Speaker 1: Hello everyone, and welcome to Talk Nerdy. Today is Monday,
July twentieth, twenty twenty six, and I'm the host of
the show Doctor Kara Santa Maria. I'm actually on vacation.
I guess you could call it. It's a working vacation.
This week and next away with the Skeptics Guide to
the Universe in Australia and New Zealand for some conferences
down under. I will be back in a couple of
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Speaker 2: Wow.
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do is visit Patreon. That's p A t R e
o N dot com slash talk Nerdy. All right, let's
get into it. So this week I had the opportunity
to speak with doctor Maria Tatar. She's the John L.
Lobe Research Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and of
Folklore and Mythology Emerita at Harvard University. That's such a
long title. So she is an Emerita professor of Germanic
Languages and Literatures and of Folklore and Mythology. And among
her many, many many books she's published, we're going to
be talking about her newest one today. It is called
a Raknomania spiders and the cultural work they do for us. So,
without any further ado, here she is doctor Maria to talk. Well, Maria,
thank you so much for joining me today.
Speaker 2: Great to be with you.
Speaker 1: I'm excited to talk about your new wist book. I
think it's important to say that because you've written many
many books, but your newest book a Racknomania spiders and
the cultural work they do for us. But before we
get into our favorite or not so favorite Araknids, I
would love to talk to you about your background a
little bit, so Germanic languages and literatures and folklore and mythology.
You're a professor of these things, professor emerita at Harvard
University of these things. How does one become a professor
of folklore and mythology for example?
Speaker 3: Well, first, I have to confess to having academic add
I cannot sit still, I can't stay in one place.
I have colleagues who study Kafka for their entire lifetime
and I can't do that. And also I've been around
for a long time. So I started out studying German
literature with a PhD in that field, and then I
gave I was invited to give a talk on the
brothers Grim and I realized, to my astonishment, that no
one with a PhD in German literature studied the Grims.
Speaker 2: It was just.
Speaker 3: Their fairy tales were considered children's literature, wasn't part of
the true and the good and the beautiful. So that
got me off and running and once I after I
get that talk where there were about two hundred people
as opposed to the ten people that usually came to.
Speaker 4: Academic talks, I thought, you know, maybe I'm onto something here,
and that led me into folklore and of course mythology,
and it's all part of the great cauldron of story.
Speaker 3: And these days we don't stay in one time and place,
but folklorists and those who study literature as well move
around from one continent to the next and from one
era to the next. It's an exciting time.
Speaker 1: It's so I mean, it's so lovely to hear that
somebody has dedicated their career to celebrating and investigating this
fundamentally human endeavor. You know, this show has been on
the air now for eleven years. I've been doing this,
and early on I really kind of situated it as
a hard science show, and most of my guests were
physicists or chemists or biologists. And as the years moved on,
the show itself evolved into more social justice orientations, with
more representation and more of a kind of inclusive conversation
around academia and beyond. And I think part of that
was my transition from more like hard neuroscience into clinical psychology,
and now I have all of these wonderful people who
joined me on the show from all these different kind
of areas of academia. And I love it because A
I don't know anything about this, Like obviously, if I
thought about it long enough, I would realize that people
do this for a living. But it feels so far
away from a lot of my exposure. And so I'm
so excited to be able to pick your brain today
and learn what your career has looked like. Like, what
does a professor who you know, part of the job,
if you're in academia at the level of professor PhD,
is to teach, and part of your job is to
do scholarship. What is the scholarship of somebody who studies
literature and especially studies like mythology, in folklore and beyond.
Speaker 3: Oh well, I have to say that there's My research
and my teaching were always entangled because I've learned from
so much from my students, who made me aware of
what was dull and what was interesting. I looked at
their faces, and you know, I could always tell whether
I was going down the right path or whether I
was going into terrain that was just totally uninteresting to them.
