Have a Hagfish Halloween!

I got this photo of hagfish slime from iStock photos, but I’m also gonna wait for you to go take a look at the first photo in this excellent Atlantic article on hagfish published a couple of years ago.

Source: ffennema on iStock

Isn’t it magnificent? The slime just totally engulfing that car, reaching out like a swamp monster determined to claim back the land and everything on it, one mucusy tendril at a time.

What a hagfish looks like. Source: Nastastic on iStock.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, Happy Halloween, y’all. Also, that slime doesn’t play nearly as big a role in my life as the Nickelodeon of my childhood would have had me believe. 

I love the article too — I love all of Ed Yong’s articles — although apparently in this case, the slime is somewhat deceptive. Instead of being, well, snotty in the most graphic sense, it’s elastic and smooth. Douglas Fudge — and how great is it that the scientist who studies hagfish slime has the name Fudge, which combined with slime makes it all the more textural and somewhat queasy — describes it this way: “‘It doesn’t feel like much at first, as if a spider has built a web underwater.’”

It has grip though, just like the swamp monster. “But try to lift your hand out, and it’s as if the bucket’s contents are now attached to you.”

I’ve been feeling a bit haunted by a swamp monster lately myself. I’ve been thinking of all the things I’ve said wrong, all the times I should have held my tongue and didn’t. It’s as if I’ve put my finger into a bucket of hagfish slime and tried to pull it out.

I read this wonderful essay recently, Sandra Newman’s Every House is a Haunted House. “For me, the act of slicing onions is haunted by the person who taught me a trick for slicing them more efficiently, a man who died from a heroin overdose twenty years ago,” Newman writes. “Gloomy words are totally infested; for most of us, cancer will sooner or later be terrible with personal history.”

There’s the swamp monster’s finger, there’s the haunted history. It’s hard to move, sometimes, with all the slime.

That said, if the hagfish’s slime is so effective, so inescapable, why don’t we live now in some hogfish world, wading each day through oceans of mucus, trapped like bugs in amber by some furious fish?

Apparently, slime is not the hagfish’s only trick, or even its primary one. It escapes predators mainly by “wearing a set of extremely loose pajamas, Fudge says. If a shark bites down, ‘the body sort of squishes out of the way.’”

Only after escaping does the hagfish let loose with the slime, clogging its enemy’s gills in the process. “Even a shark was forced to retreat, visibly gagging on the cloud of slime in its jaws.”

Maybe less swamp monster, then, than a good last line before heading to the door. “And don’t ever mess with me again!” Something like that. The kind of thing I can never think to say in the moment. “Serves you right!” Or just the classic, “Fuck you!”

“We ourselves are mostly made of ghosts and can’t exist without them, much as our bodies are made by DNA, which is the living persistence of the deep past,” writes Newman. “There is no real decluttering that does not move us closer to our own extinction, just as there is no real antisepsis that is not universal death.”

Sliming is such an odd defense because it’s both a release and a capture, an escape and a reaching back. If we are made of ghosts and can’t exist without them, maybe sometimes our most complicated ghosts are our regrets, the things we run away from, slime, hold on to, come back to, hear from again, swamp monster, repeat. 

Maybe the hagfish has it right. Hold on, hold on to everything. Haunt it all.

Happy Halloween!