ENTANGLED LIFE
I have been reading Entangled life: how fungi make our worlds, change our minds & shape our futures and have been bowled over by it. But at the same time I have been unable to put my response into words. I think there are at least several reasons for this.
My first thought is to think that I am too stupid. Merlin Sheldrake explains things as simply and clearly as he can, aimed at a general reader, not a biologist, and I simply am too dumb to understand. This may well be true, but I think that this reasoning would also apply to other ordinary non scientists. I am guessing that the book is almost opaque to most people. Are we all dumb or is something else going on?
A second thought is that the understanding of micorrhizal networks is so new, with scientists themselves not understanding what is going on, that scientists have to develop a new set of words to describe what is going on. A micorrhizal network is the connections that fungi form within colonies of fungi to exchange nutrients and chemical and electrical connections which also can include connections to a wider variety of plants through a network of underground filaments. But somehow when I write this it doesn‘t describe what is really going on. Many more specific precise words are necessary, words and processes that are very hard to explain.
A third thought is that scientists themselves barely know what is going on. And the reason for this is that the complex micorrhizal networks are so new and so counter intutive that when we explain them with the language we use for everything else we talk about that we are simply using the language that humans use to describe human functioning in the world. Micorrhizal networks simply function in some completely other way making our language and ways of understanding the world incomplete and self centered. Describing the micorrhizal networks in human terms blinds us to what is really going on, or at least is too narrow to be very useful. And when scientists develop a new vocabulary and turn intuition upside down, as an ordinary person using the old language I can‘t tell what they are talking about.
So how then, if I am so blinded by my own narrow language that I feel completely stupid, can I so blown away. I should simply be baffled and give up. So I‘ll try and put into words some of the things in the first half of the book that have blown me away.
1. Interconnectedness to the point of fusing. The first thing that knocks me out is the discovery that in a world of separate plant life and animal life and human life all competing to survive in the slow evolutionary process that has led to every form of life on earth, micorrhizal networks show that fungal life and microbial life and plant life and animal life are very often fused together and not separate at all. There is often a symbiotic relationship among separate forms of life with one form of life embedded within another or fused with another in what is described as the “wide wood web.” A lot of this is going one within me. And this teeming fusion of life is basic to the survival of all life. This idea is so counter intuitive and so huge that it simply knocks me out.
2. Communication within the micorrhizal networks is done in a huge number of ways, over long distances and almost instantly. Intuitively I know that you need a brain to communicate so that only creatures with a brain can communicate. I know I’ve read that in quantum physics certain things (don’t ask me what) can seem to affect each other when completely separated from each other. I accept that as a cockeyed idea that I am not going to worry about. But here, right under might feet, apparently through fungi micorrhizal networks all kinds of communication of very different types—chemical, electrical, physical and who knows what else (magical)—is going on between mushrooms and lichens and plants and various kinds of slime. This is happening right here on College View Drive among stuff that I dismiss as weeds and mushrooms and lichens and trees, a process that I am completely unaware of it. This is so complicated that even Merlin Sheldrake is unsure what is going on or how. But he assures me it is. I put things in words, birds chirp, elephants bellow, whales communicate over thousands of miles. All are forms of communication between animals with brains. But this cacophony of signals right under my feet through an a web of micohizzal fibers and ducts is too huge for me to be able to accept.
3. Assumptions about time. This web of micorrhizal networks began when the first fungi left the ocean and came on barren land in a fusion with plant life. The micorrhizal networks served as roots until plants developed roots and when plants developed roots they were connected with micorrhizal networks. That was 600 million years ago. They have been developing ever since and are everywhere, miles below the surface of the earth, in boiling springs, embedded in ice. In the brief time of the dinosaurs and the short time of mammals on earth and the flicker of an eye that humans have been human these fungi have been everywhere and can survive almost anything over long periods. Humans are like the moon shade flower that blooms for one day only and then is gone, fungi, that mushroom in the yard, the flower of fungi, are basic to life on earth.
Those are three things that reading Entangled Life has done that dislocates me completely and that is enough for one night. I’ve had to skip the explanation and the big words except for “micorrhizal” which is still beyond my understanding because Entangled Life is impossible for me to summarize. But the larger ideas which I’ve just listed and which Merlin Sheldrake insists on beating me over the head with, just knock me out.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 