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Mushroom Magic: Commentary with a Review of Fantastic Fungi by Louie Schwartzberg

Saturday, January 4, 2020 22:48

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This is a piece that morphed from an essay into a review. It’s something that’s been germinating for a while, but I think after watching the documentary from Louie Schwartzberg Fantastic Fungi, it finally bore fruit. As I try to formulate my thoughts, finally writing what is a difficult topic, my elderly mom shouts from the next room, asking a question that’s already been answered more than half a dozen times, interrupting my flow yet again. My being a full-time caretaker has certainly brought a few things into focus, things that until last Friday, I had trouble putting into words. But, watching an eagerly anticipated film in the great little Showroom Cinema in Asbury Park, I’m finally able to gather the words together and perhaps move forward, finally, with intent and compassion.

It’s not that I’m not compassionate, but it’s been running low lately, and I find, alongside what might be caregiver burnout, my old childhood fears have started creeping forth again. Fears I thought had been forcibly stuffed away were merely incubating there beneath the surface. Of course, that’s common sense. My fears are also common, but I suppose it’s better to work this all out now, while I have “time” instead of be in the position my father found himself in 3 years ago: facing a terminal prognosis with a resolute, almost absolute refusal to believe it, even when his body was shutting down, even when he stopped functioning. My father’s subconscious insistence that This Wasn’t Happening granted him what has to be one of the worst deaths I could imagine. After months of chemo and only 1 radiation treatment, my dad went on hospice, kicking and screaming. I still hear his accusation that merely suggesting hospice was the collected effort (on the part of my mother and myself) to plan his “demise”. After only a handful of days on hospice, eating, drinking, and speaking ceased. Yet he continued to breathe, lingering for almost 2 full weeks. I never understood the phrase “death rattle”, so common in the dark fiction I read and write, until I sat there at his beside listening to that sound, persisting against all reason for 12 days. That and being my mom’s caregiver brought my fears up from the depths.

So, as with most people, I have the fear we all share: a fear of death. Fine. But, ever since I was a child, the fear of death and decay bordered on phobic. When I first became aware of this “malady of mortality”, I became obsessed with the idea that I would go to sleep at night and just not wake up. More than that, I would die and immediately rot away so that when my mom discovered me in the morning, I’d be an unrecognizable lump.

I wasn’t yet in kindergarten at the time, which I started a few months later, just before my 4^thbirthday. I had been having a series of dreams about a baby fighting to live, her arm a grotesquerie, swollen, screaming; doctors and nurses swarming, my mother, shouting. I could see her through a window. These dreams were my first brush with insomnia, which was the natural result since I decided the only way not to have the dreams and not to have any spontaneous decomposition was not to sleep. Just imagine the dreams that I did have when I finally succumbed to sleep, especially those that plagued me after I heard about spontaneous combustion and saw an image of Mary Reeser’s remaining leg, obscenely poking from a pile of ash? I didn’t know which was worse –spontaneously decomposing while I slept or spontaneously combusting while I sat quietly reading? In a rare moment of parental prescience, when my mother wanted to know

“Mommy, why aren’t you sleeping?”

After I described my dreams, she told me the nightmares weren’t dreams; they were memories of the night I had died. At the time, I didn’t know the story. I just knew that I had a scar, Frankensteinian, bisecting my abdomen in a bizarre denticualtion. No one else had such a scar.

Mom divulged most of the tale, one summer night on our back porch. I remember looking at the stars as she told me I had been a premie, born with pyloric stenosis, undetected. Failure to thrive was still a thing back then. But my mother’s gut refuted that idea–along with my violent inability to retain any nourishment beyond a few moments. That led me to a race in my uncle’s GTO, my father cradling me in his hands, his comb comforting in his back pocket slicing into my uncle’s new leather backseat. Midway to the hospital, my father told my uncle not to stop for any more lights.

“Jessie’s not breathing.”

Dad told me years later that he felt my heart waver and cease to beat. It was a few days before my first Thanksgiving. I was little over a month old.

