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Oh what tangled webs we weave . . .


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An episode of Bones, The Pinocchio in the Planter, left me musing about Sir Walter Scott's "Oh what tangled webs we weave, when first we practice to deceive." What is the perceptual basis for a web. I can't think of anything more self-evident than that of what a spider weaves.

The strength of a spiders web, for its thickness, is analogous to steel in the tensile axis. The web, once built, provides the spider with its sustenance. Flies, gnats, mosquitoes, even grasshoppers become ensnared in its web, providing the spider with an ample source of nourishment. The spider feeds upon the virtue of the very being of these insects being ensnared in the web it wove.

I have fond recollections of my mother using Sir Walter Scott's phraseology as a means of calling to task what she perceived as deceit. She passed away in 1999. Any webs that would have been woven then, would be now considered cobwebs.

A google search on cobweb provides three telling contextual definitions to me.

  • a spider's web, especially when old and covered with dust.
  • a tangled three-dimensional spider's web.
  • something resembling a cobweb in delicacy or intricacy.

The deceit used in the world today to ensnare and entangle, in the sense of altruism, is especially old and covered with dust. Sir Walter Scott introduced an observation of the relationship of a web, entanglement and deceit in the 1800's. Lastly, the delicacy or intricacy comes to the forefront.

The delicacy bears with the age of a spiders web. Altruism, the lone spider of tribalism (Selfishness Without A Self) roots into a time where the tribe was required to fend itself against other tribes.

The tangled web weaves in nicely with Sir Walter Scott's observation.

The cobweb suggests the that the age of the spider's web that wove the initial deceit is old (Plato, and others leading up to Kant and beyond), tangled (not easily unwound), and containing an element of both delicacy and intricacy—i.e., can fall apart or be held together by the relationships of the elements involved.

Edited by dream_weaver
Correction to title.
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