As for scholarship, I suppose, you know, I have to
say that I'm an omnivore, and so I love just
moving all over the place, all over the map, as
I said before, and then digging deep into My training
in German taught me that skill of digging deep and
taking things to the sixth decimol point in a way,
and learning the language, learning about the culture, but then
being a FOLKLSST. I was a sort of liberator from that,
and I realized, you know, I could go to China
and I could recollections to be sure they were translations
of Chinese fairy tales, and discover the connections with Western
analogs and so so scholarship to me is oddly very
unsystematic in a way, because what what I like to
do is just have my basket and collect all kinds
of things and then sit at my desk and you know, there,
I would say there is a certain amount of solitude
that is required, you know, going from the classroom to
the desk and just thinking hard. And I should say
Cloud Levey Strauss, the great French anthropologist, taught me that
animals are good to think with. And that accounts I
think for part of my turn to animal animal studies,
because really thinking hard about our world and how we
coexist with other beings on the planet.
Speaker 1: It's so important. And I wonder, I mean, obviously, you
have so many colleagues and this is the world that
you've been steeped in, but for a lot of you know,
people that you meet on the subway, people that you
meet in the grocery store, I wonder how many of
them realize that there is this rich academic world where
people are digging deep into story and how stories shape
humanity and society. I can't help but ask, like, when
you first got into you know, when you first decided
to go to college even and then continue on to
graduate school, was it really situated in like I just
really love to read. Is that what brought you is?
And do you find that with a lot of your
students or your colleagues that most people in this world
are just passionate readers.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 3: I confess to being bookish, and one of the things
that I disliked in my childhood was my mother was
constantly telling people that I always had my nose in
a book. And one of the things I discovered. It's
such an interesting question that you raised, because years and
decades ago I decided to teach a course called fairy
Tales in the Culture of Childhood. And it was tough
to get that course past the gatekeepers, who were worried
that I would have bottom feeders in that court, because
fairy tales.
Speaker 5: You know, these sort of silly, frivolous not stories, right,
And of course, you know, I took some of that seriously.
Speaker 3: But what I discovered when four hundred people showed up
for the course I was expecting fifteen. The beauty of
it was why did they come to that course? They
were passionate readers, and they wanted to go back and
look at the stories that they had grown up with
and analyzed them, you know, not have the immersive reading experience,
but also step back and look at them. You know,
why was this important? What does this story mean? We
are homo significants, not just homo sapiens, but we are
in search of meaning. We engage in these signifying practices.
We try to understand something about the stories that we
tell to each other. And you know what you said earlier,
I mean stories make the human world, and they also
make the world human and they keep us human, which
is something that is more important than ever I think
in an age of AI and new technologies.
Speaker 1: Oh. Absolutely, they help us understand ourselves. I think we
can't understand ourselves unless we understand how we are situated,
you know, how we relate to others, how we relate
to to lore. And one thing that I had to
bring up when you were talking about doing these this
course that's more geared towards, you know, the folk tales
of our childhood is whenever we take a minute to
actually introspect, to not just take what we're reading at
face value or say, oh, here is information, I'm going
to add it to my prior information. But to sit
and go like that's kind of weird. Why would they
were to? Then you start to realize, Wow, a lot
of folk lore is pretty dark. A lot of things
kids are exposed to has a lot of depth, and
maybe they're interpreting at a certain level when they're a
specific age, but digging deep probably uncovers a lot, doesn't it.
Speaker 3: Oh yes, absolutely, the darkness and fairy tales in particular,
folklore and lore in general, myths as well, they are
just weird. They're wired for weirdness, and so I always
think of that phrase that Churchill use to describe Russia,
a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside in an And
sometimes these stories are so minimalist.
Speaker 2: In your concept what what first.
Speaker 3: You're asking what happened? You know what's next because it's
often a great story. But then why, And so wonder
tales sometimes fairy tales are called wonder tales, which I
think is a beautiful designation because wonder, as Aristotle and
Plato taught us, is the beginning of philosophy. And so
you start to understand why Einstein is reported to have
said this may be apocryphal. If you want intelligent children,
read them fairy tales. If you want more intelligent children,
read them more fairy tales, because they get you thinking,
and they also get you in conversation with other people
who have heard a similar story and are also perplexed
or puzzled and have a different take on the story.
Speaker 1: Oh I love that. Yeah, it reminds me of I
I never had the opportunity to be exposed to too
much like literary training beyond my core courses in undergrad really,
but it reminds me a lot of the work that
I was lucky enough to do in some of my
philosophy and my poetry courses, where you're not just creating,
but you're co creating, and then you're really taking the
time to attempt these I guess hermaeutic interpretations, like how
do I read this in my context? But also what
was thegeist at the time, you know, what were they
maybe trying to say and how relevant is that to
this conversation.
Speaker 3: Yes, I love the fact that you use the term
hermaeneutic because my students loved it when I referred to
them as hermauts. There were interpreters. They were searching for meaning,
they were trying to figure things out and to get
I I really think it's so important to emphasize what
you just said about the power of story, because we
also live in an era that is characterized by hermeneutics
of suspicion.
Speaker 2: We read things and we say.
Speaker 3: What you know, we become overtly critical in a way
and in an effort to be ideologically correct. But you know, again,
sometimes sometimes that kind of suspicion also gets conversations going.
So I'm not completely opposed to it, you know, I have.
Speaker 1: To admit that you know, a rachinomania I think really
speaks to me because I do come from a more
natural science tradition, and sometimes I struggle when I read,
maybe less so when I read. But I love that
you mentioned this label of wonder stories as opposed to
fairy tales or wonder tales. I sometimes struggle with watching
fantasy films or getting involved in the world building that's
necessary to get lost in fantasy. I find that I
struggle to suspend disbelief in those in those areas as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I hear you completely. I am a huge fact.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: I've never met a story that I didn't like in
one way or another, but I should. I'll make one
exception there. I could never get into Lord of the
Brain me neither. It's like a whole thing, no I know,
And I thought, well, maybe if I had a lifetime
to learn always so I say, I've never met a
fairy tale I didn't like, but I have met fantasy books.
And also science fiction is a genre that I struggle with,
but everything else I love and I embrace and I
admire the people who can really get get into these
into these worlds and visualize and see them so Oh.
Speaker 1: So it's yeah, it's interesting, like there's a there's a
point I guess where it's too in the uncanny valley
and it requires too much cognitive effort. But if it's
really fantastic, it's like, oh yeah, it's you know, it's
easy to suspend that disbelief.
Speaker 3: And I'm glad I found a kindred spirit. And now
that we're in the confessional boat, I love it.
Speaker 1: It's a lot of people they don't understand that. So
I've got to ask. Then you mentioned this turn to animals,
and this turn to I guess life, ecology, biology, the
way that we are situated amongst all of the living creatures,
all of the organisms. What specifically turned you to spiders?
Speaker 2: That is a great question.
Speaker 3: I ask myself that almost every how did that land
on spiders? And you know what you said earlier about
connection and relationships. I immediately thought about spiders in the
way that they spin webs and all the metaphors that
we derive from observing spiders. But the beginning of it
was in a book that I wrote some time ago
called The Heroin with one thousand and one Faces, which
looked at the craft of storytelling and craft I used
that word deliberately because stories were often told in places.
Speaker 2: Where chores were carried.
Speaker 3: Where women sewed, where they mended, where they wove spinning rooms,
sewing circles, at all of that. And while I was
writing that book, a Rockney became one of my thousand
and one heroines. She led me to spiders because she,
according to Avid, she was the first spider. So forget Darwin.
Speaker 2: I know you like science.
Speaker 3: Forget Darwin, forget evolution. Avid tells us how spiders came
into the world. And Arockley is just a young girl,
a beautiful young girl known for her weaving. She's also
a bit of a show off. So she catches the
attention of Minerva or Athena, who challenges her to a
weaving contest. And what does and this is why Iraklei
became my hero And that is she creates this tapestry
in which she weaves all of the misdeeds of the
gods on and we get Zeus's sexual assaults, the rape
of Europa, the seduction of Lyda, the deception of Akmena,
and so on. Well, Athena is glorifying the gods in
her tapestry. Athena is so outraged by this that she
she tears a Rockney's tapestry into pieces, hits her over
the head with a spindle, and then a Rockney is
ashamed and plans to hang herself, but at the last
moment Athendo turns her into a spider. But she's now destined.
She can no longer be a show off. She's destined
to spin in dark corners. But what I found so
fascinating about Arockney is one she speaks truth.
Speaker 1: To power.
Speaker 3: With the craft, not with her voice, but with her tapestry.
With images, she creates a textile and also a text
and then she creates a thing of beauty. So to me,
what resonated with me was this sort of entanglement of
both beauty and justice in our storytelling practices in general.
And so this is this is how she became my heroin.
And then she led me to all of these other
fascinating spiders in not just in literature, but in mythology.
There's a Nanzi, the African trickster god, who is also
a master linguist and storyteller. And then there's the Navajo
grandmother spider, who creates the world by weaving, not by
saying let there be light, or using you know, words
naming things. But she does this with the sky god.
And I love these parent mythologies where you have a
male and a female god goddess creating the world and
then by you know, this wonderful act of weaving, creating fabrics,
these protective materials. And if you you know, Freud once
said that weaving was the only contribution that women made
to civilization, which I guess laughable exactly.
Speaker 1: But also there's a lot of depth behind that.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of death they had that And then
if you think of weaving versus tool making, you know,
man the toolmaker and woman the weaver. Who these women
are creating protective coverings, everything from blankets to tense to
and so on. So I think Freud, you know, underestimated
what women did, but he also underestimated the power of
weaving and the importance of that to our culture.
Speaker 1: And you know, I can't help but point to you know,
for the listeners of the show who have been with
me for a while, it actually you don't even have
to have been with me for that long because this
only dates back to February. But I had an author
on this show an author and research psychologist and knitter
named Nicole Narek who wrote a book with her own
handsmen Weaving their Stories. And one of the things that
we really dug deep into was this like quintessentially feminist
act that has existed throughout a lot of human history
where women who were uh, you know, they really were
in a lot of ways stripped of any sort of
voice within the public arena. They were able to tell
their tales through things like you know, let's say, like
the biotapestry or these different very famous works of art
that very likely it was women who made them, and
they interjected a lot of women's perspective in this work.
And gosh, there's so much crossover there with your with
your spiders, who are of course weaving their webs.
Speaker 3: Oh, I have to listen to that podcast for sure.
And you brought up knitting. Of one of the sections
of my book looks at spinster sleuth who are often
you know, you get the physical description of them, and
you realize that there had to be some sort of
awareness that these women all look like spiders. They're wearing black,
they've got you know, and they're knitting. And this connection
between knitting and sleuthing, I mean, soothing. Detective work was
one of the things that women could do where they
did have some agency, although not a voice, as you
point out, because who had the voice the police officials,
public of the government, you know, judges, And here are
these women, you know, knitting, puzzling things out, figuring things out,
and staying ahead of the officials who are who are
not very good at solving mysteries and crimes.
Speaker 2: Spider women.
Speaker 1: I love it, and I love the just the etymology.
You know, you were talking earlier about your work in
German and really digging deep into not just the era,
but of course the language itself. I love that this book.
Of course it's a book about spiders by you. So
so this is one of those lovely times when etymology
and entomology it should not be mixed up, but are
both quite relevant. But I think about terms, you know,
we we do we we weave a we tell a
yarn or weave a yarn like like webs spear story. Yeah,
their stories, their tales. Do you know where that comes from?
Like what that actually dates back to this idea of
the story being a web that was woven.
Speaker 3: Well, I think that it actually goes back to the Greeks,
where sewing and poetry were connected.
Speaker 2: You sewed words together.
Speaker 3: And then you have I mean it's hard to trace
this perfectly, but I always think of these spinning rooms
and as I said, sewing circles, these places where people
gathered and you know they were carrying out household chores
I mean, knitting. You have to have something else there,
just like the cigar rollers who listen to novels, who
have novels read to them. When you have work that
is repetitive, you really need, you desperately need a good story.
And remember nineteenth, eighteenth, nineteenth century, earlier times, no electronic entertainments,
long dark evenings, so you needed really peppy, melodramatic, racy,
racy stories to keep things things going. And that's what
you know we do for spinning tails, spinning yarns, or
weaving webs. And then I mean we could even take
it up to the World Wide Web and the way
that many women were involved in the beginnings of uh well,
not not just artificial but you know, just the computer
in general and programming and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: How much has your work throughout your career been interested
in the social justice components of stories, maybe you know,
a feminist perspective or an intersectional perspective. I know that
you've written about Vymar Journey Germany. You've written about these
very kind of of their time, before their time, experiences
that individuals were having. And I'm curious how much that
your own I guess feminism or femininity has driven some
of the stories that you you like to dig deep into.
Speaker 2: Yeah, my own feminism.
Speaker 3: And also I think I learned a lot. Here's a
point at which I learned a lot from my students
who were ahead of me in terms of thinking about
issues of social justice. And I had always framed it
when I was studying fairy tales many years ago, I
suppose in the eighties and nineties, I had always framed
it as getting even that is, you know, there is
kind of naive morality and fairy tales, and you know,
the villains were you know, goodness was rewarded, virtue was rewarded,
advice was punished, and the scales were balanced out in
a way. But over the years, I think, you know,
listening to how my students read these stories, I think
so much of it is, you know, moving in the
direction of fairness. And I mentioned beauty before. I would
love the fact that our English termed fairness captures both
social justice and beauty. And again, you know, through story.
I mean, think about the Me Too movement. I mean,
we had the court the courts are courts which did
not give women justice for many, many years, and then
we have the court room of public opinion and what
was that but sites of storytelling where women told their
stories and by God, the culture changed. That was an
extraordinary moment and I think it really tells us a
lot about the power of storytelling.
Speaker 2: And there.
Speaker 3: I mean you could say it was a movement also
to get even get revenge in a way, but I
don't think that was the driving force. I think it
was more, you know, speaking truth to power, getting justice,
seeing the other side of the story, discovering that these
voices that had not been heard were worthless to Yeah, it's.
Speaker 1: You know, it reminds me one of my favorite memes
online that I that I come across periodically, because clearly
the algorithms know what it is I'm looking at. We'll
say things like men should be uh, men should be
happy that women just want equality and we don't want revenge, right,
A very different world we'd be living in, uh if
that were the case. Speaking though, of this very feminist
or feminine perspective, I mean, I can't help but but
point to the the feminine of the spider. Like when
we think about spiders, there's so much sort of uh,
I don't know, analogy, there is so much of it
feels so feminine.
Speaker 3: Yes, you know what and that is that's you know,
I think of Stephen King's It.
Speaker 2: I don't know whether you've ever read that.
Speaker 1: It's oh I did when I was too young, too
much too Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well what a blood curdling story that is. And
the spider the monster of course, you know there's a
way in which that story framesponster, what are you afraid of?
Best than your monster? You create your own monster, but
it which is everyone's monster, it's female and it's pregnant.
Mm hmmm.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 3: So you know there's something about that that tells us
about our our fear of not just of women, but
of their capacity to give birth, to create.
Speaker 1: And their power, their power. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And trying to unpack that is uh, you know,
a real challenge, I think, uh, to try to understand
what is what is at the heart of.
Speaker 2: That, Why why would Stephen King come up with it?
Speaker 3: And Stephen King is you know, in many ways very
politically correct too, you know, so, so when I came
to that moment, I thought, what you know, and stranger
things too. If you think about the monsters in the
it's I always down under or the I.
Speaker 1: Always get the yeah, the upside down.
Speaker 3: Upside I always want to call it the down under,
the upside down?
Speaker 2: What is in that world?
Speaker 3: This kind of mass of it is a little bit
like a womb, like going inside a body.
Speaker 6: And then the the uh, the figure, well, the carnivorous
carnivorous spider is.
Speaker 3: You know, oh, well, talk about it is reminiscent of
female genitals. I'll just say it because Shalob is the
same thing where uh you know, this creature comes sort
of the most frightening feminine form possible.
Speaker 1: Right, you know, I can't help I think my own cynicism,
or maybe I'm not being cynical, maybe I'm being a realist.
But I can't help but see this through the lens
of somebody who can't help but see patriarchy all around me,
and think about the fact that there has been a
long history of men clinging to power and preventing women
from having said power or having said voice. And I
do wonder how much underlies or how much of it
is underlying this, like this fear that women have, you know,
these ultimate powers they can create life. And I think
historically too, because of the positioning of men and women,
the normative gender roles, there's this mystique. Right, this suckubis
kind of Yeah, women are going to get inside your
head and they're going to like undermine your your manhood
or whatever. And really, yeah, it's all just been a
I guess, just the activity of women to try to
make sure their voices are heard. But it's become monsterfied
by the men who told these stories.
Speaker 3: Of right, right, it sort of is whom that What
is the title of that book from long ago is
male to culture as female is to nature. You know,
the nature culture divide. That is, with the male being strong, autonomous,
self contained and the woman being very much body and
biology reproduction. I mean you could find its production versus reproduction,
creativity versus procreation, and that binary I think is something
that we really have to worry about.
Speaker 1: I agree, yeah, because it is artificial, right it is.
It is a story in itself, right, right, Yeah, And
that's such an interesting thing as a person like you know,
working as a psychologist. One of the things I've long
been grappling with is the idea of constructivism.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: I'm a science based thinker, I'm an evidence based thinker.
I'm an atheist. I don't believe in anything supernatural. And yet,
although I agree that there is an external reality that
we can consensually agree on based on our tools, I
also believe that every single person on the planet constructs
their own reality from their own experience. They have their
own lens, and we all have narrative. Right. Stories are
codified versions of those narratives, and hopefully with a lot
more creativity and wordplay, and you know, hopefully just like
with the interest in the pizazz that keeps us fascinated
and wanting to turn the page. But a story about
a spider that is either passed down through the ages
or is you know, put on the page, is in
a lot of ways no different than a person's story
about their own life, right, or how they are situated
in the timeline of humanity. It's still a story. It's
a narrative.
Speaker 2: It's a narrative.
Speaker 3: And what I would say is that in many ways,
I mean, even though I mean, take take something Stephen
King's it, we just talked about how you know how
horrifying that scene is. And yet I would say the
importance of the story is the minute I read that,
I wanted to go out.
Speaker 2: And talk to somebody about it.
Speaker 3: So the story, you know, everything is constructive in a way.
But because we have this contact zone in story and
its story gives us, I mean gives us a symbolic world.
But to me, it's also so important that the symbolic
helps us navigate the real that often we need the
story about the spider instead of the human in order
to understand ourselves. That is, you know, spiders are in
a funny way, our significant others are curved mirrors, are
you know they tell us something about us. I'm only
I always marvel at how fables, for example, I big fables.
We tell these fables to children about animals. You know,
again going back to Levey Strauss, animals are good to
think with, and they sort of help us to construct
a symbolic world that helps us understand the real. And
getting back to what you said and how the wheel
is also socially constructed.
Speaker 1: It's you know, I'm long grapped when I work with
my patients, and I work in a large cancer center
in a large hospital, and a lot of what we
do is logo therapeutic work, right meaning focused therapy, life review,
trying to understand purpose, trying to understand and live life
to the fullest, regardless of what life is left right
and how much time we have, really grappling with mortality.
Metaphor is so fundamental to the work. There are just
sometimes you just cannot verbalize an emotion or an experience
without utilizing the power of metaphor.
Speaker 3: That's I think that's exactly what Levey Stross was getting
at that. You know, I always think about it when
you ask children, how is school today? How is that movie?
What did you like about the party? They clam up.
They you know, they have nothing to say. And then
if you start to, you know, just start telling them
a story and then you'll see that I mean, they
are myth makers in a way, because they pick up
bits and pieces of the day and they if you
you know, I don't I don't mean just tell them
the story, but create a story with them, and suddenly
you'll start to understand. This is why, you know, it's
such a two way We always think of reading to
children or telling children's stories. We're teaching them, we're entertaining them,
but above all teaching them. But it's a two way street.
And we learn a lot about the child and how
the mind of a child would say, you know, the
great mystery, how does the mind of a child, we
learned hold much about them through the story.
Speaker 2: And they need metaphor.
Speaker 3: I think they may not know what a metaphor is,
but they really need it to be able to open
up and talk.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I'd argue that as adults were not far
off from that either. The child inside of us, especially
in a you know, I mentioned a therapeutic setting because
that's sometimes one of the most vulnerable places that we exist.
And yes, metaphor is a huge helper to be able
to go into the death right.
Speaker 3: And what you described just reminded me of my experience
with children. And you're right, it's often a crisis situation,
an emotional crisis, the triggers the need for a story, yes,
and the need for metaphor.
Speaker 1: That's probably why so many of these fables right have
such dark roots and even as you're doing your or
you were doing your scholarship, you know, basically combing all
of the literature for these examples of spiders and what
they represent and where they are. I mean, nobody writes
in a vacuum. They write in the political landscape that
they find themselves situated within. And so you know, even
what we think of is these like innocuous stories usually
have very dark and difficult themes of like human conflict.
Speaker 3: Actually, storytelling in general, I was going to say fairy tales,
but storytelling in general takes up cultural contradictions.
Speaker 2: You know, This is why there's.
Speaker 3: Never one single meaning right that you can get from
a story, because a story will wrestle with contradictions that
we have to live with for better or for worse.
We think of beauty and the beast, it's a story
about empathy and hostility, you know, the two ways you
can accounter the other by being empathetic or you can
be frightened and scared and terrified and hostile hostpitality. As
one critic hospitality and hostility. And we sort of live
with things like that, with terms like that, and we
have to find not so much a middle road, but
we have to find it positions somewhere on that spectrum,
and I think stories help us work out our values.
You know what is you know, is compassion the right answer?
Does that work better than hostility or anger or all
of these toxic emotions that we've all felt at one
time or another. So, yeah, the darkness, you know, it's
a human condition. We have to live with both darkness
and light and everything everything in between. But you know,
stories are I think of the term kiero scuro, which
is applied by film critics to the light and shadows
that you get in films, and that kind of.
Speaker 2: That contrast that.
Speaker 3: Comes across so vividly in black and white films. That's
sort of what I mean. We live, in many ways
in a black and white world and we have to
navigate our way through that.
Speaker 1: And I think both it's so interesting. I keep coming
back to the work that I've been doing recently and
the relationship to this literary conversation. But this concept of
ambivalence is one of the central features to the psychotherapy
that I am often engaging with my patients in. It's
not choosing one or the other, it's it's learning how
to sit with the fact that you can feel know
two things at the same time, even if they feel
like they're in conflict. And I think so often in
this in this world where we're tasked with having to
polarize ourselves and and sort of deny one thing in
order to embrace another. But I think story allows us
to feel conflicting emotions and to ride that roller coaster
in maybe a safer way than you know, overtly confronting
our existential demons.
Speaker 3: Oh, absolutely, or you know, as opposed to reading the newspaper,
we're going on social media. Yes, you know, stories are
our salvation in that way because everything you said about
ambivalence and conflict and you no ambiguity. F Scott Fitzgerald.
I think it was Fitzgerald who told us that the
sign of an intelligent mind is the ability to hold
two contradictory thoughts in your head at once. Yeah, and
and to try to work that out. And again, you
know what you've found in your there to talk about that, uh,
to talk about that and not you know, argue with
somebody about it, but just to try to figure out
this great all these great existential puzzles that we live with.
Speaker 1: And you know, when I think again, about I love
the title, by the way, racknomania, right, because when we
hear a rack noo, most people go to phobia like
that is the sort of uh, the heuristic in our minds.
But of course I have to admit I'm a lover
of spiders. I think they're beautiful, I think they're fascinating.
I never kill them in my home.
Speaker 2: And I have learned.
Speaker 3: I have learned the easy way to get a spider
out of the house is just put a glass over it, yes,
and it will climb up the glass, and you just
need a paper towel or something like that and you
can take it right outdoors. I'm so glad to hear that.
And of course, you know, I mean astonishingly a rock
no phobia.
Speaker 2: They're no.
Speaker 3: You know, we have alloraphobia, sinophobia, this fear of cats
and dogs. But but none of those words have become
part of our normal discourse. It's only a rock nophobia.
I think it does take us to a very deep,
dark place, the one that we were talking about that
is often associated with women.
