Spiders, Flies & Similes
I see myself in spiders - and also in first. That probably sounds strange, given that one is a predator and the other it’s prey, but I’m talking about a particular spider and about bluebottle flies in general.
The bluebottles are those big, annoying black and dark blue flies that come inside in the summer, particularly when, like me, you don’t take the rubbish outside often enough. They whizz around your head when you’re eating, or reading, or trying to write, in an attempt to make you get up and spill your wineglass while trying to kill them. The rest of the time they buzz like hell and repeatedly bump their heads off the window pane, wondering why they can’t fly through. That’s when they annoy me the most. That constant buzz buzz, bump bump, buzz buzz. There could be an open window right beside them and they’ll never find it. They’d much rather buzz and bump ‘til they’re dead on the window-ledge or until I get lucky with a newspaper.
But there’s another way they annoy me. They annoy me by being metaphorical. I hate it that they eat shit and hatch maggots but still, despite themselves, aspire to metaphor. I can’t stand it when mere insects get metaphorical (particularly the simile-type), and most of all I hate it when they get metaphorical about me!
Each one is a tiny irritating mirror of my existence. For sixty plus years I’ve buzzed at the window-pane of life, buzzing my noise into the internet, eating shit, knocking my head in and getting nowhere - every year the same as the last but with less hope - and it took higher education to get to my level of failure. The flies, on the other hand, had a natural talent - for them it was a cakewalk and they jumped ahead of me. It’s galls me that my brain mass must equal thousands of entire fly bodies but somehow we’ve ended up with the same level of achievement - except I studied to get there. They deserve everything I throw at them.
The spider, though, is a slightly different case. The flies come and go. They disappear, sometimes for days, or just die and clutter the window sill. But the spider hangs there in it’s web by the stove - right in front of my face, never moving. The web is a mess, composed of a few scraggly strands covered in dust and tangled with the webs of other, long-gone spiders. It hangs there, upside down, the spider equivalent of the last down-and-out tenant of a crumbling apartment block. You’d be forgiven for thinking it was dead but, if I reach out my finger towards it, it shifts slightly and moves it’s legs as if reluctantly considering moving out of my way.
Spiders normally lurk in corners near their webs, or in the dead centre. In corners they tend to curl their legs in while remaining poised to rush out in a split second should Uber drop them a fly. In the centre of a web they tend to have all eight legs spread out in an action pose, like Spiderman ready to beat up some crooks. Every so often they extend a particularly long front leg and tighten their web, as if tuning it, so it makes exactly the right note when the Uber guy arrives with fly pizza.
Most spiders exude an air of competency, patience and danger. But not my guy - he just hangs there in his badly positioned wreck of a web, never catching anything, never moving unless prodded. He hangs upside down with his legs messily arrayed below him like he’s sunk one bottle too many and blotted out the problem. Maybe, like the spider of Robert the Bruce fame, he tried and tried again - Bruce’s spider was lucky - it only had to try a couple of times and then he got out of the way of it’s success. Maybe my spider tried a couple of hundred times and has just packed it in as a bad idea. I’m not in his line of work, so who am I to judge or criticise? I just don’t see why he has to dangle his drunken failure and despair in front of me. But then, maybe the spider - and the flies - feel the same way about me.
