The Web of Life, Part 9: Web as Mutuality

In exploring the theme of The Web of Life, I have thus far discussed two principal topics. First, the web considered as selectivity. Experience considered as what we pay attention to, on the one hand, and what we ignore on the other. And I showed how the way in which we pay attention to the world creates isolates—I'm using that as a noun—isolates that we call particular things, events, and persons, and they seem to be disconnected, and to be alone, because we ignore the connections between them. And I used the analogy of weaving, where the threads go underneath and join on the back in a way that is not seen on the front. So you might say, in the unconscious—although I don't particularly like that word, because it makes it seem as if it were something rather dead—but, on the unconscious side of life, as on the back of the weaving, or the back of the embroidery, there are connections which are not published.

Now, in the second part of the theme was the web as mutuality. When I discussed the way the existence of a web, the existence of cloth, or anything like that, depends on a mutual support of the warp and the woof. And this miraculous thing occurs that, when these things support each other, being comes into being. Cloth comes into being. And so, in exactly the same way, our world is a manifestation of relativity, and this requires a balance, a combination, a relationship of opposites in every domain of life. And although these opposites are explicitly different, and even antagonistic, they are implicitly one—and that's the secret. See, there are these two secrets that we went into. The connection between what are supposed to be separate things and events, and the mutual unity between what are manifestly—that is to say, openly, for purposes of publication—opposites.

Now, this afternoon I'm going to take two other aspects of the web. The web is a trap, like the spider's web is a trap for flies. Also, the lovely embroideries are worn by women as traps for men—from a certain point of view. And I want to consider the web as something playful. You see, there are so many ways of looking at it, and you will find that all these ways are right, but what we need is the fullness of the view.

There are people, for example, who can see the web as a trap and get stuck with that. There are people to whom existence is simply hateful. They see it as nothing but a ghastly mistake. The Lord really erred when he created this world, because he arranged it in such a way that everything lives by eating something else. And what I'm doing is, I'm describing a certain point of view, you see? I'm not exactly philosophizing, I'm describing a point of view. You can look at life in such a way that the whole thing is this ghastly mistake. For example, there is no such thing as genuine kindness, or love. Everybody is really pretending that they are loving other people in order to get some advantage from them.

And indeed, there is a point of view which occurs in certain forms of paranoia, where people don't seem to be real. They are mechanisms, and you can think that out quite intensely with a good deal of intelligence. After all, if you start from a good old Darwinian or Freudian basis, and see that man is a material machine, and that the consciousness of man is simply a very involved and complicated form of chemistry, and that's what it is, you see? Well, then these awful mechanical things, these Frankensteins that everybody is, they come around and they say, Well, I'm alive. I'm a human being. I have a heart, I love, I hate, I have problems, I feel. And you feel like saying, Come off it! You're just a monster, and you put on this civilized act because, really, you're just a set of teeth on the end of a tube, and got a ganglion behind those teeth which you call your brain, or your alleged mind.

And this thing is really, basically, there for two purposes: one, to be cunning enough to get something to eat, to put down the tube, and the other—you know what—Mr. Freud's libido. And everything else, you see, can be construed as an elaborate, subtle way of pretending that that's not really what you want to do. But you do, but you put on a great show. Now some people, according to this view, get mixed up. They so repress that what they really want to do is to eat and to screw, that they get involved in higher things that are the masks for these activities, and think that that's the real purpose of life. And then they become what's called neurotic, because they get involved in being pure camouflage. So that's what's called escaping from the facts: not looking at life, not looking at reality correctly.

Now, this is a very strange thing, you see, that it is partly true that the universe, so far as its biological aspect is concerned, is this weird system that lives by everybody eating everybody else. Only, what we do to maintain what is called order and civilization, is that various species make agreements, as it were, that they won't eat each other. They'll cooperate, and so be an enormous gang which can beat down the others. So the human being is the most successful, so far, of this gangster arrangement. We are the most predatory monsters on Earth, and we have cooperated to assault the fish, and the vegetables, and the chickens, and the cows, and everything, you see? Only, we do it by not letting our left hand know what our right hand doeth. In other words, ladies and gentlement—unless gentlemen happen to be prone to going hunting as a sport—they don't see their food killed. They don't see the slaughterhouse. And so, what you get [from] the butcher in the market is steak, you know? It's a thing in its own right; it has nothing to do with a cow. Steak is a thing shaped thus and so, and it looks as if it might be like a banana, or something like that, you know, and nobody worries. And when a fish is served up, it does indeed look like a fish, but it's not the squiggly, squirmy fish that comes out at the end of the fisherman's line. You know, when you really fish, you realize that the fish doesn't like it very much.

Now, there is that absolutely extraordinary side of things that is really terrifying. And so, let me repeat the illustration I used of the cross in the net, where one side of it is scissors that cut and eat, teeth that chew and get this thing in, and the opening side of it is like James Joyce's—in Ulysses, the girl who says, Yes, and I said, Yes, yes, yes, she wants to be absolutely ravaged by her man, you see? So it's open, open, open!

But now comes the—if we take the dark view of things, the horrible view—excuse me if I go into some rather grizzly details, but have you ever heard of a vagina dentata? That is the idea that, in the sexual organ of the woman, there are teeth. And a lot of men have this fantasy, and so are rendered impotent. They daren't make love, because they feel that the price of this blessed experience, this creative experience, this loving experience, is you're going to get trapped. You're going to get emasculated, and you're going to lose your precious member. And this is a very ancient fantasy. It appears throughout all known history, because this is simply the woman's come-on, where she attracts, but she's out, really, to get you. She is basically a spider mother, you see, who is selfish and doesn't really love you—not really—but says she does. And, of course, there are, on the other side, all the tricks of the men, which we can go without mentioning.

So this is a view of the world as a system of mutual exploitation and of maximal selfishness. Now, it's a very profitable view to explore.