kerlingarfjoll started reading Faith, Hope, and Carnage by Nick Cave
Faith, Hope, and Carnage by Nick Cave, Sean O'Hagan
Faith, Hope and Carnage is a meditation on faith, art, music, freedom, grief and love.
Created from more than forty …
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kerlingarfjoll quoted Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting …
A mycelial network is a map of a fungus’s recent history and is a helpful reminder that all life-forms are in fact processes not things. The “you” of five years ago was made from different stuff than the “you” of today. Nature is an event that never stops. As William Bateson, who coined the word genetics, observed, “We commonly think of animals and plants as matter, but they are really systems through which matter is continually passing.” When we see an organism, from a fungus to a pine tree, we catch a single moment in its continual development.
kerlingarfjoll quoted Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting …
No matter where fungi grow, they must be able to insinuate themselves within their source of food. To do so, they use pressure. In cases where mycelium has to break through particularly tough barriers, as disease-causing fungi do when infecting plants, they develop special penetrative hyphae that can reach pressures of fifty to eighty atmospheres and exert enough force to penetrate the tough plastics Mylar and Kevlar. One study estimated that if a hypha was as wide as a human hand, it would be able to lift an eight-ton school bus.
kerlingarfjoll quoted Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting …
The Latin root of the word extravagant means “to wander outside or beyond.” It is a good word for mycelium, which ceaselessly wanders outside and beyond its limits, none of which are preset as they are in most animal bodies. Mycelium is a body without a body plan.
kerlingarfjoll quoted Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting …
Mycelium is conceptually slippery. From the point of view of the network, mycelium is a single interconnected entity. From the point of view of a hyphal tip, mycelium is a multitude.
kerlingarfjoll quoted Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting …
Boddy encouraged mycelium to work out the most efficient routes between the cities of Great Britain. She arranged soil into the shape of the British landmass and marked cities using blocks of wood colonized with a fungus (the sulfur tuft, or Hypholoma fasciculare). The size of the wood blocks was proportional to the population of the cities they represented. “The fungi grew out from the ‘cities’ and made the motorway network,” Boddy recounted. “You could see the M5, M4, M1, M6. I thought it was quite fun.”
kerlingarfjoll quoted Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting …
Mycelium is ecological connective tissue, the living seam by which much of the world is stitched into relation. In school classrooms children are shown anatomical charts, each depicting different aspects of the human body. One chart reveals the body as a skeleton, another the body as a network of blood vessels, another the nerves, another the muscles. If we made equivalent sets of diagrams to portray ecosystems, one of the layers would show the fungal mycelium that runs through them. We would see sprawling, interlaced webs strung through the soil, through sulfurous sediments hundreds of meters below the surface of the ocean, along coral reefs, through plant and animal bodies both alive and dead, in rubbish dumps, carpets, floorboards, old books in libraries, specks of house dust, and in canvases of old master paintings hanging in museums. According to some estimates, if one teased apart the mycelium found in a gram of soil—about a teaspoon—and laid it end to end, it could stretch anywhere from a hundred meters to ten kilometers. In practice, it is impossible to measure the extent to which mycelium perfuses the Earth’s structures, systems, and inhabitants—its weave is too tight. Mycelium is a way of life that challenges our animal imaginations.
kerlingarfjoll quoted Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting …
One can confront hyphae with microscopic labyrinths and watch how they nose their way around. If obstructed, they branch. After diverting themselves around an obstacle, the hyphal tips recover the original direction of their growth. They soon find the shortest path to the exit, just as my friend’s puzzle-solving slime molds were able to find the quickest way out of the IKEA maze. If one follows the growing tips as they explore, it does something peculiar to one’s mind. One tip becomes two, becomes four, becomes eight—yet all remain connected in one mycelial network. Is this organism singular or plural, I find myself wondering, before I’m forced to admit that it is somehow, improbably, both.
kerlingarfjoll quoted Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting …
Dante started digging furiously. “It looks like a truffle,” Lefevre said, reading the dog’s body language, “but it’s deep.” I asked whether he ever worried about Dante’s nose or feet getting hurt from all the frantic digging. “Oh he does keep injuring his pads,” Lefevre admitted. “I keep meaning to get him some booties.” Dante snorted and scraped, but to no avail. “I feel bad not rewarding him for his efforts when he’s unsuccessful”—Lefevre crouched down and ruffled his curls—“but I haven’t found a treat that’s worth more to him than a truffle. Truffles trump everything.” He grinned up at me. “For Dante, God lives just below the surface of the soil.”
kerlingarfjoll quoted Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting …
Boil it down and there aren’t many other options. Fungi may not have brains, but their many options entail decisions. Their fickle environments entail improvisation. Their trials entail errors. Whether in the homing response of hyphae within a mycelial network, the sexual attraction between two hyphae in separate mycelial networks, the vital fascination between a mycorrhizal hypha and a plant root, or the fatal attraction of a nematode to a fungal toxic droplet, fungi actively sense and interpret their worlds, even if we have no way of knowing what it is like for a hypha to sense or interpret. Perhaps it isn’t so strange to think of fungi as articulating themselves using a chemical vocabulary, arranged and rearranged in such a way that it might be interpreted by other organisms, whether nematode, tree root, truffle dog, or New York restaurateur. Sometimes—as with truffles—these molecules might translate into a chemical language we can, in our way, understand. The vast majority will always pass over our heads, or under our feet.
kerlingarfjoll quoted Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting …
Correlating human language with an odor involves judgment and prejudice. Our descriptions warp and deform the phenomena we describe, but sometimes this is the only way to talk about features of the world: to say what they are like but are not. Might this also be the case when we talk about other organisms?
kerlingarfjoll quoted Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting …
Truffles thrive in the disturbed environments that humans make. In Europe, truffle production plummeted during the twentieth century as the truffle-growing heartlands of managed woodland were either cleared for agriculture or abandoned and left to grow into mature forests. Neither are good for truffle production. For Lefevre, the resurgence of trufficulture is exciting because it is a way to produce a cash crop from a forested landscape and divert private capital into environmental restoration. To grow truffles, you have to grow trees. You have to acknowledge that the soil is full of life. You can’t cultivate truffles without thinking at the level of the ecosystem.
kerlingarfjoll quoted Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting …
Biological realities are never black-and-white. Why should the stories and metaphors we use to make sense of the world—our investigative tools—be so? Might we be able to expand some of our concepts, such that speaking might not always require a mouth, hearing might not always require ears, and interpreting might not always require a nervous system? Are we able to do this without smothering other life-forms with prejudice and innuendo?
kerlingarfjoll quoted Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting …
The truffle and its tree are like lovers, or husband and wife,” he crooned. “If the threads are broken, there can be no going back. The bond is gone forever. The truffle was born from the root of the tree, defended by the wild rose.” He gestured to the brambles. “It lay inside, protected by the thorns like Sleeping Beauty, waiting to be kissed by the dog.”
kerlingarfjoll quoted Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting …
Fungal self-identity matters, but it is not always a binary world. Self can shade off into otherness gradually.