{"id":10840,"date":"2025-06-06T16:41:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-06T20:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/mushrooms-and-our-search-for-meaning-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-06-06T16:41:00","modified_gmt":"2025-06-06T20:41:00","slug":"mushrooms-and-our-search-for-meaning-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/mushrooms-and-our-search-for-meaning-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Mushrooms and Our Search for Meaning \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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This essay was originally published as the cover story in the Summer 2025 issue of Orion Magazine<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u201cWho are you?\u201d the caterpillar barks at Alice from atop the giant mushroom, and Alice, never quite having considered the question, mutters a child\u2019s version of Emily Dickinson\u2019s \u201cI\u2019m nobody! Who are you<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n

Before he was Lewis Carroll, author of the Alice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland<\/em> books, Charles Dodgson was a logician. His Wonderland is a series of nested thought experiments about change and the limits of logic. When the caterpillar tells Alice that one side of the mushroom would make her smaller and the other taller, Alice is stupefied by how something perfectly round can have sides, how a single thing can produce such opposite effects. And yet inside this fictional parable about the nature of the self is a biological reality about the nature of fungi \u2014 organisms that operate according to a different logic. They belong to a single kingdom, yet they are endowed with polar powers: the lion\u2019s mane mushroom that can sharpen a mind and the honey fungus that can slay a tree; the cordyceps that can drive an ant to suicide and the psilocybin that can drive you to delirium; the Penicillium<\/em> that has saved millions of lives and the Puccinia graminis<\/em> that has blighted nations into deadly famines, changing the census of the world.<\/p>\n

I grew up with Alice, and I grew up with mushrooms. Around the time I discovered Wonderland, my mother \u2014 my complicated mother oscillating between the poles of the mind \u2014 discovered foraging. Each weekend we would head into the forests of Bulgaria and spend long hours searching \u2014 for mushrooms, yes, but also for a common language between our two island universes. I delighted in the unbidden flame of a chanterelle on a bed of moss, in the shy bloom of a shaggy parasol between the pines, and, once, in finding a king bolete bigger than my awestruck face. Here was a world that was wilder yet safer than my own, resinous with wonder. I was captivated by the notion that edible species could have poisonous doubles, by the way the brain forms a search image that trains the eye on the inconspicuous domes. Mushrooms were helping me learn so much of what life was already teaching me \u2014 that a thing can look like something you love but turn dangerous, even deadly; that the more you expect something, the more of it you find.<\/p>\n

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Art by Ofra Amit from The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

An organism, of course, is not a parable or a metaphor. An organism is a cathedral of complexity, both sovereign and interdependent. Although mushrooms have populated our myths and our medicine for millennia, they were only factored into our model of the living world less than a century ago. When Linnaeus devised his landmark classification system, he divided nature into three kingdoms: two living (plants and animals) and one nonliving (minerals). The scientists of his generation gave fungi no special attention, brushing them under the conceptual carpet of plants. Darwin ignored them altogether, even though we now know that fungi are the fulcrum by which evolution lifted life out of the ocean and onto the land \u2014 they greened the earth, helping aquatic plants adapt to terrestrial life by anchoring their primitive roots, not yet capable of acquiring nutrients on their own, in a mycorrhizal substrate of symbiosis.<\/p>\n

Perhaps, then, it is not accidental that a marine biologist \u2014 Ernst Haeckel, who coined the word ecology<\/em><\/a> the year Alice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland<\/em> entered the world \u2014 proposed Protista<\/a> as a new kingdom of life for primitive life-forms that are neither plants nor animals; after some hesitation, he moved fungi into it. But it would be another century before, just after my mother was born, the American plant ecologist Robert Whittaker gave fungi their own kingdom of life.<\/p>\n

Among the hundreds of thousands of species now known, and probably millions not yet named, there are ones that crumble at the lightest touch and ones that can survive the assault of cosmic radiation in outer space. On the western edge of North America thrives a fungal colony older than calculus, older than Jesus, older than the wheel. In the mountains of East Asia blooms a bright blue mushroom that bleeds indigo. A bioluminescent agaric lights up the forests of Brazil and the islands of Japan. Across tropical Taiwan grows a pale blue mushroom whose button is smaller than a millimeter. In the old-growth forests of Oregon dwells an individual fungus spanning eighteen hundred football fields \u2014 Earth\u2019s largest living organism.<\/p>\n

