The Slither.

You’re walking.

And you can feel the ground underneath your feet so clearly, you may as well be barefoot. Maybe you are? The sun is warm and it lights up the ground, the stone, the sand, the chalk, the gravel. Whatever kind of surface you are standing on. It’s different for everyone.

Your feet aren’t used to this skin to earth contact and so it hurts a little, but as you wriggle your toes into some kind of comfort around the grains of matter of your choosing, you certainly know you are there, in that place.

The thing.

The problem.

Perhaps.

Is that although you might be here in this place. Look up, ahead, over there, over the vista, the valley, the grassy plain, the river, the sea, the wall, into the distance. That’s where you want to be. 

Over yonder, in that place.

And although you’re not sure why, you begin the journey.

You can see it in the distance, you’ve seen it many times, in fact it’s always there, it pretty much surrounds you on all sides at all times, it’s a little blurry and hard to make out but it’s doable.

I’m not sure where you are standing as you look out at it. But I can describe what I see.

It’s often pink, and fuzzy around the edges, most of it – in fact all of it – doesn’t take up much of the rectangular format that my mind revents to when thinking about this place, although ive never actually been. In fact it’s mostly a slither along the bottom of the frame. A train or car window, the lip of a field, boarded by a hedgerow far far away.

The other three quarters of it are taken up by the vastness of blue.

And so you fall in love with a colour – in this case the colour blue – as if falling under a spell, a spell fought to stay under and get out from under in turn. ^[1]

The vast blue often takes the form of a gradient, starting pale, maybe more palma violet and of the same density, leading onto a thin pink rinse, closely followed by the kind of blue that can at once – denote to a person inside looking out – a cold autumnal mist and the need for a coat or scarf. Or a soft spring morning due with grass illuminated by dollar spot^[2], or web.

In any case I can see this blue scape a lot closer up than I can see the slither along the bottom.

In any case I must get to that slither even if I must get down and mimic such a movement myself.

I don’t really know what’s over there, north south east or west respectively, but as I walk forward upon a limestone gravel path, bathed in sunlight and crowded by nettles, I foresee a stage in front of me.

It is not a literal stage, but a stage set enough for a protagonist to march on into and roll out lines and verse. It’s in front of me but between myself and the blurry slither and the blue.

Let’s call it as a painter would.  It’s the middle ground. I am the foreground and the slither is the background.

I suppose in walking onto this stage I will feel compelled to tell a story, I suppose I already am.

Landscape after all, is passive, inert made up of natural things, non humans, plants and animal bodies, minerals that constitute a backdrop for me, you. The human actor.

Landscape is: A format of printed matter or screen display that is wider than it is high.^[3]

Standing in a salon hung room of landscape paintings that open like doors, I choose this green plot to set my stage.

Of course this middle ground is in fact full of stages of varying sizes and colours, from varying time periods.

Some of these stages are so old and so “far away” they are like dying stars, flickering dimly and from such a vast distance in time that we can barely see them.

What we can see of them, their stages and their actors, that is, is barely legible, a language i atleast cannot understand. A story therefore that cannot be told.

Some stages, although large and seemingly denoting through their largeness that they are important, are in fact only loud, while others are so large yet so quiet we barely notice them.

After a small amount of probing we can see that a lot of these stages are the same, they’re soaked in a conqueror’s red, they are sharp, they are mostly if not all male presenting and they try to dominate the landscapes of past and present.

Well, I’m not telling that story.

We’ve heard it. We’ve all heard about the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long hard things, but we have not heard about the things to put things in, the container, for the thing contained.^[4]

The container for the things contained.

You blink and at once all the world is in fact not a stage but a bag.

And although perhaps equally as abstract and broad as the openness of a stage.

You think to yourself as you continue down your path.

How It feels nice to be in something rather than on it.

Suddenly the middleground and your foreground feel tantalisingly close, even the slither feels closer.

The trees that felt impenetrable like flat walls, walking through a small corridor, now have depth and if you weren’t before you’re definitely barefoot now.

It feels good.

Everything in this bag has been chosen, placed lovingly and carefully inside. Not one thing over another, but together and although the presence of the stage looms the narrative feels shared, like a conversation or an ongoing thought rather than a definitive answer or plot.

This isn’t to say that the conversations within these bags are inherently happy or good but they are of equal importance, they may even all speak at the same time but no one voice is louder than any other.

There is no perceivable roof or sides to this bag, it’s more like a knowing and much like there were many stages. I know the presence of many bags with many items all playing out their conversations at once and to no one.

Yet I am not needed to facilitate the narrative in these bags nor am I needed to carry it on my shoulders or swing it on my fingertips in order for it to continue. I am not the point, I am not the main character.

As I glide by them playing with them in my fingers as tho flicking through a clothes rail I clamber up the ridge to the water’s edge.

The slither is across the water now and still feels equally as far away as it did before.

As I stand there and think about how I’m going to navigate this water  and safely get to the otherside i’m reminded of a children’s story that is told in the format of a sort of song.

We’re going on a bear hunt.

We’re gonna catch a big one.

What a beautiful day,

Were not scared.

Oh- oh a river!

A deep cold river.

We can’t go over it

We can’t go under it

We’ve got to go through it!^[5]

And with that you go.

It’s pebbly at first and really tricky to walk.

It’s not slimy thank god but it is rather cold.

At some point you give up on your feet and accept your pre land, pre air breathing best instinct and begin to swim. It’s very suddenly deep and the distance between this shaw and the next is seeming a lot further away than you first thought.

There is a slight feeling of panic in your movements and your breath isn’t exactly easy as the coldness and weight of the water push in on you.

You note to yourself never to enter the bag that contains water again like this, as seeing as though you are not the main character you could quite easily be written out of the script.

