Is the story of the universe a story about the spider’s web?

If so, it begins like this: with minor fluctuations; one particle makes eyes at another, and they move closer together, cautiously at first. It continues with several particles submitting to gravitational longing and merging, so that a network of fine strands of matter soon fills the whole of space. And it goes on with the network, everywhere at the same time, growing stronger, its threads ever thicker, driven by gravity to become one. With formations of visible matter arising where the accumulation of particles is at its densest, at the knots or node points; planets, stars, dust.

But it is the same with the universe as with everything else: the visible depends on the invisible. In science’s story of the universe the baryonic matter in the network’s nodes is comparable to drops of water on a spider’s web, while not itself constituting the web. The spider’s thread consists of the dark matter, whose existence science postulates so as not to have to believe the universe is falling apart; nobody has yet seen it, since it cannot be seen, but its forces of attraction hold existence together.

How does the story of the universe end? It does not end. If the story of the universe is a story of the spider’s web, it is because it is about something that goes on continually, something that is endlessly constructed without being a construction; about a structure that is simultaneously directionless and functional, simultaneously random and self-evident.

The human being detects patterns, she can do nothing else. And yet the patterns are not there from the beginning, but are always created, the meaningful is just the meaningless repeated sufficiently many times. To things she hears said over and over again, the human being ascribes meaning, if only to make the repetition less bothersome. She sees rectangles and squares as being related through their shapes, since she has stared at them for so long that she has developed square eyes; meaning arises out of repetition.

The story of the universe as a spider’s web also acquires its meaning from repetition: over and over again the threads converge, over and over again a void arises between them – an act of repetition that is its own teleology. But for the science of astronomy, from which the spider’s-web metaphor sprang, the repetition not only creates meaning, but also makes it possible to carry on looking for meaning: in order to be able to construct a mathematical model of the universe, researchers utilize a repetition that does not exist. The creation of a fundamental building block, a little box universe whose structure is representative of the whole, allows the problem of infinity to be circumvented; instead of the impossible task of constructing an infinite model, the same finite model can be repeated an infinite number of times. In this way a universe is created whose perfect regularity makes it describable, and this regularity is the result of the scientific gaze having blinked away all irregularity.

And perhaps this is also what the human being does each time she speaks: with the blurred vision of language, she makes herself blind to any bumpiness, levels out differences and polishes down the edges of reality so as to make it fit into the constricted categories of vocabulary. The spoken and written myth creates meaning by incorporating humanity into an archetypal sequence of events that goes on continually within and outside language, but language in itself is also both a structuring and a transforming ritual. The symbols imposed on real events by linguistic practice not only mediate the meaning of these events, but also constitute it. The proliferation of the world that occurs when the human being assigns the same name to different things is a form of reified repetition aimed at conferring meaning on reality.

If the story of the universe is a story about the spider’s web, must it not at the same time be a story about its knots or nodes?

If so, it might be the story of the Gordian knot – of how the Phrygian kingdom is without a monarch, of how an oracle decrees that the first man to enter the capital city on an ox cart is the legitimate ruler, and of how a poor peasant is thus crowned king – if so, it is the story of how this peasant, Gordius, ties the cart that he has to thank for his exaltation with a knot, and of how an oracle foretells that he who unties that knot will rule all of Asia. Perhaps it is the story of how Alexander the Great arrives much later on, after an untold number of men have tried to find a way to undo the Gordian Knot, and slices it in half with his sword.

It might also be the story about the magic knots that could do such harm that Plato advocated the death penalty for those who used them, about Buddhism’s Endless Knot, or the story about Celtic knots, about the knots with which the Sámi caught the wind, about the Aztec priests’ knots that predicted the fate of the sick, or about the Love Knot that binds lovers together for eternity.

If so, it is at the same time a story about the innermost core of humanity; human DNA can be visualized as a knot with both ends missing, a closed curve that cannot be transformed into a circle. Science undoes this knot by studying enzymes and proteins, by repeating AGCT with the persistence of someone in doubt. It speaks of mutations, transcriptions and replications, but it is a story that lacks a narrator, and hence also meaning – for humanity, there is no Alexander’’s Solution.

The human being repeats herself, she can do nothing else. It is herself she repeats every time she speaks, and thereby constantly re-creates herself. It is for this reason that language is never finished, the meaning is never made clear, the artwork never finished: the repetition that confers meaning on existence requires that the human being continually unravels her web of words and weaves it back together. It requires that she takes back what she has just said and says it again, in words that are linked together only slightly differently. Her repetition does not untie the knots in language, but on the contrary makes them grow ever bigger and more tangled, ever more Gordian. Despite this, she continues to talk, in the secure conviction that she will never be able to say anything that has not been said before.