Without fungi, we would never know Earth\u2019s most beautiful flowers \u2014 orchid seeds have no energy reserve of their own and can only obtain their carbon through a fungal symbiont \u2014 or Earth\u2019s most alien: white as bone, the ghost pipe<\/a> (Monotropa uniflora<\/em>) lacks the chlorophyll by which other plants capture photons to alchemize sunlight into sugar for life. Emily Dickinson considered the ghost pipe \u201cthe preferred flower of life.\u201d A painting of it graced the cover of her posthumously published poems. She was not wrong to think it \u201calmost supernatural,\u201d for it subverts the ordinary laws of nature: rather than reaching up for sunlight like green plants, the ghost pipe reaches down so that its cystidia \u2014 the fine hairs coating its roots \u2014 can entwine around the branching filaments of underground fungi, known as hyphae, sapping nutrients the fungus has drawn from the roots of nearby photosynthetic trees.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Ofra Amit from The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

These mycorrhizal relationships permeate every ecosystem, making fungi the enchanted subterranean loom on which the fabric of nature is woven. Perhaps this is why it was so hard for so long to classify them separately from other life-forms. Perhaps we never should have done so. Perhaps it was a mistake to segregate them into a separate kingdom, or to have kingdoms at all, as nonsensical as dividing a planet veined with rivers and spined with mountains into countries bounded by borders that cut across ecosystems with the blade of warring nationalisms. Beneath every battlefield in the history of the world a mycelial wonderland has continued to thrive, continued to turn death into life so that ghost pipes and orchids may rise from where the bodies fell. Fungi made Earth what it is and they will inherit it. They are not a kingdom of life \u2014 life is their kingdom.<\/p>\n

Almost exactly one year before Charles Dodgson dreamed up Wonderland to amuse ten-year-old Alice Liddell and her two sisters<\/a> while boating from Oxford to Godstow, a letter by someone who signed himself Cellarius was printed in a New Zealand newspaper under the heading \u201cDarwin Among the Machines.\u201d<\/a> It would later be revealed as the work of twenty-seven-year-old English writer Samuel Butler. Epochs before the first modern computer and the golden age of algorithms, before we came to call the confluence of the two \u201cartificial intelligence,\u201d Butler prophesied the birth of a new \u201cmechanical kingdom\u201d of our own creation, which would take on a life of its own alongside the kingdoms of nature. \u201cIn these last few ages, an entirely new kingdom has sprung up of which we as yet have only seen what will one day be considered the antediluvian prototypes of the race,\u201d he wrote. \u201cWe are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation\u2026 daily giving them greater power\u2026 self-acting power.\u201d With an eye to the evolution of consciousness, he asked: \u201cWhy may not there arise some new phase of mind which shall be as different from all present known phases, as the mind of animals is from that of vegetables?\u201d More than a century and a half before our modern worries about artificial intelligence<\/a>, Butler worried that this new kingdom of life would be parasitic upon us. He worried that although the human mind has been \u201cmoulded into its present shape by the chances and changes of many millions of years,\u201d the mechanical kingdom evolved in a blink of evolutionary time. \u201cNo class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward,\u201d he cautioned. \u201cOur bondage will steal upon us noiselessly and by imperceptible approaches.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps we are on the brink of living Butler\u2019s prophecy because we modeled our machines on the wrong kingdom, modeled their intelligence on our own, only to find that they are as parasitic and predatory as we are, as they parasitize and prey upon us. What if the correct model was always there, hidden beneath our bipedal overconfidence \u2014 all this time we have been building and walking and warring over Earth\u2019s original networked intelligence, this planetary \u00fcbermind transmitting the signal of life via the hypertextual protocols of hyphae, through the mesh topology of mycelium. What if our worship of binary logic is what warped Wonderland? Who would we be if our \u201cartificial\u201d intelligence turned natural, built on the nonbinary logic of symbiosis, restoring the unity of life into a perfect circle with no sides to take?<\/p>\n

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Art by Ofra Amit from The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

For more inspiration and illumination at the intersection of nature and culture, science and spirit, the ecological and the existential, give yourself the gift of a lifetime that is a subscription to Orion<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This essay was originally published as the cover story in the Summer 2025 issue of Orion Magazine. \u201cWho are you?\u201d the caterpillar barks at Alice […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10841,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10840\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}