One explanation for our incomprehension is something I’ve read so many times it’s started to seem the kind of repetition born of desperation. We are unable to conceptualise the fact of climate emergency, the argument runs, simply because of the way our brains have evolved. It’s our deep evolutionary past that makes us unable to respond. We’re hard-wired to not be able to comprehend something so big and all-encompassing. And while it’s a relief to be told that it’s not our fault, that is not relieving. The reason I think of migraines when I read about the climate emergency is that I have come to suspect that our inaction might work the way my migraines do. What if it is not our evolutionary past that makes us unable to see? What if it has nothing to do with selective pressures in the lives of early humans? What if it’s us, right now, experiencing a structural issue that makes it impossible to comprehend symptoms as premonitions? My migraine symptoms are a concatenation of unrelated things that seem to have nothing to do either with each other or with the pain that follows them: beetroot, banana milk, yawning, phonophobia, exhaustion. It’s hard to imagine how those things relate, or how they could fit together into a whole. And it’s just as hard for us to comprehend that things we have been taught are unrelated to each other, that seem only incidentally connected to the workings of the world – things like agricultural production, food distribution, international trade agreements, global corporate culture, among a thousand others – it’s hard for us to comprehend that such things might be causal symptoms of the climate emergency. We’ve been conditioned by our times not to process some types of problems and solutions because they do not fit with how we’ve been taught to think about society. We’ve been led to believe we can make decisions that change the world in the supermarket; that only our individual decisions matter; that to bring about large-scale change we should concern ourselves with the smallest actions: changing light bulbs, eschewing diesel cars and plastic straws. But sometimes it is not you. Sometimes the world is to blame. Defiance and change in process are collective acts, not individual ones. Massive, concerted cultural action is what we need, and that is what we should be hastening to organise.
For many years, a great fatalism would overtake me when I felt the first twinges of an oncoming migraine. I knew that it was too late – whether I took to a darkened room, drank pints of soda water, listened to tapes of whale song, nothing would make any difference at all. All I could do was hunker down and wait for the pain to come that would take away the world. Then, quite recently, I tried taking a migraine drug that works by mimicking the effect of the natural chemical serotonin to selectively constrict migraine-inflamed cranial blood vessels. It can be dangerous to postmenopausal women and people with heart problems, among others, so while it can be bought over the counter here in the UK, you have to fill out a comprehensive questionnaire and discuss your health at length with a pharmacist before you are allowed to buy it.
For so many years I had assumed that my only option was to ride the migraine out, lash myself to the mast and wait for the storm to pass. And that is still an option: some migraines are terrible, but not world-ending, and I’ll suffer them because I know that frequent use of the drug will render it less effective. But if the pain ratchets up to breaking point – and I know when that is, when it happens, with absolute certainty – I will swallow a pill and in just over an hour the pain will be gone. The light of the sky will soften again, my eyes will cease watering, the agony will disperse like clouds after a passing weather front. I’ll feel foggy and strange for days. But the pain will be gone. The most striking thing about this is that every time I take a dose of the drug I believe it won’t work. It seems an absolute impossibility. Yet every time it does. Its action is as close to a miracle as anything I’ve experienced in my life.
Of course what is happening to our planet is not like what happens to a migraineur’s brain. When it’s only your own body, you are justified in making your own decisions about how to handle things that impinge upon it. But there are aspects that chime. My migraine mantra was always that’s just how it is until I realised it need not be. We’re already in the early stages of planetary ecological breakdown, the prodrome of catastrophe. Our eschatological traditions tend to envision the apocalypse as happening very fast, with the dawning of one final, single, dreadful day. But the systems of the wider world do not operate according to the temporalities of our human lives; we are already inside the apocalypse, and forest fires and category five hurricanes are as much signs of it as the rising of the beast from the pit.
