Between heaven and earth

philosophical musings on seeing a slug

Between heaven and earth

 

I lay down on the long, luscious summer grass. After a while, the dark clouds of life's trials and tribulations melted away, and as I looked up into the limitless blue sky time slowed, and white cloud after white cloud drifted over, untainted. Instead of time passing as a raucous parade of thoughts my mind stilled and I lived timelessly in the moment. I was content.

 

Without conscious intent I turned my head and came eye to eye with a slug. It was indulging its unwitting and lifelong passion for the succulent summer grass. As I gazed, the slug grazed. To say I fell in love with the slug would be a mild exaggeration, but there was, without doubt, a mounting but unrequited infatuation with the incredible creature.

 

Black is undoubtedly beautiful and my fascination was accentuated by the moist sheen on the slug’s body - it made the creature a few inches from my nose positively shimmer in the sunlight. It - the pronoun used advisedly because slugs have both male and female attributes - seemed to be looking at me, having only male attributes! Well, at least, when I say looking, it's two visual antennae swivelled smoothly in my direction! The other two ‘smelling’ stalks turned up their noses at me - so to speak! I moved my finger towards the stalks and they disappeared back inside the creature's head - remarkable! I lay for a while, in rapture, watching my black beauty, and after a safe interval the antennae eased out cautiously and went back to their sensory tasks.

 

I watched the slug with growing fascination as it continued doing what slugs (along with the rest of us living creatures!) are best at doing - moving, eating, breathing and getting rid of waste. I wondered if I might experience some seedy feeling of voyeurism if the opportunity to watch my slug having sex materialised (to paraphrase the great American song writer, Cole Porter, ‘even slugs to each other do it’) but unfortunately in the absence of another he/she the doing remained undone!

 

As I observed my slug it became obvious that, what most of us humans would regard as a nasty, slimy, disgusting garden pest was in reality a beautiful fellow creature. Slow rhythmic ripples in its stunningly striated muscular foot shimmied it forward with, admittedly sluggish elan, as it's 'shining carpet' of slime (gr)eased it's passage. I was amazed when a dark hole seemed to appear out of nowhere on the right side of the slug’s mantle, just aft of it’s head, but then I realised it could only be its breathing hole.

As I watched ‘sluggy’ moving along it struck me that we, unthinkingly, regard an animal such as a slug as a simple fellow but even replicating its mode of propulsion would fox our most brilliant engineers! Then my thoughts (or should I say trusty old ‘Wickipaedia,’ and is that not, for many people, what stands in for a brain nowadays?) turned to sluggy’s genealogy - and if we go back far enough, and I mean way, way back - right back to the primordial slime it turns out we share the same ancestors. Surprisingly, we share 60% of our genes with a fruit fly, so sluggy and I might have more in common than I thought!

 

Then I realised that I was only seeing the large scale complexity of this 'simple' beast. If I could zoom in on sluggy’s muscular foot I would see all the miraculous detail of the muscle tissue along with its nerves and blood vessels. Deeper in, a 'city' of cells would appear, each with their complex structure including their genetic material. The DNA molecules making up the genetic material are themselves enormously complicated double helixes containing the genetic instructions of all living things. Tumbling further and further in we can see the smaller molecules and then the individual atoms that form everything. And the journey doesn't stop there - dodge 'with uncertainty' through an individual atom's  cloud of electrons and we are metaphorically in the empty dome of St Pauls cathedral. You might just make out the pea sized nucleus at the centre - a minute bundle of protons and neutrons. If miracles existed then surely the existence of sluggy should qualify for one! But miracles (in the sense of a supernatural intervention) don’t exist and all this complexity is down to the working away of natural selection for millions of generations. And all this to let my gorgeous gastropod graze his life away!

 

For a while I closed my eyes and lay in the sun. Every so often I took a peek to check that sluggy hadn’t slithered off, although I now knew that I could follow its slime trail to any place of hiding. For the time being sluggy seemed content to chomp grass which ‘to a slug’ ….. a phrase that triggered some link in my brain and came up with ‘to a mouse’ a wonderful and profound poem by our Scottish poet Robert Burns. I suddenly realised that Burns, from two centuries before, had foreseen the existential crisis that sluggy (an innocent party in the matter of our imminent demise!) and we humans, (guilty as charged!) and in fact all life on earth are facing today. The lines below seem particularly apt.

