Leah Mandel
SLIME
THE URSCHLEIM
Once upon a time, the German scientists Lorenz Oken and Ernst Haeckel and British biologist Thomas Huxley all had this theory that life originated from spontaneously generated structureless organisms: protoplasma, or Urschleim. Oken was first, in 1805, with his “agglomeration of Infusoria” and “mucous vesicles.” Then came Haeckel in 1864 and the “little floating globules of slime” that he once saw in the Mediterranean Sea at Villafranca, near Nice. And Huxley last, when he studied a mud sample in 1868 and proclaimed what he thought was a newly discovered substance: Bathybius haeckelii, the primordial matter.
The Challenger expedition headed out in 1872 to survey the seas and three years later came back having not found even a hint of Bathybius. Huxley recanted. He was accused of distorting the data. The mistake was used to strengthen the case against evolutionary theory. Haeckel maintained his stance until 1883. Popular Science Monthly published an article he wrote defending his theory, in which he refers to himself as the “godfather to this ‘ill-famed primordial slime of the sea-depths’” and describes Bathybius as “another Icarus, [who] in a very short time bec[a]me a biological celebrity, ascending to the heaven of terrestrial fame, and then before the end of its first decennium tumbling down into the gloomy Hades of mythology.”
By the time he backed down, the image of primordial slime, the formless protozoan being that oozed all we know into existence, had stuck. Which makes sense. The Urschleim gave a simple, iconographic answer in one fell swoop. Plus, it’s not so hard to believe my biological origins are the consistency of snot when I leak, exude, excrete, dribble, drool, drip, seep, spurt all kinds of slimy stuff from all my holes on the regular. (As Estragon says, “It’s never the same pus from one second to the next.”)
THE BLOB
Fun fact: slime molds don’t have nervous systems but are able to learn, remember, and problem-solve. Slime mold has no brain but can find the most efficient way through a maze.
O
Fun fact: slime molds are colonies of cloned, single-celled animalcules. They appear to move as a single entity, but each has its own imperative. Their “chemosensory” imperatives:
1. Move toward food.
2. Move toward same-species cells.
They drag each other along, and, therefore, appear to the human eye to be one being.
O
Fun fact: slime molds are protists and they can look just like fungus even though they aren’t fungus. Wolf’s milk slime is often mistaken for fungus because its fruiting bodies appear on wet, rotting wood, as soft little pink pustules. If you puncture them before they mature they pop open and out oozes a bubblegum-colored goo. #oddlysatisfying.
SUPER SLOPPY DOUBLE DARE
“Sliming” was probably most famously featured as a gag on the Nickelodeon game show franchise Double Dare (there was also Super Sloppy Double Dare, which sounds highly sexual, and Family Double Dare, which does not…or…does it?). But it was essentially a Nickelodeon motif. On most Nick game shows—like Figure it Out, for instance—you’d get “slimed” every time you said “I don’t know.” That meant a whole bucket of green slime got dumped on contestants’ heads. There was even a slime geyser at Nickelodeon Studios.
A post on r/ShowerThoughts: “Nickelodeon Slime being blasted really seeded fetishes for people.”
Headline on satirical site Hard Times, 2017: “5 of My Darkest Sexual Fetishes and How Nickelodeon’s Obsession with Gaking People in the ’90s Totally Inspired Them.”
Bunny Ears’ October 2020 Fetish of the Month: Getting Slimed! “Once you begin to lust for slime, you start to see it everywhere.”
SLIME
“I’m trying to write
about slime
do you have any insights”
O
“haha yes
it comes out of my cock”
MORTAL KOMBAT OR “HOW SHALL I DROWN OUT THE SOUND OF THE SEA AT NIGHT?”
I was a scaredy cat as a kid. Couldn’t even play Mortal Kombat without getting this funny smell in my nose. The way it smelled at the Halloween store: kind of plasticky, incense-y. Like synthetic frankincense. Statues of martyred saints at Notre Dame freaked me out. Why did they grill St. Lawrence alive like that? And Bartholomew flayed. In some stories beheaded, too. There he is in the Duomo in Milan, skinless, wearing his excoriated hide as a shawl. Wrinkled empty foot hanging down by the floor. His curly hair, his face, slung over his shoulder.
One night my dad watched the Lizzie Borden opera. The 1999 revival, Rhoda Levine’s staging of Jack Beeson’s 1965 “family portrait in three acts.” He must have taped it when it aired on PBS. He used to have a stack of VHS tapes between the closet door and the TV, operas he’d recorded. To be fair, the Lizzie Borden story is pretty sinister. I was eight. It’s one thing to hear a folk rhyme; it’s another to watch a soprano’s face contort during a murderous aria.
Beeson’s score has been described as “angular.” Not scary necessarily but pretty eerie. Powdery perfume, metal, New England, bitter strings, velvet, chartreuse musk. And if I recall correctly there was a line about flies buzzing around an open mouth. Anyway I fled to my room and had nightmares for weeks.
If I recall correctly, I was around eight the first time my grandfather got sick. Sat between my parents’ four legs in their bed at the 95th Street apartment. This must have been not the first time I learned about death, but the first time I really thought about it. I clammed up. Frowned. They asked, “Are you thinking about Grandpa’s death, or your own?”
I said, “Grandpa’s,” because it felt wrong, selfish, to think of myself if Grandpa was dying, but I couldn’t help it and for a long time I couldn’t stop thinking about it and every time I saw death in a movie or death on TV I was ripped immediately from the moment into the future when, someday, I would die, I would be dead and gone, think nothing know nothing be nothing, like the time in the past when I was nothing, before I came sliding sticky slimy out of my mama. I’d stare from the bottom bunk at the wood panels holding my brother’s mattress above my head in our mint-green bunk beds and try to imagine pre-birth.
WHAT IF YOU FELL INTO A POOL OF HAGFISH?
Hagfish slime isn’t sticky to the touch but if you were to fall into a pool of hagfish the stuff is strong and plentiful enough that it would tangle around your body and if it somehow got into your mouth you would choke and drown. Hagfish don’t have skeletons so they can tie their bodies into knots, which they do often while emitting slime to keep themselves from choking on it. Hagfish have four hearts but they don’t have eyes or jaws and even sharks have to watch out for them because they produce so much slime. Hagfish slime is 99.996% water and consists of mucins and strands of protein ten times stronger than nylon and thinner than human hair. Hagfish slime is used to make sustainable fabric and is being researched further to potentially be used to make diapers and airbags and bulletproof vests but it’s not all that easy because hagfish don’t breed in captivity. No one knows that much about how hagfish reproduce. In Oregon in 2017 a truck transporting seven thousand five hundred pounds of hagfish overturned and coated the highway in slime.
About the Author
Leah Mandel is a (mainly) nonfiction writer from and based in New York. She writes about sex and art and music and other weird stuff. Her favorite band is ABBA.