Experimental writing for DIY Mycology thesis  



entangle, replicate, and layer. Needle pushes through, connecting mycelium creating a body. A ship that Carries a pool of synthetic. Human’s synthetics. Translating the real and the natural.

landscapes and tiny universes. unknown scales.

presentations with and without a light source. mermaids left pearls by the shore and on the woods. trickled on the forest ships. webs expanding. Circular maps.

Highlighting the presence to send nourishment.   Stay.   but slowly shift.

Deviated. Spun in place. Cover in breath, particles, dead skin, tears, spores, and maybe denial. Then set with ageless plastic. Not to preserve– But to understand why the application happened, why the choice was made?


I saw a lot of lichens the last time I went outside. A symbiotic knitting of species. Crisscrossed. A decorative flannel. The symbol of harmonious living of interspecies. A nice warm sweater.

I wish to be safely cradled by the strands of fungal filaments, and gently swaying with algae cells. I wish to be resting in one of the pores of the decayed polypore bolete I saw the last time I went outside. Quiet dark room. then to be released, carried by the breeze but to never land. Kind of ironic how Polypores feeds on the decay of trees, but then end up decaying themselves after they’re done. Like the rot-eater rots.



the word ecology roots from the Greek word oikos, meaning ‘house,’ ‘household,’ or ‘dwelling place.’ The human body is a dwelling place to organisms. A mere fungal casing to feed and be fed on. Then the fungal body is also dwelling in a space, an ecosystem, that may not seem as harmonious on the outside with all that yelling, but the microbials are wriggling like maggots beneath and all over the flesh. It’s okay, everything is held together with the strong hands of mycelium. Webbings that sees all and feeds all. She’ll tell you when someone is approaching and when the sun rises. She’ll remind you to prepare for winter and send more food for your meds. If you see her, she’s like veins I will die without. Tunnels of information, what would it feel like to run through one? Though it is unclear if she’s the ancestor or we only shared one, she’s still the mother. Whatever idiotic mammalian definition of that, I could give a fuck about. Fungi, the reason of all life, willed itself into existence, from a single celled ancestor who once was under water then spored itself to land, to the moldy food in my stomach. The mold and my stomach aren’t even different. We’re still like the immune system, answering questions about distinguishing the self from nonself. There is no distinguishment here. Fungi the mother exceeds mammalian requirements for mothering. Perhaps a replacement time for the human ideal. Away with denial and the training that no one fucking asked for. Who knows at this point what the real raw instinct was even saying or what psylocibin said to it? After all the societal alterations and programming mistakes, the self is covered in what has been done and only left on their own to uncover. Attempt to correct mistakes unwilled by me. The fungi mother would web till healed, unbeknownst to faults. Reliability unchallenged. Trust unbroken. So, what if a replacement was assigned? now it’s just this being that is unspeaking, unbeating, unviolating, excusable, logical, lacking of human stupidity, vainness, selfishness and social conforms and restraints. The perfect replacement that is of quality to be the bearer of another life. Truly nourishing. And like all wildlife, there is the choice to kill. But within reason may I say. Truly an encapsulation of life. What is the purpose of the need to convince the self that everything is the fault of an evil vile bitch? IF that hadn’t happened, then this would never have happened. If those choices were never made, then this wouldn’t have existed. If the child hadn’t been wronged, then the child wouldn’t fuck up. What’s so hard to understand –

The webbing of mycelium can stretch for miles, as the biggest living organism on earth is a patch of mycelium covering 3.5 square miles and estimated to be 8,000 years old. The largest fungal colony on earth is still giving life, nutrients, and information. A rot-eater that doesn’t rot. What is resting under that thick 35,000 tons blanket feel like? Safe.



-

A love letter

Dear so beloved,



I inhaled spores. It felt a little funny maybe because I was aware or maybe because I felt them sticking to my nasal canals, moving in twirling movement with each inhale like when leaves and wind are cornered, and they perform a dance together. Hand in hand spinning each other, or is it one spinning the other? Either way, I wonder what emotion does that evoke? I think about symbiotic relationships and perfect symbioses. Of course, perfect would be lichens; My imagined love story. What happens when you say, “my relationship is like lichens, the perfect symbiosis”? wouldn’t that introduce another category of bond that isn’t so perfect? It’s nice to dream we can be as good as lichens. But oh well, we can’t. we’re strayed. We don’t have a goal-oriented mind. That goal could’ve been to coalesce into a heterokaryon, share a cell for a lifetime. A giant one-celled, to fit inside the myosis in my eyes. Wear my brown iris as a ring and hope it shines gold in the sunrise. The sand that fills them, let it be spores that’ll plunge itself into space with the slight touch of your breath. Let me expand into a net, underground, underneath this sheath of dirt and feed you what I find. I’ll leave the water, I’ll breath this air, and grow an exoskeleton for us to share. I’ll turn blue, rust, and red when I’m hurt so I have nothing to hide. I’ll keep my gills nice and equal, and you get to decide whether they’re better free off the stem or decurrent. I’ll change colors because somehow, I’m only bright red in Alaska. I can go on to say how much I will envelop life, but I was just born again yesterday, and you don’t know me again. Yet, to no one’s surprise, I’ll still be here underneath this dirt, on this tree, around this stone, in your lungs, and eating away at your words but I’m recycling. No one else is here.



