Cowpoke, Entangled

pull up a (toad)stool and stay awhile, pardner.

We’re all currently charmed by mushrooms, aren’t we? They’re everywhere. We’ve watched Fantastic Fungi, we’ve tried mushroom coffee, we now have amateur mycologists at every farmers market selling clamshells full of a myriad of fungal fruits. Many of us have watched enough mushroom-centric Ted Talk content to convince ourselves that a deus ex michorhysic salvation awaits.

I too have been snared in the mycelial cocoon of mushroom adoration. 

The initial concept for our upcoming 10 year anniversary show- that of unveiling the shroud of enchantment bestowed upon the mythic cowboy; of helping to vision and clothe an elder-ified iteration of this adolescent archetype- that idea first was birthed from my exposure to and subsequent metabolization of The Flowering Wand, an unexpected book of essays by Sophie Strand. 

In The Flowering Wand, Sophie Strand makes numinous the mushroom by using mycelium as a powerful metaphor for psyche, or collective consciousness. She posits that we, like societies before ours, ought not remain stubbornly loyal to the narratives of gods and goddesses from centuries past. Instead, we might (as was the case a priori for any cultures of oral transmission) honorably compost those mythic figures and allow them to be the nutrients with which we grow and harvest new gods- gods for our era, for our unique challenges. Sophie suggests, as the mushroom is the fruiting body of a vast underground network of mycelial connective tissue upon which so much of life depends symbiotically, so do gods and goddesses erupt from the underworld of the human psyche, the collective unconscious. 

Enamored of this idea and hungry to learn more about not only the concept of an evolving mythology, but also functionally about mushrooms themselves, I noted each reference Sophie made in her book. She, via her writing, pointed me towards Merlin Sheldrake, who’s Entangled Life had been on my must read list since its publication.

Merlin’s book helped me begin to understand the wonder that is mycelium, but more relevant to our journey here was his inspired complication of the difficult question of what constitutes an individual. 

In the introduction to the book, Merlin sets the stage by immediately disrupting our naively  misunderstood concept of individualism by recalling his time at a conference on tropical microbes.  After listening to several presentations wherein the previously believed to be straightforward categorizations of plants began to break down due to newly discovered internal chemical, fungal and bacterial behaviors, he states, “After two days, the notion of the individual had deepened and expanded beyond recognition. To talk about individuals made no sense anymore. Biology- the study of living organisms- had transformed into ecology- the study of the relationships between living organisms.”

He is speaking here about the futility of attempting to compartmentalize an individual entity without opening a pandora’s box of symbiotic and parasitic relationships, many of these relationships involving neurological implications we have just barely begun to understand the implications of and which call into existential question the largely western notion of autonomy, singularity, executive control. 

He continues, “My response to the discussions at the conference was not just intellectual. Like a diner at Alice’s Restaurant, I felt different: the familiar had become unfamiliar. The “loss of a sense of self-identity, delusions of self-identity and experiences of ‘alien control’,” observed an elder statesman in the field of microbiome research, are all potential symptoms of mental illness. It made my head spin to think of how many ideas had to be revisited, not least our culturally treasured notions of identity, autonomy, and independence.” 

And later again he states “Our selves emerge from a complex tangle of relationships only now becoming known.”

The book further explores the ways in which we as human hosts are indivisibly entangled with chemical, bacterial and fungal partners who, though we’ve come to comfortably acknowledge their metabolic benefit, may be more participatory in our behavior, decision making and notions of free will than we’ve understood previously. 

These are notions, however, that seem to have been understood by our animistic ancestors, decoupled from the golden handcuffs of the scientific method. Which circles us back to Sophie Strand and her “lunar kings, trans-species magicians, and rhizomatic harpists” as explored in The Flowering Wand. When we navigated a world full of both human and non-human personhood (the river, the stone, the mushroom- all people to the animists!) how much more deeply must we have lived into this existential interconnectedness? 

So, back to our mythic cowpuncher. 

Now how do we speak about “rugged individualism” without acknowledging the vast interconnected ecosystem we’ve coevolved alongside? 

Certainly there are human behaviors we consider adaptive to survival and creative exploration that are laudable and worthy of deep respect and honoring. We celebrate the capable and courageous, as we should! But how do we reverse engineer the singular self from which to clearly parce an individual journey? Seemingly, we have only a vague understanding of the multitude of microorganisms that could be doing a fair amount of heavy lifting when it comes to our capacity to think, or to grow, or to decide. 

Under what willful authority does an “individual” concoct the impossible cocktail of one's microbiome or genetic resources, and how thin is the veil between our preconceived notions of autonomous bodies, anyway? Ask the ant, infected by the Ophiocordyceps. Ask geneticist William Bateson who Sheldrake quotes, “We commonly think of animals and plants as matter, but they are really systems through which matter is continually passing.”

Systems! Borrowing matter on temporary lease. 

Considering this paradigm of a complex self, how might we reimagine the lone cowboy, riding the range? What microbial collaborators might have rewired his neural circuitry, programming an intense longing for solitude? What symbiotic benefit may exist for a microscopic stow-away, chemically urging our cowboy to roam? 

And, while we’re poking at this notion of autonomy, the aforementioned invisible collaborators aside, what about our conventionally held notions of interconnectedness? Who taught him to snare a rabbit, to skin it, to navigate an unknown river crossing? 

So back to our question of how to define this mythic individual we so long to anoint with romantic ruggedness- devoid of the frustrating randomness of luck. 

This physiological and social meritocratic myth, how impossible! But more curiously, considering our attachment to the scaffolding of its concept, how lonely! 

We’ll continue to revisit our cowpuncher here, but through a more complex lens- because as we entangle him in the humus under foot, or hoof- there is still to be reckoned with the undeniable selfhood we all experience. No use attempting to deny its power, it’s evolutionary necessity. So the notions explored above are no attempt to erase the radical call to individuate- only a small attempt to tear away a bit of the scaffolding from which prior notions of individualism might have been built. 

Yahoo!

To be continued…

(By the way, some of the above imagery are some digital noodlings of what will eventually be embroidered and screen printed aspects of our upcoming collaboration with Howler Bros and Counterpart Studios! Stay tuned for more peeks.)