Is my writing too wet?
In defence of gloop
Lately I’ve been feeling warlike. My blood’s running hot. Maybe it’s because the longest, greyest, most miserable winter I can remember is finally over and the world is returning to life. All the trees are in bloom, the birds are cooing in their soft pink branches; it’s the season to conquer and destroy. I need an enemy. Someone big, someone people take seriously, someone who’s just slightly overrated, someone who might be able to hurt me. I need to rip them apart in four to five thousand words of frantic talons. I need to wet my feathers in their blood. Maybe you don’t understand this impulse; maybe springtime just makes you want to live in peace with the world. But I doubt it. Lately, everyone’s been ritually sacrificing Lindy West. She wrote a book about some nightmarish polyamorous marriage she’s pretending to be fine with; the pretence is that you’re all really concerned about her being exploited. And this is why you’re all arranged in this torchlit circle around her, and why each of you have been sliding your little thinkpieces about the death of millennial feminism into her back, sinking them in all the way up to the hilt. Cowards: you can’t face live prey. As it happens, the night before her book came out I had a magnificent dream. I dreamed I was riding around a postapocalyptic landscape, all buildings crumbling into the desert, in a great brass chariot. I was smiling like Ashurbanipal as I rode around in my chariot, firing arrows at my enemies, and my chariot was pulled by a powerful, steaming Lindy West. She, too, gleamed like brass in the fresh light of spring.
My problem is that it’s so hard to find a good enemy these days. There are plenty of people who write stupid opinions I disagree with in newspapers and magazines, but fighting them feels sordid, unkind, like spitting on a tramp. There are also plenty of bad novelists too, but what makes them bad is mostly how limp and bloodless they are. Let’s say I did manage to get in a shooting match with Solvej Balle, author of On the Calculation of Volume. What would that be? That would be a war crime. She’s a civilian.
Occasionally, there is someone who isn’t a civilian. Sometimes I’m attacked first. There are a few people out there who don’t like my writing, and make a point of saying so. They always say the same thing: they think it’s indulgent, or long-winded, or evasive, or annoying. These days, I find it hard to get excited about this stuff. If I were someone else, I probably wouldn’t like my writing either. How you feel about what I’m doing here is, in a very real way, not really any of my business. Even when people seem to actively hate me with the eye-bulging intensity of a very small dog, I’ve learned to accept this. In fact, I quite like almost everyone that hates me; the real enemy isn’t someone you dislike, just someone whose head you think would look good on your wall. But lately there’s been another critique of my work floating around, and this one is serious. It demands a response. And strangely, it’s not even coming from my critics. It’s people who claim to like my work, who like almost everything about it—except. Except, they’ll add, have you noticed that every single thing he writes includes the word gloop? Or if it isn’t gloop, it’s goo, or gunk, or ooze, or slop, or slime, or some reference to a bog, or a swamp, or a fen, or a mire. It doesn’t matter if I’m writing about middle-eastern politics or the history of philosophy or whatever bullshit I just saw online; sooner or later I’ll be bringing up some kind of viscous fluid or wetland habitat. What gives?
Before I respond to this baseless and defamatory allegation, it might be worth just double-checking to see if my critics might actually have a point.
It’s true that I do, occasionally, use the word gloop. I have described vegan milk as ‘a colloid of oat gloop and vegetable oils,’ ink as ‘the magic gloop of bureaucracy,’ and the outside stereotype of India as ‘a land of unsanitary gloops.’ I have described the British as ‘bog mutants’ and ‘bog-dwelling savages.’ Among other uses, I have invented a fictional literary magazine called Red Gunk and a fictional US Congressman called Gunk Sclugmond. Sometimes my slimes are literal: I will write about things that genuinely happen to be a bit wet, like zombies, bog bodies, or the British. Other times they seem to ooze out for no obvious reason. In a piece on Nietzsche, who tended to keep himself reasonably dry, I managed to refer to both ‘the mystical gunk that had accumulated in my brain’ and ‘the black slime of your own self-regard.’
