Motion & Mushrooms
School is postponed due to the pandemic. I’m in a weird blank space, free of the responsibility of work but also of the grounding and normalcy that it could provide. I am face-to-face with myself, with zero distractions from the task of living my life and making every hour worth something to me, since they’re not worthwhile by any economic measure.
Anthony and I were driving across the country as the virus spread. The plan had been to pick up my brother’s old car in San Francisco and then take some time getting back to New York, touring the South and Southwest. When the country began going into lockdown, it didn’t really make sense to change our plans, though we began to skirt the cities and tourist attractions, sticking to hiking and remote cabins in farmland.
It felt safe in our car, in a very American way. Shut off from other people, with total freedom of movement, engaged in an activity that even amidst a pandemic is the most likely thing to kill you. But one danger seemed present and the other so prosaic as to be invisible. I felt mostly very calm as I drove. I had one task, which was to keep going, and it took just enough attention and energy that I couldn’t obsess helplessly the way I did every time we stopped.
The way the emergency expressed itself on the road was indirect. Gas prices fell as we drove. Was it due to the region or the dropping price of oil? The churches we passed had signs like, “Wash your hands cuz Jesus and germs are everywhere,” or “Pray and wash your hands, God’s got this!” We saw trailers with Quebec license plates driving north on I-81 — Canadian “snowbirds” who wintered in Florida going home just a little early.
We went to big-box stores to stock up on supplies but disagreed about how much to get. Seeing empty shelves at Walmart triggered my American cockroach brain, sending me into a tailspin of panic and greed. I found it hard to articulate what I was afraid of. It wasn’t even the unlikely prospect of literally having no toilet paper — I’m fine using water. My fears, I think, were more about scarcity in general. What if I couldn’t buy this thing later? Or what if it were really expensive later, and I regretted not buying it now? There’s a subtle but significant distinction between fear of not having something vs fear of regret for not having bought it. America always blames you for not taking advantage of the opportunities presented you, which in practice often means not getting enough for yourself while the gettings good. We’re seeing senators being publicly skewered for profiting off a global pandemic, which is unambiguously corrupt, but at the same time is exactly the behavior our country preaches, at a smaller scale. (I have no idea if this tweet is a troll, but it’s perfect.) Anyway, we didn’t buy all of the toilet paper.
When we finally got back to New York, it was like coming home to a city you’d known a long time ago. There was our familiar skyline, and there were people on Canal street, as always, but not as many as there should’ve been. And maybe it was our imagination, but it seemed that people shuffled past one another quickly and that it was not loud in the way we were used to. Since coming home, my mind bounces jaggedly from “nothing has changed” to “everything has changed.” But then, minds do that always. Near the end of our trip, when my parents were urging us to get back to New York before the city “closed down,” panic would come in waves occasionally followed by moments of magnificence. Inhale and focus on the blue Shenandoah mountains, Billie Eilish growling over the stereo, Anthony next to me in a warm car surrounded by fog. The only thing that’s changed, for us, is our certainty in the future, but for now we’re okay.
What I’m reading
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Precarity once seemed the fate of the less fortunate. Now it seems that all our lives are precarious - even when, for the moment, our pockets are lined. In contrast to the mid-twentieth century, when poets and philosophers of the global north felt caged by too much stability, now many of us, north and south, confront the condition of trouble without end…
We hear about precarity in the news every day. People lose their jobs or get angry because they never had them. Gorillas and river porpoises hover at the edge of extinction. Rising seas swamp whole Pacific islands. But most of the time we imagine such precarity to be an exception to how the world works. It’s what “drops out” from the system. What if, as I’m suggesting, precarity /is/ the condition of our time - or, to put it another way, what if our time is ripe for sensing precarity? What if precarity, indeterminacy, and what we imagine as trivial are the center of the systematicity we seek?
Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others. Unpredictable encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves. Unable to rely on a stable structure of community, we are thrown into shifting assemblages, which remake us as well as our others. We can’t rely on the status quo; everything is in flux, including our ability to survive…Indeterminacy, the unplanned nature of time, is frightening, but thinking through precarity makes it evident that indeterminacy also makes life possible.
The Mushroom at the End of the World is a fantastic book, a weird mix of social criticism and anthropology as told through the story of a mushroom. Her idea of building a framework for looking at the world through precarity, rather than progress, was mindblowing to me and couldn’t be more relevant to our present moment.
I have plenty of friends whose response to climate anxiety is a kind of aloof nihilism, calmly accepting futility in the face of societal collapse in a way they think is edgy and radical. But what Tsing argues, I think, is more radical. Capitalism tells us that our lives are only worthwhile to the extent that they are accumulative, progressive, constantly improving. Most of us would claim not to fully buy into that, but then where do we get this deeply-held belief that life stops if our civilization begins to recede instead of grow? We can all agree that the future is apt to be a shitshow. But instead of giving up, maybe we need to change our understanding of how the world works. And one way to start, Tsing suggests, is to begin noticing what functions at the edges of capitalism today.
She brings it all back to the matsutake, an extremely valuable (in Japan) mushroom that flourishes in human-disturbed forests, specifically eroded or cleared land that advantages pine trees. The matsutake cannot be cultivated, only foraged, and so the economic systems around it preclude the industrial-style farming that has messed up so much of our land and food. The matsutake is both a symbol of what Tsing calls “pericapitalism” and its commercialization is an enactment of it.
I’ve never tried a matsutake; supposedly the taste is strange and even “disturbing” to people who aren’t used to it. I’ve loved every mushroom I’ve eaten, so that makes me even more curious about it. But having only our regular, industrially-grown mushrooms right at this moment, here’s a recipe for portobellos.