessionals rooting the hearts and mounds of countless men in confessionals, Mason points to the sort of “rough agrarian” xenophobia that still exists in Alabama on both sides of the political spectrum, often eager to shame or reject those who don’t “sound” southern enough:

Less documented than the proliferation of right-wing serials in print, or the love of a conservative tradition of great nonfiction books, is how the reading of fiction and poetry compels right-wing movements. Five literary journals helped shape not only what to read but also how and why literature played a role in conceiving a conservative society. These literary reviews were heavily influenced by the Agrarians, a group of scholars trained at Vanderbilt University who promoted a radical conservatism. Beginning in 1930, with their manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, the Agrarians responded to the rise of modernism as a challenge to Victorian values and to the modernization that rendered the Southern economy more industrial, forever changing society with it. Throughout the mid-20th century, writers such as Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Richard Weaver, and Paul Viereck presided over or engaged with the following five literary journals that were important to conservative thought.

All of this remains complicated, and if one pulls a strand of the web, the entire edifice quivers.

5.

Kate Manne has written extensively about media that constructs "himpathy", as in Fargo: we don't see the violence because we identify with the male, and worry about his future.

Misogyny is a problem women face "not because they're women in a man's mind, but because they're women in a man's world." Misogyny enforces patriarchal norms while sexism rationalizes them. 

“There's no control group in a patriarchal culture….”

6.

Simone, Sartre, the relationship of loyalty which resembles forgiveness on the part of female intellectuals. We want to imagine more from Hannah Arendt. We want their intimacies and loyalties to align with our own descriptions. We want, I think, an extreme option that caters to Western feminism, or to the abrupt ending. The divorce. 

I have always mistaken loyalty for what might be freedom, or the commitment of engaging the ideas which failed us, but the ideologue's promises of liberalism and liberation are not separable from the anointment of their eyes. To be chosen as a partner in thinking - for some women, this is greater than marriage or birthing children.

Sexual freedom is not separate from intellectual freedom, or the ability to reflect on the desires and fascinations of one's life. When torn with a stick, freedom sounds like a letter being dropped in a shredder.