Inbetweeners
On the meaning of (re)mediation in mycelial and human worlds.
I think a lot about middlemen. Inbetweeners. Intermediaries. Brokers. Connectors. Agents. I’m weary of them. I always have been. I’ve heard more than my fair share of stories about shrewdly clever individuals insinuating their way into situations, between the producer and the purchaser of a product, screwing over all parties involved and making their getaway. Extracting value. Energy. Resources. Time. Every step of the way in my life, I’ve tried to go it alone (in this respect) in an effort to avoid the dilution of my effort. There’s an old saying, “if you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together.” Cooperating within a team is another story altogether, in fact, it’s the antithesis (and thesis) of this one. I’ve desperately tried to skirt middlemen ostensibly selling me a service when in reality, they’re just selling me short.
I don’t mean to seem negative. It’s just the reality I’ve lived. It is, and always has been, a feature of the “civilized” human world. Sometimes, when that world gets to be too much, I take the commuter train out to the forest to spend a day away from it all. All the e-mails, all the asks, all the offers, and just be in nature. The irony, of course, is that in that escape I wind up charmed, thrilled, enchanted, and astounded by the very inbetweeners I’d sought to escape. With one crucial difference. Out in the woods, they’re fungal.
Nature is neutral. The lion doesn’t hunt the antelope out of spite, nor disdain. The beech tree does not climb faster than its peers out of jealously, nor loathing. Not least of all, connectors in the forest do not mediate relationships out of egotistic gain. The living world is not without emotion, but the relays between its feeling and action are perhaps fewer and purer in their connections. A connector in nature wedges its way in between actors for very different reasons. When Merlin Sheldrake calls mycelium “a living seam by which much of life is stitched into relation” he gets at the heart of a crucial asymmetry between the human world of language and memes and money both inside minds and between them, and the living world of carbon, lignin and chitin, and the earth, wind, fire, and water that produced them both. The evolutionary quest of living systems to find value in transformations colours positions we’d consider selfish as generous. To a stock broker, a position is how much he stands to gain off any given transaction. To the mycelium of a stinkhorn mushroom, a position is to simply be — somewhere in a world without a center, fleetingly enduring the endless expanse of time.
In a forest, amoral acts of reciprocity are not beyond the pale, they exist beyond morality. Relationships simply, are. They engender complexes that edge towards something greater through their synergistic synchronicity, something truer than their individual parts. Connections in nature evolve not out of animosity, but out of collective momentum; even in predator/prey relationships, but especially in symbiont/symbiont ensembles, life begets itself. One becomes two becomes many, yes. But it ought to be rewritten exponentially as one to the two to the many… x to the n to the ∞.
There is an intimacy in the weave woven by fungal hyphae inside of and between the root hairs of plants. The exchange between parties of saccharine and mineral nutrients — the literal, elemental transformations of the sun above and the earth below — is as far away as one can imagine from the commodities, tech, and futures markets of the NYSC. There is no credit in nature. Everything is built on something. Relationships forged not on the promised, but the palpable. In a world without sight, appearance is absent. Image means nothing; things, everything.
Fungal essence embodies interaction, but maybe even that word does them injustice. Their bodies are delocalized, constantly fissioning, fusing, and floating on the wind. They are less things in and of themselves, more happenings. Phenomenological organisms. In want of easy words, nature is for wont of hard chemistry. Signals which can’t be misconstrued. For fungi, there is a purity in their pheromonal calling to animal bodies to perceive their fruiting bodies as irresistible offerings. Sacrifices of the flesh to begin anew. Ironically, in my travels and career, I’ve bore witness to whole rackets set up full of dealers, the “truffle ladies” of Chicago or New York, import/export bribes, fungal fraud. All getting in between nature’s gifts and their ends, perverting their purpose, diverting their aim. Humans dilute to extract. Contrast that with nature, who transforms to give back.
When an energy gradient is about to come to rest within an ecosystem, nature, above all through her manifestation as mycelium, always finds a way to gently slide her wispy tendrils beneath finality to breathe, broker, proffer, and confer new life. New pathways. New beginnings. No taxes. No fees. No contracts. Just one condition. Continuation.
We could learn something of this neutrality. We could learn to do with less (human) bullshit, and learn to do more with (actual) bullshit. To get to the core of things with honesty, and a slow urgency. To see value in that which we erroneously perceive as lost. And find something of ourselves along the way.
