In praise of fungi
Because I'm on a slippery slope towards amateur mycology at this point
Here’s a fun little bit of synchronicity for you. Last week I wrote about how a magic mushroom trip gave me this reverent attitude to music and made me want to sing more and listen to choral music a lot, specifically this one piece of choral music called The Sacred Veil. I am still listening to The Sacred Veil approximately once per day and I have looked at the album cover many times without really seeing it. Then, this week, a propos of nothing, I looked at it again and… woah. You will never guess. The abstract pattern on the album cover looks like a fungus! It actually does! Not like a mushroom, but like a mycelium, ie. the underground network of fungal threads of which mushrooms are the fruit. Look:
You see? I wonder if this means that our mushroom overlords are making everything happen. I’m not even joking. Well, I am, but the more I learn about mushrooms, the less outrageous this idea seems. Post mushroom trip, I’ve been dipping my toe into the vast and fascinating field of mycology. I rewatched the Netflix documentary Fantastic Fungi this week, which I thoroughly recommend,1 and I’ve also been reading Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, which is 100% deserving of the many accolades it’s received. Tl;dr, mycology is wild.
The other week I was telling my colleague how delicious I find king mushrooms (truly the king of mushrooms, or at least of edible shop-bought varieties) and another colleague overheard and said, ‘You’re obsessed with mushrooms!’ Which felt slightly hyperbolic at the time, but seems increasingly to be the case. Yesterday Roberto and I went for a walk with our good friend Alice, and it took us about three hours longer than usual to reach our destination because I had to keep stopping and peering at fungi. Another friend came to stay recently and sent me a thank you card afterwards with mushrooms on it, so I think I’m getting myself a reputation, which is funny because it wasn’t so long ago that the sum total of my thoughts on mushrooms was a lukewarm appreciation of them as a pizza topping. Fast forward to now, and I’m starting to think that the study of fungi could be an entire branch of philosophy. (MYCOSOPHY™, if you will! I am extremely pleased with this coinage, even though somebody somewhere has undoubtedly thought of it already.)
I don’t have any specialist mycological knowledge, only the kind readily available from Waterstones and Netflix, so I may not be able to tell you anything you don’t already know about why fungi are amazing and mind-boggling. Nevertheless, here is a little layperson’s digest of cool fungi facts. If you are hungry for more, read Entangled Life, from which much of the below is quoted or cribbed.2
Fungi are everywhere
They are on and in and around and underneath us all. Sheldrake puts it into perspective: hyphae, the threads that make up mycelium, are so dizzyingly numerous that if you extracted all of them from the top ten centimetres of soil and laid them out in a line, they would stretch across half the width of our galaxy. If you ironed them into a flat sheet, they would cover all the dry land on Earth 2.5 times over.
Truffles want to be eaten
The reason truffles smell so amazing is because they grow entirely underground and therefore can’t disperse their spores in the air. This means they need to make themselves irresistible so that animals will dig them up and eat them and disperse the spores via the medium of poo.
Lichens can survive in space
Lots of extremely tough organisms have been sent into orbit to determine how tough they really are, and the answer in most cases is: not tough enough for space. Lichens are the exception, the only life forms able to survive in ‘full space conditions, drenched in cosmic rays’ (Sheldrake). The toughest lichens can survive exposure to 12,000 times the amount of gamma irradiation that would kill a human.
Zombie fungi are real
The fictional human-eating mushrooms in the video game/TV show The Last of Us are based on a real fungus that infects the carpenter ant, seizes control of its body, grows mycelium out of its feet and sprouts a mushroom from its head. In Entangled Life there is a scaled-up picture of this fungus growing around some ant muscle fibres and it looks like a set of knobbly, creeping fingers, so we’d better hope it never mutates because I don’t think there could possibly be a worse fate than having a fungus finger-creeping its way through your insides.
Equally nightmarish is the fungus that infects cicadas, disintegrating the back ends of their bodies so that they disperse its spores as they fly. Infected male cicadas subsequently become hypersexual despite the fact that their genitals literally do not exist any more. Can you imagine a more ignominious end? Me neither.
Fungi may yet save the world
All sorts of exciting innovations involving (non-murderous) fungi can potentially help us deal with some of the many crises we currently face. Fungi can decompose a smorgasbord of toxic substances including crude oil, pesticides and certain plastics. They can also be used to make new sustainable and compostable materials for use in construction, packaging and fashion, including bricks, furniture, foam and leather. And the legendary mycologist Paul Stamets has invented a sort of antiviral feeder for bees, serving them sugar water laced with medicinal fungal extracts that help to protect them against the multiple deadly viruses transmitted by the varroa mite.3
Mushrooms can speak!