Quantitative analysis doesn’t help my position. This blog contains 14 instances of gloop, 15 of goo or gooey, 9 of gunk, 6 of ooze, 12 of slop, 8 of sludge, and a full 28 of slime or slimy. This might not sound like a lot, when you consider that it also contains nearly half a million words in total, but you can compare these numbers with the Google Books corpus, and the results aren’t pretty. Look:
The goos and slimes are bad enough, appearing four times more frequently here than in the rest of the English language, but gloop really is an outlier. I use it fifty-six times more than the average writer. At this point, it’s probably pointless to try arguing that I don’t drastically overuse the word gloop. Instead, I’ll need to make the case that I’m actually right to drastically overuse the word gloop, and every other writer on the planet is wrong for not deploying it as much as me.
There’s a very easy way of doing this, which is to say that talking about gloop the whole time is actually politically virtuous. And there is, in fact, something vaguely reactionary about the distaste for any kind of slime. Adorno mentions this in his Aesthetic Theory. ‘Immediately back of the mimetic taboo stands a sexual one: nothing should be moist.’ Wetness and sliminess is a kind of intolerable ambiguity; gloop is that which disturbs the division of the world into orderly, discrete objects. The forces of repression might want to parcel out reality into antiseptic monads, but there is an untameable gloop that flows between the cells of thought. Gloopy ontology reveals that everything that exists is some kind of very slow fluid, slopping around in the universal churn of all matter. This plot of land you want me to pay rent for—just yesterday, it was the sea floor, where precambrian organisms walked on skirts of jelly. Tomorrow it’ll be a cloud of space dust, slowly coalescing into a star. The noumenon is a protean, undifferentiated mass; it’s not like anything, but if it were like something it would be a kind of dense black tar. But the human body is the same. Our bodies produce some kind of slime at every orifice; in fact, the human body is literally made out of genital slime. We’re not really separate from each other; we’re all just moments in the flubbering of a single viscous plasm. Bakhtin discusses this. The grotesque body, the one that’s constantly oozing or farting, is ‘a point of transition in a life eternally renewed, the inexhaustible vessel of death and conception.’ But the institution of private property demands a world of solid objects. Which is why bourgeois morality forces us to pretend that we all stop at the edges of our skin, and treats all the snots and splats that transgress these borders with prim disgust. Therefore, if you object to me leaving goo everywhere, it’s because you’re a bad person.
This is a perfectly serviceable argument, even if it’s slightly hectoring, even if it’s sort of hectoring you into the position that you should want to live in a world where everyone is filthy and grease-splattered and constantly phlegming in your face. The problem is that not everyone is so positive about slime. These days, when people talk about gloop and gunk in a vaguely politicised register, they’re not thinking about Rabelais; it’s the queasily uniform output that surrounds them. All the restaurants that no longer make their own food, but offer a curated selection of Sysco products. The way musical subcultures have all melded into a single stream of two-minute TikTok standards, which you can either enjoy or ignore. The publishers desperate to sell you three hundred pages of booklike product. At a certain level of homogenisation, things no longer feel like discrete objects; the overriding sense is of pure undifferentiated quantity. The pinnacle of all this stuff is, of course, AI slop, which really does have a wet, gooey quality to it. It’s impossible to encounter a piece of AI media without getting a brief vertiginous sense of the basically infinite number of outputs that the machine could equally well have churned out instead. This particular clip, in which a small brood of anthropomorphic broccoli florets cry and hold their mother as they’re boiled to death: it’s nothing; if you repeat the prompt you can get a thousand of these, a million, and while each individual element will be different—different pot, different chopping board, totally different composition in every individual shot—all of it will be fundamentally the same. If I keep comparing everything to various forms of slop, it’s because slop is that to which we’ve been condemned.
