Spider’s oil and walking the line

In yesterday's post "The spider, the rat, and the poltergeist," I mentioned listening to the Denmark + Winter cover of Johnny Cash's "I Walk the Line" and thinking of it as being sung by a spider.

For starters, this is just very spidery music. Anyone who has spent any time interacting with spiders in an indoor environment will know that they are extremely responsive to music, being drawn to some kinds and repelled by others. (I believe there have even been a few studies by The Science on this, drawing broad-brush conclusions to the effect that spiders prefer classical to techno or something like that.) And, though Johnny Cash himself would surely leave them cold, Denmark + Winter's ethereal rendition of "I Walk the Line" is exactly the kind of music spiders like. In fact, when I played it last night, a large male cane spider came out from his hiding place under the wooden slats of my balcony floor and joined me, waving his pedipalps a bit in the tentative way they do, which is about as close as cane spiders, a nervous breed, ever get to dancing.

As I suppose is obvious, I'm fond of spiders. Tolkien apparently thought of them simply as horrible and disgusting, which is also my father's view. (Once, when my father was explaining what made spiders so repulsive -- "big fat gut, long skinny legs" -- a friend of mine overheard and responded with an indignant "Hey!") With a few exceptions, I find most kinds of spiders very likable -- particularly jumping spiders, which have an almost mantis-like air of weird spirituality. When I was living in what is now Hell Hollow Wilderness Area in Ohio, I had a persistent fantasy that there were giant jumping spiders living in the woods on the far side of Paine Creek, and that, being cursed with voicelessness themselves, they would sometimes bring humans to their nocturnal soirées to perform. A pure-voiced girl in a white gown would sing, and I would accompany her on a recorder. (This was not my instrument of choice, but spiders are fastidious about music, and they had a strict rule: Mama don't 'low no banjo pickin' round here.)

As for the lyrics, "I keep my eyes wide open all the time" is obviously applicable to spiders, but the main thing is the repeated phrase "I walk the line" itself. Walking the line is what spiders do.

Today, wondering about possible meanings of "With spider's oil the lamps of Salem burn," I put do spiders produce oil into a search engine. I was pretty sure they don't, but it can't hurt to check, right? Apparently it's a common misconception -- there are lots of sites debunking it -- that spiders do produce oil, and that this has to do with their ability to "walk the line." Here's what the Spider Myths Site has to say:

Myth: Spiders have oil on their feet that keeps them from sticking to their own webs.

Fact: Everyone who educates about spiders has heard the question "why don't spiders stick to their webs?" many times. Who first came up with the oil-on-the-feet idea is unknown, but it must have originally been a perfectly reasonable guess, or hypothesis. Since the decades-old origin of this idea, in some circles it's become a dogma. It's been repeated countless times in print and online. There are even classroom lesson plans built around this false "fact".

To quote two of the world's leading experts on spider silk use (Fritz Vollrath and Edward Tillinghast) writing in 1992: "Ecribellate spiders simply tiptoe around the glue, which they deposit in spheroidal globs. When a spider accidentally steps into one of these glue balls, as it sometimes does, it suffers no more inconvenience than a human stepping into a wad of gum. When a fly slams into the web, however, it hits about 50 of the droplets, enough to make it stick." I might add that most spiders don't even make sticky silk, and those that do (mainly orbweavers and cobweb weavers) still have many non-sticky threads in various parts of their webs.

So "spider's oil" is a myth, a substance invented by those who don't imagine a spider capable of simply watching its step. Spiders aren't immune to the traps they set for others; they're just careful. (Carefulness lies very close to the essence of spider-nature, I think.) I'm not sure how or whether that ties in with the idea of "spider's oil" as lamp fuel, but it seems worth noting.

Note added: Another "spider-friendly" cover of an originally rougher song is Storm Large's take on the Pixies in the 2013 movie Big Ass Spider (one of the best opening scenes in any movie ever). People understand that this is what spiders like: