a bit of Ana4 - the spider story

The mother of the spider

They were waiting for the fire to heat the room thoroughly, so we could make the beds and go to sleep. I opened the door to the other room, turned the light on and there was a spider on the wall. He stayed quiet in full view under the light. I wondered whether he realized he was so exposed, so much in danger. I took a step closer, despite my squeamishness and that I wasn’t going to touch him anyway. He moved ahead, 2 or 3 centimeters, then stopped again. “Ugh, there’s a spider!” I cried out suddenly. I had been startled, but not exactly scared, and I registered the fake shrillness of my cry and wondered why I’d felt it necessary to act like that. My mother came and flung it off the wall with a towel.

“Don’t kill him, let him go,” dad said. “What did he ever do to you?”

“He’s sitting on the wall of my room, in my house, which should be an inhabited house – by people, not spiders,” I countered. “If someone lived here day by day and swept and dusted and cooked and talked in these rooms, he would know better than to show his face.”

“So you’re taking it out on the spider. Mature,” he said, and mum trampled it underfoot quickly, decisively, dragged it on the floor for a moment then wiped her slipper on the remains.

“I just took some webs off earlier,” she shrugged. “I imagine his eggs are around here somewhere.”

“Imagine his mother,” I said then. “Imagine she sent him out to play so she can have time to strengthen her cobweb or something. I know that’s not how things work, but there’s a mother to this spider somewhere...? Who doesn’t know what happened to him...? but she will maybe just think he’s an ungrateful son who forgot to return home to his family. She won’t think he’s dead.”

I need to read up on spiders’ life cycles, I thought. Why had I never thought of this before? Because we dramatize them as a function of ourselves, the most selfish beings alive. It’s so not a conversation about spiders but about humans. For all I know, as soon as they’re capable to feed themselves, off they go. The spider is alone in the world. The spider lives for his species, not for his family. Does the spider know this? Where is that level, inside his body, where the spider lives for himself alone?

Then my mother was angry, which came unexpectedly and she knew she was being ridiculous so she tried to still laugh through her anger, but she had to say something to cool off:

“So why the hell didn’t you say this before? You make me kill it because you have issues, and then you make me sound like a killer, because I didn’t think of the mother of the spider, for god’s sake!”

“No worry, Mum,” I said, “I know you were trying to protect me. All the rotten karma points will go to me alone.”

And when I wake up and it’s a gray day with nothing doing, that’s who I’m thinking of. My mother and the spider on the wall. He was sitting there doing nothing as far as I was concerned, definitely doing no harm, but who knows what he was doing? He was living. Breathing air on my wall with his hairy little feet propped up sturdily. Then she came and killed him gratuitously, to please me.

No other small life form my mother ever killed in the course of her cleaning and tidying will ever be remembered, but this one is being spun into a family story that tells us a lot and not enough, as always, just enough for us to come back to it. I look at spiderwebs differently now, the massive ones hanging in boughs, their elaborate constructions weighed down by waterdrops which emphasize the finesse, the resilience. This is art. It is also a house. A marker; a hunter’s trap; a compulsion – and something that another race looks at in admiration and then sometimes immediately destroys, in dark impulses of its own.

Nobody knows. Tell yourself you know it all, you don’t.

Sorry, little spider.