Tag Archives: mycelium

Unclothing

Dome tent in the mountains, with the sun just above the horizon
Photo by Kevin Ianeselli

‘What sparked the idea?’

Dr Lauren Ellis’s eyes glaze as if no one has ever asked this intellectual giant what incited the Eureka moment that was to transform environmental research—the translation software that allows scientists to communicate with entire ecosystems, to enable a more symbiotic relationship between human communities and the natural world.

‘I was camping with my boyfriend,’ she reveals. ‘One morning I woke up to see the networks of mycelial threads that stretched out over the landscape.’

Cherchez la femme, they say, or in Dr Ellis’s case, cherchez l’homme. Is the mystery man still in her life?

‘Next question,’ is the curt reply. The man remains a mystery. Thankfully, due to Ellis’s pioneering spirit, the natural world is becoming less of one.

Not boyfriend but first husband, Lauren thinks, mentally editing the article for style and accuracy. 

He’d brought her on the camping trip to confess his affair. When in the early hours she’d ripped the sleeping bag from his body and voraciously unclothed him, buttons popping on his thermal gilet, lined tracksuit bottoms wrenched from kicking legs, he must have assumed he was forgiven. But the desire that raged through her was not a longing for loving union but an implacable will to discover.

Or rather, she thinks, to uncover what lay beneath the tight web of language that formed the noun-phrase containers of his image: faithful husband, misunderstood man, complex depressive, now woeful penitent. When stripping him of the layers of clothing did not sate her, she pressed into him with a passion, not to connect but to unweave the layers of language that shaped the likeness he’d presented, the only version of him she’d ever known, as if the naked heat of such a yearning could melt through his façade and reveal some nascent truth within.

Outside in the emerging day she wrapped her sleeping bag around her and marvelled at the white web of fungal strands that clothed the organic landscape. Not to insulate, she realised, but to connect. 

Something loosened within her, an idea unravelling.

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Nonna’s prophecy

Silhouette of a person against a treeline looking up at a star-filled sky
Image by Prottoy Hassan

‘Nothing fascinates for long,’ my Nonna used to say, sometimes as a commentary upon her granddaughter’s short attention span, sometimes to dismiss the latest headline-making scientific discovery.

Her wisdom would not hit home until three decades into the next millennium, about four weeks after we first made contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. 

I was appointed to the communication team for my training as a field linguist, but it was my work in artificial intelligence that proved instrumental in setting up exchange channels. It turned out that we didn’t need to learn the aliens’ languages. Instead we wrote software that mined their equivalent of our internet and created a two-way translation device. Before long, conversation with our distant neighbours was as mundane as using the ‘chat’ function on a customer service site.

I was bored. And it bothered me that no matter how much we ‘talked’ with our extraterrestrial interlocutors, we weren’t learning anything about their languages.

‘Why would you need to learn their languages?’ my husband Gary asked. ‘Language is for communication, right? You’re already communicating with them.’

His question tripped an inexplicable sadness in me, a longing that could never be translated into the limited lexicon of our lingua franca.

Our son was watching an online video about mycelium. ‘Language isn’t for communication,’ he said. ‘It’s how things are structured.’ 

His words riveted my attention to his screen, which showed a time-lapse sequence of a white fungal net stretching out over a vast forest. I felt my breath catch. I too was caught, captivated by this silent, linguistically rich ecosystem, a structure so compelling that, despite Nonna’s prophecy, its fascination might endure.