Word: spider
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These drove his sense of alienation to the edge of madness: "What flowed from my pen at that point-an octopus with eyes of flame, a twenty-ton crustacean, a giant spider that talked-was I myself, a child monster." He also gradually became aware that he was very ugly, "a toad," walleyed, short, "not quite a dwarf...
...beautiful than the lovers in the earlier film-they look like oriental deities sculptured in living flesh. The color is rich and sensuous, and the camera catches dim disturbing glimpses of Angkor Wat, the great stone temple that lies sleeping in the jungles of Cambodia like a monstrous unimaginable spider...
...mark out the shape of my sensations." Sutherland's sensations when he faces nature are far from rhapsodic. He is like a perverse Picasso run riot in a vegetable patch: he draws polyps plopping limply atop earthen walls, a skull looking as if it were a spider's web peering from a lattice of green leaves. Once he caught a huge toad, put it in a jar and made 50 drawings of it. "He was a very bad sitter," said Sutherland. "He turned his back on me all the time...
Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when that mind is imaginative--much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius--it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations...
Taken alone, deceptively simple poems like this seem to lack substance. But like the threads of a spider web, a garland of such verse woven together creates a captivating world. Its charm, perhaps, is that it seems oldfashioned. Ransom's courtly poetic rhetoric seems antique to the ear of an age that banned charm and rhetoric from poetry in order to come to grips with life. Newcomers wandering in Ransom's poetic kingdom are likely to bark a shin on such arch words as "pernoctated," or be mildly astonished at the poet's unfashionable fondness for bucolic...