On Snails
A world beyond the ick and the "other"
Our neighbor’s garden was infested with snails one monsoon. They climbed the guava tree just because they could. I stood near the edge of a flower bed while my friend poked them with a long stick and flicked the slimy babies off the leaves of the balsam. And the marigold. And one off his shoe. When the sun was high, the gardener would shoo us off. Time for a salt spray.
Snails and slugs are a somewhat neutral territory for me now. Do I adore them? No. Imagine a world with giant beaver-sized snails sliding along the main road leaving a trail of slime that attracts tiny moths and dried leaves, and you need to think about those trainers you wore this morning before you accidentally step on slobber. Eurgh!
“I recognize terror as the finest emotion…and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify; and if I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross out. I’m not proud.” Of course, Stephen King goes at length in Danse Macabre about the art of horror writing. But the proto-writer of the protoplasmic grotesque and “otherness” in weird fiction was Lovecraft.
And now, when Danforth and I saw the freshly glistening and reflectively iridescent black slime which clung thickly to those headless bodies and stank obscenely with that new unknown odour whose cause only a diseased fancy could envisage—clung to those bodies and sparkled less voluminously on a smooth part of the accursedly re-sculptured wall in a series of grouped dots—we understood the quality of cosmic fear to its uttermost depths.
(At the Mountains of Madness, 1931)
Snails belong to the class Gastropoda and have existed since the Late Cambrian, around 497 million years ago. With 721 families including extinct ones, gastropods contain numerous species, second only to the insects in overall number. Here are four books to embed yourself in basically…goo. These books tempered my visceral reaction towards these creatures, one gross story at a time.
Susanne Wedlich’s book Slime: A Natural History, translated from German by Ayça Türkoğlu, is an exceptional volume. Juxtaposing Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean with the ectoplasmic fun of Ghostbusters while dissecting the latest biological hydrogel research and surface chemistry of frog sticky-tongue mechanism, this book oozes style.
Hortense and Edgar were making love, Edgar reaching down from a little rock to kiss Hortense on the mouth. Hortense was reared on the end of her foot, swaying a little under his caress like a slow dancer enchanted by music.
-Patricia Highsmith, Deep Water
Yes. Hortense and Edgar are snails. Patricia Highsmith smuggled escargots when she moved to France, stowing a couple under her bosom each time. (Okay, deep breaths.)
The macabre and the ominous appear in full swing in her short story The Snail-Watcher. Mr Peter Knoppert bred snails in his study but wasn’t ready for the laws of geometric population growth. Read it here. Probably not at dinner time.
The arrival of European explorers in the late eighteenth century led to the loss of Hawaii's forests due to ranching and plantation agriculture. By the 1820s, there was an unusual craze for collecting snails. Millions of live snails were reduced to specimens in huge private collections and exported to the mainland and beyond Hawaiʻi’s shores to naturalists and museums. Now, Hawai‘i’s snails are undergoing their personal, isolated mass extinction. A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions by Thom van Dooren explores anthropogenic climate change and its effects on snails and their ecological role in Hawaiʻi. Of the 750 species known to taxonomists, roughly 450 species have already been lost, mostly in the last 100 years. A book of great empathy for indigenous knowledge and misunderstood creatures.
the snail gets up
and goes to bed
with very little fuss
— Kobayashi Issa (1763 – 1828)
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey is a lovely meditation on Neohelix albolabris, the snail that lived in a terrarium beside her bed and helped the author cope with her own illness. Chronic and long illnesses slow time down. Days merge into nights. Weeks into months. Convalescence is a dying art. Often seen as a weakness. Perhaps there is a lot to learn from a snail’s slow movement. Evolution saved it from predators whose hunting activity is triggered by fast movement. The silence of its gliding protected it from those who hunt by sound. Perhaps snails teach us the importance of slow recuperation. A little sluggishness can restore us. We’ll get there on our own time. No need to rush.
Snail on. Until next time. 🐌
I am not a fan of slimy stuff (unless it's a selected few Pokémon or a plate of escargots au berre), but I'll definitely think more about snails moving forward after this!