The scenes from my dream ensued, as did the priest who refused to grant last rights since I hadn’t yet been baptized…. as did a surgeon who said my chances of survival were slim in response to my mother’s horror at the mouth-like incision he had dispatched across my midsection. I probably wouldn’t live out the year, so my parents shouldn’t worry about a teenage me being too embarrassed to don a bikini. The last four decades have done wonders for the bedside manner. What followed were years of infection, the dreams, and my first fear, that one day I would just stop. Again.

What I didn’t know at the time, nor did my parents, my surgery and post-operative care didn’t include anesthesia or pain relief. Yes, you heard me correctly. Even now, surgeons and many in the medical community in the US, believe babies can’t feel pain, therefore anesthesia isn’t administered during surgery, and for premature babies especially, even today in many NICUs across the country, analgesics aren’t used for other, non-surgical procedures like inserting chest tubes, infant circumcision, and the placement of IVs or catheters. Yesterday, when my mother conversed with her friend over my niece’s surgeries (to date 4), the topic of what pain the baby felt –the first surgery was performed when the girl was 4 months old– was quickly dismissed by my mother’s friend: “Oh, you know babies don’t feel pain none, and even now, she’s too young to understand what pain is, so she’ll forget.” This attitude is what stamped me with the fear of death and with what’s been a lifetime of physical pain.

My other fear is more nebulous. I don’t have a precise moment as to why or when I became aware of it, but I suppose with one comes the other. This fear of decay may have gone full throttle after I attended my first funeral, when I began to wonder what happened after the casket was closed for the last. My bent toward horror movies, along with the tales of Edgar Allen Poe and Stephen King taught me enough about our earthly clay to ensure my insomnia continued through til puberty and beyond. The fainting spells started when I discovered a round ball of undoubtedly alien origin growing in the fields where my brothers and I adventured unsupervised during school vacations. It was as if overnight, the ground birthed a variety of smallish fleshly soccer balls which spewed smoke when kicked. Because of some episode of Night Gallery or a forgotten Creep Show comic, I connected that species of Calvatia –and by association other fungi I observed on our adventures– with what comes after burial. This was reinforced unwittingly on a woods walk with the Junior Rangers and the explanation that fungi break down all decaying material, all organic material…which is what the Ranger had said: All Organic Material. So naturally I lay awake in my tent during that camping trip thinking any second a Giant Puffball would erupt anywhere on my body, seeking to break down my organic material. Is it any wonder I became a horror writer?

As Stamets says in Fantastic Fungi (yes, I didn’t forget what brought me here): fungi are nature’s garbage and waste disposal units. Our recyclers. Our rehabilitators of toxicity. Our exculpation for so much pollution.

The idea of being broken down by bacteria was bad enough. But then I learned– also in the Junior Rangers and from case of mold in our basement after a flood– about spores, (not puffball smoke after all) and all the myriad spores we breathe in on a continual basis.

Around this time I discovered HP

Lovecraft and Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, so “The Color out of Space”, Mi-Go, and zombie ants further shaped my insomnia, my abject terror of death and what comes after. It’s been a terror so profound that I had a healthy drinking habit by the time I reached my sweet sixteen, not to mention anorexia-bulemia. An undercurrent to everything was this seeping horror of being consumed by microbial and fungal ecosystems. Hooray.

So all this baggage sat with me in The Showroom Cinema in Asbury Park –which has to be the tiniest theater I’ve ever been in, so every seat is a great view. (My thanks to them for telling us about Smiling Earth Farm, a local mushroom farm which I’ll be writing about).

My fears sat with me in that theater. But I didn’t sit there in phobic terror, even though my fears were at phobic levels when I was a kid, which itself is a recent admission –like 5 minutes ago recent. I never wanted to think I had been thanatophobic, but the way it impacted my functionality when I was younger? The way I have found myself so many times since that conversation with my mother on that back-porch 42 summers ago, encapsulated in a depression so profound that you’d think I’d been given a terminal diagnosis? In a way, I had and it’s one we all share. One mode of coping was fiction, reading and writing, the darker the better. Another was to simply stuff it and think my fears were nothing but what a doctor of mine called First World Fears. Other folks in the world have worse things to fear than the inevitable, so my fear was a luxury fear.

Aside from death, decay (and clowns), I don’t fear many things. I don’t fear mushrooms. Mold freaks me out and I have a concern about it invading my space (unless you’re talking about the organisms responsible for cheese and fermented foods). On the contrary, mushrooms have fascinated me. Ever since my own take on Farmer Maggot’s specialty, bacon and mushrooms was a staple at our holiday meals. And ever since I came eyeball to fruiting body of a blonde Morchella esculenta while volunteering in a local park about a decade ago, I’ve been fascinated by the idea of foraging for them.

A gorgeous blonde from our secret foraging grounds.

Add to this stumbling into mushroom tinctures that have helped in my struggles with arthritis, chronic pain, immune system issues, and seizure disorder. Add to this my husband’s psychonautics and my own knowledge of entheogens (see my articles on Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind)…. Fantastic Fungi was as close to perfect as I’ve been privy to a long while.

The visuals were considered and reminded me of a quiet walk in an old-growth forest, brilliant of hue and hushed in tone. I’ve seen what has to be a dozen or more documentaries about entheogens, psychedelics, plant medicine and associated shamanism, and visually Fantastic Fungi is something that surpasses everything I’ve seen before.

I will give one critique though and it’s not with the film itself, but the film’s current website. When preparing for this review, I scoured the site for information about the film itself. From the film’s website, it’s a little difficult to decipher whose brainchild this film is. Also, there isn’t a strict “About Us” kind of page, but an odd graphic which ticks across their homepage. Overall the website is visually stunning, but lacks information about the project. Paul Stamets is listed as “The Mycologist” sandwiched between Schwartzberg “The Director” and Michael Pollan “The Author”. Other than that though, I don’t see the film’s credits or history. There’s a companion book so perhaps that information is there, but without the book, without this word-of-mouth that has been buzzing about this film on social media, I don’t have much to go on.

An aside, which I thought pretty neat, “The Narrator” is none-other than Captain Marvel herself, Brie Larson. In some reviews, like the dismissive one from The Times, there’ve been outright accusations that Larson’s involvement was merely to garner her massive online following. But, Larson is an avid member of her local mycological society. This past year, hubby and I also discovered that she’s a major Tolkien fan, too. Who knew Captain Marvel was a hobbit?

Captain Marvel herself admiring The Professor’s art at The Morgan’s Tolkien exhibit

One of the most successful elements in the film, something which certainly helped me come to what I can only describe as my epiphany, is how this film speaks to its audience. In addition to Larson’s narration, this perhaps stems from one of the film’s main speakers: Paul Stamets.

I first heard about Paul Stamets from my husband some years ago, but I recognized him as the mushroom guy that I had seen in assorted documentaries like Dirt. Aside from reading about his work in numerous articles and Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, we listened to Stamets’ Tedtalks and appearances on Joe Rogan (the most recent from this past November). Stamets does for fungi what Neil deGrasse Tyson does for the Cosmos. If I had either of them as teachers when I was a kid, not only wouldn’t I have struggled with depression and thanatophobia, but I would have become either a mycologist or an astrophysicist. Maybe even both.

Stamets does what he does best in Fantastic Fungi: bring the importance of nature home, make conservation comprehensible, all while bestowing knowledge that isn’t always easy to understand. Not only is Stamets a brilliant mycologist, he’s also a brilliant teacher, which is brought to the fore in this film.

Stamets doesn’t focus on one fungal variety in Fantastic Fungi, but looks at fungus as a whole and our symbiotic relationship with this phylum. As I said before, the film is a work of art to behold. The cinematography is enlightening. Cliche but breathtaking nonetheless. I don’t believe fungus has ever been portrayed in such a familiar, spiritual, and ultimately heroic way. The “voice” of the mycellium, after all is Captain Marvel.

