1.          Since I wrote on my Tinder profile that my kink is the apostrophe, I have had exchanges with perfect strangers about the oft-wasted promise of the semi-colon. On whether the word semi-colon necessitates a hyphen, opinion is divided. If you attend to my grammar, you will see on which side I stand.

2.          How did we leap from apostrophes to semi-colons? I ascribe it to the expectation of speed embedded in dating platforms. “What is a dating platform?” my mother might have asked, were language available to her tongue. I imagine posterity too will ask this question, eager to ascribe to my generation a dismissiveness of humanity they cannot comprehend. Swipe left. Of course, if their becoming has depended on the existence of such a virtual location, this may complicate their politics. Swipe right.

3.          I met one of the semi-colon characters who proceeded to announce his theory of me. I was, he theorized, a trap door spider. This was our second encounter, the construction of the theory presumably done during our initial meeting, a walk that began and ended in a parking lot. Dating is not what it used to be. Suitors are not lined up at the door. No bouquets of flowers sit in the receiving room—another kind of obligated existence to be sure. This is only to say I have been watching Bridgerton, living vicariously by way of Daphne. People used to tell me they lived vicariously by way of me, but this experience died with my natural hair colour.

4.          For Freud, train phobias were caused by the repression of sexual impulses. In “Three Essays on Sexuality” this comes under the minor heading, Mechanical Excitations. Pleasurable sensations were, according to the good doctor, produced by rhythmic agitations of the body. Something then in the reverberations. His theory arose out of his own fear, assuming it universal. He suspected he had seen his mother naked during a train journey at the age of two, the first child ever to have to cope with the trauma of a garmentless mother. He had to temper the libido this event gave rise to—precocious child of story—and so began his disinclination to the iron line.

5.          How much of psychoanalysis is memoir? How much of memoir failed psychoanalysis?

6.          The German term Freud uses for train phobias is eisenbahnangst, to bang against your own angst—my translation. My theorist was engaged with his own unrest as I untangled myself from the discomfort of the newly imposed bodice. Different era, different texture to the gown, without doubt. Like everyone else these days, I am clothed in petrol.

7.          The term eisenbahnangst was coined by Johannes Rigler in 1879 when industrialization was advancing quickly, on its own collision course. 

8.          I did not dismiss my theorist. He was a consummate conversationalist and for all my allusions to impropriety, I am partial to “a good theory.” A list of items we discussed over dinner, documented for posterity:

Beau Travail

Desert psychogeography

What it is to say I and you

George’s assault-kiss of Lucy in A Room with a View

Italy

The personal correspondence of Kathy Acker & McKenzie Wark

The intestines of a goat

How facial expressions give a person away

Polyamory versus monogamy

The semi-colon as the aftermath of a gunshot

When sugared ginger on a margarita glass should be eaten

               (Him: Immediately.
                 Me: Needs savouring.)

Which Eastern European country Garth Greenwell’s books are set in

                (Him: Hungary.
                 Me: Not Hungary.)

Lost crystals

Getting your shit together

Ways of Seeing              (Different)

9.          I google the word “consummate” to ensure I am making adequate use of it, but something goes wrong with Safari. It takes me to a page called the knot. There is a sketch of an abandoned event, balloons on an empty dance floor. Beneath this sketch is written: Oops. Looks like this page has already left the party.

10.       If my list were a sonnet, it would be difficult to know where to place the turn. For the life of me, I have been unable to reduce this list to fourteen items. I want to write that from the outset this encounter was overburdened with excess. I like the sound of this sentence, its motion across the page, but it is not entirely accurate. I often impose on experience a gravity it does not naturally possess. Am I willing to scrap a lyrical sentence at the foot of accuracy?

11.       A jury returns its verdicts on a case by case basis.

12.       If the life of me did depend on the reduction of this list, I would not be beyond an arbitrary choice. Writing throws out clichés in the midst of the assignation of words to the page. Do you see what I did there? Blamed writing as if there were no hands at this keyboard, no mediating I in sight.

13.       Let me return from the wilds of digression. Why did I take the time to document the list of subjects we discussed? The event did not aspire to retention. I am not throwing shade. Recall a second date you had with someone ten years ago or two even. What do you remember of such a brief collaboration in time? I wanted to commit it to language because it would be so easily confined to the landfill of memory. Does a life not consist of its often unrecorded corners too? Are these the spider spaces? Was my theorist onto something?

14.       Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology posits that all objects should be treated in the same way, all objects given equal attention. Harman’s flat ontology idea of what constitutes an object is broad. Events are included; semi-colons are included; cobwebs are included. Tinder and the theorist and the theory are all included.

15.       One aspiration of flat ontology is to move us away from anthropocentric views of the world. Consider the Argentine artist Eduardo Navarro, who dons a leather bodysuit, a helmet and a shell, and crawls about on all fours in an effort to understand the Umwelt of a turtle. Navarro’s performance piece was part of show called Surround Audience. The sensory data that encloses us can be easy to ignore, existing outside our conscious mind. “If man sometimes acted as certain insects do, he would possess a higher intelligence,” wrote Freud’s reluctant pupil, Carl Jung.

16.       My initial image of a trap door spider was no more than a house spider. My education did not extend to spider varieties. The trap door spider, I came to learn, builds a tunnel in the earth and rarely emerges. Its hovel has an earthen lid attached by silk on one side—a spider hinge. This invertebrate does not go looking for prey. On the contrary, it stays concealed behind its camouflaged door. It senses passing creatures of interest by way of the hairs on its legs—it is a sensitive recluse.

17.       If Freud is a master of suspicion, as philosopher Paul Ricoeur posited, the trap door spider is a master of stealth. A cricket should not pause to preen anywhere in the vicinity of its door. 

18.       In Philosophy for Spiders, McKenzie Wark writes that “perhaps it’s better to be a spider than a human anyway, particularly if female.” She is thinking of Kathy Acker—writer, punk icon, motorcycle rider, performance artist, stripper—who signed herself the black tarantula on occasion. Acker is for Wark a low theory philosopher, her philosophy more of the street than of academia. Hers is a philosophy “for brutes: women, slaves, beasts. A philosophy whose skill is threading words together as its own kind of carnal love.” One can aspire.

19.   Though Arachne’s head hurts from being hit over her now smaller head with the non-proverbial shuttle, the girl as spider retains her creative capacity. “The Spider as an Artist / Has never been employed—,” the esteemed em-dash poet wrote, but it is a mistake to conclude that the artist-spider is ever unoccupied.

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Image: Rebecca Clouâtre, Day 72, 2017, hand cut collage with found images