Morgana Le Fay Lives in the Toilet…
Liminal Spiders and Arthurian legends…
Morgana Le Fay lives in the eves of the toilet Keeping guard To make sure the compost is proper She’s not interested in the Green Night Each Spring Evening Creeping Out to watch My nightly motions Sitting Like a Knight On my hollow throne She descends on threads of silk To tell me, To remember, Now… Wash Your Hands!
The first time I heard the story of Gawain and the Green Knight, nothing happened - a dusty tale borrowed time and again for gratuitous Hollywood interpretations and absolution of machismo via Arthuriana…
The second time - initially a sense of ‘oh this again…really’ pervaded, then gave way to a glimmer or interest in the most fleeting character…
And then the third time; why was the spider woman/creature/being imbued with fear? Why was she not given more narrative space and time to spin her web and tell how she was integral to the tale?
Morgana Le Fay…an ethereal, connecting character often swept away as an ominous, edgy, unknown …an Arthurian “madwoman in the attic” - like the later wife of Bronte’s Mr Rochester….or maybe thats stretching the thread a little too thin.
It’s mid-April now, the evenings growing properly long, the nights warmer even once the stars have come out. Owls, Bats and other critters come out too, from the shadows.
In the porch, large hunting spiders face off, vying for territory and the best angles of the eves from which to wait patiently for an unsuspecting fly….the tips of their legs sticking out, trigger hairs poised…
Abdomens fat, foot-span as wide and thin as a fifty-pence piece, sliding themselves into any available nook or sliver of space.
There is a particularly large specimen that rules the perimeter of the toilet ceiling…Not scary per-say but definitely too large to be completely comfortable with when vulnerable with ones trousers round ones ankles….even the site of a protruding leg from the gap between wall and ceiling is a bit much…you can’t see the full arachnid extent…but you know it’s there…lurking. It can probably see you with one of its eight eyes…
So I named this obtrusive occupant - maybe if you name something it becomes less able to be feared in the imagination? You can get used to it and live next to it - co-existing. The spider can eat flies, I can defecate in peace and tranquility ….ahhh harmony and balance…
Until the spider gets a bit too cocky and decides to start wandering out in plain sight across the ceiling a little too often.
Then it must be dealt with.
A paper and glass is still too close and unpredictably precarious…it might jump on my face, or in my hair, or down my clothes…
No.
I must get someone else to deal with it.
Preferably with a hoover…
Don’t feel bad, there are loads of them and it’ll probably find its way back in and then the whole thing will repeat….like it does every year…
A slightly arachnophobic, morality test with a hint of Arthurian mystery maybe….or am I romanticising the great big hairy-legged creatures…
I wonder what would have happened If, back before Ap Gwyilym, Gawain had wondered through - On his way to Clynogg Fawr To meet his fate At the place of Beuno: Where Great Holly grows Through the Valley Where there are… Not monsters Just Pobl Od Past a Hill Where the light shifts In scintillating hues You can almost see through And each May, after long, winter has passed - Hawks wheel overhead Round the table of the sky.
My thanks to Martin Shaw (who writes
) From who I first heard the story of Gawain/ Gwalchmai…I didn’t get it the first time, but it’s in there now.