The Spider by the Concrete Steps

I recall a day that passed in late july. In the evening, before the sun had ultimately set for the night. I recall seeing a spider traversing a web in the space between a walkway post up a set of concrete stairs. Not an altogether bad place to spin a web. Out of the way of human traffic, with in close proximity to where a garden might grow, there between the spokes of the hand rail was a small glass colored spider’s web, with a single gnat caught in the center. Now, what I found most peculiar, is that a spider, when in rest and not attending to spidery business, is resting quite patiently, inanimately one might say at the center. Until some unforeseen prey has caught themselves in it’s naturally endowed trap. But the gnat in this web had taken what one might have perceived as the spider’s natural location of rest, and it was frantically wandering about the invisible threads of the web as if searching for prey that had some how fallen off of it’s radar. It would return, quite frequently, to the center, where it’s one and only meal rested. Already long perished. Quite curious it seemed to me, how this single gnat kept the spider in a kind of feedback loop of perpetual exercise, unable to rest in the center without expecting upon its arrival to find that another insect had been caught somewhere along the periphery. And so I watched it, crawl about what became a predictable path of intersections, only to return once more to paw at the bundle that had been long since pillaged. Did the spider lose its sense then of where it’s center was? What should happen, if in the next two hours an entire swarm of gnats had become caught in the web? Would it still persist in its seemingly endless futile game of circuitry? Creeping along the same hungry path only to find itself once again at the disembodied center where it’s original meal had come to rest? Perhaps that gnat had gotten it’s revenge on the spider. Beaten it at it’s own game as it may be. Condemning it to crawl ignorantly in the trough of its own vicious habit, displacing it’s center and coaxing it in its last motions to wander the side paths of an unknown labyrinthine design. Vexing questions such a spectacle renders, but none shall be answered until morning, unless the spider has abandoned it’s web, to set up shop on the next post of the handrail by the concrete steps.