thoughts on entangled life

if you haven't seen a photo of merlin sheldrake before, i encourage you to hit an image search before reading this post. i'm delighted by the vocation <-> person synchronicity here. that's a mushroom guy.

all jobs and passions can affect your appearance: corpos get choleric and glazed, rock climbers develop a bright + far-off stare. it's not usually this dramatic, though. sheldrake looks like his life was saved by a kiss from the mushroom queen & he lives forever between our two realms.

details from the book and sheldrake's wikipedia page deepen the bashertness. he's the son of a parapsychology researcher and a voice teacher who worked with overtone group chanting. terence mckenna was a family friend. may we all inhabit our lives so completely!

the final chapters of the book get into the place of metaphor in science - roughly, science proceeds by refining metaphors for phenomena that are otherwise impossible to grasp. i read entangled life carefully, & i learned truths about fungi that shocked me. it seems like our conventional metaphors about nature - + drawn from nature - are due for an update. fungi provide new metaphorical frameworks. i thought about the following:

• the present moment of your life : an intelligent hyphal tip in communication with the mycelial past. the information & influence run both ways. we also change history when we talk to it.
• politics : a forest ecology.
• the newly complicated spectrum of parasitism <-> commensalism - harm, help, and neutral coexistence not as fixed states defining relationships, but : unavoidable fluctuations within relationships.

it's a very helpful book if you, like me, have been exposed to the way certain rationalists talk about the exhaustion of scientific fields. are the days of genius over? will we need billions of synthetic minds sucking at the teat of reality in order to get a little more truth??

reading entangled life, you think: jesus, those guys are just mad that they can't sketch orchids. but sheldrake is pretty much sketching orchids. his life is in the gentleman scientist mode. even better than that, since he isn't doing harm to people, and he gets to brew cider and make movies with björk. being on a beautiful cutting edge takes grace + openness these days, maybe. if that's true, not everyone's got it. bitterness is a rich soil for bad thinking.

with sheldrake's good thinking on my mind, i'm sure we're nowhere near the limits of human understanding. how could we be, in a time of so much pain & waste? but the long future will be (God willing) more like a mushroom than a machine.

notes to self on dog-eared pages

(m., if you're reading this, sorry i did that... i'll make amends!)

remember:

• p. 74: tufts study where trained flatworms remembered environments even after re-growing their heads.
• ibid: charles sherrington in 1940 says the brain is like "an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern"; "network neuroscience."
• p. 98: lichens are a "shotgun marriage" - lichen relationships are about "the song, not the singer."
• p. 103: "holobiont" - an assemblage of different organisms that behaves as a unit. sheldrake coins(?) "symborg" to describe us and other compound lifeforms.
• p. 190: "complex adaptive system:" a person, the internet, a termite colony, a city.
• p. 230: john gerard in 1597: "Few mushrooms are good to be eaten and most of them do suffocate and strangle the eater. Therefore, I give my advice unto those that love such strange and new fangled meates to beware of licking honey amonsgt thorns lest the sweetness of the one do countervaile the sharpness and pricking of the other."
• p. 249: saint francis of assisi: "Our hands imbibe like roots, / so I place them on what is beautiful in this world." - this would be good for embroidery.

look into:

• drawings of mycelial types, fries - would also make great embroidery
• women gathering mushrooms
• radical mycology
• lisa margonelli's underbug
• ecovative
• FUNGAR
• fungi perfecti
• kropotkin's mutual aid
• st. francis' writing - maybe read in december with l.a.?