There Are Slugs In My Bathroom

In 2002 I took a class on Writing For Artists. It was a combination of business writing, creative writing, and book arts. Equal parts silly and serious. One of the sillier tasks was to write our art manifesto. Keep in mind, this was fifteen years before I started making art with snails. Prescience in action.

Part 1

There are slugs in my bathroom. Fat slimy slugs that leave glistening slime trails on the linoleum and burst under your toes in the dark... I don’t know where they come from or why they have chosen the bathroom of all rooms to colonize, but they are there. My toilet bowl is crisscrossed with the silver tinsel of their trails, and I, the master of the house, cannot plug up their hole because I cannot find it.

Although I still flush them down the toilet, these slugs are my new totems of willful, dedicated disregard for arbitrary boundaries of thought and action. No other animal is so invasive of my personal space, so unwarranted in the routine of my daily life. Ants and mice are tempted into trespass by the allure of breadcrumbs and spilt sugar- spiders by the shelter four walls and a roof can afford a fragile web. There is something natural about their presence in my run-down little home, while they are not supposed to be there, it is not necessarily illogical either. As I stare sleepless at the ceiling, I can hear the nighttime frolics of the mice inside my bedroom wall and I know that it is their lot in life to be there, just as it is mine to be too young and poor to avoid them.

Slugs have no reason to seek out the linoleum floors and fluorescent lights of my bathroom. Their appearance is a mistake, a fluke, an aberration, or maybe a revolution - I should not have to tiptoe in my bathroom to avoid their clammy skin and the feel of its rupture beneath my feet. It’s odd that they are in this space that both nature and human reason dictate that they do not belong. So I have built up a whole imaginary world, an embarrassingly detailed narrative to explain the adventures they have sporadically undertaken in the bathroom.

I imagine that…. the slugs have grown tired of the cold damp earth beneath the house, of the moldering leaves of the yard, and that they feel the need for change. Perhaps they were forced there as refugees, their homes having been destroyed by the ruthless invading armies of beetles from next door. Perhaps their jobs at the dirt factory were downsized due to the weak economy and now they’re searching for work on the shower mold farms. Or perhaps cold porcelain invites them because it is the last frontier to be conquered by invertebrate kind - because for so long it has been deemed uninviting - so foreign to their normal range of sensation and experience that normal life could not function within its parameters. Maybe, just maybe, to live life on the edge of the sink or the toilet bowl is to live life in the fast lane, to dream big dreams, to live and die fast and all those other clichés that inspire people (or slugs) to do rash and beautiful things with their lives.

As an artist I ask myself where is the endless porcelain fronteir, the linoleum canvas upon which the story of my passing shall be written? All great art comes from the place inside that questions prepackaged expectations and only listens to the voice of personal experience no matter how sinister or deviant its suggestions are. No matter how contrary to all “natural” modes of thought and decorum it may be, the voice of personal experience is the voice to listen to because it is most intimately one’s own. Our assignment as artists; strive to uncover the new, to colonize that space as ones own and to never stop reaching for that elusive next step, next move, next brushstroke, or next idea which was undiscovered….until you came along. Then it will be forever and undeniably yours no matter who may walk or think or paint or sculpt in your footsteps. You are the first and as far as the history books and the annuls of fame are concerned, you are the only and the greatest as well.

Part 2

Every act of bravery has its consequences. To play the part of the pioneer, the revolutionary, the genius, the artist is to risk everything on something as immaterial as a dream. I admired the slugs in my bathroom but I still flushed them down the toilet. I did not release them into the backyard, I did not raise them as pets in a jar – I killed them because they aspired to a world in which they did not belong. Neither nature nor culture takes kindly to improvisation upon their designs but is it impossible to deviate and defy them and not be annihilated under their footsteps?

When I was little my mother attempted a rose garden along our front fence. Long abandoned to the deer, the bugs and the weeds, I can still recall why she loved it and why it pained her to give up her dream of a white picket fence wreathed in heirloom roses. For the fence the roses grew on held a dirty secret- along its underside, hidden from the sun, was a colony of snails and slugs so large that in portions, the white paint of the fence could not be seen beneath the mottled brown shells that huddled against it. With stick in hand, it was my job as “mommy’s garden helper” to knock the snails and slugs off the fence and into a bucket. I would run the stick against the rails, enjoying the rhythmic rattling sound of the stick (rat-tat-rat-tat, like a gun, or a car, or a bike tire with a baseball card in it) and the hard plops that the snails made as they fell into my pail (plop, plink, plop – depending on whether they fell against the bucket’s side or their fallen comrades).

