Over the last few weeks I’ve been revisiting a project that I undertook in 2014, in which I collaborated with snails.
I noticed that after periods of summer rain, the gravelled front garden of the house where I was living with friends would come alive with snails. I remember that summer as one of warm rain, grass flowers, and slow mornings drinking lots of black coffee with my friend Meg.
At that time, I had just started keeping a notebook again after a few years of being without a daily writing practice. It occurred to me to try bringing literature and snails together to see what would happen. I did this by taking my notebook outside, and placing snails upon it, and then repeating the experiment indoors, to see if anything changed.
It was fascinating to observe them – they way they moved around, towards and away from one another; the variations in colour and pattern on their shells; the patterns they formed on the page. Most interesting to me was the way they interacted with the paper itself. Outside, almost all of the snails slid off the page and away into the gardenafter a short while, leaving very little trace that they had ever been there. The couple that I brought indoors started to chew the paper, and their munching was surprisingly loud and powerful. These snails did leave the marks of their presence, either biting through a few layers but leaving the page intact, or creating a hole in my ink-scribbled pages. After a while, I removed the snails and replaced them in the garden to go about their days as if nothing much had happened.
To document this process I took photos on my phone. They weren’t of fantastic quality, but gave a nice sense of the snails interacting with the paper, capturing their tentacles fully extended and the translucency of their bodies. Later, I would go on to use one of these images in my poem “Song for a lisp” (a version has been published in The Interpreter’s House, along with two of the photos from 2014). I’ve also referred back to this experiment as part of my ongoing “Compost poems” project.
In “Song for a lisp” I call this experiment “an ecoliterary intervention”, with a wink and a nudge. Having trained myself out of lisping over many years, I had wanted to write myself a tongue-twister that would undo that training and release my voice as it was/is, without the internalised social pressures and shame that too often accompany having a speech impediment. The visual experiment with the snails eventually connected with my writing about tongues (both physical and as languages). Initially wanting to explore physical similarities in texture of the tongue and the snail’s foot, I realised that the snails also helped me to employ a certain faux-academic, formally observant register in the poem, which is about mistakes, slippages and speech impediments. Using a mock-serious, verbose and procedural register allowed me to sit the poem in that space of training/being taught whilst also undermining it, letting out something freeing, uninhibited, and “incorrect”. My hope is that the effect would enact mistakes and impediments as a valid means of aquiring and communicating knowledge, and one that opens up the potential for play, irreverence, trying things out, and collaboration (even with other life forms).
Now that my first pamphlet will be published in 2021, and is currently being typeset and possibly illustrated, it has been fun to repeat the experiment in the hopes of getting some photos of higher, printable quality. I’m still working through this process, making plenty of mistakes and slip-ups, but am enjoying it and wanted to share a few of the new photos.
