Living at the speed of spiders

Phenomenology is the study of the phenomena we experience. Taking a step back from the way we normally perceive the world, the filters and abstractions that make it possible to live in it, phenomenologists try to perceive the information their senses provide as directly as possible. This makes it a very subjective study with findings that are hard to generalize, and that’s part of the point. How boring wouldn’t it be to live based solely on generalizable undisputed facts? Phenomenology is one of many ways to produce knowledge that isn’t trying to be objective.

I’ve only dabbled in this field as part of my other studies, but it made me curious, and so I’ve tried occasionally to focus on my surroundings, the sensation of my clothes, the background sounds I normally shut out, the periphery of my vision, and so on—and just perceive. Once, inspired by a Not Just Bikes video, I tried to do this during a walk home on a route through the town that I would normally take by bike, and it was really surprising how different my experience of the environments were. Just a difference in speed of travel completely changed my understanding of the space I have habitually inhabited.

Speed is an interesting thing. In physics it is defined as the rate of change in position with respect to time. What time itself is, is a bit harder to understand, but one physical definition is “what a clock reads”. Basically you define some thing, that does something periodically, and to measure time is to count how many of those somethings have passed. However, the lived experience of time can be quite different from our physical conception of it. The clock might be the first thing we think of when thinking about time, but we have a lot of other understandings of time. How bright it is outside shapes our understanding of time on day-to-day scales. In places far from the equator, our understanding of time is informed by the seasons and how quickly it becomes dark. Holidays shape how we perceive time together and serve as anchor points in our social time. How tired you feel might be an indication of how far into the work week you are.

Similar observations can be made about speed. Travelling at high speed can dramatically change the way we perceive our environments. The thin threads of connection that are continuously spun to the things around us get torn off before they can be properly formed. It is hard to perceive much about things that pass by at high speeds. The spiders of perception need time to do their work, time that isn’t given when travelling fast. During my walk home I noticed many things that I almost can’t believe I had missed before, simply because I was going too fast. Some oddly placed chairs. A relic from an old parking lot in what is now a park. A cute sticker on a light post. A big robot arm in a window (!!!).

With the extra time I also have more room to contemplate the things I perceive. Those plastic chairs look a bit out of place against the hospital wall. They look intentionally placed, but obviously not as intended by the architect, they’ve been placed there after it was built. They are placed against a big stark wall, on the lawn without any obvious path to them. I imagine it’s the respite where nurses go to take a break from the hectic work, maybe to bask in some precious sunlight. Such webs of thought can’t be spun in the span of the few seconds it would take to bike past the hospital. The threads are made out of time, and you can’t make such intricate webs with so little. When walking, I have time to wonder about the stories that lie behind the mundane things around me. What are people doing when sitting in those oddly placed chairs? Where did that guy come from and what has he been doing? Why did someone decide to build that thing in that way? How come that there is a sign left from when this area was a parking lot? How did those two that just walked past me get into that particular conversation?

Under everyday circumstances, physics tells us that speed is relative. If you get into a collision with a car, it doesn’t matter if it was you or that car that was going at 50 kmph, you will get hurt just as much. There is no distinction between who is going fast and who is going slow.

My experience at least is much richer than that. I recently visited a place where it was very common to travel both on foot or by car. When I was walking it struck me that all the cars were going really fast, much faster than I was used to, and it felt unsafe to cross the streets. But when I travelled by taxi it felt different, or rather, nothing stood out to me. It might just be that I can’t drive, but I didn’t get the sense that the cars went too fast at all. I think there is a real asymmetry here, in that the speeds at which you feel safe in depends on if it is you who has the speed or something else. This is something I’ve sensed when I’m going by bike as well, because I’ve been guilty of maneuvers that felt safe to me but not the pedestrians around me.

I think this asymmetry is greater when cars are involved because cars deprive the drivers of their senses and puts them in a protective metal cage, whereas the pedestrian is unprotected against both the physical mass of the car and the noise it makes. Waiting to cross the street at a red light is a great example of this, since both car drivers and pedestrians know that it is (reasonably) safe.(sidenote: as long as the pedestrians don’t cross the road¹ ) The difference is that for the car driver it feels safe, but the pedestrian has to calm their body reacting to dozens of really big, really loud, really fast beasts charging at you every second. This also explains why it seems that so many cars drive at high speeds even if there are bicyclists and pedestrians around. It feels safe for them to do so.

The threads of connection have a moral quality. In slowness we are connected, and thus there is a risk of consequences if I act towards you. If I’m rude towards you on a walk you might tell me off, but if I bike past you in a way that makes you unsafe you won’t have time to react in a way that affects me. I will already be on my way. Speed protects me from my actions, making me an isolated and protected individual instead of a part in a web. In a car this effect is further amplified by the protective chassi that allows me to not hear any of the grievances outsiders might have. The metal cage is effective at cutting of the threads.

Things that move fast around me also have threads that reach out, but the additional speed makes them curl into lassos. The lassos tug me along, trying to drag me to match their speed, grabbing my attention, increasing my heart rate. Fast is rarely quieter than slow.

Speed is relative, so it matters relatively little whether it is me who is going fast, or someone else. Fast implies its own noise. As is well known, cars make a lot of noise, a result of their speed. The electricness of the car carries relatively small importance, the tyres make their own sound. Have you tried listening to bird song beside a high way? It doesn’t matter how many of the cars are Teslas. Inside a car might feel quiet, but that is because of the protective barrier that exacerbates the drowning. On my bicycle I can go quite fast with relatively little sound, at least relative to cars, but the sounds that are produced, the sound of the tyres hitting the ground and the wind in my ears, are loud relative to everything else. The noise drowns out the slow.

When I go fast, everyone else is going fast. Even things that don’t move pose a threat — crashing into an electric scooter that has fallen over would hurt a lot, and so I have to be vigilant. And even if I am slow, someone else might be fast. In order to keep track of all of this, I have to deem some things as irrelevant. The vigilance drowns out the slow.

The slowness of the birdsong, the magnificent clouds or the interestingly placed chairs don’t have the same force, their threads aren’t as sturdy, and so they get left behind as my mind is dragged around by the ropes of the fast. Some understand technology primarily as a way to eliminate resistance “so that we don’t have to experience it”.(sidenote: From the novel Homo Faber (quoted in David E. Nye 2006, chap. 10)² ) Electric lights eliminate the night, air conditioning eliminates the climate, and electric devices replace physical labour. Vehicles then, eliminate the world by dilution, stretching out the experience of the world by cramping it together into a short walk of the clock, concentrating the world to only contain the relevant. Sometimes that is the desired outcome, but surely that shouldn’t be universal. Let us not dilute the places we live in. Let us let the spiders have time to do their work.

References 🔗︎

Postscript 🔗︎

Sometimes when I’ve read something good I start to imitate the style in my own writing, more or less involuntarily. The latest writer to fall victim to my imitation is Sara Ahmed. This piece was written over a fairly large span of time, and I think you can actually tell what’s written before and what’s written after I found her blog. She writes in a very playful way about very serious topics, and the style is just wonderful.