Filaments of My Imagination -- A Gossamer Afternoon

Late Sunday afternoon, fresh home from a two-hour walk on the Riverwalk, I was moving about in our kitchen, when, just as I stepped from the pantry to the stove, passing the kitchen window that looks out onto the Riverbank, something caught my eye. It was just a glimmer, but it caught me. Over there on the River, in the late afternoon light– a long, vertical strand of something -- something about a yard in length, a single luminescent strand floating north to south about forty feet above the surface of the River, no anchoring object that I could see at the top, and nothing at the bottom. Just a strand, floating.

For a second I thought I’d imagined this thing, this filament, and then I saw another. And another, and another. Then we had a virtual parade of the long, single strands, floating in the air, highlighted by the late afternoon just-right autumn sun, traveling from north of us to who knows where south of us. Some of them were longer than a yard. Occasionally one would reverse its north-to-south path for a second or two, but ultimately all of them headed south. I summoned Fred to the kitchen, in part to help me convince myself that what I was seeing was real. At first, he was not convinced. Within about a minute, though, Fred spotted one himself, so then for several more minutes Fred and I stood at the kitchen window and swapped announcements -- “There’s one! There’s one right above the leafless tree.” “There’s another one right above the gazebo.” And “I just saw one pass the damaged light pole.” After a while, armed with the binoculars, we moved to the front porch. More and more and more of the threads floated through the air above the Chattahoochee.

When the light reached a certain angle, I noticed that there were many, many of the strands lying stretched out on the park lawn directly across the street from our porch, between us and the River. I remarked that they created a “gossamer grid.” Later I retracted my statement when I realized that they did not in fact form a grid pattern, as they went in only one direction – north-south. There were no east-west filaments there on the grass.

The whole time we were watching the things, in the back of my mind I was remembering a poem – not really remembering the poem itself, but thinking that I remembered such floating vertical filaments having been referenced in a poem I’d once read.

When the sun began to set, the filaments became no longer visible, and Fred and I left the front porch, re-entered the house, and set about individual late-afternoon activities – Fred in his studio and I in the kitchen. After a while Fred called me to his computer. Apparently he’d been intrigued by my use of the phrase “gossamer grid,” its having inspired him to look up the derivation of the word “gossamer.” That search had led him first to this very nice explanation by Martha Barnett of Public Radio’s A Way With Words

And then it led him to the very poem that had pulling at the back of my brain since I’d seen that very first, most elusive filament float by – Walt Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider.” Here’s the poem:

A Noiseless Patient Spider
by: Walt Whitman

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself.
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them.
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

*************

It was then that I remembered that "The Noiseless Patient Spider" had been one of many poems that my classmates and I had memorized and recited in our high school English class, back in the mid-1960s, in a little town in central Georgia, about 30 miles east of the Chattahoochee.

In memory of my high school English teacher – Mrs. Pearl S. Garrett.