from "Slim Confessions" by Sarah Minor
Sarah Minor | Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit | Noemi Press | October 2021 | 100 Pages
The Icelandic word for lamb is “lamb,” but the village where I climb down from a tall, hot bus is called “Hvammstangi” and I’ll never learn to pronounce it quite right. There are six dogs on the farm, nine people, and three hundred sheep. It is early summer, lambing time. A season of cold fog when the collective body of the flock crowds indoors for two months of constant birth. Each morning I push two layers of socks into a pair of borrowed skateboard shoes whose laces have dried beneath a cake of manure and placenta and whatever else. Out the barn door stands a glacier and not one tree before the horizon. There is the moss and algae of Iceland—long and flaxen in streams where hot spring meets snow melt to comb plants across miles of crusted lichen. Everything out there that should be green is grey. Elsewhere, in other times, I’ve been a waitress, a maid, a manager, a research assistant, a cabaret’s secretary, a gardener, a ghostwriter, a teacher, a baker, a floor model, a gift-wrapper, a caterer, a wood-fire maker, a nanny, a set painter, but never have I spent this many consecutive hours touching something live.
In 1970 the artist Robert Rauschenberg presented a glass trough containing formless, grey-brown material titled “Mud Muse.” His “synthetic, primeval slime” bubbled and flowed. Its burbles and sluices activated a nearby sound system, which recorded the sounds and played them back on loop. When “Mud Muse” opened at the MOMA, the audience reacted to it physically. Thinking the silky mud natural, they dipped their hands into the tank. They used it to paint the gallery walls. Some visitors even tried to climb into the trough and bathe in it. Rauschenberg and his scientists were concerned about the body’s tolerance of the material because it was made using Bentonite, still a relatively new chemical at the time.
In the opening shot of this YouTube video, a woman sits down in a mini dress. She crosses and uncrosses her left knee. She crosses and uncrosses her right knee, and her elastic hem pulls shorter. She tugs the hem down, scooches back in her seat, and repeats this sequence twenty times. The camera zooms in as her thighs make soft exchanges and her lap changes its nature. When she’s finished she’ll turn at an angle to show us a column of horizontal slits cut into the right side of her dress. She’ll lift her elbow and use her right hand to pluck the rungs of fabric that march from hip to armpit, watching the camera. Then the other side. Then she’ll offer advice the way a pretty older sister does, sometimes saying “daring,” and often the word “commando,” but always, eventually, she says “This is how you do a sliming.” Though more often, lately, she’ll say “take” instead. A man in plain clothes steps in, always from the left, and his head gets cut off by the frame. She’ll tense a moment as he dumps the heavy bucket over her, but then she’ll tilt her head back and open her arms, as if taking in the wind.
ACCOUNT OF A GELATINOUS METEOR: Adams, Ellen M. and Schlesinger, Frank. Nature Magazine. 84: 105-106, 1910. “Dear Professor Schlesinger, --- Referring to the falling meteor of which my husband made mention at your lecture last evening, the facts are as follows. One evening, some years since my father Mr. Joel Powers, while walking on Lawrence St., Lowell, Massachusetts, saw a brilliant shooting star or meteor flash downward through the atmosphere, striking the earth quite near him [sic]. He found it upon investigation to be a jelly-like mass, and almost intolerably offensive in smell. I have often heard my father allude to this event, which greatly interested him, he being a close observer and an extensive reader. Respectfully yours, Ellen M. Adams.”