But I don’t think this is really the full story either. There’s something else worth mentioning about AI slop videos: for a while, the slop was literal. You don’t get it so much any more, but five minutes ago when the form was in its infancy, AI video was full of sudden explosions of fluid. The problem with the early models was consistency: they could render a kaleidoscopic sequence of images distilled from the bubbling totality of everything ever captured on film, but they didn’t know how to keep objects looking roughly the same from one frame to the next, or how to obey the laws of physics. A typical AI video from around 2023 would show some half-molten person-like entities gently deliquescing in an office filled with hazy, blobby, unnameable objects, before being suddenly consumed in an immense plume of smoke. The smoke fills the air for a second and then something imperceptibly shifts and it’s frothy surf now, great viscous tendrils of seawater, and a figure on a surfboard is doing 360-degree spins and sometimes hanging motionless upside-down in the air. After a few more unlikely acrobatics he explodes. A great big fireball that doesn’t actually seem to damage anything; it just sets off secondary explosions up and down the screen that grow and linger until the model notices all these orange pixels and reasons that it’s not fire at all, it’s orange juice, slopping everywhere as it’s poured into a glass by a smiling mother with what appear to be two separate mouths, as all of a sudden floodwaters tear through the house, exterior walls collapse to reveal more rooms behind, also collapsing, also welling with water that seems to emerge from everywhere at once… I liked those videos a lot. Early AI video was its own weird dreamlike medium; watching it felt like freebasing the collective unconscious. But it was hard to appreciate at the time, because it was so obviously about to turn into what we have now. Still, the way things developed is interesting. In traditional CGI fluids are some of the hardest things to animate: if you watch early Pixar films it’s all solid objects, stiff plastic toys. The first film to really get it right was Shrek, in which DreamWorks made the most of their newly developed fluid animation system by producing a film that was almost entirely about mud and gloop and slime. In AI video the slime came first; only later, with the addition of planet-eating quantities of compute, did it coalesce into solid objects.
This procedure might be familiar. ‘And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.’
There seems to be a general intuition that between matter and form, matter came first, and before the universe had its shape, it was made of some kind of liquid muddy guck. In the Babylonian creation story, the world forms from the fresh and salty waters of the Deep, curdling into raging chaotic gods. Eventually Marduk slaughters them and builds the universe of solid forms from their corpses. In other traditions the universe begins as a roiling ocean, and one animal has to dive to the very bottom to retrieve a single grain of mud, which ends up swelling into the land. In Finland and Estonia it’s a duck, in Yorubaland it’s a chicken; among the Ostyaks it’s a loon, for the Buryats a goose; in the Cherokee version it’s a water-beetle, while the Iroquois have a muskrat. In the Timaeus, Plato’s kindly effective-altruist God happens to stumble upon a swirling ineffable gunge called the chôra, which is ‘formless, like the inodorous liquids which are prepared to receive scents, or the smooth and soft materials on which figures are impressed.’ It’s not clear exactly where this great dark world-womb comes from, but God looks upon it and sees that it is suboptimal, and divides the primordial splat into body and soul, the four elements, the gods and the other animals, until it’s all nicely in order. Lucretius goes furthest: in his version the chaotic plasm of raw matter is all that there is. No god ever moulded it into shape; it just collided with itself until it threw up the world of solid forms entirely by accident. Sooner or later it will dissolve, also by accident. (This is also, more or less, the view of quantum chromodynamics.)
Primordial chaos has a way of seeping in, even when we notionally believe in something else. Maybe the world is made of air or water, maybe God created it ex nihilo, but you still can’t stop thinking about slime. Probably the best and most familiar account of this very Babylonish concept is the English version of the myth, in book II of Milton’s Paradise Lost, where Satan has to traverse the ‘wilde Abyss/ The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave/ Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire/ But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt/ Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight.’ This dark chasm is the stuff God used to build the world; it’s where all of us originally come from. The home we forgot. And what’s it like in there? ‘A Boggy Syrtis, neither Sea/ Nor good dry Land.’ It’s slime: sludge, slop, ooze, gunk, gloop.