 

    ‘I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion

    Has broken Nature’s social union’

 

   Scientists tell us that we are already well into the earth’s sixth mass extinction event - the last one, which was natural, killed off the dinosaurs so we have every reason to be worried. Although looking around at my fellow humans - and just at that moment I opened an eye and spotted the daily flight from Edinburgh to Dubai flying over - most of us seem to be either oblivious or in denial of our impending fate. We also have the problem that our politicians are too venal or too afraid or too ignorant to tell us the blunt truth. Robert Burns again described perfectly how it is us alone that can foresee the future.

  

   Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!

The present only toucheth thee:

But Och! I backward cast my e’e,

   On prospects drear!

An’ forward tho’ I canna see,

   I guess an’ fear!

 

Putting these worries to the back of my mind I continued relaxing in the warm summer sun and under the influence of a large meal and several glasses of red wine I drifted off into sleep. I awoke later to find the sun setting but Sluggy was still there chomping its slimy path through the lawn. A magnificent sunset of yellows and reds lit a raft of good weather cirrus clouds high above Falkland hill just a few miles away. The sky darkened steadily and I felt so at one with my surroundings that I just lay there soaking it all up. The crescent moon slid up above the steep field to the south then Jupiter appeared. As the minutes passed my bed, atop the earth, on its annual breakneck race round the sun, spun into the darkness. Sluggy and I became transformed into Captain Graham accompanied by First Lieutenant Sluggy aboard the SS Enterprise - ‘to boldly go where no man (or slug) has gone before’ and the full magnificent glory of the night sky was revealed. The familiar constellations and the bright starry blaze of the Milky Way lit the night sky.

 

As I watched the stars wheeling overhead I went back to my previous thoughts about how the wonderful complexity of sluggy and all of us, is constructed from the same building blocks. Suddenly a bright fireball dashed across the sky and burnt itself out. Without conscious thought I said, ‘more stardust!’ Of course we all know the phrase, but to look up at the stars and ‘know’ in our bones that’s where we have all come from is something different. To know that every bit of matter that we are made from was once forged by the process of nuclear fusion, small atoms of hydrogen being joined to make heavier atoms such as carbon and oxygen, made possible by the mind bogglingly high temperatures and pressures found inside stars is somehow humbling.

 

 

It was late now, time for a real bed. With eyes, now wide open, I took one final lingering look at my slimy friend and it suddenly occurred to me  that he/she deserved a name. I thought for a second or two; Gastro(too obvious), Black Beauty (short of four legs),  and then it came to me - there was only one possible name for my slimy friend!

 

Goodbye, Sluggy Stardust!

 

 

Reviews

[Yari Garcia]

This is one of the most creative and beautiful stories I've read on this site! I absolutely loved everything about this. It was full of wonder, wisdom, and prose.

The ending was also super cute ^.^

You have a great talent, my friend! This one is going in my library, under Favorites :-)

Sincerely,
Yari

[alanwgraham]

Your review has really made my day yari. Your kind words are very much appreciated. I had been thinking about this kind of story about the wonder of the everyday for ages and I'm very pleased how it turned out.
Thanks again. Alan

[Rick Puetter]

An interesting musing as thoughts turn from one view of existence to another. There is actually wonderment is everything that we see, and the wonderment exists on all scales from the atomic (and subatomic) to galactic (and extra-galactic). To me, I even find wonderment into why the range of scales should be finite (only 60 orders of 10, take or add a factor or two of 10). Yes, it is all just a mysterious place, full of surprises, and we've only scratched the surface. Greatly enjoyed.

[Tony Jordan]

Pests they may be but I have often seen them as natures binman - they eat dog poop, bird poop and I even saw two of them tuck into a vomit outside the local pub!!
I also have wondered Alan, what the heck makes all those atoms that make us up 'stay together' - why dont we simply diffuse !!??
Sluggy Stardust could be an amazing teaching guy for kids. Well done mate!