It’s June in Iceland and cold enough that breaths are rising from the pens. I practice moving toe-heel down the wooden aisles that double as feeding troughs, scanning the wooly backs. Farmer Ivan leads the way, stopping to point out the signs. How one sheep directs her chin to the rafters through a strain. Before this she bared her teeth. Before that she huffed, quit chewing her hay. He shows me how to read the barn, because the births here happen in cycles. Soon, before I’m ready, labor will spread through the flock imperceptibly, the way contractions ripple the skin beneath a fleece. First one ewe will call out, then another, shouting across the barn, and at my feet will be a third. Soon, we will be running between stalls with no time to redden our hands in hot water. Everyone lives. There’s no soap. Then the quiet. Birth is gory and dangerous, even for the hearty Icelandic sheep, and each pair of lambs is precious for its market price—the reason farmers like Ivan have been living on an island the texture of a Brillo pad for nine generations. I arrived in this country as a researcher on a grant to study the way language attaches to landscape. I came for bones and books and origins, for translators and linguists. I spent three weeks moving on busses between a yellow apartment and a national library, between a salty faucet and a rolling cart with green felt shelves. I touched what I was allowed. Then I woke one morning, climbed into a hot bus and didn’t step off the ring road until it shied from the northwest peninsula. I opened the door of an Icelandic sedan and the Chihuahua in the passenger seat moved over for me. The farmer’s wife, Katrina, drove to the grocery store for chicken cutlets and then out to an expanse where the sun sank below the horizon for only three hours a day. North. No cell service. One shower every three days, though none of this was in my proposal. Mornings, I zip on a parka and walk to the barn where, in the next hour, five Icelandic sheep will try to become mothers. Those of us on two legs are playing the game of guess who. Farmer Ivan doesn’t speak English, but he likes to make jokes with his eyes and his hands. He stops short beside me with his hand caught on the railing. “Slím” he says, pointing to a ewe with her face in the corner. I widen my eyes at him. “Slím” he says in my direction, sore knees giving into a squat. I copy the stance and look beneath the railing where a rope of white snot is descending from the antisocial sheep. Her rearmost source blows a pale bubble, as with a wad of cheap gum. “Slime?” I ask. The farmer repeats, lengthening his vowel, and elaborates, “now the lamb comes.” In this way I learn that, before the slick twins, before the horns, before the water breaks, slime announces a beginning—and also some type of end.
1969, 5pm on the southern edge of Lake Erie. A red squirrel—not fat, but lean—darts between a buckeye and a fresh trash heap and works its jaw around a corn chip. The moon at the back of the sky and the moon in the oiled river are setting brackets around this, the afternoon of Cleveland’s 13th river fire. At the top of the buckeye a spider is working her six spinnerets, laying fine lines that conduct electrical current and bear more tensile strength than steel. The rail tracks along the bank collect heat and a horn sends our squirrel back up the tree. The spider breathes, or rather, a hot breeze moves through her. Something like a hubcap is shining between the rails and though the wheels are slow to come they send up a comet of orange lights that scatter into the river, or “a sluice of debris,” “an oil slick,” “an island of sludge,” that newspapers will later report. It smolders. Then the surface ignites; the river is on fire. The flames are five stories high.
1990, Nickelodeon star Lori Beth Denberg who acted on shows like All That and Figure It Out once recommended that, while getting slimed, a participant should always lean backwards. Otherwise the slime is likely to shoot down the back of their pants. Denberg added that the green of Nick’s slime stained, and that the color could not be washed out of pale bras and underwear. Slime in that retelling still gets the last word, a kind of punchline, a cue to the audience to laugh and applaud.
1994, my parents’ damp basement. The living room carpet has followed the staircase and the green lacquer railing down to a TV set where a secret pudding recipe is making a curtain of some contestant’s hair. Applause spreads through the screen like static. I’m in my regular seat on the rug with gooseflesh strung along my arms, unwilling to leave the TV glow to find a sweater. I make my own applause with a new toy—a plastic sleeve filled with glittery, purple gel, by hopping it from one cold palm to the next. I was born into the era of Gak and Squand. The time of Tacky Hands and of Gooey Looey and The Ooze, Gushers and Flubber and Floam (the fun you can feel!), in the days when slime had just become a verb. Back then slime was narrative scaffolding; the arc of gameshows and cartoons structured around its release. Now it is 2018 and slime is making a return. This is the year You Can’t Do That on Television is having a reboot. This is the year I turned 30 and became addicted to Instagram, a platform where the “Slimer community” thrives. A cycle is the opportunity to recognize patterns. A chance to adapt. Slime is a texture, a noun turned verb. My interest is in this—slime that travels—how a material becomes narrative once it encounters human skin.