Even after the creation of the world, slime seems to cling to every newborn thing. One of Gaston Bachelard’s great projects was an investigation into the material imagination that, ‘primitive and eternal,’ underlies all our more abstract ideas. All our dreams, he says, are made out of the four classical elements and their combinations; dreamers and poets both have to work with the material stuff of the world. There are some ways of thinking about the world that are made of air, like yours, and others that are made of fire, like mine. But one material stands out: ‘the basic component of materiality, the very notion of matter’ is expressed in the combination of earth and water, which Bachelard calls paste. Paste is the perfect matter because, being formless, ‘it relieves our intuition of any worry about shape.’ When you’re caught out in the rain and cake your boots in gloop, you’re encountering the stuff dreams are made of in its rawest form. Which might be why, in the history of human culture, there’s a tendency for new forms to come out all gucky.
You could look at painting. The one thing everyone notices about the cave paintings of the upper palaeolithic is how fluid they are, how liquid the linework in all those flowing herds of overlapping animals, everything almost jellylike in consistency, so totally different to the stiff, childlike forms of the later neolithic and early bronze age. The novel is another one. By the mid-eighteenth century the novel had stabilised into a more or less solid form, but if you read the very early examples they just slosh around from one cover to the other. For us in the twenty-first century they seem strangely postmodern, destabilising conventions that shouldn’t have even existed yet; in our tired old age we’re still surprised by plasticity. Sidney’s Arcadia, with its ungodly hodgepodge of prose, play, and verse, so wormy with nested narratives that it’s practically incomprehensible. Or Gargantua and Pantagruel, strange combination of scholarly erudition with near-constant fart jokes, featuring long lists of books that don’t exist and a first-person narrator popping in and out of existence seemingly at random. Allegedly, Don Quixote is the first truly realist novel, but in fact it’s the weirdest of the lot. The idea is that it pokes fun at the conventions of chivalric romance by transposing them to the real world, so in the first volume Don Quixote thinks every roadside inn he passes is a castle, and talks to every innkeeper like she’s a princess, and gets repeatedly bonked around the head for his madness. This is meta enough, even without the pages of pseudepigraphic blurbs, or the highly conventional tales-within-the-tale, or the whole gimmick in which Cervantes is actually just translating an Arabic text by one Cide Hamete Benengeli, and occasionally needs to get into adventures of his own to track down more scraps of manuscript when the narrative runs out. But it’s in the second volume that we really see what happens when fiction and reality interact, which is that fiction brushes reality aside like a cobweb. Quixote no longer hallucinates; he sees everything exactly as it is. It’s just that Cervantes is so committed to realism that the world he describes already includes the first volume of Don Quixote, which means that everyone recognises the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance when they see him, and they all pretend to be in one of his tales of chivalry. Eventually everyone is acting out his delusions. (Pierre Menard said it was easy to write the Quixote in the seventeenth century but almost impossible in the twentieth, not least because in the twentieth it already existed. But Cervantes was already on some Borges shit three hundred years ahead of time.) What you end up with is a vision of literature as a kind of alien protoplasm, fungal, borderless, puddling over the world.