If the story of the universe is a story about the spider’s web, then must it not, at the same time, be a story about weaving?

Perhaps, then, it is the story of Penelope, who has been left behind by Odysseus, the story of how, with longing as her only companion, she awaits his return from the war he is waging in Troy. The story of how the years go by and her fingers become ever weaker. It is then the story of the hordes of suitors that surround her, of how these men believe their presence to be more powerful than Odysseus’ absence, of how they are wrong; it is the story of how Penelope weaves a tapestry and says to those paying her court: “Only when the cloth is finished will I take a new husband.” It is the story of how, in order to avoid the end that would give rise to an unwanted beginning, Penelope stops sleeping at night, how instead she sits under the stars and unravels the cloth that she has woven during the day; of how in this way she is able to continue weaving without the tapestry ever being finished and forcing her to relinquish her longing.

And perhaps repetition is always an expression of a reluctance to part. Perhaps it is out of fear of loneliness that the human being continues all her life to say the same words to the one she loves, even though she knows that the significance of the words is no longer the same as it once was. Perhaps it is for that same reason that the spider weaves and unravels, perhaps the black widow spins her web so as never to have to become a widow. Perhaps it is to assuage her hunger for the one she loves that she eats her web, perhaps she feels the bitterness of his taste in her mouth.

If the story of the universe is a story about the spider’s web, must it not at the same time be a story about the spider?

In that case, it must be a story that one living being tells to another one, not one that the living tell about the dead. For the human being who cannot create herself through myths, all that remains is to literally create herself: in the glare of enlightenment, to take herself apart and put herself together again, to use gene technology, plastic surgery and human-made artefacts to build something that she can call a self. But by doing so she does not incorporate herself into a story, but into a register; she replaces myths of creation with instruction manuals, the ambiguous meanings of mythical tales with the literal ones of the technological narrative.

If the story of the universe is a story about the spider’s web, then must it not be equally strong and equally fragile?

In order for its symbolism to be able to go beyond the schematic correspondence of representation, the story needs a sheltered space to grow in. If myth has been obliterated from everyday life, it is because imagination has been obliterated, because the scientific human being’s search for truth has made her forget that the best way of attaining the truth is sometimes to refrain from asking the question: “Is it true?” If the story of the universe has gaps in it, it is because the space where this question is not asked has been reduced, because imagination has been obliterated from reality, but also, at least as importantly, because reality has been obliterated from imagination. Thus, the understanding of the truth has become impoverished within either frame of reference: in reality, since truth there is interpreted solely in the unequivocal sense of logic; in imagination, since its truth has lost its bearing on the interplay between the subject and the surrounding world. The story that emerges in a space cropped in this way is not intended to prepare people to be able to face reality, but to help them deny it. The meaning-giving myth is not woven in the spider laboratory, but in the obscure, dew-cool hollow beneath a leaf.

The human being wants the story of the universe to be a story of the creation of the universe, even if the universe was not created. She wants the story to give her a direction, even if it speaks of an existence that is directionless. The spider navigates with the aid of vibrations in its surroundings and the position of the moon, by sensing the polarization of the light that falls on its eye. The spider does not lose its orientation even if its world is turned upside down – is this because it has woven a story to hold on tight to?

And, if so, should the human being who also longs for the stability of a story turn to art or to science? Perhaps it depends on whether she believes the meaning is in the weaving or in the web; art, in John Cage’s phrase, imitates nature in its manner of operation, not in its products. If the answers provided by mathematics and science fail to grant people existential meaning, this might be due to the fact that they are answers.

But mathematics, chemistry, physics and biology do not lack stories, and they can tell us about certain things in very great detail: about five-dimensional configurations; about a body sliding down a plane under the influence of friction; about standardized observations, controlled reactions and ideal measurement conditions.

They can tell us about the triangle; a triangle can be produced in many ways, but the description of the finished triangle is always the same: three points, with all the pairs of points connected by lines. No such description exists of the spider’s web; the human being can make pictures of it, but never make it, she sees the regularity, but has no idea of the regulations. And the same goes for the universe, the only way of describing its structure is to describe its factual origins; asked how a universe identical to the existing one could be constructed, the human being is compelled to reply that one starts out with a Big Bang and lets things take their course. The systematics of the geometric structure of the cosmic cloth are, like the spider’s web’s, something for which the human being lacks a description. Perhaps because she has still not found one, perhaps because no such description exists.