JULY 29, SATURDAY

CONNECTEDNESS

I am sounding like a broken record, not able to change the subject, but the book Entangled Life continues to upend me and makes me see things in new ways. This post is partly a response to the weekly Mahy siblings ZOOM calls which I will write about tomorrow.

But it is also my own personal, unscientific, profoundly ignorant confusion about language that is turning me upside down. Here I have been talking all my life, listening to speech all my life, writing all my life and in old age turning writing into my major occupation, and I’ve never wondered about language at all. Language is just a natural activity, so natural and normal that it doesn’t seem amazing at all, until I begin to, just slightly, pay attention. Entangled Life makes me wonder about the ways fungi communicate thorugh underground mycelium networks and that makes me wonder about how I communicate.

As I was on a walk just now I heard a bird chirping incessantly, the same notes again and again. Of course it was communicating to another bird, though for me it was just a bird mindlessly chirping, because I don’t understand its language.

I know there is an academic discipline of linguistics and since language is so complicated I am guessing that there are a number branches of linguistics in which every aspect of language is analyzed and categorized and understood, just as when I go to get my eyes checked there is one eye doctor who understands the front of my eye and another who understands the back of my eye, my retina. So there are probably dozens of linguistic specialists each understanding one aspect of linguistics.

So what business do I have trying to understand language? I’d be better off going back to school for four years so that I would know what I am talking about. But I very likely don’t even have four more years of life, and even if I have four more years of life I wouldn’t spend my last four years studying linguistics. So I am forced to deal with my confusion on my own with no reason that I can see for you, the reader, to go on listening to me as I thrash around.

I’ve got no idea how the brain became hardwired to be able to turn feeling along emotion into grammatically correct sentences and paragraphs. We certainly developed complicated languages because of some innate hard wired language ability that allowed us to do this. It is primarily through language that we communicate, although we communicate in many other ways including clothing and work and food and gestures. Our many elaborate cultures are simply forms of communication. We are born into a culture and the culture itself, the ways we communicate, becomes our identity.

But this is where I begin to sense a fusion between human beings in large tribal networks and fungi in large mycelium networks of thin tubes which first cause the decomposition of organic material and then transport nutrients, often in a symbiotic relationships with plants. Mycelium, a collection of one celled fungi can also carry communication and are almost like a giant brain.

This could be mostly in my imagination, since I am not a scientist, but this network of fungal cells seems to me almost like a huge network of humans, a tribe, in which all the individual humans are connected with all of the others and can communicate with all of the others. They all dress the same, eat the same food, share the same words, have the same intonation, use the same gestures, worship the same god, mate and marry in the same way. They are all different individuals yet they are all alike, moving as a mass, responding to threats as a mass, celebrating as a mass. They even house themselves in the same way. You can go from one end of the tribal territory to the other and somehow all the strip malls are exactly alike with the same McDonalds by the same Taco Bell.

And what ties the tribe, the culture is communication, language. We think of ourselves as individuals but we spend our lives fitting in with each other and all being alike. We are most threatened by tribes living near us who are slightly different from our tribe, recognizing the difference instantly from the slightly different language difference, the slightest pronunciation difference. Each tribe is connected through communication of one kind or another.

I know I am being unscientific and am simply sensing something that I can’t put my finger on. But somehow language of all kinds, spoken and acted, binds us together. And I have no more idea how this network of communication functions than I do how fungi communication through mycelium functions. I have no idea where these words on the page come from or how they are put together grammatically and how they go from my mouth or fingers and someone else encodes them and makes sense of them, than I know how mycelium can communicate across acres instantly. Somehow both forms of communication seem to be a similar mystery.