I am obsessed with mulch. It has come on quickly and I do not know why. Or rather I know that I am drawn to the mulch because we all are. Because we too touch roots beneath the loam and share each others fixations, need them for the same reasons and feed each others delight as we continue to reimagine what we find beautiful. I am, suddenly, deeply endeared to the slugs and the slimes. To the things that live in the shadows of other things, to the slow and the wriggling and the underneath. I have thought of mushrooms every day for months, and of how they live. I feel warmth towards them, like a litter of something innocent and sweet.
I want to know all the ugly things in the undergrowth, the trampled things, the revolting and the slithering. To me they have become beautiful, luminous, delicate tendrils and cosy sludgy edges between the living and the earth. I am so in love with the soil. And like someone in love, I want to talk about it, all the time, while finding it difficult to explain just what has infatuated me. I am stuck between two delicious positions - the desire to tell, to explain, to be understood and to articulate precisely the rationale for my affections, and the relief of silence, the quiet, undemanding rightness of the mulch. The mulch does not need to be explained, but perhaps I would like to describe it, to you.
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What we are afraid of has changed so much. Or maybe what has changed is who We are in the writing of fear that has a chance to come and be read by others. I remember the science-fiction that I grew up watching and reading, the deep anxiety in its speculations of the capitulation to conformity, the claustrophobia of a life controlled from above, a life commodified and contained and identical to that of others. What could be worse than to be eventually taken and processed into the machine, to be spat out, anonymous, on a conveyor belt, in a cubicle, in identical genderless jumpsuits. The faceless controllers of your life are here to deny you the promise of the individual life that you were born to. What we have inflicted on you is worse than death, we have suffocated the self under our homogenous edifice.
What happens to us now, when instead of compressed until our sense of self collapses, we are stretched until it might be blown apart. Everything is so precarious. Life not an assembly line but the gathered jetsam that we might maintain hold on, limb by limb, while everything moves by so fast, so fast. It is hard to imagine who is afraid, any more, of a life of too much structure, a life materially predictable, where we will after all be housed, be fed. Where tomorrow might look like today and not be on fire. Maybe this was always the case. The old stories written by the comfortable creatives of their day, describing their own fear of losing its of sense of specialness to a conventional capitalist life that - while real and dangerous - would hardly take those rarefied scribes as its first victims.
The bad what ifs feel different now. I'm less interested in how the stories play out than the images they generate: often of the violent, physical, disintegration of the powerless. Presided over, always, by a god-like over class, gods of Olympus, whose technology may be indistinguishable from magic but whose materiality is luxuriously, exaggeratedly, real. Warm wood panelling (The Periphery), glistening fresh food (Agents of Shield - S6), glass refracted sunlight gleaming on waxed floors (Altered Carbon); these substances are immediately culturally legible, and you can touch it all - or rather, you can't. Why would you fear a sleeping half when you and everything around you might be denied that materiality; taken apart by a proto-molecule (The Expanse), be infected by an improbably spore-filled baby and subsequently crumble to dust (Nightflyers). Even in the mycologically inclined Star Trek Discovery, the beautiful, luminous Anthony Rapp - himself a tender stem against the navy muck of space - might happen upon your body twisted into a meaningless knot. All catastrophic events of fragmentation for which you will not be sedated, but horribly, excruciatingly, awake.
Our image of ourselves is shaped heavily by a sense of an individual, a discrete thing, that in turn is composed of discrete entities - work, love, interests, milestones, qualities - inside a fragile membrane that once broken - perhaps as we try in an increasingly hostile world to keep these parts nourished, in coherent order, to 'keep it together' - does not allow our innards to be absorbed by the world but leaves them adrift. But the mulch is a place of emergence. The loam is arranging and abiding by a pattern of rebirth and decay, with an incredibly porous sense of which parts of it belong to life or to death. The fungal networks, the roots, the molds, seem formed not of distinct parts with recognisable characteristics, but of similar and distributed elements from which complex behaviours arises from apparently simple nodes arranged in the pattern best suited to the creature. But what creature? Is the mushroom a thing in its own right? Is the whole fungal network alive in its own right, a thing unto itself, or both, or neither? Is it, in any conceivable way, conscious?
Previous entries in this newsletter have discussed linguistics and cognition - a field very much in the business of insisting upon the equal reality of the emergent and its summed and tangible parts. This is a precise and exhausting practice of justification in the face of impossibility. The impossibility is not scientific - it is scientifically valid to argue that such magnificent complexities as novels and love letters and whispers at night arise from a finite set of simple syntactic rules; that the contours of salient thought are intimately related to the shape of body in which the brain rides; that the hitherto accepted Platonic categories of entities in fact bleed and overlap - but it is a conceptual premise that the atomic body rejects. Outside of the academy too, a description of the world and the self as an entwined feedback loop, as a reality dependent on but not of matter, of definitions as fuzzy and in constant flux, is hard fought. It is exhausting. To be real and alive and smudged across boundaries without reaching a standard of proof that would have it be internalised by others.
The mulch is real and is alive beyond any strict taxonomy and does not have to explain itself. Slime mold at Paris zoo has 700 sexes - good for you little buddy! The mycorrhizal network is somehow, improbably, real. Some snails can change their sex. It is probably the case that plants are linked at the root level, not by mere proximity and chance, but in ways that are meaningful to the conditions of their life. Earth worms are not sexually dimorphous, their mating slimy but strangely neat, passing packets of sperm along their long bodies lying on top of the earth. And it is all so real and - in a world of visual and tactile primacy - inarguably so. There is no Cartesian anxiety to overcome, no convincing to do. The mulch just is, with all its distributed complexity and category dismissing residents.
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I notice myself saying 'mulch' as a catch-all, an inverted synecdoche, the snails and slimes, the worms and the soil they create, the loam and the leaves half decomposed on their way to becoming that compost itself while lying atop and within it, all this is the mulch, and the creators of the mulch at once. The system that emerges from the decay of vegetation, of animals, and the animal, vegetable and fungal agents of that decay themselves, all together, with roles unfixed across time, all of them the mulch. What sweeter balm could there be in a world of individual dislocation, repetitive precarity, of overwhelming existential uncertain, of a harsh and violent backlash against category violation, against distributed and communal constructs as real? The mulch continues about its many businesses against the apparent necessity of such rules, and does so so quietly, in the soft peace of necessary labour.
Is it time for us, too, to self compost in this way? Can we too feel ourselves equally real and alive, equally parts of ourselves and each other in the ditches where our futures have decayed and in the parts of ourselves we have made anew, in the places where we rebuild our connections to each other, and to what we can become? I like to think that the mulch is hope. Not a distant far hope that is reached only through utopia, as individuals who may be lucky enough to be saved. But a hope that carries within it the necessity of reconstitution, of reorganising our ideas of self and selves, of reordering our convictions about how our realities come about, and by which mechanisms. Maybe this will bring our view of one another and the cultural forms we contribute to and share more in like with something like reality. Maybe it will just bind us in community. Maybe if we give our bodies to the soil the disintegration of these times - so much of which cannot now be undone - will feel less threatening, when we trust that we might reknit ourselves into new, alive, intelligent shapes. And maybe I can be quiet, and useful, underfoot.