I accrued a lot of good luck in childhood catching them in my house between construction paper, and empty jelly jars, and releasing them outdoors, telling them not to worry, to be on their merry way.ĭream analyst Jane Teresa Anderson notes that spiders, far from universal, are contingent. They were mysterious, and I wanted to know their secrets. Once, I stood transfixed at an orb weaver wrapping up an ant in silk. Real spiders were strange and often scary, but that didn’t keep me from actively seeking out spiders on the playground or in the backyard, lifting up rocks and watching their legs scurry away. White’s Charlotte’s Web reinforced my curiosity. I cherished Eric Carle’s The Very Busy Spider more than any other book in his menagerie, and later in grade school, E. The audience is turned into an active bystander, a participant whose options are to continue watching or turn away.Īs a child, I was curious about spiders. We enter into a horror film anticipating violence, and whether or not we are satiated, we cannot deny the curiosity to be made horrified, to be unable to react except with sounds, convulsions, little marks of surprise. It’s built on titillation, relies upon an audience that wants to see something disgusting or terrifying, and often indicts the audience for that same curiosity. Much of horror, as a genre, is predicated on using the audience’s assumed curiosity. They haven’t skittered this Earth for 400 million years to become a late-night snack. They don’t sneak into your mouth, slip between the warm, wet cavern of your lips, and slide down your throat the way they do when you wash them down the shower drain. It’s a myth that you eat an average of eight spiders when you sleep at night. Sometimes I just feel them as little shivers on my thigh. Sometimes, half-asleep, I half-feel them sewing up my feet in silk. Sometimes the spiders are red translucent strands attached to my body, as if my pores have sprouted their legs, and I rip them from my skin in the shower. Or, I sit at my desk and a spider weaves a web above me, becoming larger each time I look up until the creature is the size of my head. I am knee-deep in a creek and clunky crab-like spiders latch onto my ankles. In some I feel them all over me until I twitch awake. In some dreams, they’re a texture of my skin, in others peripheral.
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