Stamets and Schwartzberg do something else that’s vital for this moment in time: they don’t distance the audience from concepts about climate change and environmental conservation. While we very much live in a house on fire, we’re also in a world of warring factions, binary modes of thinking, Us vs. Them. There’s something to be said for tackling an issue head-on. A downside though, is when someone’s deep-seated beliefs are challenged; they only further entrench themselves in that belief. We see this with confirmation bias, the whole climate change “debate”, and the fact that much to the chagrin of any number of rational-minded people there are still Flat Earthers. I was forced to referee one of these discussions in my own classroom, having to curtail by succinctly stating: “Science is not a matter of belief. It’s not like God or Santa Claus. You don’t have to believe in science for it to exist. You don’t have to understand something for it to be true.”

Confirmation Bias in action

Stamets and Schwartzberg capture the attention of a mainstream audience, but they also draw in the cadenced, OG mycolologists and psychonauts. Overall, their audience is invested with information encapsulated in a story, which shows the importance of the film and the care that went into the telling of it. Fantastic Fungi make fungi available, approachable, and they make the story of the humble mushrump a story that intersects our own and further connects us to the wellbeing of the very planet itself.

Watching the story unfold, Stamets and Schwartzberg delve my old maladies, my twin fears of death and decay. Stamets probes a related fear only made more acute since my father’s diagnosis and demise: cancer. Cancer links both of my fears at a primal level. Stamets shares the vital role of Turkey tail in his mother beating Stage IV breast cancer and in that sharing of her story, an avalanche of emotions unleashed in that intimate little theater. It wasn’t just a “feel good” anecdote used to push some woo-woo esoteric alternative therapy. Stamets discussed how vital Turkey tail was in conjunction with his mother’s treatment, which may have been palliative since she was deemed not a good candidate for surgery; a drug combo was her therapy and Stamets decided Turkey tail wouldn’t hurt. Check out his article “Trametes versicolor (Turkey Tail Mushrooms) and the Treatment of Breast Cancer” In fact, it may have allowed the therapy to push beyond merely making his mother comfortable in what could have been a losing battle. Stamets writes about his discovery and talks more in depth about it in his Tedtalk.

Fantastic Fungi also tackles the concept of decay and why decomposition is of importance. In a way being taken into a mycelial network is a form of immortality. Becoming one with the world on a visceral level. This may sound a bit trite, but this was and is mind-blowing for a person with a phobic fear of death and decay.

I mean Hubby and I toyed with the idea of those pods tree thingies on the return trip home from his cousins wake a week or so ago. In the back of my head I had the familiar thought, or rather that low static scream which brought me back to my childhood dreams. But, on the ride home from The Showroom Cinema? We talked about it again, sans mental screaming. This was the first time I really thought about being committed to the earth instead of a crematorium– despite related anxieties about my loved ones not getting all of me or having my ashes mixed with someone else’s or related horror stories about unethical crematoria. Despite Neil deGrasse Tyson complaining that cremation wastes our essence into the vacuum of space, thereby severing us from the web of nature and even the cosmos. But Stamets gave me pause and by the end of the film, my misgivings and the nightmare visions of melting away, of being digested by slime molds and fungal bodies like in the X-filesepisode “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” just that. Melted away. I felt uplifted and not terrified.

After the words from Roland Griffiths and his terminal patients at John’s Hopkins’ psilocybin studies and the lessening of my collective fear of death, I’m eager to read the companion book to the film, alongside titrating my own dosing of psilocybin– both micro and visionary dosing.

After the film, we found some fantastic fungi scattered about Asbury Park.

It’s time to put my fears to rest and start living. Needless to say I recommend Fantastic Fungi heartily and I’m scheming for my own amadou hat. Messieur Stamets I wouldn’t turn one down.

Source: http://www.green-and-growing.com/2020/01/mushroom-magic-commentary-with-review.html

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