But since I’ve already been talking about animation, you can see it there too. If you watch any of the really old Max Fleischer cartoons on YouTube, you’ll usually find someone in the comments wondering what the world would have been like if Fleischer, and not Walt Disney, had won the battle for the future of animation. It’s a good question, almost a Germany-wins-WW1-level counterfactual, Hannibal-wins-the-Punic-Wars, generating dizzyingly different worlds. We’re talking about a clash of the primordial elements here. On one side, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, prim white Calvinism, bowdlerised takes on the Brothers Grimm, trilling princesses, orchestral scores, family-friendly feature-length productions, the latency period, the gods of the air and the sky. On the other, Popeye and Betty Boop, the subterranean alliance of Jews and blacks, immigrant modernity, mongrel impure, wailing ghosts, black-eyed strays, demonic cave paintings, a druggy decadent sexuality, plump thighs, mutability, the gods of the underworld and the night. The early Fleischer cartoons were very unambiguously for grown-ups in a way animation has never quite been able to recapture; even now what passes for adult animation is either just a bunch of kids screaming manic profanities, or some unutterably tedious bullshit about mental health. But if Disney had crumbled in the 1940s instead of Fleischer, it’s hard to imagine we’d be living in the same childlike, desexualised, racially uptight society we inhabit now. There would not be grown adults arguing about Harry Potter. There would not be anything even slightly resembling the sterile, stuttering paedophile slideshows of anime. People would not live under the crushing idea that fun and pleasure belong only to childhood, and the best way to enjoy your life is to avoid growing up. No picket-fence fifties conservatism, no soppy soporific peace-and-love sixties counterculture, just a Jazz Age that never ended, growing darker and toothier with every decade. Birth rates in the developed countries would never have slipped below replacement, but the world would be scarred with the wreckage of multiple small nuclear wars.
But increasingly, I think Fleischer could never have won, and history could only have gone one way, because all his productions were slimy. Disney cartoons are about animals or princesses; Fleischer’s were, ultimately, all about ink. In his very first series, Out of the Inkwell, the main character is a living, polymorphous blob of ink that just happens to take the form of a clown called Koko. Even in the later cartoons all forms are basically provisional. At any point someone’s head might suddenly turn into a gramophone, or a gold chain, or a bottle of hooch. Even when there aren’t straight-up metamorphoses, motions are strikingly fluid. Figures move like water, like invertebrate things, cuttlefish, pulsing squid. Look at this Popeye cartoon. Gloopy protean ink-splats, dark and fertile, a chôra briefly amusing itself with shapes. The kind of thing you can only achieve with animation, which doesn’t have to obey the rules of bony reality. You can probably see where this is going. Max Fleischer’s great innovation, developed right at the start of his career, was the rotoscope. Those impossibly fluid animations were real human movement; that ectoplasmic ooze is the real Cab Calloway; that shifting cartoon-world is the world you’ve been living in all your life. Fleischer had distilled the black ooze that churns beneath the phenomenal world and put it on the screen. But only for a moment. Slime belongs to the beginning of things. Eventually his fluid universe had to harden into Disney’s sweetly singing princesses and die.
For all their sexual maturity, there’s still something childlike about those films. The fresh fat flow of the beginning of things. After all, who is it that really likes goo, and slime, and sludge, aside from the priests, philosophers, painters, and poets of every era? Answer: children. When I was a kid, basically all the entertainment the mavens at CITV had devised for me involved various straight-laced adults being sprayed down with thick coloured gunge, or pushed into giant pools of the stuff, while the hosts all yelped like wounded cats. (Today, from what I can tell, the official children’s entertainment on the TV is all about learning to process your difficult emotions, and as a result the unofficial entertainment the kids actually watch online is all about how the entire female sex were invented by Jews to emasculate the Western male. We should have kept the slime.) But why do children like goo so much? Stupid question. Because it’s fun. But why?
There’s one answer in the mythos of psychoanalysis, a more or less total theory of gloop. If we keep coming back to the theme of a creation that grows from slime, it might have something to do with the fact that we all share the same primordial creative experience. The first time any of us create anything, the first time we put anything out there into the world, it’s by shitting. Karl Abraham, expanding on a connection that doesn’t actually appear in Sigmund Freud’s Character and Anal Erotism, suggests that the child’s originary pleasure in shitting ends up being ‘sublimated into pleasure in painting, modelling, and similar activities.’ The first and most perfect work of art, something of the self realised as an external object, is the turd; this is why the people driven to create art are all some kind of revolting pervert. Later, when we try to imagine the divine creation of the universe, we might not picture God shitting out the world, but we still give the materials of creation the same sensuous properties as shit. Maybe if humans produced neat little pellets like goats our gods would have stacked up the universe from rocks like a cosmic cairn; instead we get the illimitable ocean, the body of Tiamat, and the darkness on the face of the deep.
