Animals Strike Curious Poses

by Elena Passarello

  The lights came on in Arabella’s cage, simulating sunrise. It was six days after her release from the vial and two weeks after launch, and her air was still charged with that defeating kind of nothing that kept her lines from catching and confounded her body when she tried to rappel. But the walls of the cage were solid in a way she could understand, so she connected a taut bridge line in the short gap between them. The only way to make a web in flight, she discovered, was to avoid flight—to stay grounded.

  Clinging to the walls and corners of the cage, she made more short silk lines, pulled them as tightly as she could, and walked along them (rather than free-falling) to affix every radial, every spiral turn. She used the length of her hind legs to measure each spiral; each ring matched the distance between her spinneret and the tip of her back claw. The central claws of her third pair of legs clung to the silk like grappling hooks.

  It was a less ambitious web in certain aspects. She had ringed it in fewer spirals, and omitted the crucial lopsidedness of lining the web-bottom with that stickier trapping silk. But the structure was even and tight. Back home, a human face crashing through it could have thought it the work of any earthbound arachnid.

  From Commander Bean’s journal, August 7: “Arabella finished her web perfectly. When Owen told Jack at breakfast, Jack said, ‘Well, that’s good. I like to see a spider do something at least once in a while.’”

  Bean again, on August 8: “Arabella ate her web last night, and spun another perfect one.”

  Commander Bean on Aug 10: “Owen did the Spider TV three times today.”

  The men and their cargo were orbiting Earth every other hour, curving fifty degrees north and south of the equator—ringing the parallels, rising and sinking. Their remaining tethers to the earth were the kind that are difficult to pull on—teleprinter dispatches, the transmitted sinusoid waves of their wives’ voices, the electric grid of Enid, Oklahoma, which blinked for Garriott when his hometown knew he was passing overhead. And though their distance never increased from the day they docked, the human cargo drifted further with each spacewalk, each tube of liquid spaghetti, each wrench slipping from their fingers that they no longer reflexively reached out to catch.

  August 11 was supposedly the crew’s day off, but none of the three wanted rest. Neither did Arabella, who spun another lovely web—her fourth in as many days. Garriott had taken to calling her “our friend Arabella” and noted the day before that she was “near a very large horizon at this point.” In his transmission back to Earth on August 12, he described his friend moving her web from the corners of her cage to front and center—a much more telegenic place—where it stretched ever closer to the webs of home. There was a delighted lilt in his voice when he reported how, “without the benefit of previous experience and simply working on her own, she figured out a very nice solution to the problems of zero gravity.”

  Houston woke the men every “morning” with news updates, but the crew knew the worst events of the day were always missing. NASA had arranged for Skylab to hear of no plane crash at Logan Airport, no coup in Chile, no serial killer found fifteen miles from the very control room that shot their news into the sky. Back on Earth, Skylab was, of course, making its own headlines—at least an article a day on the men and their work hounding comets and setting records for nights slept in orbit. And most of the stories found a way to weave into their paragraphs news of the little spider in the TV-ready box.

  Footage of her spinning aired on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. Her image, perched at the center of an impressive silver-toned web, ran in Science News, the Los Angeles Times, and along the AP wire. With each web spun, observed, photographed, and transmitted, things became stickier between Arabella, the astronauts, and the people of Earth. NASA had planned to let her die in space after a few days, but as the Washington Post said, Arabella had “earned the affection of the crew” so completely that, “midway through the flight, Owen Garriott asked what could be done to prolong that relationship.”

  Who could possibly condemn to death the weaver of the universe’s first space web? A creature that journalist Lee Edson called “probably the most distinguished spider in the world”? And how could anyone be surprised when Edson announced, “NASA made another high-level decision. Arabella will be permitted to return to Earth with the astronauts on September 25.”