Not literally. But those who trip on psilocybin or ‘magic’ mushrooms often feel as though they are receiving wisdom. I did: I asked questions, and got answers. It feels weird to say I asked my questions of the mushrooms, but it also feels accurate. As Sheldrake points out, to many indigenous cultures who use psychedelic mushrooms for ritualistic and religious purposes, the idea that the mushrooms ‘speak’ is self-evident. He quotes the Mazatec shaman María Sabina:
There is a world beyond ours … That world talks … I report what it says. The sacred mushroom takes me by the hand and brings me to the world where everything is known.
The eccentric magic mushroom evangelist Terence McKenna advocated the idea that fungi could speak through humans, using psilocybin as a ‘chemical messenger’ that would enable them, in Sheldrake’s words, to ‘borrow a human body … wear our minds, occupy our senses, and … impart knowledge about the world.’ Obviously, this is pretty out there. But I do enjoy the idea that mushrooms might be having a grand old time cosplaying as humans while simultaneously teaching us the secrets of the universe.
Plants and fungi depend on each other
Mycology is often lumped in with plant sciences, but fungi are not plants, even thought they grow in the ground. They do have sophisticated relationships with plants, though. Plant roots and fungal mycelium get very intimate, entwining and entangling, the mycelium growing into and living in the roots. Together they form mutually beneficial partnerships in which the fungus receives energy from the plant and the plant receives nutrients from the fungus.
Fungi are the internet of the soil
Or the Wood Wide Web, as the mycologists call it. Mycelium connect not just to plants but also to other mycelium, forming a network of underground connections by which multiple plants and fungi can exchange the minerals and nutrients they need. Plants can ‘plug in’ to this network and essentially use it to communicate with each other, although the exact mechanics of how they do so are still unknown. What I find particularly cool about this is that resources are often distributed not indiscriminately, but according to greatest need. I was all set to make some observation about how fungi are essentially socialists, thinking I’d had a great insight, but the book saw this coming and reminded me that using human social systems to think about natural phenomena is anthropomorphism of the first order:
Some portray [fungal networks] as a form of socialism by which the wealth of the forest can be redistributed. Others take inspiration from mammalian family structures and parental care, with young trees nourished by their fungal connections to their older and larger ‘mother trees’. Some describe networks in terms of ‘biological markets’, in which plants and fungi are portrayed as rational economic individuals trading on the floor of an ecological stock exchange.
This is not to say that such metaphors aren’t useful when trying to make sense of processes we can’t experience for ourselves. But sometimes the metaphors say more about us, and what we value, than they do about the fungi we apply them to.
Fungi trouble our notions of individuality
The way mycelium partner with plants and connect them to other organisms raises questions about where said plants begin and end. ‘Can we think about a plant without also thinking about the mycorrhizal networks [ie. mycelium] that lace outward … from its roots into the soil?’ asks Sheldrake.
If we follow the tangled sprawl of mycelium that emanates from its roots, then where do we stop? Do we think about the bacteria that surf through the soil along the slimy film that coats roots and fungal hyphae? Do we think about the neighbouring fungal networks that fuse with those of our plant? And … do we think about the other plants whose roots share the very same fungal network?
Human dependence on plants is therefore also a dependence on countless other organisms, whether we’re aware of this or not.
Other areas of mycology also challenge our penchant for categorisation and our beliefs about autonomy and individuality. Lichens are fungi, but they are also algae — a symbiotic intertwining of different organisms to create a new organism that is greater than the sum of its parts. In fact, it was in response to the study of lichens that the word ‘symbiosis’ was coined. In recent years, scientists have discovered that lichens are made up not just of two organisms, but of three, four, many. As Sheldrake puts it, ‘a duet has become a trio, the trio has become a quartet, and the quartet sounds more like a choir’. (Choirs again!)
Lichens are only the most promiscuous examples of symbiosis. All life forms are symbiotic in that they are dependent on the communities of microbes that live on and in them, humans included. When you factor in the trillions of microbes that inhabit our bodies, we are not individuals but ‘ecosystems that span boundaries and transgress categories’ (Sheldrake, again and of course).
