❧ Louie Schwartzberg directs, «Fantastic Fungi». Moving Art Studio, 2019
Figure: A piece of Selles-sur-Cher.
In Jasons Market Place, where I passed by on the road home, several chunks of Selles-sur-Cher cheese seemed to have a hard time getting sold, as they were lying on the shelf for days. I didn’t blame people for avoiding this exotic food, which had on its surface such sinister dark blue wrinkles resembling gyri in a brain. Out of rebellion, I bought a piece of Selles-sur-Cher, and tried. I didn’t like it. Even stronger than blue cheese, the poignant smell and taste, curiously appealing and appalling at the same time, could hardly be swallowed with a big bite without a good mouthful of red wine.
When I was a child, I used to wonder why these cheeses with mold were edible. But they turned out to be so good; they are the prime example of something atrocious in appearance yet lovely in heart. Then it occurred to me that mushrooms are edible, which we are too familiar to doubt, and that both mushrooms and molds are fungi.
In the documentary «Fantastic Fungi», we can watch, in the time-lapse filming, the body of a mouse engulfed by hyphae until only hairs remain, or the growing mushrooms which sway erratically from the weight of their caps, or the mold spreading on an orange like thunderclouds eager to take control, before bolts and bolts of thunder, ominous and menacing, pierce the earth through to suck out every bit of energy. Fungi are an indispensable part of the ecosystem, since they transport energy from the dead to the living; they form a network, which can detect and cooperate, as if having its own senses; in addition, they produce mycotoxins, which kill bacteria and other microbes, to protect themselves. I wonder what they really are, these destructors and constructors, friends and fiends.
What happened, then, to those primitives who tasted moldy cheeses? For those brave enough to do it, good for them; at least I wouldn’t, if nobody told me that the hairy, smelly thing was safe. Indeed, such a habit might as well have led to food poisoning, had they picked toxic molds. Quite plausibly, those who survived told the elders of the information, and others just died. Every time we have a bite, let us for a second mourn for those nameless martyrs who paid with their lives for trying out new kinds of mold.
However, people who tried blue cheese were lucky. Mycotoxins produced by penicillium chrysogenum isn’t toxic to humans; even better, it came to be the source of penicillin, the first antibiotics, which saved numerous soldiers’ lives in the Second World War. This is the reason those benign moldy cheeses, along with stinky tofu and fermented fish, last so much longer.
The use of psychedelics, in addition, has a long history in ancient tribes, and I suspect that it contributed to most ostensible religious experiences, and hence those religions. What I didn’t know is that many bans of psychedelics are pretty recent, about when its usage surged in the 1960s, the age of hippies. Presently, some medical experts are instead advocating the merits of psychedelics in treating psychological diseases, such as trauma and depression, if used moderately.
Those who took psychedelics in the treatment described the feeling to be powerful, joyful, and peaceful, just as what spiritual experiences are said to be. The humanoid images, the wobbling contours, the kaleidoscope of shapes, and various transcendental, ineffable forms, which they claimed to have contact with—do they belong to the realm of the altered state of consciousness known to a meditating Buddhist monk or a praying Christian nun? Is it like the moment (I gather) we have, when the first note a pianist plays resonates in a majestic hall, freezing the air and stopping the time, or when tired of talking, guests at a table all get quiet incidentally, silent but content, still but wishful?
Whatever that is, I wish I knew, but I don’t. It isn’t the real world I recognize. The world, as far as I see, is more infinite nausea and vice, than is infinite beauty and love: beauty and love are something I am not meant to know, not as those who open their arms and close their eyes to become the unity, ironically like fungi themselves, which are endlessly expanding, are residing inside us, before us, and after us, and thus are continuing the eternal struggle between life and death, between one and many.
❧ October 20, 2021