There were so many- some days, the bucket would be near overflowing – and I would have nowhere to put them all. It had never been explained to me what I should do with the snails and slugs after they had been gathered off of the fence. I had simply been told that they did not belong there, that the space they inhabited belonged to my mother and her

beautiful roses, not to such primitive and unattractive pests as these. My mother, infamous for avoiding touchy subjects, probably had not wanted to go into the logistics of garden pest extermination and had assumed that her bright young daughter would simply devise a method on her own. And I did – I threw them in the street and let the cars and bicycles take care of the rest.

Perhaps that is why there were always so many of them along that fence, huge clusters of mucous membrane and kinotine shells – like withered grapes oozing fermented juice as they rotted on the vine. I couldn’t have been throwing them more then ten or twelve feet away from their home. I assume that those who avoided being smashed by cars simply crawled their way back to the garden, living to pester my mother and her roses another day. Perhaps, in some small way, it is my fault that all those beautiful roses are gone, ripped out and replaced with hardier – and uglier – plants such as lavender and sage. But all I knew at that young age was that the snails did not belong along the fence – that they were violating some secret insect code of honor that said only weeds should be eaten, only uncultivated parts of the yard colonized.

How many times could a snail or a slug have been saved by luck from the wheels of the street traffic outside my house and returned to their home along the fence? Were there great-great-granddaddy slugs that would tell all their itty-bitty grandbabies about what life on the asphalt was like? “Grandpa, Grandpa, tell us about the great exile of 87’ when you had to crawl back to the Fence through the Asphalt Desert! Tell us the part about the great Round Rubber Beast and how he almost ate you ! Please, please, tell us just once more.”

The snails endured and prospered while the roses suffered- value judgments aside, their determination to live in that garden and not be exterminated and/or displaced by an overeager five year old was beautiful. Perseverance is a powerful quality for change; a necessity when one finds oneself in opposition to the cold and brutal so-called “truths” of reality. Vacillation is not the way of the artist- perseverance is the handmaiden to creativity and must be cradled and nurtured in order to fully realize ones potential as a creative individual. I tried to dominate the snails, alternating between stern executioner and gentle obedience trainer. In the end, the snails were neither eradicated nor domesticated as they refused to obey my commands to die or my commands to behave. True, they suffered for it. Dried out like leather on the pavement, shattered like holiday baubles – they died in what I would imagine to be horrible ways. But not all of them did. Some persevered and lived to eat the roses, procreate, and eat the roses another day. Dreams can never be allowed to become so much dead tissue on the pavement because just as the cars and bikes and pedestrians cared not for the lives ended beneath their weight, the world will not notice either. We are the keepers of our dreams, and god fear for the day when we become their mourners as well for that is the day when we are no longer artists.

Part 3

My father has a way of using humor as leverage towards action. I was depressed for most of my teens, a fact that made me too disengaged with my surroundings to contribute much to either the household chores or chatter. My dad’s response was to goad me into action by calling me a “fat stupid slug”. This usually had the opposite effect, either deepening my silence or prompting me to tears. My senior year of high school, when the depression was lessening and I was accepted to UCSC – mascot the banana slug – he proclaimed that I had found the perfect school for me because they obviously respected “fat stupid slugs” enough the make one their mascot. I would do well there he said.

Well dad, I am a slug and I am a snail. To live and create as one sees fit, irrespective of the world’s nay-sayers, one needs the vision of the bathroom slugs and the stubbornness of the fence snails and all the luck possible in order to avoid the toilet bowl /car tire deaths of this world. I am a slug and I am a snail because I refuse to relent either in my vision or my action. I will not lead a blind and sedentary lifestyle, cut off from the outlets of my creative expression. I will listen to my intuition and let it lead me astray, and I will never be lead astray from it. In the end, years after I’m worm food, part of this world will still read in silver script, “Katherine Smith was here” because I did not shy away from the great artistic unknown but rather embraced it as the proving grounds for my creative ambitions.