None of the above sounds like it should have much to do with tripping on psychedelics. And yet! A common effect of taking psilocybin mushrooms at high doses is a sense of the individual self breaking down. In the documentary How To Change Your Mind, adapted from his bestselling book of the same title, the journalist Michael Pollan describes his own experience of a magic mushroom trip:
At a certain point, I felt my sense of self begin to crumble. I looked out and saw myself explode into a cloud of blue Post-it notes. If you imagine a manuscript being blown away by the wind, you would run around trying to gather it back together. And I felt no need, no desire to collect all those Post-it notes before they flew away in the wind. It was like, “Fine, go!”
Whether they are disrupting our beliefs about what constitutes an individual, expanding our understanding of our selves to encompass other life forms, or dissolving said selves into whirling clouds of office supplies, fungi have multiple tricks by which to show us that we are not the singular, autonomous entities we think we are, and nor is anything else.
Fungi can help us get over our fear of death
One of the most exciting things about scientific research into psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, is the transformative effect it is being found to have on mental illnesses like depression, anxiety, addiction and OCD. As a lifelong hypochondriac, the studies that particularly interest me are those that have worked with terminal cancer patients in an effort to see how well psilocybin can alleviate the existential anguish of facing your own imminent death. The answer seems to be: very well indeed. Pollan has interviewed a number of these patients about their experiences on psilocybin, and many described mind-broadening mystical experiences that helped them reconcile themselves with their mortality. As one patient says in Fantastic Fungi: ‘The most glorious part [of the trip] was that it made me feel more comfortable with living, you know, because you’re not afraid of dying.’ Pollan’s own trip, the one that turned his self into a cloud of Post-it notes, helped him to understand what the cancer patients meant. As he says in How To Change Your Mind:
They had arrived at this point where they could observe their life, and the end of their life, as the most natural thing in the world. And that without a self, they would somehow merge with something larger, and that would be their immortality.
It was these words that made me want to take magic mushrooms in the first place, because I really think my life would improve immeasurably if I could stop worrying about when and how it might end.
That being said, I don’t think you actually have to take a high dose of magic mushrooms to start feeling better about the fact of your own mortality. Just learning about fungi more generally can have that effect. I’ve watched Fantastic Fungi twice, and on both occasions I came away feeling like death was not such a bleak prospect, because under the ground is not a bleak place. It is full of interconnected organisms doing things we can barely even begin to comprehend. Granted, the documentary does deploy some very pretty CGI images of glowing mycelium branching through twilit soil, which call to mind the ‘enchanted woodland’ area of a music festival and tempt me into believing that I will one day be laid to rest beneath a canopy of fungal twinkle lights. My guess is that death will not actually be this hygge. But even if the ground isn’t full of twinkle lights, it is, in Sheldrake’s words, ‘full of textures and micropores, electrically charged cavities and labyrinthine rot-scapes’. Which is just as good! I like the idea of my atoms becoming part of this subterranean world. As Paul Stamets tells a crowd of enthusiasts in Fantastic Fungi:
You will decompose! I’m gonna decompose! We’re all gonna die. That’s okay, because we will enter into the myco-verse. We will forever exist together within the myco-molecular matrix.
And lo! We are back to my moment of synchronicity earlier this week. There’s more than one layer to it, you see. The Sacred Veil has become the main outlet for all my mushroom-bestowed enthusiasm for choral music, and this is one reason it’s pleasing to observe a certain… fungal aesthetic about the album cover. But the other reason is that it has helped me make peace, albeit in a small and possibly temporary way, with some of my fears around getting ill and dying. And guess what! So have fungi. The more eccentric brand of mycological enthusiast might say that it was mushrooms that led me to this piece of music for exactly this purpose. Mushroom overlords, like I said. I’m not saying I think this. But I enjoy the fact that everything I now know about fungi makes it a thought that is possible to be had.
The only thing I did not enjoy about Fantastic Fungi was the number of times I had to listen to the word ‘fungi’ being pronounced ‘funji’, which is obviously incorrect because it ruins the joke about about the mushroom getting invited to all the parties because he’s a fun guy.
Incidentally and excitingly, the illustrated edition of Entangled Life comes out this week.
This information feels like a double-edged sword because I was not actually aware that bees are threatened by viruses in addition to insecticides, habitat destruction and carnivorous wasps. Good news that Stamets is out there fighting the bee viruses, but bad news they exist — so a net gain of zero.
I too am obsessed with these creatures - neither plants nor animals, but a third thing. And they have hundreds of genders! I love them.