Apocalyptic thinking is a powerful antagonist to action. It makes us give up agency, feel that all we can do is suffer and wait for the end. That is not what we must be thinking now. For an apocalypse is not always a cataclysmic ending, and not always a disaster. In its earlier senses the word meant a revelation, a vision, an insight, an unveiling of things previously unknown, and I pray that the revelation our current apocalypse can bring is the knowledge that we have the power to intervene. Just as the structures of the migraine-stricken brain can be altered, even if we don’t believe it to be true until it happens, so might the structures of a world locked into what feels like an inevitable reliance on fossil fuels and endless economic growth. There are actions we can take that seem impossible and pointless and yet they are entirely, and precisely, and absolutely required. We can exert pressure, we can speak up, we can march and cry and mourn and sing and hope and fight for the world, standing with others, even if we don’t believe it. Even if change seems an impossibility. For even if we don’t believe in miracles, they are there, and they are waiting for us to find them.
Sex, Death, Mushrooms
It’s raining hard and the forest air is sweet and winy with decay. I’m walking with Nick, an old friend and former Ph.D. advisor, emeritus professor of the history of science and amateur mycologist. For the last fifteen years I’ve accompanied him on autumn mushroom hunts; today we’ve come to Thetford Forest in Suffolk. We’re carrying trugs, traditional English wooden baskets of willow and sweet chestnut, to hold our prizes, perhaps tiny fungi with hair-fine stalks, lumpy shelves broken from the trunks of rotting trees, masses like discarded round pillows, or splayed red starfish arms emerging from the ground.
Hunting for mushrooms can feel surprisingly like hunting animals, particularly if you’re looking for edible species. Searching for chanterelles, I’ve found myself unconsciously walking on tiptoe across mossy stumps as if they might hear me coming. It doesn’t work well if you walk around and try to spot them directly. They have an uncanny ability to hide from the searching eye. Instead, you have to alter the way you regard the ground around you, concern yourself with the strange phenomenology of leaf litter and try to give equal attention to all the colours, shapes and angles on the messy forest floor. Once you’ve achieved this relaxed and faintly predatory gaze, brilliant wax-yellow chanterelles often pop out from behind leaves and twigs and moss, and now they look quite unlike the false chanterelles growing beside them. Nick says that with enough experience, ‘you can reliably tell, at least for the commoner species, what the thing is, even if they are enormously variable, and you could not begin to explain how’. He has been an enthusiastic mycologist since his teens and has the names of at least several hundred species committed to memory.
Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungi that live as networks called mycelia, made up of tiny branching threads. Some are parasitic, others feed on decaying matter and many are mycorrhizal, growing in and around plant roots and sharing nutrients with their host. Picking a mushroom doesn’t kill the fungus; in a sense, you’re merely plucking a flower from a hidden, thready tangle which may be vast and extraordinarily ancient: one honey fungus in Oregon covers almost four square miles and is thought to be nearly two and a half thousand years old.
Soon Nick and I come across scores of mushrooms set in ragged half-circles, their broad tops like cooling milky coffees inexplicably placed among dead leaves. They’re cloud caps, a common species here, and considered to be r
ather toxic. We leave them and walk on. A little while later, Nick spots a yellowish gleam in the long grass. This one is more interesting. He crouches beside it and, frowning, pushes a thumb and index finger underneath the specimen and gently pulls it free of moss and grass. ‘Tricholoma,’ he says, with satisfaction. ‘Tricholoma sulphureum.’ Mycologists generally use scientific names to describe fungi, as their common names vary widely. The mushroom he holds is sometimes called the sulphur knight or the gas agaric. He offers it to me, gesturing that I should smell it, and an unpleasantly sulphurous tang makes me wrinkle my nose. He stows it in the basket.
I am not very good at identifying fungi, but I am better than I used to be. Over the years I have not only learned to identify a few species by looking at them or smelling them, or seeing the colour their cut surfaces turn, but I’ve become more and more intrigued by the curious place they occupy in our imaginations. We’ve been foraging and eating mushrooms for millennia, and they still have the power to disturb us, to conjure the deepest human mysteries of sex and death. Nineteenth-century sensibilities were especially horrified by the common stinkhorn, a fetid fly-attracting species that bursts out of a membranous egg into a shape well described by its scientific name, Phallus impudicus. In her later years, Charles Darwin’s daughter Henrietta went into the woods to collect stinkhorns for the express purpose of bringing them back to be ‘burned in the deepest secrecy of the drawing-room fire, with the door locked; because of the morals of the maids’, according to a memoir by her niece. Our continuing pieties about sex are reflected in the way some modern field guides describe the distinctive odour of mushrooms like Inocybes as ‘unmentionable’ or ‘disgusting’ rather than the more accurate ‘spermatic’.
The unpredictable flowering of beautiful alien forms from rotting wood, dung or leaf litter in a forest moving towards winter is a strong and strange conjuration of life-in-death – in Baltic mythology, mushrooms were thought to be the fingers of the god of the dead bursting through the ground to feed the poor. But mushrooms have a more direct relationship to mortality. Many of them, of course, are deadly. You might survive after eating a destroying angel or death cap, but to do so you’ll probably need a liver transplant. What’s more, the particular toxicity of fungi is as mysterious as the forms they take. A mushroom can contain more than one kind of toxin, and the toxicity can change according to whether it has been cooked, how it has been cooked, whether it has been eaten with alcohol or fermented before ingestion. Mycologists talk about poisonous fungi the same way herpetologists talk of ‘hot’ snakes: with more than a modicum of transgressive relish.
If you’re collecting fungi to eat, your expertise in identification is all that keeps you from death or serious illness. There’s a daredevil side to the activity, a sense of repeatedly staking your life against terrifying possibilities. Today’s vogue for wild foods, spurred in part by famous foraging chefs and a nostalgic desire to reconnect with the natural world, has resulted in some popular guides that feature a selection of edible and poisonous species. Nick thinks many of these are irresponsible, even dangerous. ‘They don’t explain the full range of things you might be running into,’ he warns. Many toxic fungi closely resemble edible ones, and differentiating each from each requires careful examination, dogged determination and often the inspection of spores stained and measured under a microscope slide.
Puzzling out tricky specimens is satisfying in itself: if you call on Nick the evening after a fungus expedition, you’ll find him at a table spread with fungi, several frighteningly expensive volumes on mycological identification, a microscope and a magnifying lens, and he’ll be wearing an expression of joyous, fierce concentration. ‘For some species, the colours are unbelievably variable,’ he enthuses about one group, the russulas, ‘and they get washed out by rain, and then the exact distribution of the warts on their spores is an alternative. So you’re doomed, as an ordinary citizen. Because the colours won’t do it, and you haven’t got a powerful enough microscope.’ Fungi force us to consider the limits of our understanding: not everything fits easily into our systems of classification. The world might be, it turns out, too complicated for us to know.
After a couple of hours, the rain is beginning to ease. We’re soaked but triumphant. Nick’s trug is full of small, difficult and poisonous species. Mine is heaped with edibles, including several crab brittlegills whose shining caps are the colour of toffee apples. We start to make our way back to the car through a dense stand of pines. The air is damp and dark in here. Taut lines of spider silk are slung between their flaking trunks; I can feel them snapping across my chest. Fat garden spiders drop from my coat on to the thick carpet of pine needles below. I’m about to step back on to the path when something catches my eye under a tree a few yards away. I know instantly what it is, though I’ve only ever seen it in books. ‘Cauliflower fungus!’ I cry, and run up to it. It’s a pale, translucent, fleshy protuberance the size of a soccer ball that seems to glow in the dripping shade, its complicated folds an unnerving cross between boiled tripe and a sea sponge. Looking at it, I remember its Latin name, Sparassis crispa, and that it is parasitic on conifers. And also that it is fragrant and delicious when torn and simmered in stock. I sit down on the wet ground to regard it more closely.
We are visual creatures. To us, forests are places made of trees and leaves and soil. But all around me now, invisible and ubiquitous, is a network of fungal life, millions of tiny threads growing and stretching among trees, clustering around piles of rabbit droppings, stitching together bush and path, dead leaves and living roots. We hardly know it is there until we see the fruiting bodies it throws up when conditions are right. But without fungi’s ceaseless cycling of water, nutrients and minerals, the forest wouldn’t work the way it does, and perhaps the greatest mystery of mushrooms for me is in how they are the visible manifestations of an essential yet unregarded world. I reach forward, break off half the brittle, furled mushroom and place it in the basket, eager to taste this souvenir from a place full of life hidden from our own.
Winter Woods
I try to walk in woods for a few hours before nightfall on every New Year’s Day. I’ve walked them in low sun, deep snow, rain, and in dank mist that clings to the skin and seems more water than air. I’ve walked blocks of scruffy adolescent pines, ancient lowland forests, beechwoods, farm copses; I’ve made my way down muddy paths through stands of alder and birch. Sometimes I’m with family or friends. Most often I’m on my own. I’m not sure exactly when my New Year walks began, but over the years they’ve become as familiar a winter tradition as overcooking the turkey or spending too much money on a Christmas tree.
There’s a special phenomenology to walking in woods in winter. On windless days there’s a deep, soft hush that makes the sound of a stick breaking underfoot resemble a pistol shot. It’s a quietness that fosters an acute sensitivity to small sounds that earlier in the year would be buried under a riot of birdsong. The rustle of a vole in dead bracken at my feet, the dry scratches of a blackbird turning over dead leaves in search of spiders. Now the trees are leafless, wildlife is more visible, but so am I. I’m often met by the alarm calls of jays, nuthatches, robins, grey squirrels, harsh noises designed to inform me that they know I am there. Being sworn at by woodland creatures is disquieting, but comforting too. Modern cultures of nature appreciation so often assume the natural world is something to watch and observe merely, as if through thick plate glass. These alarm calls remind me that we have consequential presence, that the animals we like to watch are creatures with their own needs, desires, emotions, lives.
A winter wood reveals the bones of the landscape it grows upon, the geographical contours of slopes, gullies and hollows. Its trees become exercises in pattern recognition, each species possessing its own texture of bark, its own angles and arrangements of branches and twigs. After the leaves have fallen, winter lets light and weather into the wood, and trunks newly exposed to sunlight turn green with algae as winter days lengthen towards
spring.
Because life is less obvious in a winter wood, where it does subsist, as bright stars of moss, or fungal fruiting bodies enduring winter frosts with antifreeze-packed cells, it demands attention. One year a cloud of winter flies in a patch of weak sun in the middle of a woodland ride held me spellbound for long moments, intensely aware of their fragility, their momentary purchase on this world. And the lack of obvious life in winter reminds me of the limits of my own human perception. Most of the life here is too small for me to see or exists underground. Beneath my feet, an intricate network of mycorrhizal fungal threads links plant roots to each other and the soil. They not only grant trees access to crucial nutrients, but give them a means of communication.
It’s easy for us to think of trees as immutable, venerable presences against which we can measure the span of our own lives, our own small histories. But trees grow, leaves fall, winters grip the ground. That woods are places of process and constant change was something that took a long time for me to understand. As a child I assumed that the woods near my home would stay the same for ever. Today, many of the paths I used to walk are blocked with thickets of birch trees, though my memories of those routes live on.
Summer forests give me little sense of time past, or times to come; they’re rich with a buzzing, glittering, shifting profusion of life. Everything seems manifested; there’s no obvious sense of potentiality. But forests in winter do the opposite: they evoke the passage of time. Winter days are always moving fast towards darkness, and when the wind is bitter it’s not easy to walk without thinking of what it will be like to be back in the warmth of home. Above and around me are last year’s birds’ nests, built to hold broods long fledged, along with signs of life usually obscured by dense growths of summer vegetation: woodpecker nest-holes, deer-nibbled saplings, fox earths, tufts of badger hair on low thorns. And while my feet are treading on last year’s leaves, those of next spring are already furled in buds on the tips of twigs around and above me.
Vesper Flights Page 7
