Slime - A Natural History

 

Slimes Of Passion

Slime - A Natural History
by Suzanne Wedlich
Translated by Ayça Türkoglu
Granta Books
ISBN: 9781783786701

Suzanne Wedlich’s charming tome Slime - A Natural History does... pretty much... what it says on the cover... by giving the reader a diverse range of accounts of various slimes and their uses throughout nature. I was worried initially that the content of the book would be a little too heavy for me... not that I’ve ever let that put me off reading something before... read a book you don’t understand once every ten years and you’ll eventually be much better equipped than when you first read it, to fathom its secrets and mysteries.

And, truth be told, there were a few chapters here which... well, they didn’t have me baffled as much as maybe overwhelmed with information. Like if I was taking a whistle-stop tour of a large and complex cornucopia of a rich topic were you find yourself leaving with some but, not all, of the rich scenery on offer. Which actually, now I come to think of it, is very much what we have here.

It’s also extremely entertaining and reasonably accessible to the ignorant layman like myself, for which I’m grateful. The book is set up as seven separate sections, each with a number of chapters in each part, usually between 4 and 6 chapters in length. The sections are labelled next to their assigned roman numeral thusly - Phenomenon, Physics, Organism, Life, Evolution, Nature and Environment. These look at various interesting phenomena of incarnations of slime and the species and structures - flora, fauna, mineral and beyond - that make use of various versions of these slithery jells.

Pretty much each and every chapter has an opening hook with a quote and often a reference to at least one instance of popular culture, often film or literature, which the author can hang her next topic on. And, like the slimes that populate our planet, it’s a quite diverse set of references at that. So she’ll talk about the slime seen in Ghostbusters (one writer thought the preponderance of slime in 1980s mainstream cinema was an unconscious reaction to threat from radioactive contagions, for example), the cosmic Cthulhu horror of H. P. Lovecraft, Matheson’s I Am Legend, the publicity campaign for the original version of The Blob, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (for one of the sections on the underwater world and Davey Jones’ Locker), Woody Allen’s role as a sperm in Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex and Asterix with his druid pal Getafix. There's even a bit delving into music, such as John Cage’s composition currently being performed in Germany, an ideally non-stop performance which is due to last 639 years. Alas, on that last one, they had to briefly pause the performance for a number of months, presumably due to the Coronavirus pandemic (a virus which is also mentioned here in ways it connects with the book’s subject matter) but which is now continuing in performance from where it left off.

And she had me right from the start, even with the ‘all seducing’ film references, by trying to define the contours of slime by asking whether it is a liquid or a solid... and then, by way of illustration, telling the story of the researcher who was trying to apply that definition to cats, to ascertain if our feline co-habitors are one or the other. For example, a liquid will fill a vessel amorphously by taking the shape of that vessel and, of course, so do cats pretty much, gliding through small, improbable spaces or, you know, filling a cardboard box.

And I learned quite a bit from this tome too, I’m happy to say. Not detailed technical knowledge but, for example, the fact that the human body uses at least four different kinds of slimes of various chemical make up to act as essential shields and barriers and, also, a pregnant woman will change the composition of one of those slime barriers to ensure the life inside her isn’t naturally attacked by her body’s own defence systems. Or the fact that the oceans of our planet are not only full of different slimes fulfilling different functions but, also covered with a very thin layer of slime on the surface... the skin of the sea, so to speak. Not to mention the importance of slime manifested in, say, a runny nose, being a useful indicator that the human body is under the spell of a virus. And the history of our species originally assuming odour, rather than slime, was the original harbinger of infection, hence the phenomena of city streets being paved and hospital beds having long legs... to cut down the risk of infectious smells.

I also learned that the popular mystery writer Patricia Highsmith (who apparently died alone in Switzerland due to her fractious and challenging nature), absolutely loved snails and had loads of them as her ‘real’ friends. She would pack them up with her in her bag when going out to dinner and, when she moved to France where she wouldn’t have been able to import her friends legally, she made several trips where she smuggled a few at a time on the undersides of her breasts, rather than live without them.

Another hugely interesting thing I discovered, among many to be found here, was that slugs were often used as lubrication of coach wheels back in the day, when it seemed they were not operating at 100% function. Just put a slug on the wheel to be crushed and oozed into the path and this was presumably better than a pot of oil.

And don’t get me started on the devastating haboobs or dust storms which were introduced to me by this author via a quote from Steinback’s The Grapes Of Wrath. I was, however, happy to encounter the story, once again, of slime moulds mimicking/rebuilding the Tokyo tube map in their search for food... although I understand now why this was more a probability than the moulds actually doing something different.

Surprisingly, for someone like myself who is absolutely not well versed in any branch of science or manifestation thereof, I did find myself picking up on a fair few mistakes which dropped me out of the experience a little but, of course, these mistakes were amongst the various film references thrown into the book. For example, when using an example about Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters, the writer says that Weaver would go on to encounter more slime in A L I E N. Which is, of course, totally wrong, since A L I E N predates Ghostbusters by a good few years. Similarly, when one scene from A L I E N is described later in the book, it’s quite clear that Wedlich is confusing this film with its sequel, ALIENS. Another glaring error is when she’s talking specifically about the 1951 movie The Thing From Another World. What she’s describing doesn’t happen in that movie at all... instead she’s confusing it with both the John Carpenter remake, The Thing and also the original short story it’s based on, John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There?

I was however, intrigued to learn just how much plastic has been found around the world, including in the digestive tracts of many organisms including humans... to the degree where I think David Cronenberg must have read and been inspired by this book (or something much like it) when he directed his recent incarnation of Crimes Of The Future (which I reviewed here). Perhaps Slimes Of The Future would have been an equally appropriate title.

However, pop culture references aside, I have to say that Wedlich’s Slime - A Natural History took me on a very welcome and enlightening voyage, although I’m now worrying even more about the ecosystem of slimes on the planet which can do a lot of damage to us under the umbrella of global warming but which is, of course, due to its nature, a much neglected point of interest in the war against the gradual destruction of our planet. If what I read here is correct, we ignore slime at our peril and our undoing may come about much more spectacularly and quicker than the various other perceived threats to our planet’s stability... or at least it habitability (is that a word?... it is now). Still, I’m very grateful for the writer to bring all this to my attention... and in such an entertaining and accessible way too. This one gets a strong recommendation from me... give it a go when you have some time for slime.