As I was putting up my blinds, I noticed this spiderweb in the iron lace beneath our bull-nosed veranda (to use the terms used in real estate descriptions), unexpectedly marrying two recent images in this blog.Hope nobody was offended by my description of the spider webs as "hunter gatherer," an unowned allusion to the Aborigenes. I plead guilty to reading everything I see in Australia as related in some coherent way to everything else, despite all my academic training. After nearly a month no question it's a sort of self-indulgence: Roland Barthes' time in "Japan" (described in the infuriatingly wonderful Empire of Signs, our best show and tell of the impossibility of distinguishing "nature" from "culture" in a new place) was only three weeks.
At what point does a suggestible openness to reading everything in a new place as significant, a sign, shade into a refusal to acknowledge the otherness of the other place, the messy webs of thought (and thoughtlessness) which even the finest ethnographer or historian would require years to make out? The issues are only trickier here, where it's so easy to ellide the Aborigenes and the "Australian nature" against which Australia's sea-facing coastal cities define themselves (supposedly) as "culture." Sometimes a spiderweb (or a snail trail) is just that.