Due to this liquid pressure surrounding your body, the overwhelming feeling of being in something rather than on it is stronger than ever.

In something or on something you think.

I’m in a bag. I know that, a bag filled with water and I am in the water.

But what if i was in a bag filled with water, but on the water instead.

You lay your head back and thrust up your legs. Your belly acting like a fisherman’s boyd pulls your body flat and even with the surface, like a shipwreck in reverse. You’re floating.

Your view of the world is weird from here, it’s that vast blue again but with no slither of edge, no edge at all and it is as infinitely deep, as it is wide.

For something to be weird it must first exist, yet exist for reasons we do not know^[6].

The weird thing is not simply the awareness of the outside but the perceptual flip that happens upon awareness when you see back at the inside, from the outside position. Its only when you get a glimpse of “normality” that you realise you’ve been inside at all.^[7]

The pressure of the water helped you realise you were inside something and therefore had the ability to also be outside of it. As you step back on the shaw and the atmosphere around you that you know you are in yet cannot feel constantly pushing against you, raises the question, what is it to be outside of it.

To be outside of this atmosphere is to be in space.

And to be in space, to be in dark matter, to see a black hole.

Now that is to be weird.

Okay, but what is it to be outside of this middle ground that I now find myself in.

What is it to be outside of this bag?

How many bags am I in?

At once the bag that was so comforting before feels like a plastic one being pulled over your head and tied around your neck. The thought is overwhelming.

The line of what’s outside and inside a thing and whether you yourself are in fact inside or outside of it, is a blurry place. The further you go with it, the closer to infinity, but with that always comes infinity plus one.

Welcome to the infinity hotel.

In much the same way that size is only measurable by comparison. Eg: I am big compared to an Ant, and an Ant is big compared to a molecule. An earth is big in comparison to a continent but a planet is inconsequential in comparison to a solar system or a universe and so on and so on.

A sisyphean thought experiment, in this case, of relative uselessness going on and on and on much like:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time. It is a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.^[8]

But what about that blurry line?

What is the significance of the blur?

You’ve come to accept that perhaps the blurry slither you’re walking towards, yet get nowhere closer to, is a bit like a false summit. Every time you arrive at the top there is another top and another and another. Each one blurrier than the last.

The fact that you never actually get to this place or summit the mountain does not mean you can’t imagine what it might be like.

The blur therefore may well be a representation of a thing, a mirage, in that it is hard to make out and sits in the distance, but upon closer inspection is still just a pile of sand.

An accumulation of thousands of grains of sand, pilled together to simulate the recognisable whilst not existing at all.

To recognise is to put together an image in one’s head of something you think you have seen before, whilst looking at something you can’t quite see, until it comes into focus.

Recognising but not naming or knowing is the pixelated image before it comes into clarity.

It relies on past experience and memory, smell, taste, touch and sight to amalgamate into one clear image what it is in front of you.

If the image remains blurry the light bulb moment does not come, there is a gap in the recollection or the experience and the recall halts.

Unattainable, not fully describable but familiar, the horizon remains a blur.

A pixelated image isn’t always a bad one.^[9]

For it holds within it the essence of a thing without having to describe it.

Giving just enough to recall feelings, memories of past thoughts whilst staying loose enough to defy a truthfulness.

A pixelated image might make you want to squint and look closer. Make you think closer, read closer and slow down while you think about what it is you may be looking at.

A poor image of landscape then, might be described as an over-stimulated over populated result of landscape being inherently everything.

But what does everything look like when you see it all at once.

Blurry or flat?

Let’s imagine all the stages, all the bags and all the narratives within each one, across all of time playing out all at once. Let’s imagine all the photographs taken of this mountain landscape before us and its blurry slither layered on top of each other.

Into one another, pages and pages of google images weaving in and out of each other,

as well as the stages

and the bags

and you.

What does every single event that’s ever happened ever!

Look like all at once.

I digress, but to truly see 1000 spelled suns that hide behind these walls^[10], would be to die, or at the very least, go blind.

The idea of the monster, what it looks like and what it might be able to do to us, is always scarier in our heads than what is ever actualised.

So why actualise it.

Horror or disaster movies in the form of climate catastrophes are glimpses of terrifying futures.

It is not a future into which we can progress.

The future is unthinkable. Yet here we are, thinking it.^[11]

The horizon is always ahead of you tomorrow and alas with no chariot at your disposal.

You are in today.

You are not from the castle

You are not from the village

You are nothing.

Fortunately though, you are something, a stranger.^[12]

You sit upon a ridge, that you hoped may have been that slightly denser part of the slither where slither meets the blue but of course find yourself looking out again and more slither and more blue in the distance.

And upon this sight you finally accept that you are a snake eating its own tail.

You do not feel the need to go there, nor describe every inch or tell every story.

You exhale the air from inside your body out and allow yourself to simply look.

The landscape is quiet, yet full, the slither, still blurry.

And you?

Neither in, nor on.

Simply part of the scenery.

^[1] Maggie Nelson, Bluets, 2019

^[2] Dollar spot is a fungal disease found in turf grass that has the appearance of spider webs.

^[3] Google search: Landscape, Definitions from Oxford Languages

^[4] The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin, 1986.

^[5] We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, Michael Wayne Rosen, 1989

^[6] Dark Ecologies, Timothy Morton, 2016.

^[7] The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher, 2016

^[8] Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, from Macbeth, spoken by Macbeth, William Shakespear. 1606.

^[9] In Defense of the Poor Image, Hito Steyerl, 2009.

^[10] Kabul, Mirza Muhammad Ali Sa’ib, 1700’s

^[11] Dark Ecologies, Timothy Morton, 2016.

^[12] The Castle, Franz Kafka, 1926