  By then, Mission Control had its own mascot spider, Arachne, living in a glass cage in the Command Center. They could look at her when they heard Garriott in space, describing his friend Arabella. They radioed an order for Garriott to set aside a housefly-sized morsel of that evening’s space-dinner: filet mignon. “When Arabella is in her cage, carefully place a piece near her legs,” ordered CAPCOM Richard Truly. According to the New York Times, “The spider loved it, and proceeded to build another web.”

  Each new web held the planet tighter in her grip. Only Arabella could bridge the distance between all earthbound creatures and the incomprehensible developments of Skylab—the X-ray maps of the galaxy, the Technicolor evidence of holes in the sun. As she steadied her slow steps along the straight line of her web and gripped the solid products of her body for support, she was walking back to what the people of Earth could understand: an organic narrative of success amid what on TV and in the papers must have seemed a dark and unnatural nebula. She did so naked, assisted by nothing but the tangible: her legs, her cage, the lightbulb someone turned on for her every eighteen hours. Dogged and stealthy, the spider created an earthly object in that wild and distant nothing. And alongside all the work of the floating men, her work was weighty and familiar—a lifeline tailor-made for the people of earth.

  For a spider in the center of her web is less distant from you than a man backflipping through a spaceship in his underwear. For a man in space is a decorated Navy pilot in alien coveralls, unraveling a golden fleece to save his billion-dollar ship from frying in the nearby sun. For the spider in space still only knows a garden sun. She lifts the same eight unsheathed legs that tread any apple branch. She isn’t an honorary Doctor of Science or a Fellow at the American Astronomical Society. She’s never seen the earth while standing on its moon.

  For a spider in space has no title, just the sweet name of one of our daughters. When we speak it, the name makes the sound of a bell in the air.

  Commander Alan Bean retired a few years after splashdown to start a painting career, and nearly every canvas he finishes is a scene in oil of a man on the moon. After commanding a space shuttle voyage in the early 1980s, Pilot Jack Lousma ran for state senator and lost. Owen Garriott returned to space a decade after Skylab, then helped send his son to the International Space Station twenty-five years later—the first American to pass space travel down a generation.

  Arabella made it back to Earth, but just barely. According to NASA, they found the spider curled into a ball in her transport vial the day after splashdown. “An autopsy will be performed,” reassured Reuters. It ruled dehydration as the cause of her death, and then there was nothing else to do but catalog her with the rest of the Skylab data.

  Preserved in formalin and arranged in a black cylinder with a plexiglass viewing front, she’s now item A19740484001 in the National Air and Space Museum, on display with Skylab’s other equipment. Among the titanium alloy, the neoprene, the epoxy-resin ablative and the resin-impregnated fiberglass honeycomb, she is the rare logged item on display that is listed as “organic matter.”

  Though he’s outlived her by over forty years, Garriott has not forgotten the spider. In 2013, he sat on a NASA panel held for the fortieth anniversary of Skylab—a panel that also included a science pilot from the contemporary space station. When this younger scientist referenced early work with animals in microgravity, Garriott, now a vigorous eighty-two-year-old, all but interrupted him. He sat forward in his chair and pushed his words out faster than he could pronounce them. His blue eyes widened as he looked into the small crowd of reporters and students. “Does the name Arabella ring a bell with an
y of you?”

  Behind him was a large projection of the official Skylab III embroidered mission patch, which had been sewn to the shoulders of all Skylab personnel. The circular patch is a take on Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, in his notorious power stance. Behind the naked man is a circle half filled with a globe and half filled with a flaming sun. The man seems to float in the center of the patch, splitting the blue and the orange. He reaches to the edges of the frame with all eight of his appendages.

  (Children are, briefly, somewhat different.)

  John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?”