Wishing you a full breath of air during a pouring rain,

Yours lovingly.





-



To understand and digest the edible,
I can’t stop asking questions. No one answers. The response is always silent and laborious.
Beady myotic eyes in the dark, searching for signs of mother. The traces that are left are for us to eat. 

Stabbing through, building from hairs of a fungal animal who may or may not consumed many mothers. Hairs to replicate mother. Not her scent though. What shapes do you see? What are you filtering through those dirt spore-filled eyes? Mother becomes scattered into shapes I dissect. The limbo of desire I reside in is between replication and exploration. replicate to understand the growth and labor of being and of becoming one and part of the mother lineage. The steps it took a barely visible hypha, to become a stool towering the sheath of dirt it was once part of. How did my hyphae layer, cross, and weave without a toothed steel needle? And how did my skin look like through hyphae’s eyes? How does skin look like through iris ribboned eyes?
To decipher the reasons of the steps in this process of sporing, fusing, transforming, and continuing
to live, is to eventually replicate. We speak seemingly different languages, but we communicate the same things and do the same things. Although our wants are different for now, we still end up doing the same. To understand the different routes it took to reach the same goals, is something of a replication. 
Be, to understand.

Exploration is what happens after replication. There’s a new found knowledge, what’s next? On hikes, where the mother is most visible to ribboned eyes, as they count my every step, I introduce myself to every hypha that reveals itself to me. With a greeting gesture of digited hands, I pluck only 14 thumbs out of the ground. Through I wish to exceed, I only have too many glass kitchen ware to spare. After an inpatient few hours, the thumbs are finally laid in my pretend lab. I start to cut the cap off the stem, peer my eyes, and smell. Was that vanilla or dirt? Or vanilla dirt? I don’t eat raspberries, but is that the scent of a fresh one or a moldy one? I record in chicken scratches the data then I’m reminded of high school chemistry class. Carefully, with shaky hands, I slice the head in two. I’m only happy if my little pocketknife grazes between two gills without breaking them. More peering while thinking all gills are subjective. Adnate, andexed, adnexed? My god, there’s a typo in this book! Finally, after getting through that fit of reading disabilities, I place the caps on their little spots where they’re going to sit with me for several hours or watch me sleep. Shamefully, labeling my new roommates with numbers instead of their real mysterious names. I make sure everyone is tucked and comfortable, I lay a drop of water on top of each head to accommodate rain. I use my scarce glass kitchenware to create little houses for each cap and some caps end up being housemates with one another. I blow a kiss through the glass and wish them a goodnight while they watch me get to bed. Restful night of sporing passes and the first thing I do is peek into the glass. What a horrifying sight it must be from the other side of the glass bowl. Warped eyeballs covering the sky curved with a grin similar to that of a child who hears of an old man in red coming down a chimney to give out presents or however that odd story goes. Unable to wait any longer, I remove the glass, I peek under the caps to witness what has

to be one of the most beautiful prints this world has to offer. Delicately lined fingerprints, one streak at a time divided by so little space, visible in such delicious colors. The longer I stare, the more they start to fade. Of course, moments like these never last. As long as I’m breathing, as long as there’s air circulating around me, this is fleeting. As I’m inhaling in the spores that has enveloped my surroundings, I think about them growing in my lungs. Tiny stools calcifying in the soft tissue that is basically a meat air sac. There’s air they can grow. We breath the same after all. The soft sac stiffens like the gauze on an oozy rash. Exhale to expand the fungal colony and inhale to contour the new appendages. I need to know if lungs can be farmed.  

After a few pages of recoded meaningful scribbles, there’s maybe half a conclusion, or maybe none at all. Because at the end of the day, they didn’t introduce themselves, only I did. Persons of mystery, no one can truly be sure, even if they have been prying their fingers in the dirt for more time than it’s worth cleaning soil off the under nails.

A colorful meat pile forms as the remnants of this get together. We have to part for now.

But thanks for hanging out with me.



As I continue to return this fungal body to its rightful place, I reclaim a family that carried me on their backs since my existence. Was it ever enough to just say “thank you”? I never carried this flawed body alone as I thought I was. I poke and pry the flaws; I acquire knowledge. The same way I poke and pry fungi. I want to know you. I have an itch and it’s made of mycelial holes. I keep wondering what my skin is and how fungal it is. While I felt, I think about fungi, lichens, and skin. The human body, seemingly separate from that is fungi but it is not, it’s one and the same. I think about sores and how that’s a fungal imagery. Pores and pores. One and the same. I’m beginning to merge my skin into my vision seamlessly without a clear beginning to that subconscious idea. I question ways to enlarge my skin and make it fungi. It folds, it mends, it absorbs, it secretes. As I gaze into the blurriness that have become my horizon, I know, my research is still on going. Toad stools pave a way for my flights to land and mycelium is in my brain pulling my neurons close. The fungus way is ahead, and I can already breath in the spores.