[alanwgraham]

Thanks Tony, I was a science teacher so perhaps Sluggy has been filed away waiting to emerge on WC!
Thanks for reading and for your comments.
Regards,
Alan

[barleygirl]

Your final naming conclusion is definitely the best part of your imaginative story. This is very unusual writing . . . you slide from sensory to scientific so that it seems these various observations are not even in the same vein . . . yet what brings all these disparate thoughts & conclusions together is in the makeup of your bizarre point of view. In short, I don't know how everything you're describing fits together into a linear statement of anything in particular, except that it shows us how your fascinating mind works. The most unusual aspect is the way you are so comfortable in the realm of childlike & sensory observing via storytelling, while also being keen to know & espouse about scientific details & weaving them beside the fantasy-like aspects of your story. It's an uncommon combination. I mostly prefer the parts where you are being childlike & in a bit of a fantasy land in telling your time spent with Sluggy Stardust.

[alanwgraham]

Thanks for your very perceptive comments M. I've been thinking of a piece of writing like this for ages and looking at the slug seemed to kick start it. Perhaps calling it a story was a bit misleading- there is definitely no story line. My intention was to use the wonder and complexity in the commonplace and then zoom in and out to give its (and our) place in the great scheme of things. I thought my favourite poem 'to a mouse' fitted in with this. I think what you call my 'bizarre' point of view is a matter of shifting my perspective to see things from a different angle. I feel that my experiences of being high has developed this way of looking at things and it seems to have stuck. I hope you own creative urge continues!
Thanks again,
Alan

[barleygirl]

I mean "bizarre" as a compliment . . . I can't stand cliché writing! I'm pretty regimented myself, so I admire those who can fathom their messages outside the dots of what's typically written about.

[alanwgraham]

Cheers for that! I didn't read too much into your use of bizarre. You're lucky that you're only subjected to the workings of my mind occasionally, I have to live with it all the bloody time! Ha ha!
Alan

[Hi]

Quite an in depth extrapolation of a slug or the universe back to a slug. I preferred the beginning story line, but a well thought piece.

[alanwgraham]

Thanks for reading this Matt. I know this is a bit different and I hope you got something out of it.
Cheers,
Alan

[Joel Armstrong]

This sir is a very curious piece indeed. And I enjoyed reading every bit of it.
I used the word curious as an adjective to describe this because it is something that induces a certain inquisitiveness in ones mind. And truly sir id like to commend your observation skills. Not many these days possess something as valuable. Because one can find great many things about something just by observing it closely. Things which most people are ignorant of.
I too used to, well I still do, observe closely many things, and to be absolutely honest I too have had an encounter with quite a few slugs in my life, some come up in the bathroom or on some wall of the house. The creatures sure have quite a way of life. Well I even had a cockroach whom I named Melchizedek. I'm a biology student so I'm pretty much awed by all creatures under the sun..well some consider it as disgusting thing to do but its pretty interesting if u ask me.
Well back to your piece,its been very well written and id love to read more : )

[iamshadowine]

this story gave me goosebumps! I loved it so much!!!! :D Thanks for sharing it! excellent imagination used here!
I still am amused! "woah* *hats off*
keep writing :D

[alanwgraham]

Thanks very much. It is great to get some feedback. It is the great thing about WC!
I've been thinking about this idea for while so it was great to finally get it done.
Regards,
Alan

[FractalLuna]

I enjoyed reading your observational transitions in this! From gazing at the slug, to empathizing with it, to considering its (and our) origins, to befriending and naming it. It's an enlightening process to simply lay in the yard, contemplating and consuming the Earth's energies and forms. It was a wonderfully descriptive adaptation of Carl Sagan's "we are all made of star stuff."

[alanwgraham]

Thanks for your very thoughtful review. I was around when Carl Sagan was popularising all things ET and I suppose it has rubbed off. Its a good idea to revisit good ideas every so often because they do get forgotten. Of course in our present pickle we need all the ideas we can get!
Thanks again,
Alan

[FractalLuna]

I am all about getting ideas!