  WHEN I WAS in first grade, a migrating humpback whale swam seventy miles upriver from the San Francisco Bay and found itself marooned in a freshwater slough north of Rio Vista. The national papers filed dozens of stories about the whale—soon named Humphrey—and the nightly news checked in with his progress for nearly a month, with extended Humphrey segments on weekend shows like 60 Minutes. I caught as much of it as I could from my home on the other side of the country. The video footage rarely offered much—usually just shots of the small flotillas surrounding Humphrey, or of the people, both aboard and ashore, banging cookware to frighten the whale downriver. I remember one still image of a man in a fishing boat tossing buckets of salt water onto Humphrey’s back. Too lethargic to flip or spout, Humphrey was just a long, slick log floating near scores of excited humans. That was all I ever knew of him on earth.

  This could be why I filed Humphrey the humpback into the same category as My Little Pony or the Easter Bunny. Nothing about the Humphrey tale was anything short of magic to me. When Peter Jennings said Humphrey’s name on the news, I ran into my living room with the same enthusiasm I felt upon hearing the Smurfs theme.

  They finally got Humphrey to swim back to open water by plunging a high-tech speaker into the river and blaring the cries of feeding humpbacks, which he followed. These cries were described to me—by the news, by my teacher—as “song,” so my seven-year-old understanding was that this whale had been crooned to safety. I can still see the finale footage—how Disney-perfect it looked!—of the boats leading a shadow of a gigantic fish under the largest bridge I’d ever seen. They were all in a faraway land no one in my family had ever visited, and that whale swam home right under the most fantastic-sounding bridge: the Golden Gate.

  Most of the animal world held for me this incorrect magic, which spurred me toward an impasse—an inability to note the contextual divide between the animals that shared our world and the ones that were invented to please me. At whatever moment of a child’s development that she learns to separate natural wonder and wondrous tale, something inside me misfired. Only from the distance of adulthood can I even see the disconnect, and I’m not sure if this is the case with other young children of my era, because I grew up alone.

  I was born at the tail end of the seventies, four days before Easter, and all the cards sent to my mother were covered in pastel chicks and lambs. The nurses wrote my sex and my hospital ID number on cards with pink dancing bears, which they stuck to the bassinet and the door of our room. Someone gave me a stuffed hare in a navy vest that sits near me in early photos. In all these shots, I am a bleary-eyed, furry little thing.

  My mother took me home in a receiving blanket patterned with geese in blue bonnets. She mailed announcements of my length and weight on cards bearing crewel-stitched puddle ducks. The early facts of my life were written into a book with a fat bunny on the cover. I slept in a yellow Beatrix Potter crib set, surrounded by Peter Rabbit, Tom Kitten, and Hunca Munca Mouse.

  This was the year after critic John Berger published the first version of his “Why Look at Animals?,” an essay often hailed as a founding document in the field of animal studies. Berger’s essay begins by outlining a loss: once, and for a very long time, animals were crucial to human life; they surrounded people and culture in a close circle that connected to both the everyday and the spiritual. But, Berger says, due to the Industrial Revolution and the ripple effects of the twentieth century, “every tradition which has previously mediated between man and nature was broken.” As Berger saw it, animals were no longer the “messengers and promises” of culture, or our partners in survival. Instead, they were available only as neutered pets, as kept zoo creatures, or as “commercial diffusions of animal imagery.” These commercial images, stuffed toys, and storybook animals aped “the pettiness of social practice,” Berger said, adding that “the books and drawings of Beatrix Potter are an early example.”

  According to my Peter Rabbit baby book, the first song I could sing was “Old MacDonald,” and I knew the word “kitty” by the end of my first year. For my birthday, Mom baked a chocolate cake in the shape of a cat with uncooked spaghetti in the icing (for whiskers). By then, I’d tell any interested party what the kitty said, what the doggie said, even what the fishy said. In my crib at night, I watched a mobile of padded quadrupeds spin to “Farmer in the Dell.” My green bikini top was shaped into a pair of googly-eyed frogs, I wore a brown-checked dress covered in bespectacled owls to meet Santa Claus, and I was given for Easter a stuffed rabbit in a pink pinafore—my best friend, Tammy—that I rarely let go of through kindergarten.

