The Idea of Wall Spiders
My fiancée named our wall spider Derek. He’d been living on the ceiling of our bedroom for about two weeks. He would come visit us in the shower and nurse on droplets that hung on the green subway tiling. After a month of this, he vanished. A bigger wall spider, Erek, appeared a few days later. I don’t need to tell you what happened to Derek.
Sara is understandably leery of dime-sized Erek and not nearly as enthusiastic about his appearances at shower time. She asked me not to kill him, but to take him outside instead. But I won’t; he’d die just the same as if I squashed him. So Erek remains.
In August, around the time Sara named Derek (the first spider), she also sent me a video on Instagram where the creator recited “Mercy” by Rudy Francisco.
If I am ever caught in the wrong place
at the wrong time, just being alive
and not bothering anyone,I hope I am greeted
with the same kind
of mercy.
Erek has been left to his devices.
Funny the coincidence, that during our great spider crisis the algorithm should gift us this poem, this idea of mercy for cannibalistic spiders.
The idea of wall spiders: coincidences fuel creativity.
The Idea of Ideas: Big Magic
Do you own the ideas you think of? Pretentious to say no, they just come to me. An unbearable, eye-rolly, humblebrag to propose that you’re just some conduit through which ideas pass. But Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic and Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore suggest this is how ideas work, and not unconvincingly.
Non-fiction, or not trying to be fiction, sort of a memoir, sort of a craft book, Big Magic posits,
“I believe that out planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us—albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will.”
I didn’t come to know Gilbert through her Julia Roberts movie which was also a memoir called Eat, Pray, Love, but through the podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me. She appeared on an episode to promote her 2013 novel The Signature of All Things. In that episode, and in Big Magic, she gives the same analogy, which I have no qualms re-retelling here.
“It seems to me that the less I fight my fear, the less it fights back. If I can relax, fear relaxes, too. In fact, I cordially invite fear to come along with me everywhere I go. I even have a welcoming speech prepared for fear, which I deliver right before embarking upon any new project or big adventure…
“‘Dearest Fear: Creativity and I are about to go on a road trip together. I understand you’ll be joining us, because you always do. I acknowledge that you believe you have an important job in to do my life, and that you take your job seriously. Apparently your job is to induce complete panic whenever I’m about to do anything interesting… There’s plenty of room in this vehicle for all of us, so make yourself at home, but understand this: Creativity and I are the only ones who will be making any decisions along the way.’”
Gilbert’s idea of Fear and the car has lived with me for a while. I have these conversations with Fear and Creativity now too.1 Ideas are infectious, Gilbert goes on to explain. But this is a very downstream angle on creativity—the idea of a roadtrip with Creativity and Fear is a polished, well-formed, clearly stated concept. Easy to transmit from one mind to the next.
But ideas are rarely so well formed and polished when they first enter the artist’s head. It’s the artist’s—the conduit’s—job to package them, or not. Murakami studies ideas at that point, higher up, in the creative process.
Gilbert’s Idea of Ideas: ideas are living beings; well packaged, they travel easily
The Idea of Ideas: Killing Commendatore
In Killing Commendatore, an unnamed artist in a rut becomes the caretaker of the house of famous painter Tomohiko Amada. Hearing noises in the attic one night, he ventures up there to find two things: an owl—the source of the noise—and a painting. The painting mesmerizes him. Easily, it is Amada’s finest work, but no one else has ever seen it. Why not? Nights later, an Idea, wearing the form of one of the figures in Amada’s painting, begins visiting the struggling artist.
I fear I’ll oversimplify the plot if I imply that Killing Commendatore is about an artist breaking out of a rut, that the Idea who visits him allows the artist to elevate his craft. Like true creativity and process, the way is rudely nonlinear. Murakami never tells the reader that this is what the story is about. He strictly shows us. We observe the narrator’s work evolve over the story and we see how he drinks and reads and has sex and takes walk in the woods and teaches a class and falls into another dimension and almost dies at the bottom of a hole. But we are never told how what’s happening is shaping the artist’s work.
Murakami’s Idea of Ideas: a master writer knows better than to put their ideas into words.
The Idea of Owls
Artists and neuroscientists alike want to know how brains do creativity.
Gilbert rejects that there’s anything scientific about it. “Just the other day, I heard a respected neurologist say in an interview, ‘The creative process may seem magical, but it is not magic.’
“With all due respect, I disagree.”
