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