Speaker 1: And so as you were doing this work and you
were digging deep into all of the mythology, all of
the representation, the situating of of you know, spider throughout
time and throughout space within the stories that you came across. Obviously,
the work could never be completely done. There's no way
you could ever, you know, come across every spider ever
written about. But did you start to notice, you know,
I think we've talked about a lot of themes, like
like femininity, but also like deception and some of the
more like at dark themes that that we see a lot.
But did you start to notice anything that maybe surprised you?
Representations from from cultures or from eras that felt like, oh,
that seems really out of step with how we usually
think of spider in literature.
Speaker 3: Oh, you know, I have to say, I think I
was surprised by everything in a strange way. You know,
there was nothing that I sort of took for granted
I thought, oh, yes, of course.
Speaker 4: I think what I was.
Speaker 3: Shot by was the number of spiders, the way that
they you know, I mean, they're ubiquity right now, they're
probably about five or six spiders within a few feet
of me and h and in literature, mythology and you know,
just our culture as a way of being obsessed with
these creatures. But at the same time marginalizing them and
pretending they don't exist, and also forgetting that they are,
I mean, just an agriate. Think of the number of
insects they of where we be without spiders probably well,
you know, we wouldn't have much to eat, for one thing.
But I think what astonished me was, you know, one
of the things that happened when I would tell people
I was writing about spiders, I often got the ug
oh how can you do that? But I also got
a kind of oh, yeah, Charlotte's web, and you know
that that was sort of it. That became the reference point,
and gee, that can't be very interesting. And so I
think what I was astonished by was that, you know,
I discovered a Nansi and ground I knew about Anansi,
but grandmother Spider was someone a figure I was not
that familiar with. But that led me then to Sumerian
sources and Indians, and you discovered that these weavers in
Egyptian in Egyptian mythology, they're also weavers. And each of
those stories is very complicated as a slightly different take,
but the prevalence, the prevalence of them, and the diversity also,
I think just as you know, there are so many
different types of spiders and different types of webs. They're
reconfigured in each era and by each culture, and so
you know, I did have this sense, you know, I
could just keep writing this book forever because I kept
coming up with new examples. But it's also good to
stop and say it's done. But the next person continue
and find all this that I missed.
Speaker 1: Well to that, And I am curious here as we're
winding down down the hour, I'm curious, what are your
hopes for this type of your own narrative? Right like
you endeavored to not just do the scholarship, but then
to write this book for public consumption, for folks to
sit down and say, you know, my curiosity, my appetite
has been wedded. What are you hoping that people walk
away with after reading this book?
Speaker 3: Oh? I think you know, I helped to awaken their
curiosity about spiders and also to think about Oh, Darwin's
Entangled Bank, that wonderful passage in the Origin of Species
where that he talks about, you know, just a world.
You look at a place in your yard and it's
teeming with life and with inner actions and all that,
and just understanding again. I'll go back to the metaphor
of the web if I may, the interconnectedness and the
way that we depend on these creatures, and you know,
we need to be sensitive to the world. That's even
as you know, we're living in a planet that is
indifferent to human suffering. We have to be attentive to
what is happening in our environment, but also to give
a little bit of hope to us because we are
there's so many we're living in crist You know, every
era has its own crises, and you know, terrible things happen,
But it seems to me that the next generation is
going to have to manage so much more than my
generation did, certainly, and I think that sometimes looking at
the small and the marginalize and what appears to be
trivial helps us get through the larger problems, the large,
painful things that are in our environment.
Speaker 1: I love that even what you just said, there is
so much depth, There are so many layers, and I
have to admit I just love hearing you talk. You
have such a wonderful like your voice is really rich
with awe and wonder and I feel very inspired by
this conversation. It's been an absolute joy getting to talk
to you today, and I'm just so grateful for your time.
Speaker 2: Oh, thank you.
Speaker 3: I just feel as if we're so much on the
same waveleng then it's been a pleasure, a joy really,
just true.
Speaker 1: Everybody, of course everybody. The book is a Rachnomania Spiders
and the cultural work they do for us by doctor
Maria Tatar and everybody listening. I want to thank you
as well for coming back week after week. I'm really
looking forward to the next time we all get together
to talk in the road