Spider Woman
“Time traveling, which is not quite the good clean boyish fun it’s cracked up to be, started for me when this woman with the sigil on her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom where I’d hidden myself and the bottles and asked me, ‘Look, Buster, do you want to live?’….
Her right arm was raised and bent, the elbow touching the door frame, the hand brushing back the very dark bangs from her forehead to show me the sigil, as if that had a bearing on her question.
Bordered version
of the sigil
The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark lines and about as big as a silver dollar. An X superimposed on a plus sign. It looked permanent.”
— Fritz Leiber, “Damnation Morning“
For Vine Deloria Jr., who died at 72 on Sunday, Nov. 13, 2005:
Things forgotten are shadows.
The shadows will be as real
as wind and rain and song and light,
there in the old place.
Spider Woman atop your rock,
I would greet you,
but I am going the other way.
Only a fool would pursue a Navajo
into the Canyon of Death.
Related material:
from
a Log24 entry on the morning of
Deloria’s death–
Kaleidoscope turning…
Shifting pattern
within unalterable structure…
— Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat