way, I love the way Plath’s mushrooms Diet on water, / On crumbs of shadow, / Bland-mannered, even though that is only a half-truth; saprophytic fungi actually require nutrition derived from decaying organic matter, just as the lignicolous mushrooms (the kind that live on wood) need that special dirt and log vitamins to thrive and reproduce.
I sometimes wish I could write Plath to explain my discoveries.
One recent Friday night I had some mushroom tea brewed from dried Psilocybe cubensis and spent the evening alone.
I can step into a vortex of minutiae. My apartment has teal green walls covered with miniature paintings and small tchotchkes stowed on every shelf. My current favorites are a half-inch-tall ceramic Jawa mounted on a broken cuckoo clock, and a quarterinch plastic Fly Amanita resting beside a one-inch squirrel holding a mini acorn. One night alone with a mug of mushroom tea can turn this situation into a microcosm of amazement.
After I’d examined the squirrel’s hair patterns (the way they swirled in bristly waves over his hindquarters) and its nose, which was smaller than a pinhead yet meticulously tipped in black, Sylvia Plath’s book (the one with the mushroom poem in it) started glowing yellow on the bookshelf. It looked as though it were pushing itself off the ledge into my hands. I opened it and proceeded to listen while the poem was read to me in the voice of a woman whom I believed to be Sylvia Plath in the afterlife. Her voice had a low, Lauren Bacall quality. As the poem’s lines were recited, I visualized each stanza while making scientifically accurate associations. Each word in the poem —bedding, hammers, earless, crannies, nudgers— began to seem like the microscopic reproductive units called spores, which are discharged from mushroom gills and dispersed on air currents. The letters that formed the words became akin to mushrooms themselves, which, by the way, are actually the fruits of the fungus—a thing that gives birth to other things.
Life forms such as mushrooms appear immortal because they are basically impossible to eliminate. When you pick a mushroom, the spores that float away will encourage more mushrooms to grow. Dead mushrooms generate life. Look at letters arranged on a page, and they too become a growing puzzle: of words, that is. The more I eat mushrooms, the more I feel related to mushrooms. We both communicate with the dead, in a way.
Sylvia’s ghost deduced from my half-formed thoughts that I wished to share my fungi learnings with her. She in turn taught me that words, like mushrooms, are capable of communicating to the living what the dead are trying to say. Don’t write to the dead, Plath taught me. We’ll come for your thoughts when we want them. Though I don’t sell mushrooms anymore, I do read books written by deceased authors. One can learn a lot from a ghost, and vice versa.
LADY OF THE LAKE
Amy and I pushed our beds together to make an island piled with stiff, green camp blankets and stuffed animals we’d brought from home. We hung by our knees from the headboards and took pictures of each other with monster hair. I looked like the Bride of Frankenstein. She looked hot like a red-faced rock star chugging Gatorade offstage. That’s the kind of life I wanted—to be the lady in tight leather pants who wiped her sweat off with a bandana—not the lady cooking chili at our Girl Scout Camp.
We spent Saturday horseback riding, not out on a trail through vines and waterfalls, but in a metal corral. Amy, who was riding behind me, said, “Remember in Friday the 13th when the girl gets stabbed in the bathroom?”
We’d been watching horror movies. Amy was a year older than me, so her mom did the renting. Friday the 13th, Hellraiser, and Repo Man were the first R-rated movies we saw. We chose them because we liked their boxes. Repo Man was boring—something about green glowing stuff and dumb beer guys taking cars away from people for some unknown reason.
I sometimes wish I could write Plath to explain my discoveries.
One recent Friday night I had some mushroom tea brewed from dried Psilocybe cubensis and spent the evening alone.
I can step into a vortex of minutiae. My apartment has teal green walls covered with miniature paintings and small tchotchkes stowed on every shelf. My current favorites are a half-inch-tall ceramic Jawa mounted on a broken cuckoo clock, and a quarterinch plastic Fly Amanita resting beside a one-inch squirrel holding a mini acorn. One night alone with a mug of mushroom tea can turn this situation into a microcosm of amazement.
After I’d examined the squirrel’s hair patterns (the way they swirled in bristly waves over his hindquarters) and its nose, which was smaller than a pinhead yet meticulously tipped in black, Sylvia Plath’s book (the one with the mushroom poem in it) started glowing yellow on the bookshelf. It looked as though it were pushing itself off the ledge into my hands. I opened it and proceeded to listen while the poem was read to me in the voice of a woman whom I believed to be Sylvia Plath in the afterlife. Her voice had a low, Lauren Bacall quality. As the poem’s lines were recited, I visualized each stanza while making scientifically accurate associations. Each word in the poem —bedding, hammers, earless, crannies, nudgers— began to seem like the microscopic reproductive units called spores, which are discharged from mushroom gills and dispersed on air currents. The letters that formed the words became akin to mushrooms themselves, which, by the way, are actually the fruits of the fungus—a thing that gives birth to other things.
Life forms such as mushrooms appear immortal because they are basically impossible to eliminate. When you pick a mushroom, the spores that float away will encourage more mushrooms to grow. Dead mushrooms generate life. Look at letters arranged on a page, and they too become a growing puzzle: of words, that is. The more I eat mushrooms, the more I feel related to mushrooms. We both communicate with the dead, in a way.
Sylvia’s ghost deduced from my half-formed thoughts that I wished to share my fungi learnings with her. She in turn taught me that words, like mushrooms, are capable of communicating to the living what the dead are trying to say. Don’t write to the dead, Plath taught me. We’ll come for your thoughts when we want them. Though I don’t sell mushrooms anymore, I do read books written by deceased authors. One can learn a lot from a ghost, and vice versa.
LADY OF THE LAKE
Amy and I pushed our beds together to make an island piled with stiff, green camp blankets and stuffed animals we’d brought from home. We hung by our knees from the headboards and took pictures of each other with monster hair. I looked like the Bride of Frankenstein. She looked hot like a red-faced rock star chugging Gatorade offstage. That’s the kind of life I wanted—to be the lady in tight leather pants who wiped her sweat off with a bandana—not the lady cooking chili at our Girl Scout Camp.
We spent Saturday horseback riding, not out on a trail through vines and waterfalls, but in a metal corral. Amy, who was riding behind me, said, “Remember in Friday the 13th when the girl gets stabbed in the bathroom?”
We’d been watching horror movies. Amy was a year older than me, so her mom did the renting. Friday the 13th, Hellraiser, and Repo Man were the first R-rated movies we saw. We chose them because we liked their boxes. Repo Man was boring—something about green glowing stuff and dumb beer guys taking cars away from people for some unknown reason.
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