The fly can escape when it realises it is the spider

A short musing on being trapped in culture, and the sticky business of non duality.

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly. We don’t know why, but it seems likely that it was an accident. The spider, however, was a choice. Following a subsequent series of questionable decisions, the lady ate a horse. She’s dead, of course.¹

The coroner’s report was tactful, simply stating that the cause of death was iatrogenic.² The solution is often the problem. He noted that further research is required on the relationship between flies and spiders.

The cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz once said “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself have spun”. He’s giving a nod to biology, but talking of culture, and he makes us all sound like spiders and flies. Figuratively speaking, maybe we are.³

When we are the fly with the gift of flight, rendered trapped and helpless, the spider may appear to be an ominous object outside of us (perhaps capitalism, the state, or our mortality), but in a deeper sense, we are co-constituted and bring the spider into being.

As the spider, the fly is our livelihood, our sustenance, not quite our raison d’être, but it will become part of us; yet we don’t tend to identify with the fly, despite consisting of digested flies.⁴

If the web were to speak, it might say something like: “I take no sides. I come from the spider, but I serve nature by holding the fly.”

The fly may not feel so dispassionate.

Yet what is actually present is a spider-web-fly, and all that gave rise to them and all that situates them. Ecologically speaking, and spiritually too, thou art all of that.

We can meet with other flies on the web - other individuals in culture - and collectively lament the spider, but we are more likely to free ourselves if we start by asking: what exactly is this web, and how did we become part of it? If this is not my DNA, is it at least my amino acids? Did I consent to this?

We appear to live as subjects in a world of objects, and sometimes we feel agentic and creative like the spider. Yet even the spider has constraints, curiously compelled to spin webs and catch flies, with no hope, for instance, of becoming a butterfly.

It is normal for all parties to feel that there must be more to life than spider-web-fly. Many sense a soul-like and relatable presence, tantalisingly undisclosed, or perhaps ubiquitous.

Clearly, there is life beyond the web, but we have to stop spinning to find it.

Transcendence and immanence are different, but equally real and inextricably linked. It seems likely to me that we are both in this world and not of it.

All of the above came to mind while thinking about what we are subject to, about paradigms, worldviews, and imaginaries, and my recent reflection on cosmogonies.

I feel this idea has legs (at least eight) so I may come back to it, but in summary, here is a playful provocation for the next time we get bored of talking about the weather.

We are the web, the spider spinning it, and the fly that gets caught there. The fly can only escape when it realises it is the spider. The spider can only escape when it realises it is the fly. The web abides.⁵

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**I write on applied philosophy and other organisational matters over on Perspectiva’s Substack as part of my job. Here, The Joyous Struggle, is becoming a place for personal thoughts, marginalia, and lateral pieces like this one which arise in my own time. If you can become a paid subscriber, it is good for morale, helps me justify the time invested, helps the posts remain freely available, and keeps the show on the road. Thank you.**

1. In Moloch in Therapy, the session begins as follows:

Therapist: So what brings you to therapy?

Moloch: That’s a very personal question.

Therapist: Is it? Well, that’s good. Therapy is personal work.

Moloch: Well, I am not really a person. God made sure of that. On the other hand, I sometimes feel like one, and it’s not clear what I am. Technically, I suppose I’m a demon, but these days I am invoked by humans to represent negative outcomes caused by inexorable competitive logic arising from lack of imagination and unwitting design.

Therapist: *Scribbles note: ‘complex identity structure, possible narcissistic personality disorder’ and looks up*.

Can you explain that to me in plain language, please?

Moloch: There was an old lady who swallowed a fly. Remember her? I guess she died, right? And why? Because one thing led to another. She swallowed the spider to catch the fly, she swallowed the bird to catch the spider that wriggled and jiggled and tiggled inside her, and so on. The old lady soon found she had to eat a horse to solve her problems. As the saying goes: good luck with that.

Therapist: So are you the horse?

Moloch: No! I’m the kind of underlying logic that leads people to figuratively eat horses to solve their fly problems.

2. Iatrogenesis is about harm caused by medical intervention, for instance, through drugs with bad side effects, or worse, but the idea applies much more broadly - solutions create problems.

3. The ‘himself’ being used as a universal is very seventies, so I haven’t updated it to be gender neutral but I don’t think the point is specific to men. It seems this idea is derived from the sociologist Max Weber. The full quote, from Geertz’s essay, Thick Description: Towards an Interpretative theory of culture, in a book of his selected essays from 1973, goes like this: “The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays below attempt to demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical. But this pronouncement, a doctrine in a clause, demands itself some explication.” (You’re damn right, Clifford…I do like ‘surface enigmatical’ though).

4. Swami Vishnudevananda used to say the human body is just “pizza and bananas” and that when we die, what happens is that we lose our pizza and bananas…

5. That last line is distantly inspired by The Big Lebowski (1998) directed by the Cohen brothers where “the dude abides” became the signature line of the film.