Yesterday, I achieved my own mission impossible. I shimmied my way to the garden shed and back again without disturbing a single spider’s web, or any resident arachnid. I didn’t feel the need to hack my way through with a machete, or simply abandon the idea altogether. My objective was to retrieve my gardening gloves with no unnecessary loss of animal life. I got my gardening gloves. The spiders lived.
I attribute this, in large part, to having spider loving boys. As a result of my arachnophile sons, my own moderate arachnophobia has eased. It has shifted from moderate to mild. I can almost imagine, without wetting myself, the feel of a spider, a small one, in the palm of my hand as I delicately remove it from the kitchen into the garden. And this, I attribute to my sons’ unhysterical curiosity about our eight legged friends.
Gabriella spent the best part of half an hour sitting in her handler’s hand. We were listening to him (I never found out his name) talk about spiders and their ways, at the zoo. She didn’t move. She was obviously comfortable. He talked about how long she and other tarantulas were likely to live. What they liked to eat. Where they liked to live. Their mating habits. She didn’t stir. His calmness inspired her calmness, or the other way round. In any case, by the end of the talk, I’d come to find Gabriella, the Mexican tarantula, endearing.
The zoo runs a course for arachnophobes. Some participants can’t even eat a vine ripened tomato, so unnerved are they by its spiderlike stalk. But by the end of the course they can hold a tarantula in their hand. And relocate a common house spider from A to B, using a cup and saucer.
The obvious point to conclude is that exposure to one’s phobia, can’t be a bad thing.
It may be a leap too far to talk about xenophobia in the same light. But it is interesting that those who live in areas least populated by immigrants or asylum seekers, are often those most keen to shut them out or see the back of them.
It may be too much of a leap to compare fear of spiders with fear of foreigners, or indeed fear of anything that seems to lurk in dark crannies, and threatens to scuttle or spill into one’s living room on many many legs. But I think there is a commonality.
Xenophobia is not a word that has found its way into common currency. Perhaps because it is too exotic. Or perhaps because it smacks of something unacceptable. Instead, Brexit-leaning types like to talk about sovereignty. It’s not that they don’t like foreign types. It’s just that they prefer their own. Wrapping this Little Englander mentality up in a package of constitutional soundness, makes it sound edifying. Unarguable, even. But to my mind, ‘sovereignty’, has little to do with wresting powers back from Brussels. Hearts and minds are not won by debating the relative merits of legislative chambers. For all his much touted opposition to so-called ‘Project Fear’, it is Farage who has done most to stir the dark, unnameable fears that lurk in peoples’ hearts.
Sitting in the Bug House with my sons listening to the spider handler talking gently and knowledgeably about Gabriella, the hairy tarantula, I felt strangely moved. Gabriella, at least, has found a safe home.
Ariadne Birnberg 