Yet as esteemed neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux put it,
“Is it plausible to think that a conglomerate of nerve cells with axonal and dendritic extensions through which various electrical and chemical signals travel can be responsible for something as seemingly incomprehensible as creativity? There is no physical proof against it.”2
Both the neuroscientist and Gilbert are wrong, and are right.
Creativity is a divine process just as it is humble synapses firing.
Neuroscience doesn’t rule out that creativity is magical, just as it can’t rule it in.
We’re sophisticated enough to hold these contradictory ideas in our heads; I know we are: like cannibalistic spiders and the non-utilitarian reasons why we should save them.
The best art mirrors, emulates and inspires this contradiction.
I wrote earlier that it would be insulting to Murakami to say that Killing Commendatore is about an artist breaking out of his rut, because that’s not really what it is about, but what it is. The layer that distinction adds is crucial to this article. It is the same as the difference between the owl flying around the attic and the shadows, sounds and leavings of that owl.
I don’t know if Murakami wrote Commendatore while he was experiencing some artistic crisis. Such is never surrendered to the reader. Throughout, Murakami’s narrator never admits he’s in a rut. But he shows us.
The owl in flight, not its leavings.
There is no end that goes, “and then I realized how to paint better and from there my career really took off and was amazing. Thank goodness I met that strange Idea in that strange house. The end.”
It’s not a book about creativity. It’s about that experiences the creative process, that nests the reader in amongst the owls in Murakami’s—or perhaps the narrator’s—head and looks not at the shadows they cast nor listens to the sounds they make, but instead experiences them.
The Idea of Owls: Inspiration is magical, and though ineffably so, the result of synapses firing
The Idea of Happenstance (which is different than the idea of wall spiders)
I found Big Magic because of a colleague at work. Around the same time, I wanted to try out 19Q4 by Murakami, but his only book in the library was Killing Commedatore. Is that just coincidence? I want to say no. To say an Idea caught me; this Idea about ideas about ideas engineered for me to read these books at the same time.
The neuroscientist in me (yes I do have a degree in neuroscience) can’t help but consider the frequency bias,3 which argues the more we notice something, the more we notice it.
See the part about wall spiders. Do you really think Derek and Erek were the first two wall spiders we ever noticed in our home? But the coincidence of seeing them and hearing “Mercy,” and the happenstance of naming them both made their existence more salient for us.
Similarly, the Idea that ideas are living beings has been clanging around in books and movies and conversations I’ve experienced for my entire life. It just didn’t mean much to me until Big Magic explicitly laid out the Idea for me. Then I started seeing it everywhere—conversations with my therapist and other writing friends, Killing Commendatore, and so on.
And while that’s a nifty, practical explanation and entirely true, it doesn’t rule out that the Idea about ideas isn’t somehow also responsible for all of this. Couldn’t it be both? Neuroscience doesn’t rule out that creativity is magical, just as it can’t rule it in.
The owls are the gap between these two seeming contradictions.
Owls are the happenstance, the interstitial space that strings the wall spider coincidences together. The narrator of Killing Commendatore heard noises in the night (an owl) and this is what drew him up into the attic, where he discovered the painting and set the story in motion.
I kept waiting for the owl to come back. I kept waiting for its triumphant resurgence as one of the Ideas, or as the spirit of Tomohiko Amada, or an avatar of any of the other fascinating characters I’d met. But it didn’t come back, even when it reappeared. It was just an owl. It had no wants, nothing to gain or lose in the whole story. It simply was.
Everything in Killing Commendatore is a metaphor. The painting is an obvious one, but the owl—who drew the narrator to discover the mysterious painting and set ideas in motion—perhaps, not so self-evident. But much more important.
Happenstance is the word.
What I mean is the cognitive processes one experiences between the occurrences one’s brain links with the frequency bias. I also mean the other random Ideas, the coincidences and the stuff that happens to make us notice the coincidences. I mean the scientific and the magical.
And that’s the most important piece of the creative process—not the Idea, or the painting.
The owl.
Like writing a bloggish book review about wall spiders, owls, Haruki Murakami and Elizabeth Gilbert. We haven’t gotten to the owls yet.
Changeux, J.-P., & Goldhammer, A. (1996). Creativity and Neuroscience. Grand Street, 58, 75–86. https://doi.org/10.2307/25008087
If you want to impress your friends, you can call it the Baader-Meihof phenomenon.