Jan Darling

The Spider's Strategy Jan Darling

The Spider's Strategy is about survival--being forced to remember and then advised to forget.

As a child, Carol learned early to handle pain and cruelty, experiences that created the prism through which she views her life. She is now seventy-five and spending more and more time mulling over the past. She comes to realize how destructive to her adult life are the defenses she developed as a child.

She worries she is becoming senile. She takes to her bed where she feels she can hide from the world while she thinks. She imagines her memories as a web that she must untangle and the spider who spins the web as a part of herself she converses with.

She sees the spider. She feels its web insinuating itself through her nostrils, into her ears, wrapping itself around her neck, and she is terrified. Slowly, she understands that the spider is a symbol of integration, that her task is to clarify her memories, accept their reality, and reenter the world.