Children are obsessed with slime because slime is the first thing anyone ever made, and the one who controls the slime is something like a god. They know that the deep secrets of the universe are found in the waste products, intolerable excesses, things better left unmentioned. They like seeing adults being gunged because while adults might govern the world they’re far too dry to have created it. The worldmakers are the slimy laughing ones, and the same gloop of their delight is a punishment for any stiffnecked unbeliever. I’m obsessed with the stuff for roughly similar reasons. I might cast about a lot of performative disdain for a generally infantilised and infantilising world, but I’m the same. In my own way, I also failed to grow up.
Maybe we’re all a little more immature than we think. Before, I said that we don’t imagine God shitting out the world, but in fact that’s not quite true. The creation story of the Ikataiwa of western Peru begins with the ancestor-spirit Eiwatsi, wading in the dark through a lifeless and infinite swamp. He eats a handful of ajuge fruit—it’s not clear where he got them from—and begins to feel queasy. Soon after he squats, groaning, and shits. His first turd is made of fire. It sinks into the depths of the swamp and becomes the Sun. Eiwatsi wades on, with the Sun swimming around his feet as he walks, lighting the way, but before long he groans and shits again. His second movement is diarrhoea: pure water. It splashes into the swamp and becomes the rivers of the world. After a few more paces his guts roil a third time. The third part of creation is a great solid log. Eiwatsi moulds it into plants and animals and women and men, but these creations are lifeless; they just float in the swamp, unmoving. Finally, the pain stabs Eiwatsi once again, and he squats to shit, but all that escapes is an enormous fart. The air wafts into the animals and humans and gives them life. Eiwatsi teaches the small group of humans how to make things for themselves; he teaches them the secrets of arrows, blowguns, baskets, and pots, how to plant manioc, and how to make magical charms. Then he walks on. Some day he might come back.
We have this story because it was collected in 2009 by Arão Elias, who was a Brazilian missionary with the LDS Church. I say was, because after returning from his mission with the Ikataiwa, Elias left Mormonism and now seems to spend most of his time sending strange emails full of death threats to the various archaeologists, both in and outside the church, he believes to be deliberately hiding the truth. What set him off was the creation myth. Most indigenous peoples place the creation of the universe in some vaguely defined heroic past; not the Ikataiwa. They said that the world had been created about four generations back. Some of them said that their grandfathers or great-grandfathers had been among the first individuals fashioned by Eiwatsi, that they’d personally learned the art of firemaking and spearfishing from the demiurge himself. After a night in his hut crunching the numbers, Elias deduced that the Ikataiwa creation had taken place in 1924. When he tried to tell his hosts that scientists had estimated the age of the earth at four and a half billion years, they laughed at him. Ridiculous numbers. Like if someone told you that people in his country had calculated that they were twenty miles tall. Clearly someone where Elias lived had been ashamed of where he came from, one of the original turdborn men, and had started making up this lie. They were absolutely certain about this. All of them had known someone who had looked directly into the face of God. They had spoken to people who were never born but created, whose lives had suddenly begun midway through adulthood. All Elias’s attempts to talk about books and photographs from the pre-1924 past were met with mocking laughter. It made it very hard to teach them about Jesus Christ. Eventually, after some persistent badgering, Elias convinced some of his hosts to take him to a village three days’ canoe-ride away, where one of the first humans still lived. The trip was bug-bitten and uncomfortable with constant downpours and in the end they arrived too late. The man had just died. But he lay on his pyre for another day before the villagers burned him, and Elias got to look. Hard to see inside the grass-reed hut of mourning, where the stink was heavier than the darkness. The dead man was naked and had already started to bloat, jowls all melting around his neck. In death, he clasped his feathered penis-sheath between his hands. Elias peered closer. He had no navel.