…the uncontrolled lives of mushrooms are a gift—and a guide—when the controlled world we thought we had fails.
—Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World
“Like most of us, trees don’t want to be eaten alive,” begins a piece posted on the U.S. Energy Department website. The anonymous tree-sympathetic authors explain how trees use lignin to toughen cell walls, and how for a hundred million years, nothing could break that lignin down, even as the trees died and sank out of sight. Enter fungi, some of which developed the trick of converting lignin into energy—feeding on death that could otherwise have overwhelmed the world (“Behind the Scenes: How Fungi Make Nutrients Available to the World”).
I developed tough cell walls a hundred million years ago as a child in 1970s New Jersey. My family had moved there to shorten my engineer father’s commute. His presence in the evenings had an unexpected dark side: martini-mixing started at five-thirty instead of eight. “The verbal abuse was worse,” my younger sister says about the dinner hour, but he seemed to enjoy inflicting physical pain, too, especially in small ways. He’d make that “okay” sign with thumb and middle finger then snap our heads hard above the hairline, where a bruise wouldn’t show. We never acknowledged this as violence until after our parents died and were metabolized by fire into ash.
I haven’t been silent about it, exactly, but I’ve long felt inadequate to breaking these experiences down into meaning. I didn’t, I thought, suffer as much as others—my mother and sister, for starters. My father’s violence therefore entered an inner litany of not-enoughness that has shaped how I think about and present myself. I’m not abused enough, not queer enough, not neurodivergent enough, not first generation enough. My father earned a Master’s although none of the women in my line had ever gone to college. With medication, I function well. I pass as straight.
I am the Girl Who Got Away. I won degrees, snagged a good job, created a different kind of family. I keep outrunning and outworking the torrents of criticism that threatened me during my personal Paleozoic era. I built a professional identity, however, as both a literary critic and a poet, a potential object of literary criticism, as if I can’t imagine myself beyond judgment’s framework. The quality of my writing aside—who can see their own work clearly?—I worry I am not charismatic enough to seize the big stages. When I give readings, I sell books but not great shiny mounds of them. This shames me.
Enter fungi.
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The term “wood wide web” first appeared in a 1997 article in Nature. In “Net transfer of carbon between ectomycorrhizal tree species in the field,” Dr. Suzanne W. Simard and her coauthors traced isotopes to reveal how “Plants within communities can be interconnected and exchange resources through a common hyphal network, and form guilds based on their shared mycorrhizal associates.” Mycorrhizal fungi have a symbiotic relationship with plants, connecting through hyphae—filaments collectively called mycelium, the underground organism from which mushrooms sprout—to the green plant’s roots. The interaction can be parasitic but often benefits both. The study detailed in “Net transfer of carbon” shows nutrient exchange between paper birches and Douglas firs through mycorrhizal networks. Trees, it turns out, can help each other survive environmental stressors by sending underground pulses of nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon to struggling individuals nearby. I want to call that generous, but obviously every party profits. The tree, for instance, pays the message-carrier with sugars and fats gained through photosynthesis.
In the twenty-teens, as I wrote criticism about international poetry networks enabled by digital exchange over great distances, I started reading and thinking about the fungal equivalent. My hundred-year-old house sits on a quarter acre lot on which moss competes with patchy lawn and most of the plants look scraggly. I’m a lazy gardener, allergic to all our proliferating ivy—a sad excuse for an ecopoet—but I started learning the common names of our trees and trying to imagine when they sprang up or were planted. Black walnut. River birch. A young star magnolia and crepe myrtle had clearly been introduced by the owners just before us, who did have patience for yard work.
When in 2001 we moved in with two young children, there were also three red maples, each shading a different edge of the property. We removed the rotten maple that leaned drunkenly toward the house. Another, the most beautiful, was destroyed in the 2012 derecho, a month after my father died in his own storm of feuds and betrayals. Only one still stands, and it’s not doing great. I suspect it’s as old as my wood-framed house. Did a long-ago woman stop on the stairs, arms full of laundry, and gaze at it from the window? Did she worry over her loved ones during the 1918 influenza epidemic, as in 2020 I would fret over mine?
One year I stood barefoot in the side yard by this surviving maple. I thought about a triangle of trees, two vertices now lost, and wondered if they had grown up together, with knowledge of each other, communicating through mycorrhizal networks that persist below me. How did the last maple feel now, as she dropped dead twigs starred with lichen in every heavy wind?
Then came one of those sober psychedelic moments that occur, if you’re lucky, a few times in a lifespan. I wondered if the maple was talking to me, emitting chemicals that were nudging this very train of thought. My scalp prickled. Fungi communicate with each other in electrical pulses. Recent studies show that they possess memory and make decisions. Could an underground mind be reaching out to me?
For some interval I can’t define, I knew right down to my bones that we’re all connected. The mechanisms might be cryptic, perceived only unconsciously, but we are interdependent organisms. The river birch’s thriving is my thriving. All poets’ successes are my successes.
It’s enough to be mycelial, only popping up mushrooms on an occasional damp day. You don’t have to flower in a flashy way or tower over a neighborhood to be part of its drama, its beauty.
***
I can’t always maintain a mycelial mindset, but reading helps. The truism that reading is the best way to get unstuck during a difficult writing project: I once thought this was because we espy, in the works of other authors, literary strategies we can pluck and graft. Now I suspect the gift arrives through participation in a good book, temporarily identifying with another voice, and forgetting that I’m a separate being. A poem, story, or novel must possess a certain kind of fluency and authority for me to achieve uncritical surrender—my cell walls are still braced with lignin—but what a trip.
Evangelists for fungus extol its uses as food and medicine; they dream about harnessing it to fix carbon and remediate pollution. Psilocybin can help humans suffering from PTSD, although I haven’t tried it. Pyrophilic fungi enable fire-ravaged landscapes to spring back to life. Yet fungus is associated with poison, death, and decay for good reason. Recent stories of mycological menace include the zombie fungus in the video game and HBO series “The Last of Us,” or the house haunted by mushroom spores in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic. The weird otherness of the fungal kingdom revolts and frightens people as often as it fascinates them.
Mycelium is having a moment. It’s mysterious and alarming yet full of potential, like so many of the secrets we keep. A vision hits me of a luminous mycelial thread of love and responsibility connecting me to each family member during those terrible childhood dinners. I pick up scissors and snip the link to my father. Along that line, the care only flowed one way.
Literally, none of us could live without fungus. Metaphorically, it suggests how a person can process harm by digesting it, converting it into something useful. Mycelium seems to accomplish these miracles without a brain or ego. Without charisma or literary fame.
In one of the most fun pop science books of recent years, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, & Shape Our Futures, Merlin Sheldrake writes that “Mycelium describes the most common of fungal habits, better thought of not as a thing but as a process: an exploratory, irregular tendency.” Mycelium is my current muse for the practice of making art, which I can’t always manage to do regularly or well. My failures and occasional successes don’t matter. The process, that wild secret tangle of evolving connections, will outlive me.
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Image by Carlos Andrés Reyes
