There’s a Fungus Among Us: The Contemporary (Re)Surgence of Mycelium
“You can not kill me in any way that matters.”
“Decay is an extant form of life.”
Mushrooms grow in dark, moist places teeming with rot. They are the first things to arise after death and function as a part of decay. Various fungi have long sprung up from the pages of gothic horror novels – a necessary result of the decrepit haunted houses and sometimes the haunting themselves.
One fungus (in real life, not in fiction) takes over the brains of ants and can infect whole colonies. Ophiocordyceps unilateralis (commonly known as the zombie-ant fungus) is the stuff of science fiction and the advent of apocalyptic tales, yet we coexist with these disturbing realities all the time. (The same fungus inspired the popular video game The Last of Us). The world is incredibly strange and becomes more so the closer we look, generating that feeling of horror, that urge to look away, instead of deal with the limits of our own understanding.
Why are we so obsessed with them? It’s certainly part of the unknown – we may have discovered that mushrooms are at the heart of many of our insanities, much as we’ve discovered the root of other things that go bump in the night and run, insane, through the attic. But it goes deeper: there is so much that a fungus can do as it is unrestrained by many of the rules that plague us animals. Their requirements for life are death: as tumblr user personsonable noted, “decay is an extant form of life.” It persists beyond where human hearts would stop beating, and it can even move the dead.
There has been a slew of books in recent years investigating the ways that fungus lives with us. In the recent novella What Moves the Dead, T. Kingfisher takes inspiration from Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” a quintessential haunted house, and Silvia Garcia-Moreno’s Mexican Gothic. The protagonist, Alex Easton, is a non-binary soldier from the fictional country whose language, Gallacian, has more modes of being than are translatable in English. Coming to call on their childhood friends, Madeline and Roderick Usher, they meet an odd British mycologist and an American doctor attempting to understand what, exactly, is happening to the House of Usher. All is not as it seems, as the possessed wildlife and decaying life all seem to turn towards the lake, replete with life – or something else entirely. Everything seems coated with a white film, including Madeline and the fish that they’ve been eating, but the rabbits are rather suspect, hopping merrily away after receiving mortal wounds. What is the strange flow emanating from the lake?
In her acknowledgments, Kingfisher encourages readers to “just go read Mexican Gothic,” which I agree makes an excellent complement. The book follows Noemí Taboada as she goes to the estate of her cousin’s new husband, from which the cousin had sent a panicked missive begging for help. There is a nod towards Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and the tradition of women being shut up in massive estates for the sake of men’s wealth and image (and immortality). Upon her arrival, Noemí is told – by the family’s exclusive doctor – that her cousin is suffering from tuberculosis and general hysteria. Noemí remains unconvinced and begins to investigate as she experiences strange nightmares. The overbearing matron of the house bans smoking, noise, and speaking at dinner, and the decrepit patriarch casts disturbing looks at Noemí when he isn’t wailing through the night. The connections between generations of colonial trauma, the disturbing, eugenicist racism of the patriarch, and the isolation of the family estate make for an eerie, disturbing setting in which Noemí tries to determine who she can trust.
Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland is an intense, tragic foray into the world of fungus and transformation. Vern, 15 and raised in a religious cult called “Cainland,” escapes into the woods 7 months pregnant with twins. She forges a place for herself and the children, Feral and Howling, for several years before persistent visions and bodily changes make her search for her childhood friend who escaped the cult without her. Vern has to grapple with the changes that Cainland – and its trauma – wreaks on her body, a body that becomes stranger to her every day. A story of survival, Rivers Solomon makes visible the impacts of trauma on the body, both the ways it can make you stronger and the ways it makes you incredibly vulnerable.
Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake follows myriad forms of fungus through their hidden life stages. By examining different species, Sheldrake encourages us to re-examine our concepts of intelligence and individuality, a recurring theme in the books mentioned in this article. This book invites us to investigate different ways of being and being in relation with the world around us.
Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World connects humans to fungus not only through our oh-so-permeable skin but also through our lifeways and economies of freedom and refuge. Looking particularly at the matsutake, a highly sought-after commodity that grows in the wake of disaster. Formed as an assemblage of growth and life, The Mushroom at the End of the World veers between the history of immigration and refugees in the United States (and globally) and the experiences of those in matsutake foraging camps and examining various policies that are and are not abided by. Tsing presents a multitudinous examination of the connective tissue of our world and a philosophical examination of what it means to survive and thrive in the wake of capitalist destruction.
Fungi have a remarkable ability to change and grow in the most adverse of conditions. Perhaps that is what makes them so interesting – do we want to emulate them? Do we want to avoid them? Mushrooms are only the fruiting, visible bodies belying the extensive systems running through plants, animals, and the earth alike. They comprise an omnipresent structure in our world if you know how to look. They aren’t solely sinister though they disturb our concepts of the world as we understand it and our concepts of ourselves. They make for rich metaphors that can affirm and threaten our current lifeways, real or imagined.
Why have mushrooms pervaded our literature so thoroughly? Perhaps we’re looking for new ways to live with the world.