  I realize now that, growing up in a house shared only with two working adults, I was a fairly lonely girl, which left inside me a tender spot—not broken, just bruised—that I can still locate. When pressed, the lonely spot feels like being lost; it reminds me that, for years, I was the only member of my species (the species of modern kid). It’s a wonder this didn’t convince me that Humphrey, the only creature of his kind for miles, was a part of my real world. But the tender spot was most certainly soothed by the promises and messages of (what I thought were) animals. I obsessed over creature books, toys, and movies. The Poky Little Puppy taught me to read. Charlotte’s Web taught me that rats were gross and that my mother would die one day. Koko’s Kitten taught me that every creature just wants something soft to care about. I still can quote the majority of these animal stories from memory; they kept me company.

  At night, after I cleaned my room by cramming all its loose contents in the hamper at the foot of my bed, I could hear my stuffed animals inside the box, whimpering in the dark. Alone in the yard, I often pretended I was an orphan in the wilderness. I’d splash around in the rain and find reasons to fall in the mud. I fantasized what kind of animal would find me and take me (perhaps literally) under its wing. Sometimes it was a natural animal, like a wild horse or a wolf, but just as often it was something more magical—a luck dragon or a white horse that could fly. They were all the same to me, of course.

  The year of Humphrey, I turned seven and celebrated at a pizza parlor known for its “live” animatronic critter band. In the dining area, the robot animals performed at programmed intervals—a brown bear on drums, a gorilla on keyboards, a polar bear on guitar. A curtain drew around them at the pauses. I snuck behind it and looked up the pleated skirt of the tambourine player—a giant, deactivated cheerleader mouse. Her purple robot eyelids had frozen, half-raised, when she lost power.

  The sharpest moment in “Why Look at Animals?” involves a glance between a beast and an earlier human. Berger is vague about where and when this might have taken place, but his man and animal, as they stare at one another, experience a deep understanding. They recognize both their mutual power and their separated secrets. Berger calls their connection an “unspeaking companionship” grounded in the lack of a common tongue. It allows human and animal to live along “parallel lines,” during which the human feels the animal’s gaze enhancing “the loneliness of man as a species.”

  Berger says “the look between animal and man … may have played a crucial role in the development of human society.” We were inspired by their proximity—both what we knew of them and what we didn’t. And while the product of this isolating gaze gave animals a spiritual power and a place in human art, their nearness as both livestock and predator kept them “real” and vital. “They were subjected and worshipped,
bred and sacrificed,” Berger says. Thanks to that Bergerian gaze, animals covered the major components of human life—both religious and quotidian, both biological and mythic. Because of that look, a lion could become for humans both a threatening neighbor and a god. That look assured that animals “belonged there and here.”

  But according to Berger, this gaze is something I would never myself experience, because the real animals had been extracted from my own here long before I arrived. I wholeheartedly recognize this. Here for me was but a synthetic wilderness. Here was Minnie Mouse jamshorts and Thundercats bathtub toys, plush mammals I could take to bed and tell my secrets to. But, still, my here was never without an animal representation. More than people and more than machines, false animals inhabited my field of vision (even though they could never return my gaze). It is important for me to remember that these animals were, essentially, fact-less. But because they were omnipresent and because they outnumbered everything else, this was the universe—an absolute onslaught of fake animal presence was every fiber of my here. I wonder if Berger ever took into account what might happen to future generations when those “commercial diffusions” of animal shapes became available to young minds at such a fever pitch.

  In his essay, the affected twentieth-century humans are nondescript capitalists, but it seems we should take them all as fully formed. In Berger’s thinking, little space exists for children. The bereft “now” of his essay is full of adults who stand within a generation of the earlier human-animal connection. But what happens when a person is born after the mess we were in circa “Why Look at Animals?” What happens when she begins not just forming herself, but finding herself among a sham menagerie?